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The Happiness Dilemma

Folks are usually about as happy as they make their minds up to be.

—Abraham Lincoln

Emma Seppälä is someone you should get to know. She serves as the science director at the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education at Stanford University. In her book The Happiness Track, she defines happiness as “a state of heightened positive emotion” and elaborates further: “[Happiness] increases our emotional and social intelligence, boosts our productivity, and heightens our influence over peers.”⁷

Happiness is about your state of being. It is about the heartprint of positive emotion we leave at school each and every day. We either walk into work in a positive emotional state or we don’t. Alternatively, we are either creating an emotional drag on our students and colleagues, or we are not.

You and I make an impact each day: one way or the other and no matter the circumstances of our lives. The students also need us to be at our best, which on some days can be very difficult to achieve.

We each have a story—your teaching career consists of a sequence of school years or seasons, generally starting in August and ending in late May or early June. Our lives and our careers revolve around one season after another. These seasons stack up one upon the other, each with a unique path in its own way, year after year, eventually stringing together the real-life chapters of what will become your professional career for good or for bad.

It is in the daily grind that our school seasons unfold. And it is in our school seasons that our professional life unfolds.

What’s happiness got to do with it? According to Seppälä, quite a bit. It maximizes your resilience at work, your creativity for your lessons, and your interactions with others, your productivity, and even your charisma factor!⁸

All your former students and the trail of colleagues that intersect with the wake of your work will remember your happiness state season after season. It becomes part of your reputation in the community and among your colleagues.

Speaking of seasons, which season number is this for you, as you read this first part of the book? What school year are you in (for example, 2019–2020)? And, is this school season number one, five, twelve, or twenty-five for you? Or is it some other number? What time of the year is it? First quarter, third quarter, or is it the off season (usually summer) as you read these words?

MY HEART PRINT

For the eighth season of my teaching career, I chose a job at Community High School District 94 in West Chicago, Illinois. We started the school year twelve days late due to a teacher strike (I had not yet set foot in the door, and I was already walking a picket line). As we started the school year—the new season—I was in a department of teachers that was not in a positive emotional state. Department meetings were contentious. We experienced disagreements about what to teach and how to teach it. We prepared lessons but with minimal effort and planning. We had lost two weeks of pay, and everyone and everything seemed to be suffering.

Where was the happiness? There … was … none.

And the students felt the brunt of it.

Identify your current professional moment in time as you read this. Place a date on the page and the actual time right now. List your school season number and the current time of year in that season. It affects your frame of mind and provides context when you look back at what you were thinking as you read this part of the book. Add your location as you write this.

It was a rough start to this new and eighth season of my career as well as for all my colleagues. However, I was strangely living outside of this state of negative emotion. A positive person by nature, I did not have emotional attachment to the events leading up to the strike. Later in my career, I would serve as a faculty union president and as a school district superintendent. But at the moment, I was mostly detached from the strike issues. I just wanted to teach!

This brings me to a happiness dilemma. Based on these circumstances, should there then be no happiness? You might know that a dilemma is a usually undesirable or unpleasant choice. Being unhappy seems to me to be an unpleasant choice. I have never been part of or observed an unhappy school culture that was successful.

Enter Barry (not his real name). Barry was a teacher in our department perpetually in a state of heightened negative emotion. He was the exact opposite of Seppälä’s definition of happiness. He was very unhappy. His students felt it and for sure his colleagues felt his wrath as well. No one dared cross his path. Not even those adults “to his north,” such as our department chair. He was an angry person and wanted to be left alone. For him, the teacher strike had given him fuel and an enemy for his state of unhappiness. It was a happiness dilemma, for sure.

Is there someone like this in your school or office? Is there a negative, unhappy person residing within the path of your work? If so, think about him or her. Imagine this person in your mind. How do you approach someone like that?

I asked around to see if there was ever a time in Barry’s teaching life when he was happy. Not too many could remember. I was sure he did not just wake up this way. We tend to drift to a place of unhappiness and for whatever reasons, both Barry and his colleagues allowed him to drift too far, so far in fact that now it seemed no one could touch him and bring him back to a place of happiness.

His heartprint was negative, and his legacy was trending as not so good. It bothered me but not enough to do anything about it. After all, wasn’t that someone else’s job to help him, like the principal?

Then in the early winter of his eighteenth season (my eighth), our department went on a curriculum retreat at a former Baptist center in the middle of rural Wisconsin. We all shared a large house and also had to share rooms (like in a hotel).

Barry was my roommate.

“Why did I get this assignment?” I thought. I just knew I was headed for a long weekend. The first day proved me correct, as Barry’s emotional state was peppered with complaints about the why, what, and where of the entire retreat event. He was leaving a trail of negative emotion on each of us.

It appeared to me that teaching was no longer his calling. It was for him, at best, a way to get a paycheck every two weeks. I was not sure which season of teaching he could reconnect to and remember why he became a teacher in the first place, but I knew it was not a season close enough for him to remember.

Deep down, I sensed Barry had a teddy bear–like quality. He could actually be funny at times despite all of that cynicism. But somewhere along the way, he got burned out. On the second day we were there, it started snowing and the two of us set out to find some firewood for the house as the sun started to set.

So, back to my happiness dilemma: the usually undesirable or unpleasant choice.

When searching for firewood, I wondered, Should I ask Barry why he is so negative and unhappy all the time? Do I face this undesirable choice of aggravating him further in light of the circumstances? Do I lean in to this angry person? To go on receiving his negativity was not a good choice for my happiness or the happiness of our school culture. Professionals do not act this way, I kept thinking. They face the happiness dilemma and work their way through it.

And at the moment I had my own dilemma: to speak or not to speak. So, I quietly decided, yes. I’ll face the happiness dilemma that was like a cancer to our team and department. I will face my own personal dilemma and say something. But what should I say? What would you say?

As we were walking, I asked him a simple yet complex question: “Why do you hide behind this wall of unhappiness? What happened to you?”

Silence. I repeated my question and waited. You could hear our footsteps crackling in the snow.

His eventual response was revealing in so many ways. Barry told me that it was just easier than dealing with the reality of what his students don’t know. Essentially, he had lost his desire to do battle. He could not slog through another season of students failing. It wasn’t just the teacher strike. Essentially, he no longer found meaning in his work, and for him it was just easier to blame his problems on the students, the administration, and sometimes his colleagues—like me.

I asked him if teaching was his passion. He wasn’t sure anymore. I asked him if he wanted to stop being so negative. He said no. So, I stopped talking for a while. Eventually, we returned to the house and talked long into the night. He didn’t bite my head off, but it was difficult at times, because he seemed so angry with me. I knew it wasn’t about me, but it was still hard to listen and not take it personally or not tell him I thought he was rude sometimes. We became what I would term cautious colleagues over the next few years.

I won’t get into more details, because it was a personal journey for Barry, but I will say he reconnected with owning his own emotional state, becoming more aware of his negative impact on others, and finding some love for his students once again. It took him time, but his heartprint gradually began to change. I don’t think he ever reconnected with his original passion for the work. He also thought my positive outlook was not acceptable given the teaching conditions that caused the strike.

MY HEART PRINT

In the end, I told him I thought he had those endearing and funny traits of the better teachers I have known. He had, however, just forgotten what it meant to join and commit to the teaching and learning profession. It was okay to search for his happiness in his work. It was okay to find joy in the journey. It was okay to connect to students and colleagues with grace and, as we will discover later, something called grit.

It was his choice after all. Just as it was my choice too.

Think about Seppälä’s definition of happiness again: “A state of heightened positive emotion.”⁹ In the space provided, write about some of the actions you take at school or home to maintain your positive emotional state with your students and colleagues, even on the toughest of days.

Do you have a happiness dilemma that needs to be resolved? Do you have a work relationship that is draining you? Are you avoiding that colleague or student? Do you need to make the choice to lean into and engage a colleague who needs a happiness checkup?

Name the colleague (keep it to yourself—you do not want to offend someone, even if you need to lean into him or her), and decide the action you are able to take after you read chapter 2. For additional support with this type of happiness dilemma, see also chapter 19 in part 3, “A is for Alliances.”

How do you and your colleagues generally exhibit a positive emotional commitment to your students, each other, and your work? Be descriptive with your response.

It is possible that you will be able to reconnect that person to his or her passion for the profession. This connection, in turn, may just be what this person needs to help him or her find elements of happiness in professional life once again.