If You Feel Too Busy to Read This, You Really Need to Read This

By Bobby Canosa-Carr

For the first time in my adult life, I don’t feel busy.

Don’t get me wrong. I have plenty to do. Over the past year, I’ve pivoted my career, founded a company, created a blog, earned certifications as a leadership coach and a mindfulness teacher, hiked to the top of Half Dome, apprenticed as a rock climbing guide, and spent quality time with my wife, my kids, and my dog. And I’m more motivated than ever to take on countless other monumental challenges.

But I don’t feel busy, even when I have a lot on my plate.

My experience seems to be a unique one, because almost everyone I encounter seems to feel busy. All the time. Often they are so busy that they don’t even have time to engage in a conversation about how to become less busy. They have so much on their to-do lists that they don’t even have time to figure out how to get things done.

I don’t blame them, because I’ve been there too. 

I remember, in years past, feeling proud when people would see my Outlook calendar, packed with back-to-back obligations from first thing in the morning to late in the evening, packed day after day for weeks into the future. When people would ask, “How’ve you been?” my default response was “busy.” And sometimes after a sigh and a pensive pause, I would add, “very very busy.” Although I believed that my busyness was outside of my control, I also felt a little bit of misguided pride in having a packed calendar.

Being busy meant that I mattered. It meant that I was in demand. It positioned others so that they were always asking for my time, and, when I wasn’t available, it sent an unmistakable message that there was someone more important who had already asked for my time. Why? Because I was important. Or so I told myself.

When we take a step back from this ego-driven busyness, we can easily see that it’s not helpful to us or to the people around us. Being busy doesn’t make us better at our jobs, it doesn’t contribute to solving problems, and it certainly doesn’t make us better in our personal lives. In fact, John Maxwell, one of the foremost experts on leadership, asserts that “The greatest enemy of good thinking is busyness.” And yet, as leaders, we still obsessively busy ourselves. 

Like a virus, busyness grows and grows until it consumes us, and then it infects the people around us. It is truly a pandemic, and it is highly contagious. It leaves people thinking,  “If everyone else around me is busy, there must be something wrong with me if I’m not.” We inflict our obsessive business on others, infecting their psyches with a need to feel busy and infecting their calendars with meeting invites. 

Because we’re always going-going-going, doing-doing-doing, meeting-meeting-meeting, we miss the opportunity to rethink how we go about what we do in order to make all of this going-doing-meeting into something meaningful. Because we never pause to figure out how to do things well, we continue doing things poorly. When we do things poorly, they have less impact. So, in order to achieve the impact we intended, we have to do those things more. Which results in more doing, less reflecting, more going, less planning, more busyness, less achievement. And on and on and on in a never-ending cycle of filling our calendars without achieving anything meaningful. 

One of the practices that has helped me to shift out of the vicious cycle of busyness is to re-think how I plan my schedule for each day. I haven’t given up my to-do lists, and I still get that hit of dopamine to my nervous system when I check something off of the list. 

The difference is that now, I also create “to-be” lists. Every morning, when I plan my day, I not only list what I’m going to DO, but I also list how I’m going to BE. I keep the list short, so that I can hold it in my head throughout the day and check in periodically to see how I’m doing. 

Today, in addition to all of my goals for DOING (write this blog, meet with clients, catch up on emails, etc.), I have also goals for BEING:

🮖 Be a good listener.

🮖 Be creative.

🮖 Be present.

It reminds me that my success is not just measured by what I do. It’s also measured by how I show up for other people – and for myself – when I’m doing those things. It reminds me that I can write a blog, meet with clients, and respond to email, but if I do those things while being a poor listener, while lacking creativity, and while worrying about the next meeting on my calendar, there’s not much point in doing those things.

Simply by adding the element of intentional BEING, the DOING feels much more in control, much more purposeful, and much more do-able. I still have a to-do list, but it used to feel like my to-do list had me. 

If you’re ready to start working on your to-be list, you might first have to start letting go of that addiction to busyness, and open yourself up to thinking differently. That can be a challenging process, but you don’t have to do it alone.

If you’re willing to clear up a little space on that packed calendar, let’s connect soon so that we can work on your to-be list together. I promise I’m not too busy to take your call.

The Power of Self-Awareness

By Bobby Canosa-Carr

Self-awareness is the foundation upon which all personal and professional growth is built, and yet it’s incredibly elusive. Even for those of us who have a clear idea of our identities as leaders, it’s rare that we really know how our leadership looks to those around us.

We’ve all had bosses that lack self awareness…. There are the ones that talk endlessly, absolutely convinced of their own brilliance, while the rest of us look for any possible distraction from the meaningless droning. There are the ones who are always scheming and backstabbing, convinced that no one sees through their game of thrones. There are the ones who send the performative social justice messages on all the appropriate holidays but are completely unaware of how their day-to-day microaggressions perpetuate misogyny, homophobia, and racism in the workplace.

Most of us are quick to notice ineffective or harmful behaviors in others, but it can be challenging to see them in ourselves. This is why the leadership ability of many people seems to plateau at some point in their careers. We develop habits of thought and patterns of behavior that become deeply ingrained in how we lead. And we don’t often receive the honest, insightful feedback that we would need in order to change ourselves for the better.

Self awareness is one of the most elusive – and most powerful – competencies that a leader can develop. When we hone our ability to see ourselves through the eyes of others, we simultaneously develop our capacity to be more intentional and more impactful in our leadership. 

Even the most feedback-oriented cultures rarely have systems in place to ensure that people see themselves through the eyes of their colleagues. We might receive feedback like: “Keep doing this…. Stop doing that…. Start doing this other thing.” But none of this tells us about our impact on those around us.

In order to get to know myself better – both through my own eyes and through the eyes of others – I recently engaged in the most thorough and illuminating feedback process of my life: The Leadership Circle Profile© 360. As a  part of the LCP process, I asked more than fifteen of my recent colleagues – including peers, direct reports, and bosses – to complete a confidential survey about my leadership. The results were compiled to show me how I show up for other people, and how their perception of me compares to my perception of myself. 

I received a comprehensive report of my creative competencies – those characteristics that are positively correlated with effective leadership – and my reactive tendencies – those behaviors that negatively impact my work and the people around me.

The insights were profound. 

Unsurprisingly to anyone who knows me, I rate extremely high in the area of “courageous authenticity.” I have a tendency to speak my truth, even (maybe especially) when it’s likely to unsettle established power dynamics. What I didn’t completely understand is how – when I’m not at my best – that same competency can show up very differently, making me seem arrogant or critical. Other areas of strength were “integrity” and “community concern,” although these competencies – when I didn’t manage them well – sometimes showed up in harmful ways, making me appear ambitious or perfectionistic.

At the same time, I also learned that my positive impact, particularly on my direct reports, was far more powerful than I had known. The Leadership Circle Profile revealed that my teammates see me as purposeful and visionary, committed to building caring connections, and devoted to mentoring and developing others.

Through this simple process, I experienced a deeper level of self awareness than I had ever gathered from any other feedback process. I emerged with confidence in my strengths as a leader… and clarity about the next steps in my journey of professional growth.

I am excited to now be certified as a Leadership Circle Profile practitioner, which means that Enlighten Leadership Coaching can now administer the LCP for our clients, as a part of our coaching engagements. 

If you’re interested in getting these types of insights about your own leadership, let’s connect soon!

How to Add to an Already-Filled Cup

By Bobby Canosa-Carr

There’s a zen parable about a scholar who studied under a monk. As the monk taught him, the scholar frequently interjected stories of his own experiences, in an attempt to demonstrate his wisdom. As the scholar spoke about everything that he already knew, the monk poured tea into the scholar’s already-full teacup, spilling tea all over the table. “What are you doing?” the scholar shouted. The monk smiled, and responded, “I’m trying to pour tea into a cup that’s already full. Your mind is filled with what you already know, with your own perceptions, opinions, and biases. You’ll need to empty your cup before it can hold something new.”

A version of this story has played out in almost every professional learning session that I’ve ever experienced, either as a facilitator or as a participant.

As adult learners, we inevitably come to any learning experience with a wealth of knowledge and experience. This is especially the case in professional settings, where we’re expected to already possess some level of expertise. As a result, there are a few ways in which we experience professional development:

1. We use it as an opportunity to demonstrate what we already know. (We’re simply showing up to prove that our cup is already full of whatever is being served.)

2. We tune it out, because we believe that it has nothing useful to offer us. (We know that our cup is already full, and we’re content to sip from our own tea without partaking in whatever is being served.)

3. We actively resist it, because we perceive it as a threat to our current perspectives. (Since our cup is already full, we can sense that what’s being offered will probably spill all over the table, and we might get burned.)

This is why most professional development has little measurable impact on professional competencies. No matter how much training we engage in, it won’t make an impact if we haven’t created space in the cup to hold new knowledge and skills. 

Most trainers and facilitators respond like the monk in the parable, asking learners to empty their cups and let go of their current way of doing things, even when participants have spent a lifetime developing their current skill sets. Most of us are not zen masters, with the credibility to convince people that what we’re offering is inherently better than what they already have.

So we’re left with a dilemma: We need our teams to continue learning new approaches, new skills, and new knowledge, and yet our team members may not be ready to process and internalize that new learning, even if they want to. The solution is NOT to empty their cups. In most cases, this only serves to intensify resistance (which may show up in either active or passive forms).

If there’s no space in the cup, the solution is to grow the cup itself, expanding its capacity, creating space for it to keep what it has and to hold more.

The good news is that this can be accomplished through holistic coaching. 

The International Coaching Federation (ICF) defines coaching as “partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and professional potential. The process of coaching often unlocks previously untapped sources of imagination, productivity and leadership.” When people participate in effective coaching, they are re-shaping their cups by engaging their neuroplasticity. They are seeing their knowledge and experience in new ways and building new neurological connections and pathways. They discover their potential to incorporate different perspectives and innovative practices into their existing frameworks.

It’s important not to conflate coaching with other forms of professional support, like training, mentoring, or advising. These other approaches can be very effective in filling up someone’s cup by adding more knowledge or understanding, but they are ineffective when working with an already-full cup.

Authentic coaching (in the way that the ICF defines it) has the potential to fundamentally alter the shape of the cup, increasing its capacity to hold more. This is why coaching works so well in tandem with training, mentoring, and advising.

If you’d like to explore how coaching can complement your organization’s professional development plans, let’s connect soon!

Creating the Conditions for Powerful Learning

By Bobby Canosa-Carr

What was the most meaningful learning experience of your life?... The experience that ensured you would never do things quite the same way ever again... The experience that fundamentally shifted your thinking and your behaviors in ways that you couldn’t have imagined before that day... Take a moment and let yourself recall that experience and that learning. Dig it out of your memory and inspect it.

Let me guess: It wasn’t a lecture. It wasn’t a presentation from a slide deck. It wasn’t a how-to manual. It wasn’t overly structured. And it wasn’t easy. If you’re anything like me, the most powerful learning experience of your life didn’t look anything at all like school. 

It probably felt uncomfortable, and you weren’t sure you had it in you to get through it.

It probably felt important, like something truly valuable was at risk if you didn’t adapt.

It probably felt dangerous, like it was threatening a core part of your identity. 

If these are the types of experiences that lead to meaningful learning, then why don’t we structure school in ways that create the conditions for this type of learning? 

Audre Lorde wrote, “The learning process is something you can incite, literally incite, like a riot.” Reflecting on my own life, the most powerful learning experiences certainly felt like being engaged in a riot. Rather than being fueled by discipline and structure, my learning was fueled by passion and purpose. Rather than being fueled by competition and accountability, my learning was fueled by community and connection to something larger than myself. Rather than being planned by an educator, my learning was inspired (or maybe even incited) by the conditions around me.

There’s no single right way to structure a learning experience, just like there’s no single right way to incite a riot. But there is one thing that is essential to any riotous experience: The conditions must be in place to inspire passion, commitment, and connectedness. These simple questions could serve as a powerful starting point for any lesson plan or any professional development session: 

• What about this learning experience will spark passion in the learners?

• Why would a learner make the commitment to deeply engage in this experience?

• How does this experience build community between the learners and connection to what matters most to them?

Some educators are likely to dismiss these considerations as impractical or unrealistic. Certainly, planning a lesson or a PD session that meets these criteria is more challenging and time consuming than the alternative. 

But the thing about riots is that they’re not always well planned… and neither is learning. It’s like a wildfire. When the conditions are right, it doesn’t take a particularly powerful spark to get it started. 

So maybe our job isn’t so much to teach, but rather to create the conditions for riotous learning to catch fire.

Inside-Out Leadership: Transform Your World through Internal Transformation

By Bobby Canosa-Carr

“I change myself, I change the world.” These words from scholar/poet/activist Gloria Anzaldúa ring truer than ever for me today.

I spent the last few days trekking through the Sierra Nevadas with a group of entrepreneurs and executives, on an excursion with Cairn Leadership. We scrutinized our core values as we trudged through the snow; we told stories about our leadership journeys as we huddled next to a lake; we practiced navigating leadership polarities as we navigated our way up a mountain.

By the time we trudged back out to civilization, one thing was clear: Although I had benefited from the discussions and learning activities, those weren’t the most impactful parts of the experience. Something else had happened to me in the Sierras that was far more profound than learning. I had changed.

My perspective, my processing, maybe even a part of my identity… had shifted. The version of me that came down from those mountains wasn’t quite the same as the version that had gone up. (The nature of those shifts will be fodder for future blog posts!) 

It struck me that most of us have it backwards when it comes to our thinking about impactful leadership. Typically, we think of leaders as change agents who take action to impact the people, the systems, and the conditions around them. While we keep ourselves busy changing other people and other things, we often neglect to work on changing ourselves.

While I’m certainly not opposed to taking intentional strategic action to create change, I think that this paradigm is missing something crucial: Leadership isn’t just something that we DO; a leader is something that we ARE. 

Most leaders can tell you the mission, vision, and values that they attempt to build into the culture of their organizations. They can tell you about their strategic plans and frameworks, their objectives, key results, and indicators. And competent leaders can build systems and procedures to implement these ideas. But there’s a massive difference between implementation of an idea and embodiment of that idea. It’s the difference between doing something and being something.

That difference is the key to transformational leadership.

If you’re working to achieve marginal improvements in predictable ways, then traditional leadership training will probably help. But if you aspire to catalyze authentically transformative outcomes, the work starts with personal transformation. 

The experiential learning of my adventure in the Sierras, when paired with powerful coaching from my guides (Thank you Abigail Jones & Knight Campbell!), sparked in me the type of mindset shift that is certain to show up in my leadership, both consciously and subconsciously) in ways that are exponentially more impactful than traditional learning. 

When leaders show up as different versions of themselves, they inevitably think differently, speak differently, act differently and create different kinds of impact. This is the transformational power of coaching. Change yourself…. Change your world.

P.S. If you’re interested in having a transformational outdoor adventure, check out www.cairnleadership.com.

If "comparison is the thief of joy," then why have we built a culture of comparison in our schools?

By Bobby Canosa-Carr

After his team was eliminated from the NBA playoffs over the weekend, Miami Heat guard Kyle Lowry declared in his post-game interview, “For me, it was a waste of a year. If you’re not going to win a championship, it’s a waste of a year.” His posture was dejected, his eyes shaded by a hood pulled over his baseball cap.

Lowry’s team had finished the season among the top four teams in the most elite basketball league in the world, and he was paid twenty-seven million dollars for his work. It was a year that most of us could only fantasize about having, and yet Lowry was dejected. In that moment, what seemingly mattered to him was his standing in comparison to the Boston Celtics, who had beat the Heat and were moving on to compete for a championship.

It was the embodiment of the saying: “Comparison is the thief of joy.” And it reminded me of our education system.

We all want our children and teens to experience joy at school. As educators, we know that when people experience connectedness, belonging and wellbeing, the affective filter lowers and they learn better. And yet, so often, we undermine these positive social-emotional states by favoring comparison over joy.

It sometimes seems as if our schools were built to create winners and losers. It happens in every test, every competition, every awards ceremony. Someone is lifted up as the winner, and others – no matter how much we try to obscure it – have the experience of being losers. Even within a high school graduation ceremony, which should be a day of joy, we prominently label winners and losers.

• Some students graduate while others do not.

• Some students wear cords and sashes to commemorate their achievements while others do not.

• Some students have the opportunity to give speeches or performances to celebrate their talents while others do not.

• One student is labeled the valedictorian while all others are not.

Even when our schools are celebrating our students, we are obsessively comparing them to one another, and we are conditioning them to live a life of comparison, rather than a life of joy. Remember, that like Kyle Lowry, we have a tendency to compare ourselves to those who outperformed us while negating all of the times that we outperformed others. Even when we win, we are constantly reminded that we have not won as much as someone else.

I invite you to take on this challenge: For one day, notice every time a student is either explicitly or implicitly compared to another student. Rather than celebrating the accomplishments of the winner of that comparison, let yourself feel the experience of the student who is not celebrated. Then think about the compounding impact for those students who come up on the losing side of these comparisons again and again. It becomes easy to see why countless students dread the experience of showing up to school. This is why the eager countdown to summer vacation is a nearly universal experience, particularly as students move to higher grades and the comparisons become more intense and carry higher stakes.

There is no easy solution to this challenge, particularly since those who are most likely to have the upper hand in these comparisons are – for obvious reasons – attached to maintaining the system. Institutionalized racism creates a tendency for us to create systems in which some people — based on their racial identity — are more likely to emerge as winners and others are more likely to emerge as losers. This is what we mean by privilege and marginalization. The more privileged you are, the more likely you are to feel attached to the rankings, the awards, the grades, and everything else that labels you as more successful than someone else.

These privileged voices in our school communities are often the loudest and most influential. 

It is our job as school leaders to notice the culture of comparison that we’ve created within our schools, and to begin dismantling those systems one step at a time. It’s not enough to level the playing field. Instead, let's change the very nature of the field, making it a place of collaboration and interconnectedness, where we all take joy in learning and personal growth, regardless of how it compares to anyone else’s experience. 

This process begins with training ourselves to notice what we’ve overlooked in the past, and to reflect on how we steal the joy of our students by upholding systems of comparison. This week, try reflecting on comparison as you go about your work:

• What systems in our schools are creating winners and losers?

• How can we emphasize individual growth rather than competitive victory?

• Where is the short-term joy of victory emphasized over the enduring joy of wellbeing in community?

As always, if you’d like a partner in thinking through how you can bring transformational change to your school, I’d love to connect with you. Let’s talk soon!

Feeling Lost in a Maze of Complexity? Broaden Your Perspective.

By Bobby Canosa-Carr

As school leaders, it sometimes feels like we’re stumbling around in the dark, trapped in a maze with countless corridors, few of which lead to success. The demands placed on schools have become exponentially more complex in the past few years, and none of us were trained for what we’re facing. 

• Managing a global pandemic?

• Shutting down the school campus and switching overnight to distance learning? Then reopening schools and being held to the same standards as before this collective trauma?

• Helping students and teachers to process yet another racially-motivated mass murder?

• Navigating a racial reckoning, and learning to have culturally-competent conversations about bias, privilege, and systemic oppression within a politically-charged environment?

This wasn’t covered in the curricula for our administrative credentials, and yet, our communities are looking to us for leadership. So how do we lead when we feel lost?

Over the past few weeks, I’ve seen too many school leaders turn a blind eye to the crises unfolding around them in order to go back to their comfort zone: standardized testing. Maybe we can teach our students enough test-prep gimmicks to help them fill in the right bubbles on the answer sheet, which could result in some test scores that prove that everything is under control and that we’re perfectly equipped to lead our schools. We can escape into summer before we have to do it all over again.

Sometimes it’s easier to just close our eyes and pretend that everything is fine. But if we’re honest with ourselves, we know that our training didn’t equip us for the type of leadership that our schools need. 

Our work as school leaders is far more complex than it has ever been, and the old ways of doing things are not working any more. At schools across the country, student attendance rates are dropping, disciplinary incidents are increasing in frequency and severity, and teachers are leaving the profession in droves.

We can’t close our eyes and make this go away.

Rather than narrowing our field of vision to focus on what’s comfortable, these times call for school leaders to broaden their perspectives. We need to look at problems in new ways, from new points of view, while asking ourselves new questions. This is how we see what might have been invisible to us before. 

In the coaching profession, we often describe this strategy using the metaphor of “going from the dance floor to the balcony.” Imagine yourself in a packed club, with dim lighting and bodies surrounding you, moving in every direction. It’s easy to get overwhelmed, to bump into somebody, to spill your drink…. It feels like chaos, and it’s hard to formulate a strategy to accomplish much of anything. If you’re ok just dancing in place and letting things play out around you, you’ll be fine, but if you have a goal in mind, it could be a frustrating experience. 

A great coach can help a leader to find their way off of the dance floor and onto a balcony overlooking the entire club. From there, the leader can see the systems and patterns that were invisible before; they see the who, the what, the where, and the why. From the balcony, the chaos can start to seem manageable. 

This is how coaches are fundamentally different from mentors or advisors. Whereas an advisor would rely on her own experience and expertise to devise a plan for you to execute, a coach won’t do the thinking for you. On the contrary, a coach will make you do the thinking yourself. Most of the time, your coach won’t know how to solve the problems you’re facing, and that’s usually for the best. The coach is there to ask questions, to explore points of view, and to shift perspectives. 

I think we can all agree that there are no experts in relation to the challenges we’re currently facing in our schools. None of us have done this before. As leaders who are sometimes fumbling around in the dark, we may simply need someone to help us shed some light on our challenges.

Hey principals, how are you (really) doing?

By Bobby Canosa-Carr

With May being Mental Health Awareness Month, I’ve been asking friends who are former school principals a personal question: During your time as a school leader, how often did you cry on your commute to and from campus? The answers haven’t surprised me, because they’ve mirrored my own experience: We cried way more often than any of us ever let anyone find out about. 

For me, the feeling typically hit me on my way to work. A couple of miles away from campus, just outside of the school’s attendance boundaries, I had a spot where I would pull over when the feeling overwhelmed me: “I just can’t do this for one more day.” 

This month, I’ve seen more content than ever before about the mental health of teachers. And rightfully so. The emotional demands of being in the classroom with young people struggling to regulate their nervous systems and manage their chaotic hormones, while often processing extraordinary levels of trauma…. It’s more than any teacher should have to experience. And yet teachers do it every day. We all see it. Although there’s not enough empathy in our society for teachers, almost everyone can at least imagine what it might be like to experience the demands that teachers face. 

But the demands of a principal are different. (Not necessarily more or less challenging. Just different.) Most of the pressure goes unseen and is experienced in solitude. Teachers know that, in every classroom, there’s someone else experiencing similar challenges, and teachers often build community based on these shared experiences. But there’s only one principal, and that person carries the emotional weight of everything that happens on that campus. It’s heavy. And it’s lonely. 

In my first principal job, from the moment I arrived in the morning (usually before 7am) until I drove out of the parking lot at night (often late into the evenings after supervising whatever game, concert, or event was happening that day), I usually didn’t encounter a single person for whom I didn’t hold some form of responsibility. My peers were on their own campuses, miles away, and my superiors were at the district office downtown. If there was a problem, I felt like it was mine to solve. Any day could include any number of fires (literal and figurative) to put out, not to mention the countless unseen crises that I didn’t see but felt the constant need to discover.

Very few sitting principals will tell you this, but it’s too much weight to carry, and our school districts and CMOs are not typically set up in ways that allow for that weight to be shared effectively. So principals bear a massive emotional burden every day, fearing every night that tomorrow they might collapse under it. When the impact of that burden starts showing up, when principals start showing signs of anxiety, depression, or overwhelming stress, they are criticized, undermined, disciplined, or simply labeled as ineffective leaders. Which, of course, makes the situation worse. 

This is why most principals do what I did: just keep pretending that we have the whole school under control, when we can’t even control what’s happening inside our own heads. Although some principals pull it off, they shouldn’t have to. During my first principal job, after more than three years of pretending like I had what it takes to carry the weight of the world, I collapsed in the middle of the quad, feeling like an ice pick had smashed through my forehead; I was so disoriented that I barely knew where I was. Years of anxiety, tightly packed away inside of every part of my body, suddenly exploded like a bomb.

It should have been a breakthrough for me, but it wasn’t. I should have asked for help, but I didn’t. I picked myself up on the grass, told everyone I had tripped, and went back to carrying the weight of the world on my shoulders. It wasn’t until I was out of sight that I snuck to my car and drove myself to the emergency room, where the doctor explained what should have been obvious to me: I had a panic attack, and I needed help processing the pressure that I was experiencing at work.

Although many principals still won’t admit it out loud, my story is not an isolated case.  One of the most crucial challenges we’re facing in education today is the mental health and emotional wellbeing of our school leaders. 

This is why leadership coaching is so essential in our education system. Although coaches are certainly not mental health professionals, they do play a powerful role in helping leaders to maintain wellness under challenging circumstances. A well-trained coach can support principals in processing their experiences, reframing their patterns of thought, and finding sustainable ways to have a powerful impact. 

When I mention leadership coaching to superintendents and school board members, they typically respond by saying that they have a few underperforming school leaders who “need coaching.” This response comes from the fallacious assumption that, when leaders are getting acceptable results, they must be doing well. What those district leaders need to be asking themselves is, “What price are principals paying, on a personal level, to meet the professional goals that we set for them?”

When district leaders tell me that a particular principal is “doing well” and therefore can’t benefit from coaching, I like to challenge the idea of what “doing well” actually means, because coaching isn’t just about the quantifiable metrics. I believe that school districts have an obligation to ensure that school leaders aren’t just doing well in terms of attendance percentages, survey results, and test scores, but doing well as people. 

So to all the principals out there… How are you (really) doing? 

If there’s anything I can do to help you not only DO well, but also BE well, let’s talk soon.

What If We Stopped "Appreciating" Educators and Started Respecting Them?

By Bobby Canosa-Carr

I’ve always wondered what school leaders are expected to do the week after “Teacher Appreciation Week.” Many of us spent last week serving donuts/bagels/pastries as teachers arrived in the morning or handing out mugs/T-shirts/school supplies inscribed with cute sayings about the heroic nature of teachers. It’s become an obligatory annual ritual that somehow makes us all feel a little less uneasy about the fact that teachers are just regular human beings trying their hardest to meet unrealistic expectations without adequate support, while being underpaid. 

And now that Teacher Appreciation Week is over, we go back to the normal state of teachers being not-so-appreciated… which is why I wonder if “appreciation” is really what teachers need from their leaders. Somehow, “appreciation” feels like an acknowledgement that we don’t do right by teachers, and so we appreciate that they keep showing up regardless. It’s tied up in our societal myth of teachers as self-sacrificing heroes, driven by their boundless, selfless love for their students.

This dynamic feels fundamentally unsustainable… both for the teachers who deserve a lot more than a bagel and a mug, and for the leaders who are also under-supported, under-appreciated, and overworked.

What if, instead of focusing on appreciation for teachers as heroes, we shifted our efforts to respect for teachers as professionals?  

If we made this change in how we see and treat our teachers, we would be making some monumental shifts in the way our schools work. Consider some of the differences between heroes and professionals:

• It’s ok to underpay heroes, because they’re expected to work for the greater good, rather than for a paycheck. But if we view teachers as professionals, we would have to pay them well, for all of the hours that they work, including lesson planning, giving feedback on student work, and communicating with students’ families.

• It’s ok to expect heroes to work in undesirable conditions; in fact, heroes often seek out the worst possible conditions in order to save the day. But if we view teachers as professionals, we would have to provide professional working conditions, including providing the supplies necessary to do their job well.

• It’s ok to expect heroes to achieve insurmountable odds and accomplish the impossible; this is the nature of their heroism. But, if we view teachers as professionals, we would have to provide them with the training, the resources, and the support necessary to achieve the desired outcomes.

Clearly, there are thousands of changes that would need to be made at every level of local, state, and federal government to make this vision of respect for teachers a reality. But it can start – like all transformative change – with simple shifts in mindsets and perceptions. This is where every school leader plays a role. If we change the way we think about teachers, we will change the way we speak about teachers and act toward teachers. And this has the potential to set a powerful example for our society as a whole. 

In this “Week after Teacher Appreciation Week,” let’s start a new tradition of noticing our own patterns of thought about teachers, of catching ourselves when we think of teachers as being more-than or less-than human, and of simply respecting them for the devoted professionals that they are.

Why We Need to Rethink Coaching in Education

By Bobby Canosa-Carr

How many coaches have you had in your life?

If you’re anything like me, I’m guessing you can count more than 20 people who, at various stages of your life, thought of themselves as your coaches. This might range from volunteers loosely supervising youth sports at the local park to supervisors who preferred using the word “coach” instead of potentially uncomfortable terms like “boss” or “evaluator.”

With all of these “coaches” in our lives, you might think we’d have sufficient experience to clearly and concisely identify what it is that coaches do. But we can’t. Try for a moment to compose a tweet-sized definition that encompasses what it is to be a coach. You’ll likely find that “coach” is often used in education as a catch-all term that can mean mentor, advisor, teacher, supervisor, thought-partner, and on and on and on.  It’s a glaring problem that schools have invested so deeply in an approach for which we don’t have an agreed-upon definition.

Want to project yourself as being an approachable, collaborative, down-to-earth boss? Call yourself a coach!

Want to make sure that teachers are implementing the right curriculum or pacing plan, but you don’t have enough time to be involved in instruction? Send in a coach!

Don’t know what to do about that teacher who’s not teaching well or that principal who’s not leading well? Get them a coach!

I could continue listing the endless scenarios that have led to “coaches” being employed in our schools, but I know that you can probably fill in the rest of that list for yourself. So let’s get back to trying to define the role of a coach in an educational setting.

The common thread seems to be that a coach is someone who takes responsibility for the outcomes generated by another person. This is convenient because coaches are often more disposable than the people they’re hired to coach. (If you want an example, look no further than the recently fired coach of the Los Angeles Lakers, who lost his job because a team consisting of LeBron James and a host of other future hall-of-famers didn’t make the playoffs this year.) 

The closest most people get to a concise description of a coach is this: It is the coach’s job to get another person to generate better outcomes. But here’s the problem: If the coach is expected to control outcomes generated by another person, then doesn’t that also imply that the coach has some degree of control over that other person. And isn’t that just called a boss?

One of my former bosses once told me that I needed to coach a principal… to coach her leadership team… to coach some teachers… to coach their students… so that the students would score higher on a standardized test! If coaching is really a space in which the coachee has power and choice, then how could we possibly predict that every person along that daisy chain of coaching would make the decisions to do the things that my boss wanted done? (Ironically, when my boss was demanding that I get these prescribed results, he probably thought he was “coaching” me.)

When we grasp too tightly to our desired outcomes, and when we try to get people to do things without directly asking them to do those things… that’s not coaching. That’s manipulation.

So if our ideas about coaching in the education sector are deeply flawed, what do we do about it?

The first step is to stop using “coaching” as a catch-all term for pseudo-management. We need to clearly articulate the type of coaching that will be genuinely transformative in our schools. Here are some principles I propose as a starting point:

• Coaching is not about the coach, and it’s not about the outcomes. It’s about the coachee. If the people being coached achieve growth through coaching, the outcomes will follow. 

• Coaching must be built upon respect. Before you begin coaching someone, ask yourself, “Do I believe that this person is inherently wise, whole, and capable of making good decisions?” If the answer is anything other than a resounding “YES,” you need to back away and let someone else do the coaching.

• Coaching should not be used to achieve compliance. If you need someone to follow a policy or implement a procedure, just say it. There’s no need to be coy when you already know what needs to be done.

So now I’ll circle back to where we started and ask you again: How many coaches have you had in your life? If you apply the principles above, and eliminate any so-called “coaches” who were really just bosses, supervisors, compliance-enforcers, performance-trainers, etc., I’m guessing you’re left (like I am) with a much shorter list. But I’m also guessing that this is a list of the impactful people in your life.