What Happens When You Name the Mental Load Early: City Year Baton Rouge | Mindset Workshop Case Study

The Context

City Year Baton Rouge prepares Corps Members to serve students in demanding school environments where emotional intelligence, resilience, and presence matter as much as instructional skill. Corps Members enter the year highly motivated and mission-driven, often carrying a strong sense of idealism about their impact.

In 2025, City Year Baton Rouge partnered with SDC to pilot a new approach to Corps Member development, one that addressed not just performance, but the internal demands of the work itself.

This engagement marked the first implementation of what would later be known as the Conversation Gap framework.

The Challenge

Corps Members are asked to show up consistently for students while navigating high emotional load, ambiguity, and pressure. Yet much of that psychological reality remains unspoken during onboarding and training.

When expectations are framed primarily around service and outcomes, Corps Members often internalize stress, frustration, or self-doubt as personal failure rather than a normal response to complex work.

The risk is not disengagement, but quiet erosion of resilience.

The Real Constraint

The issue was not commitment or capability. It was the absence of shared language.

Without a way to name the emotional and mental demands of the role, Corps Members had limited tools to process their experience, regulate themselves under pressure, or remain grounded when outcomes were slow or uneven.

Unspoken strain creates distance. Between peers. Between purpose and practice. Between intention and endurance.

The Work

SDC facilitated a mindset workshop for Corps Members that centered on naming the Conversation Gap, the space between what individuals experience internally and what they feel permitted to express.

The workshop focused on:

• Normalizing the psychological realities of service work

• Building self-awareness around emotional responses under pressure

• Creating shared language that reduced isolation and self-blame

• Strengthening internal alignment between purpose, expectation, and reality

Rather than offering coping tactics alone, the session addressed how meaning, identity, and emotional intelligence intersect in daily practice.

The Shift

Feedback from Corps Members indicated a measurable internal shift.

Participants reported feeling more in tune with themselves, more aware of their emotional responses, and more grounded in their role. The work helped reduce the gap between what they felt and what they believed they were allowed to feel.

That alignment created space for resilience to form early, before fatigue or disillusionment could take hold.

The Result

While long-term student outcomes will continue to be assessed, the early impact was clear.

Corps Members left the session with increased self-awareness and emotional clarity, foundational elements of emotional intelligence that directly affect how they show up for students, teammates, and themselves.

By addressing mindset early, the organization strengthened the human infrastructure that supports consistent, relational work in schools.

Why It Worked

Resilience increased because the workshop named the psychological realities of the work instead of avoiding them.

When Corps Members are given language for their experience, endurance becomes possible. Idealism does not disappear. It matures into sustainable commitment.

This pilot demonstrated that emotional intelligence development is not supplemental to service. It is central to it.