For more than a decade, I’ve focused on the need for cultivating emotional resilience in educators. I’ve argued that resilience coaching helps us retain effective teachers, reduce conflict among staff, eliminate resistance, and improve student outcomes.
Initially, when I started talking about resilience, I buried the idea of emotions way below the surface. A decade ago, “resilience” seemed more palatable to educators who might have been suspicious of, or resistant to, exploring their emotions. But when we talk about resilience, we are talking about emotions. Resilience describes a disposition, a feeling state, an outcome from processing emotions.
There seems to be more openness now to discussing and addressing emotions, even in the workplace, perhaps as a result of the mental health crisis that has intensified since the pandemic or because of our increasingly unstable world. Lately, as I travel across the United States, I experience greater receptivity, curiosity, and willingness from coaches and school leaders to coach emotions. And, in recent years, my vision has expanded from discussing resilience and emotions to talking about healing in schools.
From Feeling . . .
When it comes to coaching emotions, we can start by acknowledging emotions when they’re present. A principal might say to a teacher, “I think I’m hearing some sadness in what you’re sharing. Does that sound right?” or a coach might ask, “That interaction with your student’s mother sounds like it left you feeling unsettled. How would you describe the emotions you experienced?”
By asking these questions, we normalize the experience of strong emotions, and we signal that it’s OK to talk about them at work. When we include our full humanity in the workplace, we’ll see the kinds of outcomes that we all want to see. Compartmentalizing our experience as humans and denying and suppressing emotions have not served us—not in our homes and not at work. Leaders certainly don’t need to be therapists to acknowledge emotions, and every team meeting won’t become group therapy if you ask people how they’re feeling.
By simply acknowledging that emotions exist, that we’re all likely to experience them, that they’re normal and welcome, we validate them. By doing so, we’re able to release uncomfortable emotions and harness those that feel good (like joy, happiness, connection, delight, and gratitude), and we can use the energy from the more comfortable emotions to fuel us onward. Emotions are sources of wisdom, insight, and strength; they’re not things we need to manage or get rid of. We just need to change our relationship to them.
Emotions are sources of wisdom, insight, and strength; they’re not things we need to manage or get rid of.
. . . To Healing
The need for resilience arises from feelings of trauma and chronic stress. To heal from those stresses, we must address the causes. Skilled mental health professionals can help us explore and release trauma, but that’s only part of what our healing journeys require.
Hurt happens in relationships. Many of our woundings occurred when we were children as a result of what our primary caregivers did or didn’t do. And they happened in the social arena as well—in school or on the playground. Therefore, healing needs to happen in the context of the relationship.
When we experience healthy social relationships, when we’re heard, accepted, and appreciated, we experience what psychologists call a “corrective relational experience.” This is healing. We don’t just need to clear out the past; we need new experiences that validate our inherent worth and belonging.
Leaders can create these new experiences by cultivating psychological safety among staff and inviting people to talk to one another about things that matter. We can also lay the foundation for healing by teaching people how to listen with curiosity and compassion. For extensive guidance on listening, see my newest book, Arise: The Art of Transformational Coaching (Jossey-Bass, 2024).
It Starts with You
Although I can guide you on how to create intentional healing experiences for staff, you must also experience them yourself. Without the embodied experience of being in a healing space, you won’t know how to facilitate them. You might have such experiences in therapy or coaching, in well-facilitated learning or support groups, and in other community spaces as well. Seek these out, engage in your own healing, and then explore how to create healing spaces at work. This is the next step in our efforts to transform schools—and our world at large.
