As leaders, we’re often conditioned to believe the fallacy that we are in control.  “I’m the leader, so all these things that are happening are because of me.” “I can control how other people feel and what they do.”  These are blatant distortions of reality that leaders are frequently invited to embrace.  We’re told that great leaders take responsibility for everything and everyone … they decide what’s going to happen and then make it happen.  Essentially, we’re told - though never in so many words - that great leaders play god.  And for most of my career, I was all too ready to hear it.  That’s often what my ego wanted to believe anyways.  But abundant research shows that the most effective leaders don’t operate that way.

Think about what’s going to happen during the rest of your day.  What are you going to do?  Who are the people that you’re going to be with?  What are things you might say to them?  Now I’m going to invite you to entertain a startling thought.   Imagine that it might be the last conversation you’re going to ever have with those people.  What would you say to them if you knew you may never speak again?  How present would you be in that conversation?  How honest would you be? 

This last week I’ve looked for some outside voices that can balance out some of my challenging inner ones.  I’ve come back to a voice that has given me a lot of guidance and comfort over the last few years. Thich Nhat Hanh was a Buddhist monk and peace activist who was exiled from his native Vietnam in 1966 for refusing to take sides in his country’s brutal civil war.  As I’ve found myself full of emotion and energy to resist in some way, he reminds me that there IS a way to rebel that doesn’t involve more judgment, hate, and polarization.  He saw a radical way to “resist” that is life-affirming and compassionate.  And he saw harder times than these.  

I wanted to share some of his words with you this week.

I’ve been waiting for this election day (and waiting for it to be over) for months.  In my worst stretches, I found myself compulsively checking for new headlines – reflexively getting out my phone to look at the newest “election updates” in almost every spare moment.  My daughter would walk into the room and I’d put my phone away, but my head now was in Michigan or Arizona, or wherever the rally was taking place that constituted some form of “news.”  About two weeks ago I realized what was really happening: I was constantly looking for some small piece of evidence that I could use to deepen my hope that everything was going to turn out okay.  I was trying to alleviate my anxiety, and in doing so, I was adding to it significantly.  It was my classic “autopilot.”  We all have a set of patterns and behaviors driven by our ego that we default to when we’re moving quickly or mindlessly through our lives. 

For a few months now I’ve had the nagging feeling that someone I care about has been upset with me.  I care about her a lot, but we’re not that close.  So I was finding it extra hard to bring it up and just ask her about it.  I tried to put it out of my mind but it kept popping back up.  And the more time I spent with my feelings, the more clear it was to me that I should talk with her.  And the more certain I got about what I needed to do, the more terrified I got about actually doing it.  

My three-year-old daughter has started telling me to “put my listening ears on.”  It’s a little scary to realize how adept she is at knowing when I’m not actually listening to her.  I’m reminded constantly how much parenting (and leading … and living) is about listening. 

And the hardest kind of listening requires more than just my ears.  When I’m listening at the deepest levels, I can hear my daughter say, “I’m NOT nice to you” (another favorite phrase of the moment) and understand that she’s trying to figure out how to process and communicate an emotion like anger.  When I’m truly listening, I can hear her say, “I’m exhausted,” “I’m afraid,” or “I’m curious.”  And to be clear, she’s never actually said any of those things. 

But I don’t think this just applies to three-year-olds.

I’m no expert on Buddhism (in fact, I just misspelled the word on my first attempt) but what I have learned has inspired me. One practice in particular that has really helped me personally are the 5 daily remembrances – 5 truths that we can say out loud to ourselves every day.  I remember the first time I heard them, one in particular made me recoil: 

I will be separated from everything that is dear to me.  

Unfortunately for the people I encountered in my social life, I used to love talking about my school when I was a principal.  Sometimes, when I was going on and on about my school, I would start getting a certain look from people … the kind of look you get when someone is wondering whether you’re in a cult. While I don’t think my school was a cult, there is a danger that arises when we spend too much time in our organizational bubble – an environment where choices have been made and standards, norms, and labels have been chosen.  We start to lose sight of the fact that the norms or labels that get used within our bubble are subjective, and they don’t speak to a “universal truth” that exists outside that bubble.  

This is the time of year many leaders are thinking about the kind of culture they want to build on their team.  We’ve worked with nine different teams this summer to help them get more deeply connected and more aware about what’s really happening with each other.  And in some cases, that’s meant helping them unlearn some of the previous ideas they’d internalized about what “good teams” are and feel like. One of the biggest ideas to “unlearn” is one that I spent most my career propagating: that good teams are “positive” – all the time.

The research is really clear - and there has been a LOT of it - that effective teams are not positive all the time. 

Technically, we may only be a few weeks into summer, but for many education leaders across the country, “summer” is over.  And they are hard at work preparing for the next school year. 

I remember this time so well from my years as a school and network leader.  Feelings of optimism and excitement about the new school year were tempered with anxiety about being ready for it - along with a sense of disbelief that my long-anticipated summer break was already over, and here I was, already feeling behind and overwhelmed with under enrollment and vacant positions.

We were just getting started again, and somehow it was already “crunch time”…