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Colleagues,
MVP: Be aware of your history 😉 The birth of this daily email dates back to April 1, 2020. The world had shut down and I was trying to figure out a way to help people through this unprecedented time. I had been writing a series of blogs about working from home and decided to move from a weekly to daily email the first week of April. It looked a lot different back then! Below is the “original” first daily email. It’s long but might spur some introspection… … Colleagues, This is the third article in our series on healthily leading from home. You can find the previous articles at my blog. Today we will look at some healthy practices to enact while leading from home:
All three of these practices help you to become both a better leader and a healthier one. Accepting limitations means accepting that we can’t do everything. There are too many tasks, needs, and people that need attention. This is at once terrifying, because it implies failure, and liberating as it gives us permission to choose. Understanding that everything won’t get done means that you choose what gets done today and what doesn’t. Accepting limitations also makes it easier to shut down at the end of the day. Acceptance makes it easier to focus on priority tasks, to let go of our aspirations to be perfect, and encourages us to delegate. In the video, I’ll discuss five ways to deal with things that aren’t your priority items. Being fully present is the single most powerful thing you can do to both improve your leadership and enhance your state of mind. Being fully present means that you are physically, mentally, and emotionally present to the person or task in front of you. Steps to being fully present:
Being fully present helps you:
Strengthening connections is imperative in a time of physical separation and isolation. Try these:
Best practices:
Do good and be well, Frederick
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Colleagues,
MVP: Take time to celebrate Despite the fatigue, I was able to appreciate stunning beauty:
There were also many small beauties:
We are surrounded by beauty, stunning, and subtle. Take a few minutes to reflect on the week. Identify your wins, and list the small beautiful things you saw this week. *During spring break, I solo hiked the Art Loeb Trail here in Western North Carolina. Being on the trail often helps me to reflect and clear my head, and often I see parallels between hiking and leadership. I’ll be sharing four of them this week. Cheers! Frederick Colleagues,
MVP: Change is harder than you think. The Art Loeb has a reputation as one of the toughest trails in WNC. To put it into perspective, a 15-mile day with 3,000 feet of elevation gain is a challenging day. My first day on the Art Loeb had 5,500 feet of elevation gain. I am in okay shape. I hike a fair amount, but I had to carry a bear canister and lots of water on this trip. My beginning pack weight was 32 pounds. This hike was grueling and by day four I was completely exhausted. Had I fully understood the challenge, I would have chosen a different trail. How often as leaders do we fail to fully appreciate the difficulty (and complexity) of a task? *During spring break, I solo hiked the Art Loeb Trail here in Western North Carolina. Being on the trail often helps me to reflect and clear my head, and often I see parallels between hiking and leadership. I’ll be sharing four of them this week. Cheers! Frederick Colleagues,
MVP: Learn to gauge how challenging change can be. Moving from south to north, the Art Loeb gains almost 10,000 feet of elevation in just 30 miles – that is a lot of going uphill! Moving uphill, it was hard to see when the incline leveled out. It often appeared I was near the end of a climb, only to turn the corner to see more stairs. Over the long days, these constant limitations of view followed by abject disappointment (and tired legs and lungs) became discouraging. There are times, especially during change, when we think we are near the end, only to find there is more to do. The way to combat this is to take more time to appreciate the full challenge by getting better at reading the map. *During spring break, I solo hiked the Art Loeb Trail here in Western North Carolina. Being on the trail often helps me to reflect and clear my head, and often I see parallels between hiking and leadership. I’ll be sharing four of them this week. Cheers! Frederick Colleagues, MVP: Beware of the false choice of either/or Leader… follower… Obey… refuse… Teach… learn… We don’t need to do one or the other. We can do both. Or neither. Today on The Assistant Principal Podcast, I talk with Dr. Chad Dumas about his new book, The Teacher Team Leader Handbook. We discuss dichotomies and lots of other fun stuff. Thanks again to IXL for sponsoring today’s episode.  Cheers!
Frederick |
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