My very quiet neighborhood - seen from the other side of the salt marsh.
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As you may discern from the title, this article was inspired by real events (insert “Law and Order” duh duh here). My original publication calendar had the People Talking interview with Angela Brown of Niche today. (And that is going to be a good one, so helpful for both admissions and marcomm folks! Stay tuned.) However, the time I had allotted to finish editing that interview was swallowed up by the impact of the aforementioned unexpected event.
I will admit even as events unfolded, I did think, “Hmmm. I’m going to write about this.” As Nora Ephron’s mother said to her, “Everything is copy.” Silver lining and all that jazz. (Side note - I don’t actually subscribe to that, exactly - I think “everything” has to go thoroughly through the creativity and craft machine before it ends up in a piece of writing. So anyone who knows me, don’t worry - you’re not “ copy.” Inspiration? Quite possibly.)
I had my day all mapped out last Monday, the start of a busy week. And when I stepped out the back door to walk the dog, I noticed my car was gone. Not in my driveway. Poof! Disappeared! A negative space.
Thieves stole my car, out of my driveway and as I learned later that day from a fellow car renter and then from a friend, this is a Thing That Happens in my general suburban area. We had some vandalism in my neighborhood a few months ago, but crime is very rare. In fact, the kid who picked me up to take me to Enterprise commented what a nice neighborhood it was and when I told him what happened, he couldn’t stop talking about it. I tried to change the subject and ask him some questions about himself and he said, “I’m sorry, but I just can’t let go of this!”
And I left the key fob in the cupholder, which I never do, because I was raised in a house where my dad locked the windows when we left to do errands. (Another side note: there was really no crime to speak of where I grew up, but he did this anyway). There are people who don’t know where their front door key is - that was not our house. But for some reason, last Sunday, I stepped out of the car and left the key behind. The guy I met at the car rental place also left his key in the car and we bonded over our carelessness. And yes, part of me is embarrassed because it was kind of all my fault.
I hate that! One of my favorite compliments I’ve had over the years was a colleague from Walnut Hill who told me it looked like I never made a mistake. He also said - “I’m sure you do make them, but you can never tell when you do.” And this was said in a nice way. I felt inordinately pleased.
Because - I’m sure you can tell what’s coming - this is a trap and an impossible standard but it is hard to let go of the idea that if I just kept making a little more effort…. I could abolish mistakes forever. I was recently re-introduced to the term “overfunctioning” and I am coming to terms with the fact that I think what I see as my baseline norm of “functioning” is probably “overfunctioning.” And when you miss the mark - when you drop that ball, forget to take your key with you, leave your wallet in the Uber - it’s hard to accept, which just makes navigating all the other detritus you know have to deal with more difficult because you are also busy lecturing yourself on your inadequate performance in your role as a human.
And the reason I’m writing about this at all - because I don’t expect people to find the nuances of my psychology terribly interesting - is that I suspect many of you reading Talking Out of School are fellow overfunctioners. Welcome! We get shit done! We make these impossible to run schools operate. We rarely let an email slip through the cracks. We return calls. We take responsibility for everyone’s feelings. I think comms people lean this way in particular - always anticipating people’s feelings so we can meet them where they are. Heads and senior admins - yep, many of these boxes checked.
Perhaps female school leaders are classic overfunctioners, tending towards the “taking on the emotional baggage” part whereas the men are more the “just one more email/can’t put their phone down” types. Totally gender stereotypes and I know it’s a mishmash but I do think women are more socialized to be extra tuned in to everyone else’s emotions. Having trouble managing those emotions? Step aside - we’ll do it for you!
(And as I’m writing this, I do wonder if this is why I find the exercise of “name your superpower” so irritating. Do we all have to have a “superpower”? I think maybe overfunctioning is a school leader superpower - and it’s super for schools facing challenges they were never designed to face, but it’s not always so super for us. No matter how much responsibility a role carries, to be sustainable, it should only require a person just plain function on a regular basis.)
So then the unexpected happens and although, honestly, it did throw my whole week off course, here are some ways I think we can cope with the unplanned that are a little more sustainable than trying to deal with whatever the new twist has wrought and yet keep on task with everything else as if nothing is amiss.
So here are a few observations:
Much of what you already meticulously scheduled is probably moveable, postpone-able and not that urgent after all.
Sometimes I think in order to get things done, I need to give it a patina of urgency. Often when you look at it more closely, it’s really not that urgent. Can that deadline be tweaked a bit? Can you shoot someone an email and postpone that meeting to next week? If you let yourself, the answer is probably yes. This can be a little scary because maintaining the idea that everything has at least some urgency keeps the balls in the air and the momentum moving forward and the school year sometimes feels as if it works on this 85% self-generating momentum. But it’s freeing to reconsider.
The above is good modeling for your team and your school.
In several conversations lately, I’ve found myself coming back to the idea of modeling. I think it has far more power than we realize, especially when combined with the weight of authority. When you conduct yourself as if the way things are supposed to happen is the only way it can happen, or if you can’t let go of that meeting, you’re setting the bar. When you decide the meeting can be postponed, or better yet, maybe let someone else run the meeting while you go pick up your rental car, you are showing others how to get out of overfunctioning mode.
Tell people
This is a big one for me. If stuff happened that derailed me in some way and if I assessed there was nothing someone else could do to help, I preferred to just quietly handle it myself and then maybe share it as an anecdote sometime in the far future. Why bother anyone with my triviality? Why tell people and then admit I left my key in the car, so I’m a big doofus? Why risk people feeling bad for me? So this time around, I told people. And I included the part about the key even though it makes me feel like a total idiot. And it really helped! Not only did I get some good suggestions, it also felt better just to share my small misfortune. And that’s good modeling too. You’re inviting the people around you to be a little vulnerable. And if you’re trying to build trust in your team, maybe share some of those work in progress moments and maybe even let people feel bad for you. (Cringe! I know. But still.)
Sometimes, particularly as a head, you can’t tell many people at school if something unexpected happens that you have to drop everything to deal with, or you can’t share the details. But I would advocate finding someone you can at least share the broad strokes with. And maybe even someone you can share a detail like yeah, you now realize that thing you did or didn’t do, that “key you left in the car overnight” equivalent, that moment of just plain functioning rather than overfunctioning, came back to bite you in the butt. That could be a real gift to someone who has left his own key in the car at some point.
Many of us overfunction in some parts of our lives and underfunction in others - and it can shift and change in relationships depending on the balance in someone else’s functioning. I will always have part of me that gets stuck in overfunctioning but if all of me lives there, it’s tiring and lonely and endless.
Of course, there are aspects of overfunctioning that do make us effective leaders. As a friend of mine likes to say, it’s good to know just how much water you can carry. But the more we can be conscious about our own tendencies, the more we can be in touch with our humanity and help those around us be in touch with theirs, we can cut ourselves and everyone else around us a break once in a while.
It was nice back then to be perceived as someone who never made a mistake (and I have enough of a sense of perspective to understand that was likely just one person’s opinion!). But I’m getting ok with being the person who not only sometimes forgets the key in the cup holder - but isn’t afraid to tell people about it.
Julie
PS - The car was found but no idea on its condition yet. I had two days of driving around in the truly ridiculous truck below (all they had on the lot other than a minivan, which I should have taken) where, after I drove it for a bit, I realized I was straining to reach the pedals. I had to literally haul myself into the driver seat, it was so high. I returned it for a normal car and I said to the rental agent, “That truck was not made for women.” He said, “That truck was not made for a lot of people!”
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