Tips for Teachers: How to Protect Your Peace from Toxically Negative Co-Workers

There's a quote I remind myself of a lot and that is from motivational speaker Jim Rohn, and the quote is "you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with, and I think if we really reflect, we see that it is true. We think about it with ourselves, with our students. The five people you most spend time with really do shape who you are. In certain ways, they determine what conversations dominate your attention, your outlook, and, a lot of times, even your values. So we need to be really careful with what I always say is mind to your hang with. So in this episode we're going to do a deep dive into how do we protect our peace, how do we maintain an attitude of optimism and positivity when we are tasked with working with co-workers who are toxically negative? It's a big topic. It involves, you know, compassion, it involves a certain skill set and it involves strategies, and I'm going to give them all to you in this episode. Welcome to the Balance your Teacher Life podcast, where we talk all things avoiding educator burnout, setting healthy boundaries and achieving better work-life balance. If you're passionate about education but tired of it consuming your whole life, you have found your home in the podcast universe. I'm your host, grace Stevens, and let's get going with today's show, all right? So let's talk about it. In episode three, or show number three, we talked about toxic positivity and I touched on something that is talked about a lot on campuses, which is this idea that first appeared, to the best of my knowledge, on Jen Gonzalez's Cult of Pedagogy back in 2013, I believe, and it was the idea of find your marigolds. So if you haven't listened to that episode, you can go back and listen if you're curious about that. But at that time I said that I felt absolutely 100% agreed with the idea of finding your marigold, but thinking that what that article actually was missing was the strategies. How do you deal with people or, in her case, what she described as the walnuts, the people who poison your growth? How do you deal with them if you have to work with them? So the first thing is recognize the difference between having a bad day, venting or being toxically negative. So there is no way that everybody is happy, positive, sunshiney every single day. In teaching, you know, I've been very honest about the fact that I am not a naturally, you know upbeat person. I have worked many years to gain the skills and the mindsets to have a more positively focused outlook. I think if you'd speak to any of my co-workers or past people I've worked with, they always mentioned to me oh my gosh, you're always so upbeat and positive and yet those very same people have, you know, I don't want to say took me off a ledge, but certainly have, like, knocked on my door and, you know, said hey, okay, when they've seen me hiding on my desk. So, not everybody, you know. There are days, as I like to say, the lemonade stand is closed today, right. So everybody has a bad day. There is so much to be concerned about, to be overwhelmed with. So there's a difference between you having a bad day and, you know, venting with your teacher bestie, right, you know. Or that teacher friend who comes to you and you're like, oh my god, you won't believe what this parent note did today, and they're all upset and you're like 100% behind them, like who have I got to go beat up? You know, we ride at dawn kind of attitude, right? You have those days where you are fired up because somebody bothered you, okay, and that is normal and that is human. So I'm not talking about that. What I'm talking about is the people who, no matter what, are like little eaws, walking around with that little cloud above their head. Right, no matter which group of students they have, if you listen to them, they'll tell you they're the worst students they've ever had, the worst parents they've ever had, the worst curriculum they've ever had to deal with. Right, they are just, you know, any solution you have, they find a problem with it. They are just totally negative people. Okay, and so that's a reality. There are those people out there. We need to, first off, have compassion. Oh my gosh, what a horrible way to go through life. Right, that's just, you know, really sad and we don't know much. As you know, my echo framework that I always come back to, that the the O in the echo is other teacher's experience doesn't need to be your experience, and that's true of life. Right, other people's experience of life doesn't need to be the same of yours, but, at the same time, that doesn't mean that their experience isn't real for them. Right, that experience for them is real. We need to have compassion for it. You know, we don't know what kind of battles they're facing. Maybe many areas of their life are dysfunctional and overwhelming and, you know, just plain tragic, terrible things happen to people, right, and so we need to have compassion, that's number one. But we also need to protect ourselves. We know that there are people that once we run into them and we get kind of dragged into their kind of drama and they're downward spiral of how terrible everything is. You know, five minutes, ten minutes, however many minutes you walk away from them later, you know they're a big like. I can think of a couple of people who am I experience. You know I would be. You know like bouncy and just you know my general like little. You know, walking along my my own business and get cornered by this person and then, literally ten minutes later, like walking away slower, not bouncy anymore, feel like I'm shriveled like a prune, right, they suck the life right out of me. Sometimes we call energy vampires. I think about it in terms of people who just drain your battery, right. You know there are people who anytime you're around them, you know you feel better, you feel upbeat. Even if you are talking about challenging Situations, in problems like you, still feel empowered and optimistic. Those are your battery charges. That's your tribe. Those are the types of people you need to find and be around. But what if you have these Battery drainers and you need to work with them? So here's some strategies. So the first one is, you know, be compassionate. Okay, be compassionate, see if you can minimize your exposure. That's the first thing, right, see if you can minimize exposure. So if it's somebody that you just casually run into, you know, on the way to the bathroom or in the hall, or in the parking lot or whatever, you know, when I say minimize exposure, I mean just that, just keep it short, okay. And here's the strategy run into them. Maybe you just like, hey, how are you? And then they, you know you intended on walking by and they're like, let me tell you. And then they start and at a certain point you just gonna have to cut them off. The first thing you're gonna do is validate. Okay, validate every human on the planet. We know this about our students, right, they want to be seen, they want to be heard. Just because we're adults, we have that same need. We all need to be validated. So you can say something simple like oh, I hear you. Or gosh, that sounds hard. Like sincerely, like don't not innocent. In a, you know, sarcastic way. To them it is hard, and maybe it to you. It would have been hard to. Maybe they really did have something bad happen to that day in class, right, that outrageous behavior, the room clear, whatever. It's a horrible feeling, right. You feel out of control. You feel you know I'm responsible for all these students and I am who. Control over what is unraveling here is a horrible feeling, right, so it is valid. So have empathy, validate, gosh, it sounds so hard and then bounce my friends. Bounce. What does it mean to bounce? It means get the heck out of dodge. As soon as you can come up with an excuse. Or just say I found boundary. Hey, you know what? I gotta be somewhere in five minutes. I was just running late to an appointment or I'm gonna have so much to do I need to get to my room. I hope you day gets better. That's it. I hope it turns around. I hope you day gets better. Hey, I think I'm thinking of you, right? So say something encouraging validate, but bounce. Do not engage. Okay, what do I mean by that? That's first rule of classroom management Do not engage, right, don't drag it out. So sometimes and I have been so guilty of this in the past that I want to make a connection with a person, I feel like it's on empathizing by telling them like, oh, wow, you know. So this happened to me. Like you want them to know, I understand where you're coming from, but what really happens is you are prolonging the conversation and all of a sudden it starts getting competitive. What do I mean by that? They're telling you about their experiencing class oh my gosh, this kid did this and then you're like up in the empty, like, oh, that's nothing. I had this right, this happened to me and it's just, you know, it's unproductive. One, it prolongs the conversation. Two, now you just, you know, complaining with them. And three, you're just not going to feel better about the life or your situation when you walk away from that conversation. You've made it a whole competition and I'm going to throw in here now that this is something to be aware of. It's something I had to work on in every area of my life, in particular with relationships. If you have a partner and you both work very hard, you know it can be especially if your parents too like some imaginary spreadsheet. It's like a competition. Your conversations who slept less, who has more work, whose boss is more ridiculous, like it just. It's an unhealthy dynamic and an unhealthy kind of just habit really to fall into. So I will caution you on that, and I did a lot of writing on relationships in the past and something that I would always come to was you know, when your relationships on a spreadsheet basically this mental spreadsheet when you're competing, there's going to be a winner and if somebody in your relationship is winning, you are both losing. Okay, so I really, you know, just caution you about that. But bringing it back to teaching and to running into that person in the hallway, you know, don't, don't prolong it, just minimize your exposure. Okay, so the strategy for that is empathize, understand that for everybody, their experience is real. Try, minimize exposure, validate the person gosh, that sounds hard. Or like, oh man, are you having a Monday, right? And then bounce Gosh, I gotta go. Hey, I hope you day gets better. Okay, so that's with the casual people you run into. Now, what if you have to work with the person? Like, avoiding the person is not really an option because they're one of you departmental teammates or your grade span teammates or won't be tied to your admin, okay, so then what are you gonna do with that? So the first thing is you're gonna have to set a boundary. Now, I haven't talked too much in this podcast yet about boundaries. It's a big subject. There's a lot of misunderstandings about boundaries and they're often viewed as if I set a boundary, I'll be perceived as being aggressive or just really defeatist, like you can't change other people's behaviors 100%, absolutely true, you cannot change other people's behaviors. But that's a misconception about boundaries, because boundaries is about your behavior, about your preferences, your choices, your desires, your non-negotiables things that you are willing to tolerate or not. So when you set a boundary, it is really using eye language. Right, it's not about the other person. Don't tell the other person you're always negative. It drags me down. Nobody wants to hear that. One, they're not gonna be open to it. Two, in effect, what you're doing, then, is complaining about somebody complaining. Think about the irony of that for a second. If you're complaining about somebody, always complaining, doesn't that make you the complainer now at this point? So there's no brownie points for pointing out to somebody that they're negative. Other people already know that the person probably you know that you're gonna point that out to is not receptive to hearing that. Okay, so it's not gonna be about their behavior, it's about you. And maybe what you can say is, if you are in a meeting with them or you have to work on a project with them, make it about you. I, I right, I language, so I feel overwhelmed when there's constant negativity. Can we focus on more positive topics, right? Some kind of the script that lets people know? You know what I feel, really overwhelmed when we dwell and like what isn't going right, like I really need to feel for myself that I'm empowered to make a difference. How can we involve the person in the solution? Right, how can we turn this into something that makes us feel good? What are some ways we can come up with some solutions that work for everybody? How can we be open-minded into finding our way out of the mud that we're in? Right? Okay, so you want to approach it in a way that is non-confrontational, that expresses your feelings and sets your boundary, but without placing blame and with pulling the other person into the solution? Okay, so that's one thing, right. That's one thing you can do is set your boundary. Now, that's with you saying something. You can also set up processes and procedures, right, to protect your peace, and they come in the form of wait for it. Don't groan. Meeting norms. You set up some norms from meeting. What is that? These are the things that everybody agrees to ahead of time, kind of like the classroom rules. Here are the rules in the classroom. Here are the norms for when we meet. Norms will be sure, I guess, for normal operating procedures or whatever. So some of your norms are we're going to limit small talk to the first five minutes of the meeting. Okay, that's it. Then that's it. We are limiting small talk to five minutes at the beginning of the meeting. So that puts a timeline on it. People show up and they're exhausted. These people, you know so many schools have staff meeting on Friday after school. We are plain worn out people. That is not going to be a positive experience. We're sitting for one off, we're worn out Two. We just want to be in our rooms fixing it up for next week. So we don't need to take that mental load of like oh my gosh, my room isn't set up for next week, my lesson plans aren't set, my copies aren't made right. Half of us are thinking about oh, friday night. You know, I live in the Bay Area. Good Lord, the traffic on a Friday night, like your window of missing. It is pretty narrow and you know, a staff meeting massively eats into that. So you know that's an aside, but set a time limit on it. So the norms for the meeting are we limit the small talk to five minutes. Maybe you have some kind of little procedure that's like hey, to start off the meeting, everybody take 15 seconds. Tell me the best thing about your day or the best thing about your week or something that's going right in your classroom. Right, there's something focusing on the positive before you get down into the weeds. Okay, so have some norms, have some kind of procedure. Now, again, you might need to set some boundaries with the person, the person who always shoots down the ideas. Right, you're going to approach it in a friendly way, but always the eye language hey, I've noticed something. Right, I truly value our collaborative efforts and the different perspectives that everyone brings. However, I feel that when I present my ideas, often there's an immediate focus on why they might not work, rather than how can they be, you know, refined, made better or integrated, right? So again, the emphasis is on III. No worry in there do I say you always shoot me down? Right, there's an immediate focus on what might not work. We're keeping it neutral. We're keeping it about how you feel. So in this case, the language will be how I feel. Right, how can we make this work? You know you can also put that into the team norms. Right, that everybody's expertise and knowledge will be respected. Right, all ideas will be considered before shop down. I mean, you're gonna use better you know corporate speak than that, but you are going to need to set some boundaries. There is no point in sitting in a meeting feeling like nothing got accomplished and then guess what happens. And then, when you leave, you turn to your teacher bestie and like I can't believe another waste of time. Blah, blah, blah. And then you become the battery trainer. I have an exercise I do with people and some of my coaching courses, and one of them is to really look at battery trainers. Battery charges be strategic about how you spend your day, and I really invite people to reflect. If your co-workers were filling out this form or this worksheet, which column would you be under? Would you be filling up somebody's battery, charging it up or would you be draining it Right? And so if you allow yourself to be in a situation where somebody is always being negative in your interactions and your meetings, if you allow that to persist, then you run the risk of you becoming a battery trainer. Not only do they drain your battery, like when you walk away, I always think like, oh my gosh, I walked away like Yoda, right? Like bent over with a walking cane, right, you run the risk of you doing that to somebody else, right? It's kind of like the gift that keeps on giving right. So, really understanding that setting a boundary with it is within your skill set, you can do it. You can practice, re-listen to this episode, write down what I said, verbatim, if you want, if you really feel that you need a script for that, just remember it's iLanguage and it's Seeking Collaboration. Those are the two really easiest things about it. So I'm inviting you to reflect and to commit to clear communication. I mean the work that I'm encouraging people to do here. It's not easy. Sometimes I say it's the work of a lifetime, like. I know we all want, like the BuzzFeed, kind of ten ways to fix such and such, and I try and keep it simple. But these are things that involve practice and commitment and reflection, but they will make you experience better. It is so worth it. Alright, I'm proud of you. I hope that everyone you run into today is sparkly and full of sunshine, although I doubt it, and just remember, you can be the sparkle in someone's day. Thank you.