Principal Note To Self: Don’t Stress Out About Stuff You Won’t Remember In A Week

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I was talking about “pre start of the school year dreams” with a fellow educator the other day. If you’re not familiar, it’s what happens to us as we dive into thinking about and planning for the transition back to school from summer break. We dream about it. Actually, we don’t really have to think about or plan for it…it happens anyway.

The dreams aren’t necessarily bad, but for me they’re incredibly lucid. Mine seem amazingly real while I’m dreaming them.

The subject matter shifts. There’s no common theme other than school. It could be that I’m sitting in a meeting and for the life of me I can’t find a pen. It could be that I’m walking down the hall and out of the corner of my eye I see a zebra rounding the corner into a classroom. It could be that my desk has vanished and been replaced by a gigantic donut. It’s never anything devastating, but it’s usually something odd…and it’s typically something stressful.

I don’t consider stress a bad thing. In fact, I find it helpful in many ways, depending of the situation. If taken in stride and processed with purpose and patience stress can motivate me.

Occasionally however, I misplace my stress. That’s not to say that I lose it, but rather that I attached it to the wrong stuff. In my experience the potential for stress to serve as a motivator is significantly diminished when it’s attached to the wrong stuff.

Also, too much stress, unresolved stress, lingering stress along with misplaced stress, are all capable
of diminishing productivity.

Wrong or bad stress sticks. It becomes distracting. It tries to divert productive energy in favor of it’s own longevity. It feeds off of fixation. It detests reflective progress. Not good for a positive school culture.

For me, it’s the reasonably short busts of stress which inspire reflective thought and adaptive action that tend to make a difference in healthy learning and growth.

In thinking about balance and stress management I’m toying with a prototype “stress-ometer.” It’s pretty basic.

Here’s how it works:

The moment stress hits I ask my self a series of questions. Where I stop in the series determines how much energy I give to the stress.

First I ask. “Will I remember this situation tomorrow?” If I answer, “Yes” I follow up with, “Will it be meaningfully impactful when I do?” If I answer, “Yes” again I go back to the first question, but I replace, “tomorrow” with, “a week from now.”

As long as I answer “Yes” I keep going, increasing the duration of time as I go, stopping at a year. If I answer, “Yes” to a year, the situation is significant enough to incorporate some productive stress into next steps processing and action.

If I predict that the situation is going to be impactful in my life or the lives of those I serve it merits some good, healthy stress to push me forward in positive ways.

The key is to take the appropriate action after using the “stress-ometer.” Either I actually drop it and move forward or I reflect on it and engage in a positive, connected courses of action that has the potential to drive learning, growth, and progress.

Either way lingering aimlessly in negative, toxic, disconnected or misplaced stress has been eliminated as an option and voila…the remaining stress is transformed into usable stores of fuel for the journey ahead!

Easier said than done? Possibly. But, as an optimistic explorer might say…there’s only one way to find out!

Live. Learn. Lead.
Dream Big. Work Hard. Be Well.

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