Year 10: Week 3 - Features And Flaws

One of the most important lesson my therapist, the late Nancy Good taught me was the path to happiness and contentment in your relationships is acceptance. If you are annoyed that your partner leaves dirty dishes out on the table after dinner and your feelings of annoyance are your problem. Yes, your partner can change their behavior, and perhaps they should but if you nag them and get them to change, you will eventually find something else about what they do that will annoy you.

True acceptance is essential in a relationship and that includes accepting flaws. Only by addressing them as a way to help to help your partner, not in an attempt to deal with your own feelings of annoyance, can you help your partner learn to be better person. Only by learning to accept perceived flaws and letting go of our own feelings of negativity, can we truly build healthy and meaningful relationships.

I’ve been thinking about my relationship to my school. How am I building and development my relationship with my school in a healthy and productive way? The answer I’ve landed on in the past couple weeks is to work on acceptance, take responsibility for my own negative feelings, and figure out what are flaws and what are features at my school.

There are imperfections, and things that feel like they should work better at any organization. Some of these things can be improved, these are flaws. Some of these things that seems gratuitous are part of the way an organization work. These things are features, parts of how things work.

Features at my school are conversations that seem to have year after year, personality quirks in colleagues, and ways of working that on the surface do not seem the most pragmatic. After ten years, it’s become clear to me that many of these things will never change, or if they do, these changes aren’t going to come from me. So, I can get annoyed about these things, or just accept them, and see how they come from places of positive intention and really aren’t that big a deal.

Then there are flaws, things that we can and need to address. The problem is that it’s not always clear what are features and what are flaws. Sometimes accepting things as features feels like giving up, but it’s more often a way to move on through a day with a more positive attitude.

People change, leadership evolves, and the culture of a school can change. There are times when features become flaws that can be addressed. The energy and creativity to correct these issues will be available because the institution hasn’t been drained by negativity.

Flaws are challenges, and opportunities for growth. Features are who we are, things that from one angle look like problems. However, from another angle these features are expressions of individuality, diversity of thoughts, and what makes our school special.