I've been inside the environments I work with.
I taught elementary school for years. I thought it was going to feel fun and exciting. Instead, most days it felt arduous because the expectation was that the achievement gap would be narrowed for my students.
The solution to the important yet monumental task? Curriculum changes, new classroom management strategies, and interactive technology.
It felt like there was always someone there saying, “do this and this and this.”
It was like drinking from a fire hose with no chance to come up for air.
The academic piece was also the focus. Yet, tools to manage the emotional and mental reality of the environment were never provided.
My students were bringing their home experiences into the classroom while I was bringing mine. We were basically being asked to compartmentalize our existence and leave everything else behind when we walked through the door.
That's just not realistic.
This experience isn’t unique to education. It shows up anywhere that people are operating under constant pressure - healthcare, public safety, nonprofits.
I've come to understand that you can't ask someone to change how they're functioning in an environment if the environment doesn’t change.
The people in the organization need tools to understand and manage how they're responding so they can navigate the conditions and continue doing the work when the environment can't change, which is often the case.
Most of the current approaches focus on what the people are doing and not why. This is the gap that I've built my work around.