Are You Emotionally Wise? It is one of the Most Important Attributes for a Change Maker!
A few weeks ago I posed the question: What can schools do to stoke the moral imagination of students? “A lack of moral imagination can make deeply ethical actions seem like crimes.” I am an organizational management specialist who works with leaders and staff in schools to ensure they are collaborating to achieve what matters most- improving student learning. From the Board to the bus drivers, everyone plays a role in socializing students capacity to succeed in the world that awaits.
The above stated question and my posts that followed may seem like they stray from what my speciality is and the capacity in which I work with schools, but in fact, it is very much related. Our values and beliefs influence how students are socialized. These same values and beliefs influence how we socialize with colleagues; people we are expected to collaborate with to improve teaching and learning. I often hear the following comment when working with educators: “I use this strategy with my students, but can’t understand why I need to use it with professionals.” Said another way, educators do not always practice what they preach. The word ‘professional’, and many more like it, have been weaponized. Our inability to distinguish the nuances of such a loaded term sows the seeds of contempt for colleagues that don’t conform to our beliefs.
The consequences of this are easy to observe, especially by students, that are subjected to the incoherence of practice from one room to the next. Not to mention teachers isolating themselves in silos of thought and practice. Moreover, this has a socializing affect on students, if not reinforcing potentially polarizing beliefs, it could make them cynical about education.
David Brooks in his recent Op-Ed The Wisdom Your Body Knows gave me another dimension to reflect on how this contempt and cynicism can develop and the consequences of not being able to address it. The purpose of this article originates with this Op-Ed, in which this quote resonated most closely with my practice and the question I posed about moral imagination:
When we’re really young we know few emotion concepts. Young children say, “Mommy, I hate you!” when they mean “I don’t like this” because they haven’t learned their culture’s concepts for hatred vs. badness. But as we get older we learn more emotional granularity. The emotionally wise person can create distinct experiences of disappointment, anger, spite, resentment, grouchiness and aggravation, whereas for a less emotionally wise person those are all synonyms for “I feel bad.”
How can we teach children to act with what @DominiqueBlue called a ‘kind of dangerous unselfishness’ or be morally imaginative, if we are not helping them to be emotionally wise? I work in several schools where senior leadership are so focused on performance or large organizational changes that they lack the ability to sense and understand the emotional dynamic to change. The dynamic that will most likely undermine change and build cynicism towards future initiatives, no matter how well planned they are. They are in effect emotionally unwise and their demonstration to push through change is observed and felt at all levels of the school. Teaching students to be emotionally wise isn’t something that needs to be done in a classroom, it can be easily demonstrated in how a school functions.
Before reading this recent Op-Ed, most of my ‘Performance Feedback’ and ‘Difficult Conversation’ coaching and training centered around Peter Senge’s interpretation of Chris Argyris’s Ladder of Inference and Gervais Bushe’s Experience Cube, which was influenced by the Ladder of Reference. I also love to introduce Albert Mehrabian’s work on how body language can have a much greater impact on communication that words, which this Op-Ed supports. I teach that we are living in a world of untested assumptions, assumptions that are often fuelled by observations we are socialized to make and that drive actions that can conflict with the world view of others. These assumptions result from either not taking more time to seek different perspectives, or from a lack of awareness of how others developed their assumptions. This latter point is key to this article and being emotionally wise. If we only see things as black or white, like or hate, trust or don’t trust, truth or lie, then we limit our ability to act and influence others. Our actions will be self-serving, informed only by our limited understanding of what we are thinking and feeling.
The latter part of this article I go into greater detail in my book, Hidden in Plain Sight: Realizing the Full Potential of Middle Leaders.
