The Urgent Need to Re-find Meaning

And a call to reach out if you want to put our heads together…

I am someone who deeply believes in finding meaning and purpose in life. I can’t help but reflect and analyze. I find human behavior endlessly fascinating - the reason I am an ardent consumer of novels and nonfiction, long form journalism, podcasts, and earned an MFA in fiction writing. The golden age of TV has been a festival for me. This difficult moment in time has been both an extraordinary opportunity to make meaning and an exhausting challenge with so much input coming from so many different directions, so quickly. As I’ve written elsewhere, it led me to make some major life decisions. It also has made me reflect in many other ways.

One is about age and where I am in my life and career. Since I announced my resignation as Head of School last November, and said I was leaving for personal reasons to align my priorities around the needs of my family, many, many people referred to this as a “retirement.” This drives me nuts. It comes from well-meaning people I like very much, many of whom were quite aware I am only 54. I know it’s a cliche to say 50 is the new 30 but given that I was watching Feud - Bette and Joan on Hulu recently and noted that Bette Davis was 54 when she played Baby Jane - well, I think we can all agree 54 in 1961 is not 54 in 2022. 

I think there was some awkwardness that I wasn’t leaving for another head of school job, or a job with another school or organization. But I can’t help but feel on a very visceral level, “retirement” means being put out to pasture, put on the shelf.Yuck! Maybe at some level it’s a way to put a woman doing something non-traditional in a traditional box? As I was an unmarried, childless, dog-owning female head of a New England boarding school in the 21st century - that phenomenon certainly feels familiar.  

We are in desperate need to embrace new paradigms rather than wrestle people and events into the old shapes, which only distorts us all. I think the pandemic just revealed what has been written about as malaise or other ills of contemporary life - the institutions that kept us glued together fifty years ago have vanished, people don’t live near family, the definition of family has changed, etc. This is not an easy topic to tackle but I think it plays into this greater pattern that needs urgent and serious attention from school leaders, and organizational leaders in general.

Much ink has been spilled on the great resignation, the great reshuffle, or the big quit. There are the think pieces and the re-think pieces. There has also been a lot of conversation around the alarming rise in mental health crises among young people, for very good reason. What was severe in pre pandemic times seems even more so. Mild and perhaps even routine mental health struggles that go with the avalanche of confusing realities and signals adolescents deal with seem to have become severe, alarming and in need of active and immediate intervention. And then there are the kids who in another time would have been more able to roll with the punches who are having trouble coping because it’s just too much. And younger and younger kids are being impacted, as the profoundly disturbing article by Andrew Solomon about the rise in child suicide in the New Yorker attests.

I worked with a senior team this past week on school culture - the positive forces and the forces inhibiting a school in forward movement. We discussed that gap between what people say and what people actually do, and the gap between the school narrative and the reality discussed so well in “Paradox Found” by Greg Bamford and Carla Silver of Leadership+Design in the spring issue of Independent School magazine. Towards the end, the issue of mental health came up, and it seems so often to be the underlying issue at schools this past year. The fact is that the kids are not all right, the teachers aren’t trained to deal with it and wish it would go away (not a criticism - I totally get it) and are coping with their own depression and anxiety after living in a disorienting new reality in their jobs and elsewhere since March 2020. The exhaustion around social interaction that I heard called “social atrophy” recently is also a real phenomenon and an obstacle to positive culture-building.

I also had lengthy conversations with a number of friends in other fields recently and they are experiencing similar phenomenons with their colleagues - dissatisfaction with work, turnover and then trouble hiring - or staff using the threat of leaving as a lever to ask for compensation they never would have asked for before along with debates about remote or in person work. The fracture, the lack of community, is all around us and no one seems to have any good answers.

Much of this week, I’ve thought about the link between “the big quit” and the adolescent mental health crisis and wondered if they are both rooted in a crisis of meaning. I certainly did not feel well equipped at school during the pandemic to take on a sea change I barely understood but could definitely perceive happening - it felt as if the ground was subtly shifting beneath my feet all the time and I could never completely get my bearings. 

As I said in my post from last week, the transactional approaches - the bonuses, gift cards, notes, etc - aren’t going to close this gap, or, an even better insight came recently from a head of school: the transactional approaches are just expected now, table stakes in the care and feeding of our employees. This is not a bad thing. But it’s not enough. And I think there are two issues to deal with to start to move the needle in a proactive direction.

One is - how do we initiate conversations among our faculty and staff to surface the deeper issues? You can’t demand people to be productively reflective, as I’m sure many of you who have experience asking for self-reflections as part of an evaluation process appreciate. And how do we do this in a way where the school is not taking responsibility for the complete well being of every adult on campus but provides space and time for them to reflect on their own boundaries, what is fulfilling them inside and outside of work at this time of change, how as a community we can maximize the moments of satisfaction and share the burden of the new challenges so we don’t all feel alone.

Part of the problem is that people aren’t even sure what the problem is, why they feel so unsettled and dissatisfied, so they look to the usual suspects - administrators who don’t “get” teachers, pay that is never really up to snuff for the incredibly hard work of teaching, kids who are struggling in class for myriad reasons and they don’t know how to help them. I think it is up to the leaders to name the big challenges and not just say, “Hey, here we are post-pandemic - let’s all go back to normal now.” And in the words of Carol Christ, former president of Smith College, she learned when she was provost at UC Berkeley that sometimes you had to repeat things until you were sick of hearing yourself talk - it takes time for the message to sink in. Senior team members also need the reminder that the griping they hear isn’t personal - it’s people working out their “stuff” - their grief and sadness about change.

The other major issue I see as an obstacle is the existential exhaustion facing heads and administrators right now. I’m not trying to wallow in misery but I think burnout is real and I know for me, it often made me draw a blank when taking on a new challenge, and particularly one as complicated as helping the adult community re-find meaning, so they can all help the students re-find meaning. It’s just a reality and I feel a surge of empathy thinking about all my head of school colleagues I’ve talked to over the past few years right now as I write this, both for them and for all their team members they have praised and supported. It’s been a huge achievement in education for independent schools to function so well, and an undertold story. But whether your school ended up with a boost to enrollment or a new obstacle to thriving in the 21st century - there is no resting on laurels for anyone and the summer isn’t the summer it used to be anymore.

(As an aside - there is a really exciting story to be told about the success independent schools had serving students and families in the most trying of circumstances - but perhaps because we’re not magicians or miracle workers, and we couldn’t completely preserve mental health or prevent learning loss, the amazing and impressive story gets lost in the more complicated narrative. There is so much more to the independent school pandemic story besides “in person vs remote” or “masks vs no masks.” But besides - the fact is everyone in schools is too tired to really appreciate their triumph.)

One team member at the session this past week asked if other schools were having similar struggles with morale and it made me think - it would definitely help if everyone realized how not-alone they are, how big the problem feels to so many people. And also how, if we can share ideas, and try new approaches, as well as dust off some old ones, we can help each other break down this big boulder into smaller, more manageable rocks we can move.

The issue is urgent because for schools, this all comes down to how our adults are guiding the next generation. The kids have already dealt with so much and so often it was the blind leading the blind, through no fault of our own, but as the reality of a crisis unfolding day by day, in front of us. How do the leaders find meaning, direction and purpose and help the faculty and staff find meaning, direction and purpose so it can flow like a river into the whole community and the real long term healing from this global disaster can start for all?

If anyone wants to reach out and discuss how we might be able to come together to share ideas and help each other take on this immediate challenge, please feel free to contact me through here or message me on LinkedIn, FB or Twitter (@juliefaulstich). I’m tossing around ideas about how I could perhaps help facilitate some kind of connection and support for senior administrators, particularly program administrators, to make an impact in this area of need. 

And remember - I’m not “retired” - I’m in the next chapter of what, I hope, is a long story!

Stay cool out there and enjoy the weekend -

Julie