It’s just a job
My suggestion to a client that "it's just a job" has provoked a defensive reaction ...
Imagine you've left school as a student, gone on to university and spent some time training in schools, before then going back to school as a teacher and climbing the ranks to become a school leader, and maybe now a MAT leader. Perhaps - as is often the case - one or other (or both) of your parents were teachers, or that an adult you looked up to and who inspired your career choice was a teacher. Or maybe you felt so secure and safe and contained in school yourself as a child that you wanted to go on to create that same experience for others.
In any event, it's understandable that suggesting "it's just a job" doesn’t land easily.
But it is just a job. And my role as a coach or consultant helping you explore why you're so stressed or tired or burned out, or why you find it hard to achieve the strategic distance required for effective leadership, is to say the things that are otherwise left unsaid.
I get it, of course. You've built your whole life around this profession. It's your vocation, in the truest sense of the word. Your identity as a person is interwoven with your work so completely that you can no longer tell where the role ends and you begin.
And, of course, your role is untouchable. It's up there with nurses, saviours and saints. What heretic could possibly question its importance?
And there's the thing.
What I am doing with my suggestion is not seeking to devalue the school leadership role, but rather to increase the value of you in that role, as separate from - but in relationship with - it. I am trying to help you untangle your self from your role. Because what we can then do is stand back a bit to look at the role; to marvel at its scale and complexity, to see it in the round, and to notice how small you have become in comparison; how it has swallowed you up, and - to be honest - could probably fit a few more of you in there too.
And we can then start to build you back up. We can work to reorient your self into a more healthy relationship with your role, and to explore how the role in your mind might be different from the role in others' minds. We can consider whether being fully integrated with your role actually serves it well, or whether some 'distance' between the two might enable a useful degree of objectivity. We can help you to refocus on your own sense of purpose and notice where that aligns with the role and where it doesn't, before thinking about how to fix things. And we can think about how you might reprioritise your life away from work, for example by developing interests and activities which add value to you as a person and are nothing to do with your job*.
It sounds counterintuitive, but this new found capacity to see and nurture your self as separate from your role - to see your job as just a job - will not just help you attain a better work-life balance; it will enable you to be a better school leader and a better role model for your successors.
* Nick Petrie, leadership researcher, found that people who perform at high levels without burning out tend to have an ‘opposite world’ outside of work; an activity or hobby which requires them to adopt a very different mindset to that required by their work role.