🫶Presence Practice🫶

Fred Rogers' story pt. 3

Talk to almost anyone who knew him, and they’ll tell you there was no line between Fred Rogers the person and Mister Rogers the children’s TV show host.

Mister Rogers looked into the camera and talked directly to his viewers. Through what he called “TV visits,” Rogers made young children feel like they were being paid attention to.

It was the same with non-TV visits. Friend and journalist Tim Madigan sums it up perfectly with the story of his first phone call with Rogers. Near the end of the conversation, Rogers asked, “Tim, do you know what the most important thing in my life is right now? It's talking to Mr. Tim Madigan on the telephone.”

This wasn’t a performance or an isolated incident. He placed extreme value on even the most passing of human interactions.

It’s easy to dismiss Rogers’ presence as something he was simply born with. After all, he’s just a good guy. While there are certainly characteristics everyone is born with, Rogers had a lonely childhood marked by rejection. This could have led him to spend life chasing importance, instead of recognizing the importance of the person beside him.

For Rogers, being present was a spiritual exercise. Every morning he would read the Bible and then visualize the people he would be meeting that day. While he was an ordained Presbyterian minister, he didn’t lead a church. Rogers never discussed his religious beliefs on his show and very rarely spoke about them publicly.

His habit wasn’t about generating content to build his brand. He wasn’t a Christian influencer or a spiritual guru teaching how to achieve through visualization. This habit was, as author Maxwell King puts it, “...for the goodness of heart to be the best person he could be in each of the encounters he would have that day.”

He had an exercise routine, but it wasn’t about getting better at doing something. It was meant to strengthen his ability to be.

Perhaps the oddest thing about Mister Rogers isn’t his ability to be present with others; it’s that he considered it a practice and not a gift.