Healthy Happiness Exists

I would be totally lying if I told you that everything in life feels happy lately – even as a happiness coach. We are all a mixture of happy and unhappy, depending on the day.

The bottom line is that it’s not easy being a teacher or school leader right now. We’re supposed to please parents, answer to admin., show support for our school, collaborate with our fellow teachers, and care for students. We are expected to talk about the joy and magic of teaching without showing signs of stress or weakness, even though the reality of teaching is hard.

We’re expected to play the role of the encouraging and optimistic teacher or school leader who keeps it all together and inspires students, but that’s an awfully high standard to hold yourself to.

We are human, and our jobs are stressful. If we don’t start talking about the hard things in education, we can’t get to the good stuff.

You are allowed to feel the entire spectrum of emotions.

It’s normal to feel hard feelings, and it’s insanely healthy to talk about them, too.

As much as we should strive for happiness, it’s important that we don’t fall into the trap of toxic positivity.

Instead, we need to focus on healthy positivity and be able to distinguish between the two.

Healthy positivity

✅ Elicits good emotions like joy, hope, gratitude, love, and happiness.

✅ Feels light and true. Includes more subtle emotions, too, like curiosity, open-mindedness, generosity, harmony, and compassion.

✅ Sometimes feels like curiosity, open-mindedness, generosity, harmony, and compassion.

✅ Can lead to increased confidence, feeling like a great version of yourself, like you’re flourishing.

✅ Helps you remain true to the real you.

Toxic Positivity

❌ Feels like fighting through pain and pretending to be okay because that’s what you’re “supposed” to feel.

❌ Sounds like someone telling you to focus on the good when you share how stressed and overwhelmed you are.

❌ “Fake it ’til you make it” vibes.

❌ Can lead to feeling hopelessness, depression, anxiety, and is incredibly heavy.

❌ Tells you that you are wrong for having hard and messy feelings.

❌ Elicits guilt and shame when sharing hard and messy feelings.

The truth is that toxic positivity is sometimes the norm and widely shared in schools, and we can all be guilty of it. But it’s not helpful to others, including all who work in a school, and it certainly isn’t good for our students.

To counteract toxic positivity, we need to learn how to inhabit our emotions fully and start building healthy positivity.

I urge you this week to just notice.

• Notice how you react when something hard comes up.
• Notice the messy feelings: yours and others around you.
• Notice how quickly you want to help someone find the silver lining.
• Notice how normalized it has become to brush people’s messy feelings under the rug.

Don’t do anything with the notices. Just sit with it and give yourself grace.

You’re learning, and that’s the whole point.

I have a whole chapter of my book, Teach Happy, dedicated to helping you learn how to differentiate healthy positivity from toxic positivity.

If it’s something you struggle with and are ready to find some freedom from, you might check it out!

Cheering you on!