Avoiding the Dark Side of Resilience (Challenge #88)

So this morning I’m in the middle of a LONG anaerobic threshold interval on my peloton, when, out of the blue and for the first time in almost 2 years of owning my bike, the tablet crashes and I have to reboot. I know that I’ve got about 2 minutes left on that interval, so I keep cranking away at the same pace and resistance while I reboot, and believe me, I would have been cursing up a blue streak about my first world problem had I had the spare breath to do so. The screen reboots and I log back into the ride, still playing and with just 30 seconds or so before the next recovery break. My output was still right in the middle of my target zone, and I was feeling mighty proud of my resilience. And as I got off my bike and the oxygen started returning to my brain, I was struck by a little realization. That kind of grit is great for my 5 AM workouts, but when it comes to leadership, too much resilience can be a dangerous thing.

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Welcome to the Kind Leadership Challenge, where every Monday morning I teach you how to heal your school or library in the next ten minutes! I’m Dr. Sarah Clark, founder of the Kind Leadership Guild, where I use my PhD in Higher ed leadership and nearly 2 decades of experience in academic libraries to advise a growing community of educational and library leaders who want to build a better world without burning out. 

Kind leaders make the tough decisions without becoming jerks. We plan effective systems that help us get the job done with less money and effort. And we’ve learned that once we stop controlling and start collaborating, any vision becomes possible. To be clear, Kind Leadership’s pretty simple, but it’s rarely easy. So if you’re up for a challenge, stick around to learn how to create a legacy that will strengthen your community long after you’re gone.

Like most things in life, the dosage of resilience makes the poison. And the older I get, the more I notice that too much resilience can be toxic for a lot of educators who are trying to practice kind leadership, whether their resilience comes from being part of an underrepresented identity, from serving a community that needs a great deal of support in order to succeed, or because they just want to accomplish big things with their careers. My resilience comes from my childhood as a late gen xer in the bible belt, as a combination of life experience and messaging from well-meaning but imperfect boomer adults taught me that I needed to be tough to succeed. So I became tough, or at least as tough as I could make myself, and success followed. The problem was, like clockwork, every few years some resilience powered sprint to a goal would culminate with a burnout, leaving me recovering in an exhausted, depressed heap for weeks or even months. Sometimes I went overboard with the resilience because I thought my job was more important than it was, to the point I stressed myself out. Sometimes I would put others’ needs before my own, to the point that my care and concern wore me down to a nub. And of course, sometimes I was just working too much and too hard for too long. But all three things led to the same result—I broke. More times than I’d like to admit. The silver lining though, is that I’ve learned from pretty much very burnout, and have realized that there are basically three different ways an excess of resilience can come back to bite a leader, and that each one of those mistakes can be addressed by one of the three skills of kind leadership.  

The first way that an excess of resilience can lead to burnout is when you make the mistake of deciding that your work is a calling, not just a job. That raises the stakes, which in turn raises your stress to unsustainable levels. Yes, education has the capacity to create a better world, and becoming an educational leader empowers you to scale that impact. However, there is a fine and blurry line between working to improve the world, and believing that you are required to save the world, whether or not you can sustainably do so. A few years ago I ran across the concept of Vocational Awe, where cultural norms combined with a healthy desire to use your skills to do good can cause people to slip into a belief that their self worth is defined by their job—and that taking care of the community they serve is more important than taking care of themselves. A person with a lot of resilience can keep that up for a while by tuning out their emotions and the values they hold outside the professional realm. But eventually they will go too far, and need to use the power of growing humanely to listen to all their feelings and all their values, and make decisions that honor those values, confident in the knowledge that you can take care of yourself and love ones and still be a good enough person.    

Just as a resillient leader can run into trouble by stressing too much, another risk is trying to maintain an unsustainable workload—or doing too much. Between podcasts, linkedin, and livestreams I have probably racked up a half-dozen rants on the insanity of the “do more with less” philosophy. But those of us who have forged ourselves—or who were forged by others--into stronger stuff have a different and sometimes toxic definition of working hard. This is why you need to practice the kind leadership skill of managing effectively to take an honest look at your work situation and what does and does not matter about it, and make plans to do the best job you can within the finite limits of your resources.

And finally, I think a lot of us resilient leaders can fall into the trap of rescuing weaker or struggling colleagues. We should care about our colleagues, and where appropriate we should coach our team members. But it’s not our job to swoop in and save them from the consequences of their own actions—or lack thereof. And that’s where the third kind leadership skill of creating collaboratively comes in, because when the whole team shares an equal sense of commitment and trust, then no one person or group gets stuck doing all the work.

If you read closely about these three dark sides of resilience and how you can avoid or address them, you may have noticed a common thread between all three solutions--Boundaries. Setting Boundaries about how much you care about your work, about how much effort you put into your work, and about acceptable behavior from those with whom you work. Setting boundaries doesn’t mean you’re not resilient—it means that you are strong enough to make sure that resilience serves you for many years to come. And that leads me to my challenge to all my fellow resilient educators out there—What boundary do you need to set this week, and how are you going to set it?