To champion someone literally means to actively favor one who meets opposition. Griptape defines it as someone who believes in a learner no matter what, stays curious about their interests, asks good questions, and lets them make their own decisions. The program itself is simple: ten weeks, a project the learner has been meaning to start, and weekly check-ins from a champion who tracks progress and clears whatever's in the way, a budget, a blocker, a bit of momentum.
The word I keep reaching for to define it though, is subtraction. It immediately signals something negative, I know. But stay with me. I picked up this word when I read the philosophy of the Ethereum Foundation. Subtraction is to diminish the power you have over your learner in the relationship.
You stay in the relationship for the full ten weeks and sometimes beyond that as well, but what gets removed is the power dynamic and your function as the person the learner defers to inside this relationship. The reason I say this is that any structure built for accountability runs this risk. Someone tracking your progress, or someone assigned to you to help check in with you, automatically mimics every other relationship you have had. A student-teacher, a parent and child, elder sibling and younger sibling. Here sometimes doing as you are told is often rewarded and guarantees the best outcome. The instinct to seek permission is ingrained in the learner well before you ever enter the picture.
Permission and approval are two separate instincts even though they arrive together in a learner's mind.
Permission asks whether an action is allowed at all whereas Approval asks whether the action, once taken, was good.
A champion can return permission in the first week simply by refusing to be the one who authorizes a move. The tricker, slimier one is Approval.
We are told that our effort doesn't actually count until someone older validates it and most importantly it carries the fear of getting something wrong. As a you are also entering with an immediate need to help when someone is struggling, to reward them if something goes right, and reprimand if something goes wrong.
So, the function to change or remove the dynamic is much harder than one would think. And that's exactly where the work of a champion begins.
In week one, you're assigned to check in, to track progress, to notice if a learner is facing difficulties. The learners may think of it like submitting their homework. I have seen learners refer to these calls as classes, or say that they will complete the homework or assignment. The work of the ten weeks is to dismantle that reading without dismantling the check-ins themselves. It starts with language: we don't call them classes, we call them check-ins. We call ourselves champions and not mentors or teachers. We call them learners and not students or mentees.
By the end, learners understand that the goal was for them to build the habit of being accountable to themselves. And once that habit exists, the specific person running the check-ins becomes replaceable. It could be me. It could be almost anyone else. The trait being built doesn't depend on who's sitting across the table. That is true subtraction in play. It gets embedded over ten weeks and it belongs to the learner afterward, not to me.
When does it especially get hard and why you should do it then
Imagine a learner comes to you with the following question, because you probably will receive any or many of these:
- When a learner comes to you with an ambiguous solution to a problem
- When they present their learnings, and ask you what to do
- Who to reach out to?
- If they are struggling with a problem and want a solution
- When they come to you with a solution that you don't agree with
- When you start identifying their success as your own.
The instinct to answer is right there, you can taste it, I know! But we must channel it all into attention precisely enough to ask a better question than the learner would have asked themselves. The question should never become an answer.
I don't think this fully resolves, and I'm not sure it should. A champion has to be present enough to be trusted and yet restrained enough so that you don’t become the guide the learner was expecting walking in.
Holding both of those at once, every single check in, is where the real work happens.
Why it's worth doing
The clearest case for doing this is honestly the learners who went on to become champions themselves. They saw how it benefitted them and want to enable that for the next cohort.
If you're considering it, the job description will tell you to believe in someone, stay curious, ask good questions, and let them make their own decisions. All of that is true. But you'll also spend the ten weeks fighting your (very strong) instinct to be needed and to help. You'll know you did it right when the learner stops checking with you before they act, and just acts.
