Sharing Our Blessings

The players’ entrance to the Centre Court at Wimbledon

Walking out onto center court at Wimbeldon, the last sight players encounter before emerging into public view are the words, not of an athlete or a coach, but of writer Rudyard Kipling: If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster and treat those two imposters just the same.

The words could be viewed as a meditation, encapsulating core values of resilience, perseverance, and humility. They temper the wisdom of positive psychology beckoning us to embrace happiness and optimism, almost to excess. While happiness and optimism are vital for sure, I’ve come to crave greater emotional balance.

A plethora of articles in the past several years beckon us to recognize that an exclusive emphasize on happiness can be counterproductive. Conflict energizes, mistakes are necessary to achieve top performance, and similarity fosters complacency and breeds overconfidence. Emotions typically viewed as negative like anger, embarrassment, and shame are vital to foster greater engagement, directing our attention to serious issues and prompting us to make corrections that eventually lead to success. Disagreement, typically viewed as unpleasant and unharmonious, when conducted with respect opens our thinking promoting far more effective and creative problem solving. Owning our mistakes without blame or shame, rather than hiding or avoiding them, promotes progress.

A turning point for me in my own understanding of myself came while watching Pixar’s Inside Out, now one of my very favorite movies. Seeing myself as the character “joy”, I was jolted both by how helpful, yet how annoying and blindsided a single-minded quest for joy can be. Having long emphasized, or rather overemphasized the positive, I realized I had inadvertently denied myself, and others around me, vital opportunities for learning and growth possible by embrace of a wider range of emotions and experiences.

The recognition came not only from the movie, or a number of articles, but from the painful ups and downs of life and the growth that is possible when we open ourselves to experience pain as well as joy. Reflecting with my dear friends, co-moderators of #educoach – a weekly twitter chat, and co-authors of our recently published book The Coach Approach To School Leadership: Leading Teachers To Higher Levels of Effectiveness, I reflected on how our frequent conversations on celebrating the positive, perhaps to excess,  were necessary, but insufficient. We talked more and more about finding greater balance in our own approach to coaching teachers, reflecting on balance, which in our idealistic perspectives on educators and schools, we had sometimes neglected.

With all the sharing that occurs in our age of social media, all of the opening of ourselves, it is paradoxical that much of our essence remains more hidden than ever. “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye,” wrote Antoine de Saint-Exupery in The Little Prince. His words continue to ring true, with many of us choosing to hide the messy, complicated, broken places in our lives which ultimately, when embraced, can enable us to become the best of who we are.

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim,
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same:
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build’em up with worn-out tools;

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings,
And never breathe a word about your loss:
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on!”

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much:
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!