Exposure

From here.

"Let go of the cards.  I felt so naked, so revealed. It didn’t really matter how much you learned or didn’t learn in graduate school; teaching was about exposure.  It began to occur to me that every job had an unspoken emotional requirement that, while never listed in any job description, was just as vital to one’s success as those qualifications that were.  Doctors had to be able to cope with facing the grief of others; lawyers had to be willing to assert themselves even when they didn’t feel like, and teachers had to feel the exposure of all eyes on them, of being the starting spot for everything in the room.  You could be a genius—which clearly I wasn’t, am not—and still not be up for teaching if the emotional requirement of the job—the ability to handle this exposure–were beyond your reach.  It seemed like someone might’ve mentioned that to me somewhere along the way or that it should have occurred to me. But they didn’t and it didn’t." Theo Nestor