Tag Archives: Leadership

Seeking

Uncategorized, , ,

In Colorado, one does not plant pretty things (or anything, really) until after Mother’s Day.

Last week, we had a snowstorm that closed several schools and districts. Not mine. Depending on where you park your car at night, there were reports of snow from four inches or more to wet attempts at something sticking to the ground. The irises that popped too soon were pretty for the half-second they had in bloom before the frost froze them, smacking them down with its cold fingers, forcing them to try again next year. A tree in my backyard is considering whether it should even bother — it had leaves it had worked hard to create, and the frost mocked them into submission, forcing them to either fall or hang there, humiliated.

I seek beauty in my mulch beds. Color, growth, and progress. I seek an understanding, no matter how rudimentary, of how a garden grows: what plants to plant where and when so that the other plantings are happy and grow and not get overrun, and get enough sun but not too much, and water too, but not too much. I seek community amongst the greenery, things that play well together, support one another, and a space that allows everyone to shine.

There are only a few weeks of school left, and every moment of clarity and confidence I have experienced this school year is currently overshadowed by criticism, from others and from myself, cryptic commentary that I’m not sure what to do with, and condescension from those who don’t understand the intricacies of this work. I seek to release what doesn’t serve me so that I can find a bit of peace.

I don’t claim to be an expert on being a leader. There are people who make millions because they have marketed themselves in a way that makes people believe they know what they’re talking about, that their systems work, and that they have expertise no one else has. I do not pretend to be that person.

Leadership is hard…and the learning is constant. Every time you find something you actually know, twenty-seven more things you don’t know anything about show up and expect you to learn them too…often immediately.

And the inner critic screams in exasperation, “HOW IN THE HELL DID YOU NOT KNOW THAT ALREADY? Oh my gawwwwd!”

Leadership isn’t getting people to do what you want them to do. It’s creating spaces where they can play nicely with others, support others, and ask for it themselves while accomplishing the necessary work well.

Leadership isn’t about making demands of people with the expectation that they’ll do them without question. It’s building trust so that when there is an ask, those receiving it feel confident they can do it or know they can ask questions.

Leadership isn’t about taking on everything by yourself, so no one else has to be uncomfortable or so that it’s done “right,” though some believe that is the role of leaders — to take on everything people don’t want to do, so they can do the one thing they want to do. It’s gathering a group with varied talents and interests to support the things that need to get done, that need to get addressed… Leadership is partnering with the right people so that the uncomfortable is supported, and what people want to do is a given.

I acknowledge that I make mistakes… multiple mistakes… every day. It’s what I do when I have realized I made a mistake that matters. It’s not always immediate, but if you think I don’t have a running list, you don’t know me very well.

Brene Brown wrote somewhere that integrity is choosing courage over comfort. Leadership is inherently uncomfortable on its face and deep down beneath all its layers — anyone who says it isn’t lies…and probably has very little integrity. Leading with integrity requires courage. Sometimes it’s just the courage to get up and try again. Sometimes it’s the courage to say, wait…I need some time to process. Sometimes it’s the courage to do the unpopular thing, the thing that will bring criticism because someone wasn’t consulted, notified, or didn’t get what they wanted. Sometimes courage is the tree in my backyard, contemplating whether to try again anyway.

I am not an entrepreneur. I don’t have it in me to build something from scratch. I like things that work, and I enjoy refinement. I like creating and developing offshoots of existing things that benefit others and can grow with the support of others… not to take over the garden or completely redo it, but to help support it, making it healthier and prettier.

I seek beauty in my mulch beds…and good health that allows everything to grow in ways that complement everything else.

Quiet

Education Funding, Gifted, Leadership, , , , , , ,

I have been quiet, a friend noted on one of my socials, and they said they hadn’t seen much of me in their feed in a while; they missed me. They weren’t wrong. I said I’d been quiet, not elaborating on why; I missed them too.

I have been quiet. I have spent a long time, many months, in introspection trying to figure out who I am again. Find my voice.

There’s a huge learning curve to beginning again. Everything you thought you knew goes out the window, and the skills you learn by doing take a long time to become second nature while you second-guess every move you make, every word you say, every step you take.

I’ve been afraid to say much the last several months, if I’m honest. The vagueness with which I’ve typically written was purposeful, in part because specifics didn’t matter–giftedness and the issues that go along with it aren’t specific to the people I serve or even the experiences that I have as a gifted adult. Many gifted people have similar enough experiences that it resonates regardless.

My life over the last nearly twenty years has revolved around my work in the gifted education space. I set that part of myself aside for a bit in order to address the lack of knowledge I felt I had as a school leader. When I went home at night, I replayed the day, much as I imagine a coach does after a game, looking at every play for where things went wrong and opportunities that were missed–where had I missed a signal, a subtle movement that would have alerted me to what was to come next. Some stood out like bright pink doors in a sea of earth-toned HOA-controlled homes. Others were sleight-of-hand movements, coins disappearing between knuckles while flutters of fingers distract the eye.

Negativity bias is easy–it’s so easy to see the things that go wrong, especially after the fact. And it’s easy to hear the complaints–they’re loud and the cacophony is impossible to ignore. After a while, they blend together, a common chorus of words from ghosts from the past insinuating that I’m in water above my head.

The water has been exactly at my head. And it recedes like the tide after a while.

And so I have been quiet. The fear of judgment is greater than the need to be heard or ask for help sometimes.

And there is fear, not only that I will be judged or targeted. And that using my voice will impact the kids, families, and other people I serve adversely.

The voice of my father about “those damn rabble-rousers” getting what they deserve is loud. They were seeking social change that would allow equality where it hadn’t existed before and he struggled with that…he knew it was needed, agreed it should happen, but wanted it to be less…loud and forced. He taught me to stay quiet… Quiet lets you keep your job, your home, your family. Quiet fixes it so no one knows who you are.

But I can’t stay quiet.

We were gifted a five-day weekend by the Universe the day after the election. I wasn’t mad about it. I had a lot to process and more to figure out about how to best support the people I serve and handle what I knew would be coming. Regardless of which direction the election had gone, there was going to be fallout. There were glimpses of what it might look like over the last several years, and some had been directed at me by people who don’t know me…we’ve never met beyond the walls of where I work and some have never met me at all.

But I can’t stay quiet. Everything I do and say as a school leader is scrutinized, from what topics came up in the course of a lesson on optics to why the hand-holds on the climbing wall are the colors they are to what company makes the crayons students are provided and who the parent company of that company is and how it’s connected to a tiny country somewhere in the far reaches of the ocean someone doesn’t like because they don’t agree with something the leader did or said ten years ago… But I have concerns…and they impact my school life very much.

I have concerns about how things will play out. I worry about what will happen with gifted education over the course of the next four years and beyond–the impacts of this election to all of education are concerning. “It’ll be wonderful, wait and see!” isn’t something that I am comfortable doing. Someone today told me I should “educate myself.” I did a fair bit of that before I voted, thanks…and that’s exactly why I’m worried.

I’m concerned that teachers just starting out or thinking about it will leave… The changes proposed by some local governments about what is allowed to be taught in schools eliminates important information and skills that teachers know is accurate and necessary that kids should know before they go off into the world. And changes to higher education may complicate the path to going to school to be a teacher even more.

I worry that likely changes to education funding will eliminate teaching positions and even whole departments designed to support populations of students in need of specialized instruction and the students they’re designed to serve will suffer. Training for teachers is needed, and it’s not free. Support for kids takes people…and they aren’t free either.

I worry most about our kids–gifted kids see and experience the world differently, and I’m concerned that those differences will be forced underground by those who demand blind compliance. Thinking outside the box, advocating for their needs and the needs of others, seeking justice…all things we’ve worked so hard to teach them are important parts of who they are and are valuable skills…might be lost. Is some of this thinking catastrophic? Maybe… but I’ve already lived with the “everyone must be doing the same thing at the same time” and “there’s no room for differentiation up” kind of required teaching. The damage that does is catastrophic to kids (and adults) who need the space to scratch both sides of their brains…

Knowing what I can and cannot say, what topics are verboten and which are allowed in this role, even in my own personal spaces is difficult…once something is out in the world, it’s out there. Education in our country is impacted by politics, like it or not.

To live an authentic life is to take risks and live with integrity… I can’t do that if I’m quiet.