The Power of Emotional Connection
Schools, by their very nature, involve interacting with people. Therefore, if you don’t like people, then a school is not an environment that you should choose to work in, given the level of interactions that occur every day. Interactions occur between colleagues, teachers and parents, and teachers and students. They vary from simple interactions, such as a greeting, through to more complex interactions around teaching and learning. What makes these interactions complex however is that they are all, in most cases, connected to emotions. It is our emotions that then guide us towards either an attraction or aversion to something or someone.
If we interact with a person and have a negative experience with them, then it is likely that when we see them next, given our previous experience, that we will potentially begin to construct a negative mindset towards the person, which potentially frames the way we will interact with them on the next occasion. The effect of this is that it is likely that, regardless of how the other person interacts with us, we are more likely to frame it within a negative context. Conversely, the opposite occurs if there has been a positive interaction between two people. This same scenario plays out when we find ourselves in a context that is similar, regardless of the people involved, to a situation we have experienced previously. It is this ongoing process, attached to emotive responses, which makes working in a school environment such a complex process. It is also why communicating via text and through emails is so very hard, the message is read from the mindframe of the reader, not the writer. It is important that we understand this process, which operates at a subconscious level, when managing our interactions. It leads me to the story about the two wolves. The story reads like this:
A group of Cherokee children has gathered around their grandfather. They are filled with excitement and curiosity. That day there had been a quite tumultuous conflict between two adults and their grandfather was called to mediate. The children are eager to hear what he has to say about it.
One of the children pops the question that puzzles him. “Grandfather, why do people fight?” “Well” the old man replies, “we all have two wolves inside us, you see. They are in our chest. And these wolves are constantly fighting each other”. The eyes of the children have grown big by now. “In our chests too, grandfather?” asks another child. “And in your chest too?” asks a third one. He nods, “yes, in my chest too”. He surely has their attention now. Grandfather continues. “There is a white wolf and a black wolf. The black wolf is filled with fear, anger, envy, jealousy, greed, and arrogance.
The white wolf is filled with peace, love, hope, courage, humility, compassion, and faith. They battle constantly”. Then he stops. It’s the child that asked the initial question that can’t handle the tension anymore. “But grandfather, which wolf wins?” The old Cherokee simply replies, “The one that we feed”.
The thing that we should take away from this story is that we can stop feeding the black wolf and start feeding the white wolf at any given moment. The complexity around this however, is that we must first learn to recognise our thought processes and the emotions that arise, in order for us to manage them in the first place. Regulating our emotions as leaders applies as much to us as it does to children. For us to be in a position to help others monitor and self-regulate, we must also become proficient at doing this ourselves.