Self-Regulation in Dysregulated Times
April 1, 2025
Last month I facilitated a new workshop for school leaders titled Self-Regulation in Dysregulated Times. It’s a blend of concepts and strategies from two of my books, Stretching Your Learning Edges: Growing (Up) at Work and Swimming in the Deep End: Four Foundational Skills for Leading Successful School Initiatives.
So many school leaders are ‘in the deep end’ right now as they try to manage both change at their school and their own inner psyches. When are we not balancing both to be honest. The workshop emphasizes key two ideas:
- Someone is learning how to be a person by watching you so pay attention to your energy and behavior.
- Clarity of communication is a key piece to reducing anxiety in those you lead.
After seeing those two statements you might be thinking,
- “That’s a lot of pressure to put on a leader. I’m human too!”
- “Realistically, I don’t have enough clarity. How do I communicate something I don’t have?”
I am not suggesting what I am asking is easy to do. And “tag we are it.” We are the leaders we have been waiting for. I don’t mean to sound diminishing or patronizing. I am fully aware that the work we are doing in schools, at this time and at all times, is challenging and difficult. And do we want to be right or effective?
No one is saying you aren’t human. Yet there is a time and place for when we need to be our best adult selves and not ooze our emotional pollution out into our schools. This article, from The New York Times, You Don’t Always Have to Process Your Emotions mentions a study that says 40% of folks don’t believe they can control their emotions. Not true. You can manage yourself. Self-awareness, emotional intelligence, reading the room – these capacities are possible to develop.
Understanding how important your modeling of self-management is to others who are feeling dysregulated and sensitive is not only helpful but essential. The article I linked to above has ways to assist you as manage your ‘wake’ as do so many books and my workshops as well.
Often many leaders share with me this sentiment, “The district has told us to ‘roll it out’ and ‘get on with it, (whatever ‘it’ is), and I am unsure what to say.”
As I wrote in Swimming in the Deep End: Four Foundational Skills for Leading Successful School Initiatives, “We cannot just blame those who work at the district office but instead work with the district leaders to craft answers to these questions with those who work there. It is the responsible thing to do.”
Even if we don’t know what to say, we need to take the time and own the responsibility to find the words. We can ask for assistance – and in the end, we need to find the words.
Ugh. Sigh. Boo. I know. No fun. My friend, Meg Wheatley, has two parts to one of her book titles. The main title is Who Do you Choose To Be?. The secondary title is “Facing reality. Claiming leadership. Restoring Sanity.”
Gulp. Claiming Leadership, Claiming. You ‘claim’ your dependents on your taxes, yes? So if we assert or demand our right to something, like being a leader, we need to claim it and live up to our role and our responsibility. No fun. Not easy. And necessary. So necessary at this time.
I am in the deep end with you. Growing tired right along with you. And we must keep going. The children are watching us. We need to grow our capacities to be our best adult selves. Join me.
Questions, comments, or suggestions? Feel free to email me at jennifer@jenniferabrams.com.
Cool Resources
Tiny Experiments: How To Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World by Ann-Laure Le Cunff – “Life isn’t linear, and yet we constantly try to mold it around linear goals: four-year college degrees, ten-year career plans, thirty-year mortgages. What if instead we approached life as a giant playground for experimentation? Based on ancestral philosophy and the latest scientific research, Tiny Experiments provides a desperately needed reframing: Uncertainty can be a state of expanded possibility and a space for metamorphosis.”
The Good Ancestor: A Radical Prescription for Long-Term Thinking by Roman Krznaric – “In The Good Ancestor, Krznaric reveals six practical ways we can retrain our brains to think of the long view, including Deep-Time Humility (recognizing our lives as a cosmic eyeblink) and Cathedral Thinking (starting projects that will take more than one lifetime to complete). His aim is to inspire more “time rebels” like Greta Thunberg―to shift our allegiance from this generation to all humanity―in short, to save our planet and our future.”
Oliver Burkeman’s The Imperfectionist – “Sign up for The Imperfectionist, my twice-monthly email on productivity, mortality, the power of limits, and building a meaningful life in an age of bewilderment – plus other occasional updates. Or read a sample edition first.“
