Nobody Told Me Leadership Would Feel Like This

Specifically: like you’re doing a brilliant impression of a leader while the actual you hides in the stationery cupboard.

I want to tell you about a moment.

I am standing in front of my staff team. Executive headteacher. Multiple schools. Lanyard on. (Always the lanyard. We must never forget the lanyard.)

And something in me, quietly, without ceremony, just stops.

Not in a collapse-onto-the-floor way (those of you who have worked with me will no doubt chuckle at the memory of a few of those). More in a hang on, what is actually happening here way.

I looked at the room. Good people. Tired people. People who had also, I suspect, left the reason they became teachers somewhere in a filing cabinet around Year 3 of senior leadership.

And I thought: why are we here?

Not existentially. (It was a Tuesday. There wasn't time for existential.) But genuinely, who are we actually serving right now?

The answer was not, if I'm honest, the children.

Here is the thing nobody tells you when you step into headship.

You become very, very good at a job that is not the job you signed up for.

You signed up for children. For learning. For that specific electricity in a room when something lands for a child who didn't think they were clever. You signed up, and I know you did, because you're reading this, because you genuinely believe that what happens in schools shapes what children believe about themselves and about the world.

That belief is not small. It is not naive. It is, in fact, the most important thing about you.

And then you became a leader, and the system handed you a set of urgent, important, legitimate responsibilities — and you did them, because you're good and you care — and somewhere in all of that, your values didn't disappear. They just got buried.

Under the data. The compliance. The emails you answered at 11pm because you just had to!

I used to joke, in my executive headteacher days, that my inner voice had stopped asking is this right for the children? and had started asking but what will Ofsted think?

For me, that is not an upgrade of my thinking. That is a very well-dressed form of fear. And I say this with full compassion for past-me, who was doing her best in a system that genuinely rewards it: leading from fear is exhausting, it's contagious, and it quietly infects every room you walk into.

The staff feel it. The children feel it. Your body definitely feels it: that low-level hum of alertness that never quite switches off, even at weekends, even on holiday, even when you're stood in your son's nursery at 10pm convincing yourself you'll just check your emails one more time.

(I know. I've been there. It’s rubbish.)

Here's what I now believe, having left that version of leadership and spent years working with the leaders still inside it:

You did not lose your values. You lost access to them.

There is a difference. One is a crisis of character. The other is a crisis of conditions.

You need conditions in which you can think — not perform. Reflect — not react. Remember what you actually believe about children and learning and your own capacity to lead in a way that doesn't slowly hollow you out.

You need, in other words, a moment to pause.

Not a residential. Not a two-day offsite. Not another leadership programme that tells you to be more resilient, as if the problem is you and not the pace.

Just a pause. Space to hear yourself think. Permission to ask the questions you've been too busy (or too scared) to ask.

The leaders I work with are not lacking in intelligence or commitment or care. They are absolutely drowning in all three.

What they're often missing is a protected space. A Space Between the doing, where they can slow down, get honest, and find their way back to what matters.

That's what I do. That's what I'm here for.

And if you're the kind of leader who reads a blog like this at whatever time it is and thinks yes, that's me, but I can't stop,  then you're exactly who I'd love to have a conversation with.

Your values are not gone. They are waiting very patiently for you to come back.

The children need you to.

Power of the Pause is a small-group workshop for leaders who need space to think and permission to use it. If you'd like to know more, get in touch — I'd love to hear from you.

Get in touch

To have a chat about my services and how I help, please email me at lucy@lucytimmons.com or fill in the contact form here.