How Do You Want to Participate?

Today, Wednesday, May 6, 2026, I led a dialogue among the teachers of the Lake Forest campus of Fusion Academy as part of their Teacher Appreciation Week. We met for 30 minutes and covered a LOT of ground. Here are some of the highlights — and how their perspectives shaped my own point of view on self-management after challenging situations.

We talked about restoration, but kept circling back to what reflection and resourcing make possible before you get there.

Three questions to sit with:

Who am I? What is my purpose? What is the next step?

Micro-practices for between difficult sessions (2–5 minutes)

When you only have a few minutes between hard moments, you don't need a wellness routine — you need a reset. Some options: a playlist that brings you back to yourself, a stretch (seated counts), a short walk, three texts of appreciation, standup comedy, puppy videos, YouTube landscapes or city walks.

My favorite is the complete code-switch. What other parts of your identity can you tend to for two minutes — the fulfilling, fun, full-cognitive-shift parts of you? The cook, the cyclist, the music nerd, the gardener? Connect with that part long enough to remember it's still there.

Working mindfulness into the day

First question: is it on your calendar? We could all do that right now.

The bigger shift is doing this as a matter of practice — not only when the urgency is high. Apps like Calm and Waking Up can help, but the real move is treating self-care as routine maintenance rather than emergency repair.

Disconnecting school energy from home energy

I don't have time to really break this down today, but I'll offer one provocation: what if the energy isn't meant to be disconnected but integrated?

And a question back to you — how do you disconnect from other kinds of energy in your life? Have you built that muscle memory yet? If so, what works?

Teaching another session after a hard one

Honestly? I'm sitting with this one. How DO you?

Maybe the more useful question is whether something has to change inside the system itself (ah ehm, Taryn Williams Clark , Andréa Richardson, MBA) — whether expecting someone to move directly from a challenging situation into the next session, with no buffer, is the actual problem. Or, big BIG question - is this the right system for you, really?

The certainty of uncertainty

We also talked about something the research keeps confirming: stress is linked, study after study, to three qualities of experience — uncertainty, ambiguity, and novelty.

For these teachers, the curriculum isn't novel. There isn't much ambiguity around their purpose or their schedule. What IS uncertain — every single day — is their students' behavior.

By the end of our conversation, we'd landed on something that felt important: accepting and moving through the certainty of uncertainty in their roles may require a lot more tending to than they've given it so far. The uncertainty isn't going away. It's the job. Which means the work isn't to eliminate it — it's to build the capacity to be in it.

The same could be said for the corporate leaders we work with every week.

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One comment from the meeting really stuck with me. A gentleman said, "some of us prefer to be alone." When I asked how he likes to be approached, he said with a smile, "I'm one of those people that likes to be alone!" — and we all laughed.

What was instructive about it: not everyone processes challenges with other people, let alone in groups. Some people reflect, restore, and resource themselves alone, and that is okay if it's okay for the individual. It's not for a coach or trainer or leader to decide that the person who cares for themselves privately is lying, avoiding, or doing it wrong. Maybe they're really, genuinely not. Maybe just saying it out loud was the big step.

Here's something else I want to say, even if my readers already know it.

I caught myself cringing when I said "difficult students" to this group of teachers. I asked them what other language I could use. They said: challenging. And then: challenging situations. Not students. Definitely not students.

How is this relevant to my corporate audience? I've written about this before: stop calling your employees — who are, in fact, adults — problem children. They are neither children, nor is the problem of their presence in your organization theirs alone to solve. They may be challenging adults. They may be creating challenging situations.

We could learn something from the teachers at Fusion Academy and start naming the colleagues we can't quite stand by what they actually create for us: challenging situations.

And let's not forget — we participate in those situations too. Which means there is plenty of room for us to reflect on, and decide, how we want to participate.