Word: Direction

Sentence:

Direction is knowing what matters enough to decide what gets your time, your energy, and your attention.

Passage:

When I arrived at each school I was leading, there was no shortage of things that needed attention.

Attendance was low. Graduation rates were low. The reputation of the school had taken a beating. There were concerns about instruction, culture, safety, enrollment, staffing, and whether the school even had a future. And then there was all the normal work of running a school.

Budgets had to be built. Teachers needed support. Parents called. Students needed help. Meetings filled the calendar. Emails never stopped. Something could happen in the hallway at 9:00 in the morning and completely change the plan you had made at 8:00.

It was easy for an entire day to disappear that way.

I could come in knowing what I wanted to accomplish, spend the next eight or ten hours doing important work, and still leave realizing I had barely touched the thing I thought mattered most when the day started. Do that enough times and days become weeks, weeks become months, and you can be working incredibly hard without being sure you are actually moving in the direction you intended.

Over time, I learned that direction was not about controlling everything that came at us. That was never going to happen. It was about getting clearer about what mattered so we had something to return to when everything started competing for our attention.

I have always liked the image of rocks and sand in a jar. If you pour the sand in first, there is not much room left for the rocks. But if you put the rocks in first, the sand finds its way into the spaces around them.

The sand is going to come either way.

For us, the challenge was deciding what our rocks were. Our values and priorities had to be clear enough to help us decide where our time, energy, people, and resources should go. Not every good idea needed to become our idea, and not every problem could become the most important problem. Sometimes direction meant deciding what we were going to do, and just as often it meant deciding what we were not going to do.

That became even more important as more people began owning the work. Direction could not live only in my head. If teachers, students, families, and teams were going to help shape the school, they needed to understand what we were trying to build and what we were trying to protect. That gave people something to come back to when the work got messy or when there were several reasonable choices in front of them.

I think the real danger of losing direction is not simply that we become less productive. Sometimes we become incredibly productive. We answer the emails, attend the meetings, hit the deadlines, solve the problems, and keep moving.

But somewhere in all that movement, we can lose track of time. We can lose track of people. We can even lose track of what was important enough to make us start in the first place.

That happens in organizations, but it happens in our lives too. Work can slowly take the space that belonged to family. Other people’s needs can take all the energy we meant to save for ourselves. A goal we once cared deeply about can get pushed to the side because something more urgent keeps showing up. Then one day we look around and realize we have been moving for a long time, just not necessarily toward the things that matter most.

Direction does not mean the day will go according to plan. Most days probably will not. It gives us something to return to when we get pulled off course and reminds us not only where we are trying to go, but what and who we do not want to lose along the way.

The sand will always find its way into the jar.

We just have to decide which rocks deserve their space first.

Your Turn:

What needs to go into your jar first right now?

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