Self-care: The “New” Leadership Essential

by Joe Schroeder, Associate Executive Director, AWSA 

We are entering that time of the school year when the day-to-day challenges of the job can especially become “a grind.”  This is a natural byproduct of serving a variety of folks who seek out your limited time, energy, and resources to meet their virtually unlimited needs and desires.  Day after day, week after week, they keep coming and coming and coming….  Understandably, this can take a toll – and that cost often reveals itself mightily about now.  In an era unprecedented in levels both of stakeholder needs and high expectations for results, how you sustain yourself and your daily energy is crucial.  Thus, self-care is emerging as a “new” essential for school leaders, at a time when we are becoming increasingly aware that strong leadership is more critical than ever, yet when recent studies show that 89% of school administrators report feeling very stressed at least once or twice a week, when one quarter of all America’s principals leave their schools each year, and when one half of new principals quit by their third year in the role.

In his classic leadership publication, Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey detailed a handful of personal disciplines that were evident in successful leadership across time, culture, and place.  And the seventh habit – the one encircling and sustaining them all – is sharpening the saw. This habit involves setting aside time each day for personal renewal (whether in the physical, intellectual, spiritual, and/or emotional dimensions of oneself), staying sharp and fresh so that you may be your best self for all who you encounter on a given day and year.  Some regular habits of “sharpening the saw” in my life are exercise, scripture reading and prayer, playing music, and spending time (hopefully laughing!) with family and friends.  What are some of yours? Are you committing time to them?  Simply said, sharpening the saw means preserving and enhancing the greatest asset you have:  you!  But alas, most of us have difficulty building in such habits because we are very busy people juggling great responsibility, and there is always something else to do or someone else to serve.  So rather than stopping to sharpen the saw, we just keep “sawing away” at the work before us, with increasingly dull “teeth” on the blade and rising exhaustion in our muscles – ultimately committing great effort with little impact for it all. 

And that’s when burn-out and other concerning effects can occur.  The American Institute of Stress, AIS (yes, there actually is such an organization) defines burn-out as “a cumulative process marked by emotional exhaustion and withdrawal associated with increased workload and institutional stress.”  But given the heightened challenges increasingly common in our work, you may begin hearing other “new” vocabulary emerge such as compassion fatigue and compassion resilience, which describe phenomena increasingly evident and concerning in our field.  According to the AIS, compassion fatigue is the “emotional residue or strain of exposure to working with those suffering from the consequences of traumatic events.  It differs from burn-out, but can co-exist.  Compassion fatigue can occur due to exposure on one case or can be due to ‘cumulative’ level of trauma.”  As the Wisconsin-based WISE coalition states, compassion fatigue is “the gradual lessening of compassion over time.”  In contrast, compassion resilience is the “ability to maintain your physical, emotional and mental well-being while responding compassionately to the suffering of others.”  It may be helpful to think of compassion resilience as a reservoir of well-being that you can draw upon on difficult days and in difficult situations.  And for that reason, habits of self-care that you regularly build into your life can replenish this reservoir, making you capable of sustaining your ongoing work as an effective and invigorated servant leader. 

It goes beyond the scope of this article to dive into further detail about compassion fatigue and compassion resilience today.  But if you are interested in learning more, I have found WISE to be a helpful and practical resource base.  Moreover, if you are wondering to what degree you are experiencing compassion satisfaction and fatigue, you might find value in spending 10-15 minutes to take and analyze your own situation via the Professional Quality of Life Scale (PROQOL) self-reflection instrument. (B. Hudnall Stamm, 2009-2012).

As I draw this article to a close, I am reminded of this classic Native American story:

My dear colleagues, your admirable work as servant leaders in education has you regularly engaging in the trauma, pain, negativity, and darkness of the world again and again as a natural byproduct of the job – and this will not end, as these realities are inherent pieces of school leadership!  In other words, the “bad wolf” in you is fed again and again by natural design of the work that can be, without conscious intervention by you, all-consuming. Therefore, the new year we have recently entered is a perfect opportunity for you to resolve yourself to build regular habits of self-renewal and self-care into your daily and weekly routines, thus avoiding becoming just another sad statistic of professional and personal drift amid the noblest of all professions.  In so doing, you will not only be investing in your own health and vitality, but also into the long-term viability and health of the organizations and homes where you live and lead. So take time to sharpen the saw, my friends! If you don’t, who will?

References

Churn: The high cost of principal turnover. (2014).  Hinsdale, MA: School Leaders Network.

Covey, S. R. (2004). The seven habits of highly effective people: Restoring the character ethic. New York:
            Free Press.

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