Put The Burden Down.

A reflection on leadership, process and finally feeling safe enough to be yourself.

I have a confession to make.

For most of my career as a school leader, I was ashamed of how I worked.

Not the outcomes. The outcomes were good. The improvement plans were clear, well-written, values-driven. The policies landed. The handbooks got used. The strategies I wrote became the mechanism that turned vision into action in the schools I led. But the process. The how. That felt like a dirty secret.

While colleagues seemed to have it all mapped out; timetabled, structured, drafted well in advance, I was 'winging it'. Doing the washing up. Going for a run. Scribbling something in a notebook at 11pm because a conversation with a member of staff had sparked something I didn't want to lose. Reading a novel and finding a line that somehow said everything I'd been trying to say about belonging, or ambition, or what it means to grow. The document got written close to the deadline. Always. And it was always good. But for years I told myself that was despite my process, not because of it.

There was more to that shame than I understood at the time.

I am a Black woman from a working class background. I learned early (not from a single overt conversation, but from a thousand small signals) that if I wanted to move in the circles my skills and talents deserved, I needed to assimilate. To get close enough to the middle class, white, respectable 'norm' so that my difference didn't frighten or intimidate the people who had the power to determine my future.

So I watched how they spoke. How they carried themselves. How they led.

And I want to be honest about what I was doing when I watched. I was reading a performance. I was seeing what people presented in professional spaces; the composure, the certainty, the apparently effortless planning, and I was taking it at face value. What I couldn't see, from where I was standing, was whether any of them had their own doubts, their own messy processes, their own moments of feeling like they were holding something together with string. Maybe they did. Probably some of them did.

But when you are on the outside looking in, you don't get access to the backstage. You only see the show. And the show told me this: If you are a leader in education you are emotionless. You are serious. You do not share your fears. You do not show your working out. You speak like a newsreader and you plan like an architect. That meant straight lines, early starts, late finishes and nothing left to chance.

I could perform most of it. I'd had enough practice.

But my process; the messy, incubating, sparked-in-the-shower, written-at-the-last-minute process, refused to be tamed. And because it didn't look like the show, I assumed it was a flaw. Evidence that somewhere underneath the performance, I wasn't quite as professional as I was supposed to be.

The internal monologue of those years is not comfortable to revisit.

I have to prove I have the right to be here. I have to prove I haven't been given this job because of positive discrimination. I cannot afford to fail. Not because failure would hurt me, but because it wouldn't just be my failure. It would be confirmation. It would be 'I told you'. It would mean the next person who looked like me would have to work even harder to get into the room. My failure wouldn't make the path easier for those coming after me. It would make it harder. And alongside that, equally true, equally loud: I know I can do this. I know I have the skills. Watch me.

Both things, simultaneously, every day. For years.

Mediocrity was never an option. Not because of my own standards, though those were high. But because whatever I produced had to be unassailable. Had to be the most impressive version. Had to leave no room for anyone to question whether I deserved to be in the room. That is an exhausting way to lead.

And it is a weight that nobody who hasn't carried themselves can fully understand.

I came to coaching first as a learner. It was part of my journey to becoming a qualified coach myself, and I approached it the way I'd approached most things, that is prepared, professional, ready to do the work.

What I wasn't prepared for was feeling safe.

Not safe as in comfortable. Safe as in for the first time in a very long time, I didn't have to manage someone else's emotional response to my truth at the same time as processing my own. I didn't have to watch how my words landed. I didn't have to be a representative, or a proof point, or a defender of an entire group of people before I could just be a person figuring something out.

My coach was a Black person. I don't think it's a coincidence that it was in that space that I finally said out loud the things I had always felt but never voiced.

I could put the burden down.

And in that space, lighter, finally just myself, I started to look honestly at how I worked. Not through the lens of the template. Through the lens of who I actually am.

What I found, when I finally looked without shame, was Curiosity.

Not disorganisation. Not a lack of discipline. Curiosity.

An instinct, present my entire career, to gather and absorb and connect. To notice things. To let ideas incubate in the gaps between the formal work, because that was where they grew best. The washing up was not procrastination. The run was not avoidance. The notebook, the novel, the conversation with a colleague that sent something clicking into place; that was never the absence of work.

That was the work. The thinking that made everything else possible. The process that had been producing excellent outcomes my entire career, that I had spent my entire career being quietly ashamed of. The document was never where the work happened. The work happened in the gaps. In the quiet. In the spaces where I was finally free to just think.

I have kept a small notebook for as long as I can remember. Snippets of conversation. Quotes from books (fiction as often as non-fiction). Lines that land. Thoughts that aren't ready to be thoughts yet. What started on a floppy disk (yes, a floppy disk) moved to an external hard drive and now lives in the cloud. A bank of ideas, lesson plans, curriculum sparks, half-formed strategies, things I read once and knew I'd need later. Built over a career. Still growing.

For a long time I thought of that as something I did for other people under the guise of mentoring. Resources to pass on. Ideas to share when someone asked.

It was only when I started through coaching, to name the values that had driven everything I did, that I understood. That collection wasn't for other people first, it was part of my own process. My own way of gathering, holding, returning to. My own version of the straight line that was never straight.

And somewhere in all of it, underneath the proving and the performing and the weight of representation, there was joy. There always had been. I just hadn't felt safe enough to let it show.

There is no right way to lead. There is no right way to think, or plan, or produce the work that moves your school forward. What matters is whether your method aligns with who you actually are, not who the template told you to be.

A growth mindset, in its truest sense, isn't about adopting someone else's system. It's about learning to recognise your own data when it arrives. The thought in the shower. The line in the book. The thing a child says that reframes everything. The feeling that something isn't finished yet, even when the document says it is.

Notice it. Write it down. Don't action it yet. Just file it somewhere safe. That is not a messy process. That is how some of the best leaders I know do their finest work. In the gaps, in the quiet, in the spaces between the template and the truth of who they are.

And I want to say something directly to the person reading this who recognises themselves in it, be that because of your race, gender, sexual orientation, class, disability, or any other part of who you are that the system was not build to accomodate.

The person who has spent their career performing a version of leadership that was never quite theirs. Who has never had a space where they could put the burden down. Who has felt the weight of representation sitting alongside the absolute knowledge that they are good enough, more than good enough; and felt both things, simultaneously, every single day.

You don't have to have been leading for twenty years to carry that weight. I carried it from day one. Leadership is not a destination you arrive at after enough experience or the right set of letters after your name. It is a way of seeing, a way of thinking, a way of being in the world. And if you have ever walked into a room and known in your bones that you were the right person to lead something, even before anyone else could see it? You were already a leader.

You deserve a space where that is seen. Where the whole of you is an asset, not a liability to be managed. Where you can finally, fully, put the burden down.

And somewhere on the other side of that, I promise you, the joy comes back.