Islands of Sanity
September 01, 2024
Appears in September 2024: School Administrator.
A prominent organizational leadership author on how we can create and nourish places of refuge and possibility in turbulent seas
And, on a personal level, do we still have the heart and will to discover answers to these questions?
Several years ago, having worked with organizational leaders in nearly every sector since 1973, including K-12 education, I stated with full confidence that leadership never has been more difficult. In nearly all professions and nations, leaders face a perfect storm — the coalescence of climate and human catastrophes directly impacting them over which they have no control and fearful people clamoring for fixes. All good and caring leaders, spending years striving to empower and engage people, now feel besieged by life-destroying forces intensifying at incomprehensible speed.
Let me emphatically note: It’s not our fault we’ve reached this extreme state of life-destroying behaviors. Yet as leaders dedicated to serving students, faculty and communities with quality education, what are we to do?
I answer with equal confidence: We need to restore sanity by awakening the human spirit. We can achieve this only if we undertake the most challenging and meaningful work of our leader lives — by creating islands of sanity.
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Author
When Feeling Attacked, Consider Lessons from Besieged Nuns
For several years, I witnessed at close hand how the leaders of U.S. Catholic nuns responded to attacks from the Vatican that too frequently resembled an inquisition. Under Pope Benedict, the Vatican condemned and denied their contribution, and sought to render them powerless, to control them into obedience.
As I witnessed the nuns’ perseverance, clarity of purpose, trusted practices for collective contemplation and reflection, and their deep faith in serving what they called “the God of the Future,” I felt a need, as a trainer in the field of organizational leadership, to describe what I witnessed in these principles.
When you are challenged or attacked for your leadership, keep these lessons in mind. They won’t reduce venomous attacks, but they will serve you well to maintain your stability, focus and good relationships. They can strengthen you for the next onslaught.
Don’t take it personally. These attacks targeted at you arise from a larger context. What else is going on, what history is coming to fruition, what fear is seeking blame, what misinformation is fueling hatred? You are the target, but really it’s not about you.
Don’t play the victim. Use this moment to tune into all those experiencing similar difficulties. Just like you, they feel abused, shamed, attacked, outraged. As you relate to them, your personal experience opens you to the human experience. You’re not an isolated victim. You’re a participant in the darker side of human behavior.
Avoid all forms of communication except direct conversations. As we all know by now, rapid-fire online communication deteriorates into misunderstandings and blame, even with those close to us. And politically, you don’t want records of your reactivity.
Find meaning and possibility in the struggle. Don’t be a martyr, but do keep seeking to learn from this experience. We have no control over these attacks, but we have 100 percent control of how we interpret and respond to them.
Define yourself. You are the best expert on you. Don’t let others define you. Under attack, it’s normal to internalize accusations, to doubt yourself. When overtaken by doubts, ask those who care about you to guide you through this moment, to affirm your skills and qualities, your generosity and kindness.
Don’t abandon yourself or those you love and serve. Remember who you are and why you’re here. Stay focused on your purpose, what you aspire to offer to others.
Rely on your faith. Feed your faith. Notice times when it nourishes you, when you feel held by it. Notice when people’s behaviors reward your faith in them.
Stay steadfast in your behavior. Don’t succumb to tactics of aggression and fear. There are many examples of when nonviolent behaviors gradually converted violent opposition. You may not change them, but you were not changed by them.
Find companions for the journey. Those who are engaged in similar struggles are priceless companions. We truly save one another’s sanity.
Honor yourself for staying in the struggle. However things work out, you have done your best, working with challenging circumstances in an honorable, life-affirming way.
— Margaret Wheatley
Tested by Turmoil: A School Endures as an Island of Sanity
by Timothy S. Carr
![Tim Carr headshot](/images/default-source/school-administrator/2024-september/33-tim_carr_1mb.jpg?sfvrsn=6c9eade6_3)
What did we do to deserve this magical place?” I asked my school colleague in 2014 as we surveyed middle school students tending a garden of their own design on our lush tropical campus of the Jakarta International School in Indonesia. Today, I often look back at that blissful moment as a sign of the fruits of our collective labors, a reserve of positivity that ultimately enabled our school community to persevere through the nightmare that followed.
Two days later, the school was thrown into the abyss by a series of unfounded criminal accusations involving sexual abuse initially against two school staff members.
Along with those who preceded us at the international school, we had built a sanctuary in the midst of a megacity in southeast Asia. In line with Margaret Wheatley’s thinking about islands of sanity, it was a refuge, a safe, nurturing place, where 2,500 students in preK-12 from 85 nations came together for impactful learning. Teachers felt free to innovate. Students had time and space to pursue their creative learning passions and parents were welcomed as partners.
Our school’s mission: “Creative, inquisitive, passionate, learning to be best for the world.” Our values, which we wore on lanyards around our necks daily, included perseverance, compassion, balance and fun. Joyful learning wasn’t just encouraged, it was becoming the norm.
The fact that these core elements — our mission, vision, values and dreams for the future — were co-created by representatives from our entire community in 2011 was key. Because they weren’t edicts from on high, the core documents were invitational and actively invoked by essentially all members of our community. The emergent plans served as an active compass, not a prescribed path. They guided everything we did, from lessons planned and priorities to facility construction. We had done the hard work that yielded a rare gift: organizational clarity focused on high-quality learning for all.
Guiding Lights
When our island sanctuary and its state of relative bliss suddenly fell under siege in 2014, every fiber of our community was tested. The flood of social media lambasting our community painted us as pariahs and spread like a wildfire throughout the country. An ever-growing team of crisis management experts, legal counsel, public relations specialists, diplomats and community power players all joined our leadership team and board of trustees to chart our crisis plan and pursuit of justice for innocent staff members (who later were released from incarceration after serving half of their sentences).
To our faculty, the message was simple during the storm: While we deal with these external forces attacking our school, please focus all of your energy on the students and teach your hearts out.
While these support systems were key guiding lights, our organizational clarity, our integrity, our sense of purpose and our direction collectively enabled us to persevere. Informed by the indigenous traditions of our host nation, Indonesia, we knew who we were, and so did our international school colleagues around the world. This translated into faith that we would survive, persevere and even thrive in the future.
Over the ensuing months and years that followed, that faith turned out to be contagious. Despite the shocking headlines, friends and colleagues reached out across the world to offer support. These turned out to be vital lifelines.
Steadfast Focus
Recently, I was asked to speak to the community of what’s been renamed the Jakarta Intercultural School, which I had left as head of school in 2017 for a new professional venture back in the U.S. Individuals gathered on campus around the dragon fountain and those in diaspora listened remotely on the 10-year anniversary of the firestorm in Jakarta. While it felt like ripping off the bandages yet again, I took the opportunity to reflect anew.
Paradoxical feelings linger — a mixture of deep sadness for the needless suffering, especially for those incarcerated and their families, as well as joy in the triumph of our unique, multicultural community that held firm and became stronger through the crucible of the protracted crisis. I’m deeply grateful to have been part of such a principled community, a true island of sanity, that’s still focused on learning to be best for the world.
Tim Carr is principal/consultant at Joyful Learning Leaders LLC in Williamstown, Mass.
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