Hat, Haircut, or Tattoo? A Framework for Activist Decision-Making
This past week, I facilitated my nonprofit’s annual training for local educators: a 3-day intensive on how to build relevant, hands-on projects so students feel seen and are engaged in real-world problem solving while at school.
It’s one of my favorite events each year because we work on really hard stuff: developing curriculum kids actually care about, integrating anti-racist teaching practices into our lesson planning, co-creating our classrooms with students rather than simply for them, or, in some case, for ourselves.
It’s beautiful – but it’s also absolutely exhausting.
And you can probably guess:
Many teachers for whom this is new struggle with shifting from thinking about potential changes to actually making them.
It can be scary to try new things; challenging to do the self-examination needed to think in new ways; emotionally draining to work those muscles of creativity; absolutely paralyzing to face the possibility of public failure. (Plus the event is in the middle of a teacher’s summer break, so…there’s that.)
For some, the gathering each year is like a breath of fresh air amidst a stale stream of district-led events; for others, just getting there and getting started was crushingly difficult.
We all have something like this in our lives – where getting started, no matter how much we want to, is the hardest step.
So here’s a framework I like to use as a gut-check when I’m considering starting something new: (I think I heard this first in a podcast with James Clear.)
Is this a hat, a haircut, or a tattoo?
Most decisions are like hats: things we can easily try on and see how they fit; and if they don’t, we can just move onto another one; they are easily reversible and try-again-able.
Some are more like haircuts: a bit more of a commitment and sacrifice, but still changeable and short-term-ish; if it doesn’t work great or feel right, we’ll think about it for awhile – others might let us know – but we’ll be okay.
And then there are the tattoos: the big, permanent-for-the-most-part decisions; the long-haul commitments; the decisions that come with real, embodied sacrifice.
I realized on the second day of our event that the teachers who were struggling most were mistaking hats and haircuts for tattoos: every small change felt like a mountain that had to be moved.
Sound relatable?
Especially when it comes to making changes in our personal lives or taking a deeper step into activism, it’s easy to conflate hats with haircuts…and sometimes even tattoos.
The decision to call a representative, attend a local Indivisible meeting, speak up against harmful policies or behavior at work, donate to protect immigrants from ICE and deportation: for many of us, if we’ve never done anything like this before, it can feel huge, difficult, and emotionally exhausting just to consider taking action.
But, the truth is – most of these are hats and haircuts: exceptionally doable actions that are flexible, changeable, and require very little real commitment of us.
So an invitation:
This week, try on a few hats and maybe even get a haircut. Choose to take action, no matter how small. Then, when you find something you can do sustainably to meaningfully impact an issue you care about, go and get yourself that big back tattoo.
