Acute staffing shortages, active Covid cases, and the mounting tensions around vaccination are pushing many of the leaders we work with to the brink, or, out of their organizations altogether.  Maybe it’s never been harder to survive as an education leader.  

But the challenges of “surviving” are not new - just more extreme than ever.  In many ways, the approach to ed reform has always been more hare than tortoise, and many schools and organizations- even before the pandemic -had built an existence of barely sustaining at the edges of people’s capacity.

There are probably countless opportunities to reset our approach and create something more healthy, nourishing and durable.  But if the humans leading this movement don’t personally go through their own “reset” process, we fear that broader change will not follow, because cultural change will not happen without personal change.

It only took a few hours for Arnold Beisser to go from being a 24-year-old nationally ranked tennis champion to a Polio survivor that could not stand, walk, sit, eat, drink, or even breathe unassisted. 

Despite that, he would go on to teach psychiatry at UCLA, lead a community mental health movement, and write several best-selling books. 

What allowed him to do it?  Radical acceptance of reality.  And his greatest legacy within the field of psychiatry and therapy is what he called the paradoxical theory of change: 

“Change occurs when one becomes what he or she is, not by trying to become something he or she is not.”

What do most people do when given the choice between sitting in a room alone with their thoughts for 15 minutes or subjecting themselves to a jolt of electricity? According to a 2014 study conducted by the University of Virginia, the answer is literally shocking, but maybe not so surprising.

Letting yourself “just be” and staying present in the moment is a deeply challenging exercise — and it only gets more challenging when we’re “the leader,” and we feel the eyes upon us.

Consider this question: How much of what we call leadership development is a process, not of learning, but of “unlearning”?

Vulnerability is a strength, not a weakness.

Why do some teams soar while others struggle? Amy Edmundson discovered the answer researching teams of nurses and Google spent millions coming to the same conclusion:

Psychological safety: The ability to work and grow without fear.