We cannot cure the world of sorrows, but we can choose to live in joy. Joseph Campbell

There’s a scene in Star Wars – a New Hope that used to give me nightmares as a boy. Our heroes Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, Princess Leia and Chewbacca find themselves trapped in the Trash Compactor on the first Death Star, with a monster lurking beneath a pool of space rubbish. Minutes later, just as they think they’ve survived, the walls begin coming in. They scrabble under the rubbish to find the button that will make it stop.

This is I think what it can feel like being a school leader at its worst. Financial pressures, pupil numbers, complaints, SEN needs, attendance, suspensions. Even a new and even more complex inspection framework. Pressure from all sides, no way out, the walls coming in.

But we also know what the job feels like at its best, when we experience joy in our schools. When we sense that despite the pressures and against all the odds, things are going well. When the lesson runs smoothly, when the parent meeting you weren’t looking forward to is a surprise success, when our high needs children are thriving, when Year 11 come to after-school revision, when the team is behind you. When you climb into the car on a Friday afternoon, tired, but satisfied.

In her recent keynote at the CST Conference in October, Leora Cruddas asked two questions:
– Are our pupils flourishing? (the PISA 2022 report found that pupils in England reported a significantly lower average level of satisfaction with their lives compared with other countries).
– Is our workforce flourishing? (Education Support’s Teacher Wellbeing Index 2024 found that 78% of all staff in our schools feel stressed).

The reality is that many feel they are not flourishing as educators. This is a workforce challenge, because we know that where we have flourishing adults, children are much more likely to be thriving. So how do we create the conditions so that all of us can flourish?

In chapter ten of John’s gospel, Jesus says: I have come so that they may have life, and have it abundantly. This is often translated as to live life to the full. As teachers we want our children to live lives which are rich and full of joy. This might mean experiencing a vibrant curriculum, supportive relationships, fabulous music and dance, inspiring sports, exciting trips.

As adults, finding joy in the job means holding onto the moments when everything goes well. But we also know that it’s not just about the high points. Much of the real day-to-day job satisfaction means keeping the basics going – preparing and planning solid lessons, ensuring play equipment is safe and that forest school brings smiles. Brilliant days and memorable moments are built on foundations of good routines and predictability.

But despite all this, I’ve lost count of the conversations with leaders who’ve told me a version of:  I’m losing the joy and sense of fun I enjoyed early in my career. I spend most of my working week doing things that bring me little joy.

That as our responsibility increases, our joy declines.

Now there are lots of different ways to consider the transitions in our professional lives (for example the Yerkes-Dodson stress curve suggests that increased responsibility is exactly what many of us need to spark interest and improve our performance at certain points in our careers). Transitions are important – but so is being honest about the fact that feeling less happy at work may be as much about the challenges that life throw at us: juggling growing children, ageing parents, or our own health issues.

Nevertheless, if what some leaders are saying is true, then they are progressively losing the joy of the job. We can’t accept this as the inevitable outcome of becoming a school leader. It’s not painting an attractive picture for those just reaching for the first few rungs on the leadership ladder. So, what do we mean by joy, and can we re-capture the joy of the job?

Here are 5 ways we might choose joy in our working lives.

1/ What do we mean by joy?
Joy exists in a world where, to quote M. Scott Peck’s first line of The Road Less Travelled, life is difficult. It’s a gloriously old-fashioned word (Joy is my Mum’s name – she’s 91). Whereas happiness depends on external factors, joy is a practice and a deliberate behaviour. Happiness happens to us, and it’s a good feeling. Joy on the other hand can share space with sadness and fear. If we choose joy, it can transform tough times. There are lots of books about how to achieve happiness. Fewer which plumb the depths of joy.

In Anthony Seldon’s powerful book, Beyond Happiness, he distinguishes between:

– Pleasure, which is transitory, and where we are normally at the centre of our universe. When we experience pleasure, the ‘I’ is more important than anyone else (I>O)
– Happiness, which is more rewarding, and where we are in relationship with others. To experience happiness, we treat others as equals (I=O)
– Joy, which is deeper still, where we are in harmony with others, and negate our ego. To experience joy, others must become more important than ourselves (I<O)

So, joy might be relevant to our working life by:
– realising that it’s a deliberate mindset we bring into both good and bad situations,
– focusing on others more than our own happiness or career
– seeing it as deeper current of emotion than happiness.

In my coaching I might ask people to score out of ten their current levels of joy at work, and ask what would need to happen for this score to improve. In his book 12 Rules for Life, Jordan Peterson asks what would your life look like if it was better? Maybe we’re more in control of the amount of joy at work than we thought.

2/ Be honest
In many ways it should come as no surprise that some leaders feel they’re losing their joy at work. Early in our career we find our sweet spot and we’re full of purpose. Energised by our new-found work, driven on by the new skills we are learning, we grow both in confidence and in the sense of being professionally comfortable in our own skin. We see the day-to-day difference that we are making with pupils. All of this growth creates a professional momentum which carries us forwards. We have agency in the future, and the part in it we can play.

But with greater responsibility, we’re now in a different phase. The freshness has been replaced by admin, policies and ‘stuff’. And there’s less direct contact with pupils, replaced with dealing with staff issues and greater accountability. So it is measurably true if I say that I’m losing some of the joy which brought me into the job. I really am.

But it’s also true to say that the language I choose is important. It’s easy to catastrophise. To say, the last two weeks haven’t been enjoyable is distinctly different from I’ve lost the joy. Every role comes with its unattractive but essential bits of drudgery.

3/ Choose a joyful mindset
Joy does not simply happen to us. We have to choose joy and keep choosing it every day. Henri Nouwen

Choosing joy means that you try to be less reactive, in order to become the steady, calm person your team can rely on. When someone brings a deep sense of joy to their work this isn’t saccharine or gushy, but real and practical; it helps forge team dynamics and it irons out the unpredictability of what the education system next throws at us. We all want to work with this kind of calming and positive leader.

To choose joy is to seize control of our diaries, and make sure they’re not overwhelmed with the negative. Every Thursday afternoon as HT I’d make five phone calls to parents of children who had done something special that week. I think it was good for the pupils. The parents liked it. I needed it.

It’s similar finding a routine of praise for adults. Unless I put it in the diary the negative always outweighs the positive. Creating a weekly rhythm of praise means that on Wednesday afternoon I’m already searching hard for those bits of staff brilliance that can so easily go unnoticed in a grey and dismal week. A weekly routine encourages us to be on the lookout for the positive. Searching for collective joy.

We need balance in how we give out, and how we protect ourselves. We spend lots of time preserving our energy levels and watching our workload. This personal caution makes sense in lots of ways, but when we take this too far, it can prevent us from reaching out, from saying more than we might, from being 10% more bold, from doing what we know to be good for us. To choose joy ultimately means taking some risk.

The way to have abundant life is not to save it, but to give it away, because life cannot be shut up and saved any more than a bird can be put in the shoebox and stored on the shelf. Barbara Brown Taylor

4/ Encouraging joy in our teams
They will forget what you said, but they will never forget how you made them feel. Maya Angelou.

Effective leaders choose joy when they create clarity of purpose and a sense of satisfaction in their team about the work being done. This feeling of being engaged in something worthwhile is the raw ingredient in experiencing joy in our job. For this to be meaningful, we need to know that the expectations on us are realistic, that we have a team around us all pulling in the same direction and that we are trusted. It’s often when these three criteria are out of balance that we lose our sense of joy.

We encourage joy our teams when:
– when we bring positive solutions into meetings and cancel out negative mindsets
– when we support a colleague to be successful in achieving a role they’re excited about
– when we work selflessly behind the scenes at tasks no one will see

The Dead Sea in the Middle East receives freshwater, but it has no outlet, so it doesn’t pass the water out. It receives beautiful water from the rivers, and the water goes bad. And that’s why it’s called the dead Sea. It receives and it does not give. In the end, generosity is the best way of becoming more, more and more joyful. Desmond Tutu

Bringing out the best in others doesn’t mean cultivating false modesty. It means having a healthy sense of our own ability and skill, and the grace to encourage others to use theirs and shine. Humility and brilliance walks hand in hand. There is a Jewish proverb that says we should all carry around two notes in the pockets of our coats. In one pocket the note says, I am but dust, and in the other it says, and all the earth is made for me.

5/ Find the bright spots
Many of us find ways of squeezing a little joy into our week. When everything seems impossible maybe we head for the sandpit in early years. Young children help keep things simple and they remind us what really matters when it’s all getting a bit much, (out of the mouths of children comes truth – Psalm 8). There you see children exploring, adults taking ridiculous risks. You’ll be welcomed with waves, infected by smiles, led by the hand back to the purpose of it all, while tiptoeing around the Lego.

As headteacher I loved the daily habit of greeting the same group of children at the school gate, every morning, and the feeling of building that relationship. The privilege that here is where we’ve been placed, to serve, so choosing joy means to bring warmth and energy and unconditional love to the children who most need it.

What are the things I say and do which most help colleagues? This often involves highlighting bright spots and telling real stories. It takes a little practice to spot them, but there’s plenty of raw material right under our noses we can capture in uplifting, encouraging, joyful messages. When we help to articulate the daily difference that colleagues make this can help retain people in their wobbly phases of the job. Studying what staff do, then replaying it back as positive feedback, can help point to the joy of the job.

These acts of attention are powerful and compound, creating a bank of remembered feedback, which can carry people through the bad patches. The dark moments when staff can entertain the possibility of giving up.

I suspect there is a ‘but for …’  statistic that we never see, along the lines but for those words I heard at just the right time, I wouldn’t still be teaching. That statistic must be huge.

And if you are stuck for ideas, then just spend just a little longer in class, and revel in what is going on, for the sheer joy of it. Classroom moments provide the best stories of all.

. . .

We don’t find joy alone. We find it in relationship, often informally, where we listen and check in on each other. Joy sometimes means being on top of your game, but more often it’s the knowledge that when you’re not, there are people behind you, waiting to share joy.