When the world feels too big to hold

When we’re faced with a global landscape that seems doomed, with a gloomy view of impossible, systemic change, it’s hard to know what to do in our daily work to grow, develop, and cope. The worldwide scale of troubles, from environmental crises to huge political and social tensions, can render any individual effort seemingly insignificant. Even if we turn the lens to magnify this picture and focus on closer images, like our immediate community, our workspace, or our school, the catastrophic sense of impotency can be overwhelming, and the lens still feels murky.

The snowball metaphor

Recently, a teacher reminded me of the metaphor of ‘snowballing’ to describe their current feeling about their work. It painted a powerful picture for me in our current educational settings. The idea that you’re plummeting down a steep slope, a developing heavy ball of snow growing moment by moment, unable to brake or even slow down to address the current covering. The ball collects more weight, more speed as terms move on, until we hit an obstacle, a wall of some kind. This could be burnout, illness, or a forced professional crossroads.

It is common for a metaphor of this kind to be presented to us when we’re working with schools, where the frantic pace of the term only pauses in sight of the next break, which becomes our only solution for temporary relief.

When overwhelm turns outward

Once these feelings of being overwhelmed develop, there may be a tendency to attempt to externalise the unbearable. We try to place the burden somewhere else, outside of ourselves, to make it more bearable. We might compare ourselves to others, using a defensive external gaze to find comfort, saying things like: “At least we don’t do that here” or “But at our school… [enter something positive].” A form of self-soothing that momentarily deflects the underlying anxiety.

This externalisation happens on many levels. We might blame the government for policy and process changes, or our Senior Leadership Team for misguided or detached management. We point to apparently immovable obstacles like the curriculum or assessments that dominate our time and thinking.

While these external pressures are real and valid sources of frustration in our current education systems, focusing only on them can cultivate feelings of gloom and helplessness. It reinforces the sense that we are simply cogs in a machine designed elsewhere, with the control of the machine being elsewhere too.

Adding more snow to the snowball

What we can tend to do in response is to double down. We invest more in these things that are seen to be important, and often, we design more ways, strategies, and toolkits to address the workload. The intention is understandable, but the effect is often that we are attempting to stop a speeding snowball by applying more snow instead of less.

We rarely slow down and certainly don’t stop for a period to re-think what’s going on. We are merely complicating the developing mass.

The pause we don’t make time for

In our Foundation Learning training, we use an exercise to create that pause. It gives us a moment to think about where we are overwhelmed or stuck, and to reimagine a lens that has a foundation of personal value and meaning in our work.

This is the very value and meaning that seems to be missing in the day-to-day fog of ‘achievement’ and progression. The very fog that is causing many professionals to leave the profession and look elsewhere for meaning and value in self and others.

The statistics are helpful here too. The Department for Education’s Working lives for teachers and leaders: wave 4 (November 2025) findings says: “For teachers and leaders considering leaving the English state school sector, high workload and stress and/or poor wellbeing were the two most commonly cited reasons (both reported by 89%).”

To add to this, the analysis of causes for stress and poor wellbeing is inadequate and often slips back into measuring progression and achievement, of the children and young people that we serve and of ourselves, rather than thinking about how we care for ourselves and each other.

The recent report highlighting abuse at Mossbourne Victoria Park Academy, and other public, exposed examples of a harmful or abusive school experience, are indicative of this lack of care. These examples also allow us to externalise further and give us the opportunity to look at the ‘other’ with derision, the lens firmly fixed outwardly in our judgements of the ‘problem’.

But there is little talked about in these examples that we don’t see, in some gauge of severity, in our own spaces. The difference may be a matter of degree, but when we place ourselves in a child’s shoes, the potential for harm from a system lacking sufficient human capacity and understanding is unavoidable.

The antidote? Shifting the gaze inward

Perhaps, though, there is a way of dampening the energy and chipping away at the size of the snowball. It is more a process of switching our gaze away from the wider, global unattainable, to a more personal, relational arena, where we do have agency.

Beverly Daniel Tatum (Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria) offers us some words of wisdom here. She wrote, “The antidote I have found is to focus on my own sphere of influence. I can’t fix everything, but some things are within my control. While many people experience themselves as powerless, everyone has some sphere of influence in which they can work for change, even if it is just their own personal network of family and friends. Ask yourself, ‘whose lives do I affect and how? What power and authority do I wield in the world?’”

Your sphere of influence is a real place

This is the philosophical shift we could make, and actually a realistically practical one, day to day. The colossal, systemic problems cannot be the best starting point for change. Our starting point could be the boundary of our own influence.

We cannot control government policy, but we can control the smaller spaces in which we inhabit. We might not feel able to change the national curriculum or some of the wider policy decisions, but we can change how we move the furniture around in our classroom, the language we use in reports, the way we talk to each other and children and young people.

Looking through our tinted spectacles, the snowball of workload grows because we invest in the presentation of what is understood to be important, what ‘good’ professional practice or a ‘good’ education should look like. That can pull our eye away from the experience of those we should be serving.

Tatum’s wisdom forces a different perspective: What are the small things I can do today that will make a meaningful difference to a life within my sphere of influence?

Small actions, real weight

This sphere is not symbolically small in its potential to affect and change. It might be the tiny spaces where we are just relating, playing and having conversations, but in essence this is all we’re always doing when working with children and young people.

By shifting the energy and gaze from a distant, inaccessible entity to a more personal, directly relational space, we recover a sense of potency and hope. We are no longer defined by the size or speed of the snowball, but by our day to day influence on those closest to us.

In the short term, our smaller spaces can be quickly affected and perhaps the weight of our work can feel lighter because we communicate meaning and value. In the longer term, perhaps we can start to spread this influence to reach our bigger networks and maybe even affect systemic change.

At Class 13, the hope is that using our principles of Affirmation, Democracy, Community and Critical Thinking, we might develop a less murky lens and chip away at the weight of the snowball, eventually even changing its shape entirely.