Embracing Discomfort and Well-Being

I've been wrestling with the paradox that schools resist needed change because it makes adults uncomfortable, while simultaneously being so bad at fostering cultures that nurture adult well-being.

We skip meals and exercise regimens. We spend long hours engaging in activities with students after the school day has ended. One teacher comes to work and brags to another, “I didn’t even get to shower all weekend!” The educators who do so are often praised and held up as models for others.

And yet, too often, educators struggle to rethink assessment. We push back against new practices. We often allow each other to avoid loving, honest, critical conversations. We often don’t admit when we’ve made mistakes. We know needed changes will make people uncomfortable...and sometimes, in schools (as with any human community), we just just stop trying.

Why Is This?

I remember a group of teachers who were bemoaning the crippling grading load associated with the school’s research paper assignment. When they approached the Head of School to ask for some sort of relief, the Head told them they were free to change the research paper in any way they saw fit. The English curriculum would be rich and challenging either way, he said. They were doing a great job, and he trusted them! “No,” the teachers responded. “We HAVE to teach the research paper in exactly the same way.”

Often, we don’t create space to rethink our practice because we are too busy doing things that keep us unhappy and unwell. The busy-ness feels like productivity and the exhaustion is a comforting affirmation of our value to the school.

We say we want less work, but not all work is the same. It may be more comfortable to put in crazy hours than to do the emotional work of rethinking the way we do things. The truth is that, sometimes, adults are deeply attached to the unhealthy patterns they resent.

If we want to build healthier schools and cultures of learning, we’re going to need to get uncomfortable. And the converse is also true: if we want people to get uncomfortable, we need to build cultures of learning and healthier schools.

The Problem

One of the core ideas of Leadership+Design is that, sometimes, you are the problem that you’re trying to fix.

Here’s the unspeakable truth: as adults, we have gotten comfortable with practices that don’t work for students as people, our schools as institutions, or the communities we serve. We ask that others avoid challenging those practices and, in turn, we often agree to avoid any implied judgment on the hard-won habit of others. That comfort often drives us, even when we are working longer hours, with more exhaustion and less well-being, than ever before.

I’m all for turning off your phone and setting limits on work. I like sleep, yoga, long walks, and hygge living spaces to get me through the dark Pacific Northwest winter. When I take care of myself, I return better able to do the challenging work of taking care of others.

But when comfort becomes a force that resists needed change, it doesn’t even make us happy. When the thirst for comfort is not met - which eventually, it won’t be - it sparks resentment, as though something has been taken from us. And because it fails to meet our own needs for challenge, growth, and purpose, it fails to meet adult needs as well.

Why do we have practices that aim for the zone of proximal development for kids, but not for adults? It must be that many schools are not designed for adults to be learners. Schools can only be places of learning when the adults decide that includes them. The central markers for longer life in adults are close relationships, active learning, and purpose. This is well being.

Well-being requires constructive adversity, as well as the time needed to reflect, celebrate the stretch, and rest. It provides space for adults to be held capable of improving, learning, growing, hearing hard truths, and being accountable for their actions. These expectations recognize the importance of our work and the value of our humanity.

If we can do this, we can create healthier cultures. When people are seen and respected, when they are expected and allowed to grow, when they have time to rest and reflect, they have the conditions they need to engage in hard work. That well-being doesn’t ever make this work comfortable...but it does make the discomfort productive.

Moving Into 2021

What we need so much this year is what schools weren’t always good about fostering before COVID: time for rest, community, purpose, and reflection. It is about being able to have, and hear, honest conversations. It is about learning and growth and intrinsically human states, states that at their height become a flow state. It is about the ability to be fully human, even if that takes you away from school for a while.

I worry that in a post-COVID landscape, we will seek to return to “normal” too quickly, seizing the wrong half of the pair. “I want to go back to normal,” our achy bones cry, even though a lot of our “normal” schools were broken. Many of our schools didn’t work for Black kids, or trans kids, or kids who fell outside of one narrow slice of neurodiversity. They often centered advanced courses and marginalized special and early childhood education. They often convinced generations of students that they were bad at school because they didn’t learn from listening to adults be smart at them. They usually met in person, but didn’t always build intentional communities.

What if the truth is this: the schools we are nostalgic for only sometimes served kids well? That some of the moments we look back on longingly were just average? What if the best thing for our well-being was to let go of our attachment to what had become comfortable?

What if the truth is also this: we persisted through discomfort because we had to, and on the other side, we learned that we could change and shift more than we thought? What if the truth is that some of the changes we pulled off in the moment were better than the comfortable grooves we allowed to become our fixed identities? What if, after COVID, we could continue to learn, grow, change, and experiment, while also getting more sleep, experiencing less anxiety, and once again hugging our friends?

What if the worst part of COVID was our attempt to execute a “normal” program in abnormal times, rather than to create something new?

I’m not arguing for us to live in COVID forever. It has been an incredibly hard year, and educators have taken a beating.

I am arguing for us to get comfortable with being uncomfortable, for differentiating our ruts and habits from our right to take care of ourselves. I am hopeful that we will not return to the past, but look to build something better.

The ability to reinvent ourselves, to be vulnerable and human, to learn and grow - these are profoundly positive states. It’s also the only way to change to build the cultures that will make schools work for more of the humans we serve.