As Pastor Paul Fazio stood before his church family in Kalamazoo, Michigan, last Sunday, he saw a range of emotions brimming in expectant eyes. Sadness, anger, worry, frustration, astonishment—an endless torrent.
 
Where to begin? The city’s wounds were too fresh to articulate, too raw to bandage in a way that would begin the healing. And yet that’s what those expectant eyes seemed to seek.
 
Hours earlier, a lone gunman cruised the city and its outskirts, shooting eight people and killing six. There was no logic in the act, no connection. The shooter lacked clear motive. When captured, he offered no explanation.
 
It was a cruel cliffhanger for the victims’ families, friends and community. People were—and are—desperate for answers. Sadly, it may be weeks or months before they get them.
 
Fazio knew this. And yet there was this moment. Those emotions. Those expectant eyes.
 
He began to pray.
 
He spoke of the heartache. He spoke of the darkness. He spoke of the senselessness, the tragedy. Then he spoke of the sunshine streaming through the stained glass windows of the church, coloring the sanctuary in brilliant splashes of blues and reds, yellows and greens.
 
“What are we doing,” he asked in prayer, “to color our world?”
 
It was a powerful moment. Evil people do evil deeds. Some of us suffer directly. Yet there is a greater power, one that grants us the capacity to gather together to do something lasting, healing and loving.
 
I sat in the church balcony as Fazio prayed. As he spoke of coloring our world, I felt compelled to open my eyes.
 
What I saw took my breath away.
 
On the platform steps where Fazio stood, the sunlight cast a large red glow. My eyes traced the sunbeam back to the stained glass window through which it streamed. It was shining through the image of Jesus, passing directly through the blood-red sash across his heart.
 
As if his heart was broken. Just as ours were.
 
Broken hearts. Maybe that’s where healing begins.
 
Indeed, we must mourn. We must express our sorrow, our anger. We must share these things with others, hugging and crying and raging even as we hold each other up. Without grief, we can’t heal.
 
But we will heal. We will find restoration. We will find courage in the face of fear, humanity in the face of inhumanity.

And we will color our world.

Now and then, a no-brainer question can jump-start your brain.
 
For me it happened in a recent phone call with a public relations student. Her assignment was to interview this old—er, make that “seasoned”—PR pro about his career. Toward the end of our delightful conversation, she tossed up this question: “What’s one thing you wish you’d known when you started your career?”
 
To my surprise, the answer to this predictable query didn’t come right away. And when it did, I wasn’t sure I was ready to give it.
 
But I did. Taking a deep breath, I told the student, “I wish I’d known how stressful this job could be.”
 
I don’t recall hearing about the pressures of PR in my college classes many years ago, and my youthful interviewer couldn’t cite an example, either. That left my wondering if we’re doing her and others a disservice by not equipping students to understand and cope with the stress of a career in public relations.
 
Just how demanding is PR? The profession typically ranks high in surveys and studies—most recently landing sixth on CareerCast’s most-stressful list, not far behind police officers and airline pilots.
 
How much confidence to put in such lists is debatable. But it’s true that stress comes with any job in PR. We’re often on the front line for our organizations and clients. How we perform can have broad and lasting ramifications for their reputations and even their bottom lines.
 
Ours isn’t a daily deluge of fancy dinners, glittering galas and celebrity elbow-rubbing. It’s hard work. We constantly counsel our clients on communicating well, building relationships and empathizing with audiences. We stay abreast of a changing array of tools and a shifting media environment. We represent the perspectives of leaders, employees, customers and more—sometimes all at once. We serve as the conscience of our organizations, meaning sometimes we must say things leadership doesn’t want to hear.
 
Some days we get to ballyhoo great news; some days we bear bad tidings—and the slings and arrows of those affected. Some days we’re the winners in delivering the right message in the right way; some days we’re the losers in a ruthless budget battle.
 
All of that involves stress—the stress of what we know, what we can manage, what we don’t know and what’s outside our influence.
 
Part of the challenge, of course, is that stress affects each of us differently. What is exhilarating for one person might be soul-crushing to another. What’s more, public relations owns no corner on workplace stress. Every job has its unique pressures, many far exceeding anything in PR.
 
I urged my young interviewer to go forth with eyes wide open—and to make it a topic in the classroom. We do the next generation of PR pros a great service by helping them understand and prepare to cope with the stress they’ll inevitably face.
 
A career in PR is immensely rewarding, exciting and inspiring. It’s also demanding, unpredictable and relentless. Be ready for all points on the spectrum. Do your best work. Find your center.
 
And enjoy the ride.

It’s been nearly five years since I last stood in a room filled with workers as they were told their jobs were going away. As usual, I hung out in a corner, watching and listening as people reacted to the news—some with shock, some with anger, some with tears, all with a sagging of shoulders and a nervous buzz about what would happen next.
 
It was a scene I’d witnessed far too often in my corporate career. In fact, I was the media relations contact for 26 site closures or significant workforce reductions at locations across the country. Not all of them hit the press, but every one of them hit people—hard.
 
I never had those words directed at me, so I would be fooling myself if I pretended to know what those people felt. Even so, I became all too acquainted with that atmosphere of anguish.
 
Nowadays we all can experience that anguish through the marvel of social media—and maybe corporate America can learn a lesson.
 
I don’t blame whoever posted last week’s YouTube video of Carrier Air Conditioner President Chris Nelson announcing the move of Carrier’s manufacturing and distribution sites from Indianapolis to Monterrey, Mexico. Neither should Carrier. Instant news via social media is present-day reality. Even in my corporate days, texting news of site closures to the local press was commonplace.
 
What I do find troubling is Nelson’s insistence of sticking to his script, going so far as to scold workers for complaining before he made it through his speech. Indeed, that was the only time he showed any real emotion over what was happening.
 
Thanks to YouTube, the whole world can see how he blew it.
 
I get the need for a script. I wrote similar narratives myself. But Nelson’s lack of empathy, his focus on getting the words out instead of giving them meaning, made every expression of support sound hollow. What’s worse, the business rationale—necessarily part of the message—was vague at best and emphasized at the cost of caring about the people in the room.
 
Nelson and Carrier missed an opportunity to show workers and the community that this really was an agonizing decision they didn’t want to make (assuming that’s true) and that they have a genuine desire to listen and to ease the impact. How much more effective Nelson could have been if he’d trashed his script, stepped forward, acknowledged the crowd’s anger, explained briefly and simply why the decision was made, and then invited comments and questions. Treat the moment as a conversation with stunned, upset colleagues instead of a verbal bulletin board announcement.
 
Would that have been uncomfortable for Nelson? Might he have faced hard questions, even open hostility? Might he have had to deal with insults to himself and his company?
 
Yep. And to that I say: Too bad.
 
Being a senior leader means having to be a grown-up. Making a “difficult decision” means bearing its consequences. Communicating like you are “aware of the effect” on people and communities means you have a conversation with them, you answer every question you can and promise when you’ll answer those you can’t. Hiding behind scripted comments and a hand-off to a lower-level manager doesn’t cut it.
 
Perhaps Carrier and other companies can learn from this soiled laundry being aired on YouTube. Perhaps corporations that must close sites or downsize staff will finally begin to look at how to do so in a respectful, empathetic way.
 
But I doubt it. I fear the more likely outcome will be confiscating of cellphones at employee meetings, or threats to cut off separation benefits for anyone posting to social media.
 
All too often, it’s less about the people and more about preserving the narrative.