How To Have A Bad Day

As a lifelong Newcastle United fan, I had to learn fairly quickly in my life how to deal with disappointment, despair and, occasionally, outright disaster. Indeed, my family rarely looks ahead to either Saturday afternoons (or evenings where we live now) or Sunday afternoons with any sense of gleeful anticipation as they know that dad will, barring a miracle, spend a couple of hours shouting intermittently about what an absolute embarrassment of a club we are whilst staring hopefully at his phone for some kind of indication that we’ve managed to at least get into the other team’s half for a change. A pleasant end to the day at the weekend is pretty much impossible thanks to the current staggering levels of ineptitude that make even the most orange of politicians looks like a competent administrator and it takes considerable resilience on my part not to stomp in a full-on Hulk rampage all the way from my home in the Middle East to NUFC’s substandard training ground in Benton, near where I was brought up, just to make sure that all concerned know just how much of an impact their being rubbish has on my entire family’s wellbeing each week. All (semi) jesting to one side for a moment, it could actually be that being accustomed to things not going particularly well for my favourite team since I started supporting them in the 1980s (a couple of seasons under Kevin Keegan and Sir Bobby Robson aside, of course) has sort of helped me in my personal and professional life to deal with the many inevitable dips that occur over time. Some of the best guidance that I have ever read regarding how to deal with difficult moments comes from Gill Hasson’s book Mindfulness, where she writes that “Understanding that setbacks are normal and to be expected will help prevent difficulties from undermining your determination and confidence.” Stuff is going to happen to us and around us and some of it may affect us negatively whilst other elements could have a positive impact; the biggest determiner of how this stuff makes us feel, however, is our own reaction to it. If we’re good at dealing with things not going the way that we want them to, then the stuff that happens doesn’t necessarily need to be viewed as negative and it certainly doesn’t have to knock us off our feet or ruin our day like it sometimes can. When you have a bad day, for whatever reason, that’s all that has happened: a bad day. View it in isolation, if you can; it means neither that you have a bad life nor that there is a certainty of only having bad days ahead from now on. Just a bad day. And the next day that comes along is a new day that could be completely different, depending, to a large extent, upon your attitude towards it, of course. The key to dealing with a bad day, in my experience, is letting it go. It happened and it was awful but it’s gone. Moving forward is always a better idea than standing still because you’ve tethered yourself to the awful day that you really want to be rid of. How you do this depends upon whatever you need to do as an individual to let things go. For me, I need some space or I need exercise and loud music but I know that everyone is different. Whatever you need to do, acknowledge firstly that you’ve had a bad day and make a plan to get over it that works for you. Unless you’re a Newcastle fan, in which case I’m afraid this guidance doesn’t count.

 

I learned very early in my professional life, almost but not quite as early as learning that Newcastle United lose a lot, that when you’re dealing with a problem then the problem is the problem and nothing else. What that essentially means in non-gobbledygook English is that you should focus solely upon whatever the issue is that you need to deal with and not necessarily presume that it is part of a bigger picture or make speculative assumptions about how or why something happened. Take dealing with an incident of bad behaviour by a student in a school, for example. On so many occasions I have asked colleagues in the various places that I have worked to focus upon the what happened element of the incident and not the who did it part. The problem is the problem, not the child. Even if you’ve had to deal with the same student before, focus upon dealing with the problem of what actually happened and put aside any personal opinions that you may have formed about the individual. It really won’t help anyone if even before the problem has begun to be tackled people are chipping in with comments about the student’s character or how a likelihood of future misdemeanours means that we need to act tough. Just deal with the problem and this will help you to much more effectively find an appropriate and fair solution to whatever happened. Even when there are many problems coming at you from every conceivable angle (usually a Thursday afternoon, in my experience) it’s still important to simply focus upon each problem so that solutions can be found. And then move on, of course. Don’t hang on to the problems after they’ve gone and bemoan your entire existence because you’ve had another bad day. Tomorrow could, and probably will, be better, especially if you’ve let go of everything that you’ve dealt with.

 

Quite often, a key component of my own very typical bad days is when I make mistakes, and throughout the course of my career I would guess that I have made quite a few. Some of them, upon reflection, were probably quite big ones and others were more likely bog-standard whoops-silly-me moments that everyone had a bit of laugh about (I hope) before realising that things could be put right rather easily. Since moving into school leadership about a decade ago I have learned that my mistakes have become much more high-profile and memorable than they ever were before, such is the territory that comes with sitting in the biggest chairs in the building. For a while now, I have contemplated the relationship between power and vulnerability that surely exists at the heart of most leaders within all sorts of organisations as I know that, from my perspective, although many who sit underneath me in the hierarchical structure of our workplace may assume that I could confidently deal with most issues that come my way on a daily basis in reality this is not always the case and actually for many of them I seek guidance from colleagues around me who I think might be able to help me to find a solution. Leaders are not infallible and they certainly don’t know how to do everything, at least not in my own experience, and it would only be either delusion or ego (rarely a winning combination) that would convince someone that they never needed to look for advice from someone else. You need to be strong as a school leader and it is essential to have had a great deal of experience and to possess a considerable amount of know-how, but it’s also vital to remember that you can’t do everything and that you’re just another member of the wider leadership team. Other members of your team knowing something that you don’t or being able to help you with something does not weaken your position, it strengthens the ability of the whole team to function cohesively and effectively. Honestly, thinking that because you’re at the top of an organisation you should know everything about everything and that it would be somehow embarrassing to ask someone else for help with something is a bit like a mad scientist from a Hammer Horror film meddling with things that they don’t understand (cue manic laugh) and then wondering why everything starts to go wrong around them (cue huuuge flashes of lightning). The idea of an all-knowing educationally-omnipotent superhead is a mythical nonsense, in my opinion, and although I would accept that one (usually very charismatic) person can indeed make a huge difference to a team it’s the team itself as a whole that makes a bigger difference over time. On some occasions during my career I have worked with or alongside some colleagues who have placed themselves on such lofty pedestals that no one is able to challenge them on any points at all and everything that the all-powerful leader says is taken immediately as that which must be done. This power without vulnerability stance is dangerous and nearly always leads to bad decisions being taken and not a great deal of learning or improvements taking place over time. Challenge is essential to moving forward, but this can only happen if a leader sees themselves as imperfect and if an individual’s ego does not allow for this suggestion to come into play then it’s likely that any challenge will quickly be snuffed out. When this kind of situation develops, many mistakes by many colleagues, and thus a succession of bad days, becomes the norm.

 

Although it may seem paradoxical, making occasional mistakes in a professional setting does not mean that high standards are also not present. It is possible for both to coexist in a healthy environment where lots of learning takes place because professionals understand not only that there is a team working together to support each other but also that the moments when things don’t work that well, for whatever reason, are often the ones where the most learning happens. The key, obviously, is that it’s not the same mistakes happening over and over again but rather new mistakes, with the old ones very much consigned to the it-happened-let’s-learn-from-it-and-move-on pile. Any professional culture which deals too harshly and too quickly with mistakes is only ever going to lead to even more mistakes happening and a rapid turnover of colleagues who come in, make the same mistakes that their predecessors did and then leave before anyone has had the chance to learn from what happened and put some new systems or procedures in place to stop it happening again. Making a mistake is usually a pretty clear indication of a bad day from a professional perspective, but without these bad days also becoming opportunities to learn and improve then we’re only ever going to have more bad days and not the good days that come about when things actually get better and we all work out how to do things in a much more effective manner. There is a skill to having a bad day, to knowing how to fail, as Dr. Carol Dweck calls it in her Mindset book when writing about the baseball player Billy Beane who never quite made it because “He had no concept of failure” and couldn’t cope with defeat, and it is an essential component of any successful leader that they know what to do when one comes along. It doesn’t make you an ineffective leader if you have a bad day, it is simply a reminder that you are human and that bad days are normal every now and then. How you deal with it and what you do about whatever lead to you having a bad day in the first place is what will help the next day to not be a bad one as well.