When Change Starts Here came out, I sat there waiting to be found out. My name was on the cover next to Efraim's. I should have felt proud. Instead I felt like I'd somehow fooled everyone, and any minute now they'd realise.
It still happens. Whenever something new lands, or I'm in a room where I'm meant to be the one who knows, it creeps back in.
I sat down with Julia Bialeski for this week's podcast, and we open with her version of it. She'd just been promoted to Principal in spring 2019, the role she'd worked years for, and she was walking around terrified. Convinced that at some point everyone would realise she wasn't up to it, and the whole thing would come crashing down.
Julia has a phrase she's borrowed from a friend. "Why not me?" When she is in a room scanning everyone who seems to know what they're doing while she feels she clearly doesn't, those three words pull her back. She was picked for a reason. So was everyone else.
I had my own version growing up. My grandma used to tell me, "Shane, you will go to college, and you will find a nice girl at college too." I was the first in my family to go to university. She was right on both counts. Those words sunk in early, and they've stayed with me.
That's why Julia's smile file idea hit me. A plastic envelope where you keep the cards and kind emails as they come in. On the bad days, you pull a few out. They're proof that someone, at some point, thought you were doing alright.
We're coming in to the summer term, exams looming, everyone running on empty. Before that voice gets loud this week, ask yourself: am I really not good enough at this, or am I just exhausted? Most weeks I confuse one for the other.
Episode 158 with Julia is here: https://www.shaneleaning.com/podcast/158. Worth a listen on the way home.
If you've got a smile file, or words you've kept close from someone who believed in you, hit reply and tell me.
Shane
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