Introduction: Rowing In the Same Direction

One summer, Sarah Van Brimmer was hired as a literacy coach at a Title I school in Florida. The school was officially failing—it had an F rating from the state. Its ELA proficiency was under 30 percent, its literacy and math scores were low, and it had high turnover amongst staff. In fact, Sarah was one of over a dozen new staff members who would be starting that fall. She and her new colleagues were nervous about all of the challenges they’d be facing.

Sarah’s leaders, though, were determined to rise above the challenges. The principal and assistant principal decided to host a retreat for the entire staff to build connections between all of these talented teachers.

They came together to do fun team-building activities and discussed the book, Engaging Students With Poverty in Mind: Practical Strategies for Raising Achievement by Dr. Eric Jensen, taking turns in groups to present on different sections. They talked through the values they wanted to exhibit as a team and what their collective vision for the school would be.

“[I had a] freeing moment [by the end of the retreat] where I knew I made the right choice,” Sarah said. “I was so nervous going into this new unknown, but meeting everyone there and seeing the vision and values we were committing ourselves to made me feel like this is the place for me. It made me feel like I found my tribe, my group of people who had a common vision in mind for public education. That stuck with me as a leader.”

What Sarah’s leaders knew was that something remarkable happens when you have a vision.

As educators, we face massive challenges every day. And it’s easy, in the midst of those challenges, to lose sight of our collective purpose. It’s easy for our staff to get caught up in silos, everyone doing their best in their own classroom but ultimately failing to make progress as a team.

You know what this feels like.

It feels like you’re coexisting, working around each other but not with each other. You realize you haven’t had a personal conversation with the teacher down the hall in at least a month and you never followed up to ask them how their mom’s surgery went. Weeks go by before you remember to text a friend back. At home, marriage and parenting happens in the margins as you speed back and forth between your various obligations.

It happens. We’re all busy. But at some point, we have to stop and make sure we’re still rowing in the same direction.

What happens when the people in a boat try to row in different directions?

They stay in the same place.

They get stuck.

Sarah’s leaders were wise to take action before that happened. With their careful planning and facilitation, the retreat worked to bring everyone together in a shared sense of collective efficacy.

You can do the same thing for your school. No matter what challenges you face, as a leader, it’s up to you to get everyone on the boat rowing in the same direction. You can do that by creating a Remarkable Vision.

The Remarkable Vision Formula

A Remarkable Vision sets a destination so compelling that everyone wants to row together to get there. It’s a vision worthy of everyone’s attention. It’s striking and memorable, able to be remarked upon. It gets people talking.

A Remarkable Vision starts with you, the leader. You’re the Ruckus Maker! It’s your job to dream up what’s possible, define expectations, and hold everyone accountable. This book will help you do all of that.

It begins with a focus on your own aspirations and goals because, before you can lead others toward a Remarkable Vision, it’s important to first understand where you are now as an individual and where you want to be. But it can’t stop there.

This isn’t about insisting on your priorities or your way of doing things. It’s not about pulling everyone along with you; that’s just rowing against the tide. No, a Remarkable Vision has buy-in. It’s built in collaboration with the people you care about and serve.

So the next step is to take a closer look at your family and how a Remarkable Vision can help you to be your best self at home. I believe an effective leader is someone with work-life balance who prioritizes family relationships above work ones.

Only then, after your personal and family life has received fair attention, will you move on to envisioning the school of your dreams. And that’s the key to a Remarkable Vision: it’s customized to you—to your life, your family—and to your school.

I can’t tell you what your vision should look like because I don’t know your dreams, hopes, circumstances, challenges, and endeavors for yourself, your family, and your team. Instead, I’m going to help you discover your vision through a five-step process I call the Remarkable Vision Formula.

In order to create a Remarkable Vision, you need to:

1. Retreat.

2. Visualize the future.

3. Define expectations.

4. Seek feedback.

5. Implement the vision.

We’ll talk more about this process in Chapter 1 and then apply it to three important areas in Chapters 2–4: your personal life, your family, and your school. Finally, in Chapter 5, we’ll talk about Remarkable Execution: What does it look like to make your vision a reality every day?

Once you’ve created and implemented your Remarkable Vision, you’ll start to notice some incredible changes right away. As other leaders have found, you’ll see that:

✔ You feel excited and energized to show up each day.

✔ You’re able to set the right boundaries around your work and life.

✔ You won’t hesitate to fix things in your life that need fixing.

✔ Your family will be healthier and happier when you show up as your best self for them.

✔ At school, you’ll see your team collaborating and helping to meet each other’s needs.

✔ You’ll notice consistent progress towards your goals—both your individual life and family goals, and your collective school goals.

✔ You’ll attract the right people who want to be part of that vision.

How cool would that be?

Get Away

I designed this book as a guided retreat because, as you’ll see in Chapter 1, retreating makes it possible for us to create. My hope is that you’ll take it with you somewhere special, somewhere that makes you happy, somewhere you can dream. Each chapter will help you reflect on your life and design your own Remarkable Vision.

One of my favorite places to go, and where I’ve started to take other leaders to retreat, is Taos, New Mexico. Whether by myself or with other leaders, I go on hikes, eat incredible New Mexican cuisine, and spend time journaling by myself in a place where I can’t be distracted by my dog, Alba, or by my normal routines and responsibilities. Retreating gives me the mental and physical relief I need to dream up new ways that I can serve leaders better. And I’ve seen it work wonders for the leaders I work with, too.

Sarah had been inspired and motivated by the collective vision her school’s staff had discussed at their retreat, but they still faced significant challenges, and making progress on that vision was exhausting for Sarah. While coaching her, I could see how discouraged and burnt out she was becoming. We decided that we would pause our coaching sessions over the summer so that she could take a break and travel.

Sarah went on vacation with her family and spent time reconnecting with her husband. She reflected deeply on what she wanted her experience at school to be like and who she wanted to be as a leader in her community. She came back refreshed, motivated, and with a clear vision for herself, her family, and her school.

If you can, do what Sarah did. Go somewhere new, even if it’s just a hotel or an Airbnb close to your home. Go for a day or a week—whatever you need. In the worst-case scenario, you can do this at home by using a space you don’t normally work in, or you can take your journal with you to a park. Wherever you go, make sure it’s a change of scenery and somewhere you can be alone to reflect deeply.

Once you’re there, take time to unwind and unplug. Consider leaving your phone at home and getting one of those disposable phones for emergencies. Turn off the Internet on your laptop. Better yet, bring only a simple pen and notebook so that you can journal and write down your answers to the reflection questions throughout this book. Remove whatever distractions you need to in order to do deep work.

Most importantly, commit now to not censoring your dreams. Don’t worry about whether something is too big or crazy or countercultural. For now, think as big as you can. We’ll bring in your team and the community later to get their feedback. But this first step—retreating—is just for you. So make the most of it.

If it’s helpful, you can also listen to my audio course on the Remarkable Vision Formula, which you can find at betterleadersbetterschools.com. You might want to listen to it while you walk or hike or float on your paddleboard. What’s important is that you make time to take in this work and then devote yourself to dreaming up a Remarkable Vision.

Now it’s time to start making real progress toward the life, the family, and the school of your dreams. Use the following reflection questions to help you decide where you want to retreat and how you can make the most of that time. Then you’ll be ready to begin.

Reflect

Consider the following questions and write down your responses below or in your journal:

●      Where do you want to go to get away?

●      What do you need to communicate in order to get away?

●      What would make this retreat a success for you?

Chapter 1. Start Close In

“Start close in,

don’t take the second step

or the third,

start with the first

thing

close in,

the step

you don’t want to take.”

“Start Close In” by David Whyte (2019)

Carl Jung, the famous psychiatrist, decided in the 1920s that he wanted to explore the depths of his own subconscious in a more meaningful way than he had up until that point. He bought land near Lake Zurich in the Swiss mountain town of Bollingen and began constructing a small, primitive house where he could get away. It’s known today as Bollingen Tower.

Over the years, Jung added different rooms to the Tower, which represented different parts of his consciousness. If you look it up online, you’ll see that it looks like a small castle, his inner sanctum.

Jung lived simply there—chopping wood, making food, pumping water, and moving from room to room as he explored his own thoughts and impulses. He wrote in his memoir, “At Bollingen I am in the midst of my true life, I am most deeply myself” (Jung, 1989, p. 225).

Getting away like Jung did—retreating—is the first and arguably most important step of the Remarkable Vision Formula, which we’ll explore in this chapter. The formula is a five-step process for creating, sharing, and refining a compelling vision that will reignite your energy for your life, your family, and your school.

The Art of Retreating

There’s something special that happens when you step away from your daily life, when you remove all of the things you’re used to. All you’re left with is yourself.

Retreating gives us space to create. Have you ever noticed that the words “reacting” and “creating” have the same letters? Yet their meanings and their impact on the people around you could not be more different. When you don’t make time to get away from your daily routine, it’s easy to get caught in a pattern of reacting.

You don’t feel like yourself when all you do is react to the problems coming at you. As Carl Jung observed, it’s not until you give yourself room to create that you begin to feel most yourself. This is the place where you can do your best work.

But retreating is essential for more than just deep work. Retreating might also be the key to finally overcoming whatever problems you’re facing.

In his book, Executive Retreats for Busy Business Leaders, executive coach David Achata (2023) writes about the Battle of Chickamauga, the second bloodiest battle of the Civil War. The fighting lasted for three days, during which both sides lost countless lives. Eventually, exhausted and overcome, the Union army retreated.

Delighted by its victory, the Confederate army set up camp on the mountains around Chattanooga. But while the Confederates isolated themselves on the mountaintop, overconfident in their high positions, the Union army rebuilt its resources and resupplied its men.

Eventually, the Union soldiers were ready to engage again. They ran straight up the side of the mountain toward their enemy. The Confederates, by now exhausted and running out of supplies themselves, tried to fire back with their cannons, but the cannonballs simply rolled harmlessly down the steep mountainside. The Union handily won the Battle of Lookout Mountain and the strategic advantage at Chattanooga.

While it probably looked and felt like a defeat at first, the Union army’s retreat at the Battle of Chickamauga gave it the time and space needed to come up with a strategy and return to win at Chattanooga. From there, Sherman launched his deadly march to the sea, and the Union won the war.

Retreats can offer us the same opportunity to reflect and recharge in our own lives before marching on to victory.

My friend, Joe Clausi, is a mastermind leader and coach. He finds regular time to retreat at the beach near his home in California. After dropping his kids off at school, he walks on the sand with his dog and sips coffee. Making time for this in his daily routine allows him to plan ahead, create processes, and design ways to make our mastermind systems more efficient.

Joe says that he uses his retreat time to codify the best practices he sees and hears in schools so that he can share those lessons with other schools and mastermind members. In doing this, Joe says:

My hope is that they hear one thing that they like, go back to their site and try [it], and that snowballs into a change that allows them to get a peace of mind, a few extra minutes, a mental break from chaos, or helps them make progress toward their goals.

Reflect

Consider the following questions and write down your responses below or in your journal:

●      What battles are you facing in your life?

●      Can you see a pattern in your actions of reacting rather than creating?

●      Where can you be most yourself? Do you have a Bollingen Tower in your own life? When was the last time you went there?

●      How does retreating help you prepare to engage with whatever you’re facing?

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Visualize the Future

The second step of the Remarkable Vision Formula, after we’ve removed ourselves from the stress of daily life, is to visualize the future. If visualization sounds woo-woo, don’t worry! This is a real strategy with real science behind it. Psychologist and author Dr. Gia Marson (2021) writes that visualization is “using your imagination to walk yourself through various scenarios as if rehearsing them.” She says it works because it puts you “in the right mindset to overcome life’s challenges and achieve your goals.”

Visualization is used in many high-performance contexts to help people reach new heights. For example, athletes use visualization to anticipate the moves they’ll make and prepare their bodies and minds for victory. Therapists often use it with their clients to help them overcome anxiety and make positive changes in their lives. Actors use visualization to get into character and deliver the performance of a lifetime.

Perhaps the most powerful way to use visualization is to imagine all of the things that could go wrong. In an episode of the podcast, No Stupid Questions, psychologist Angela Duckworth says:

When you just fantasize about the best possible outcome, the problem is that you don’t actually feel any sense of urgency to do anything because you’ve already indulged in this future that you, in some ways, experience just because you’ve been able to imagine it. So I think what they would say is to go to the obstacles, right? [It’s] fine to visualize the positive future that you’re hoping for. But then you need to contrast that with the obstacles that stand in the way (Duckworth & Konnikova, 2023).

By anticipating things that could go wrong, you can visualize how you might respond to worst-case scenarios and try out possible solutions in advance.

In the same episode, psychologist and professional poker player Maria Konnikova revealed that she not only uses her imagination to visualize outcomes when she’s playing poker, she also forces herself to write out those visualizations. She says:

Writing it out forces you to think it through in a way that you don’t if you just kind of say it in your head because it forces you to actually think of the nitty gritty and…how you really will be implementing something (Duckworth & Konnikova, 2023).

Years ago, I started to wonder, what if the power of visualization could be harnessed to help school leaders as well?

In the next three chapters, we’ll visualize both positive and negative scenarios to help you craft your Remarkable Vision and plan ahead for any obstacles. First, let’s see how it works.

Reflect

Try a simple visualization exercise right now. Sit in a comfortable position and close your eyes. Take three deep breaths, inhaling through your nose and exhaling through your mouth.

Now imagine yourself cooking your favorite meal. It doesn’t have to be fancy; it just has to be something you enjoy. See yourself getting the ingredients out of the fridge, taking out the pots and pans you’ll need, chopping the vegetables, and so on.

Visualize each step of the process clearly as if you were watching it happen in a movie. Bring to mind the other senses as well: What does it smell like? Do you hear the sizzling of oil or the bubbling of water? Can you feel the warmth from the stove?

Then, when the meal is ready, imagine yourself sitting down to enjoy the first taste.

Consider the following questions and write down your responses in your journal:

●      How do you feel after visualizing the meal (besides hungry!)?

●      What might go wrong with cooking the meal, and how could you avoid it?

●      What do you want to visualize next?

●      How do you think you could use visualization as a tool in your life?

Define Expectations

Author James Nottingham (2017) teaches a powerful exercise about expectations. It goes like this:

●      Draw a house.

●      Now give yourself feedback on your house.

●      And now improve your house.

Did your house get much better? How do you know?

Unfortunately, your house couldn’t have gotten much better because you never defined what you were looking for in a house. For example, how would you know the house is better because you added another window? Maybe it was only supposed to have one window.

It turns out that you can only give feedback, take feedback, and improve when you are clear on the expectations in the first place. Visualizing the future you want for your life, your family, and your school is a great step—but no one will be able to act on that vision unless they know what is expected of them.

You understand this to be true in terms of learning; you know these expectations as “success criteria,” and you have no problem coming up with them for your kids. Yet you probably rarely take time to identify the success criteria for your own work as an educator. We’ll fix that in this book.

Reflect

Consider the following questions and write down your responses below or in your journal:

●      How do you set expectations for yourself and others in your own life?

●      Do the people around you know what you expect from them?

●      How well do they deliver on the goals you set?

Seek Feedback

As the leader, it’s your responsibility to take the first step—to visualize, to define expectations, and to lay out the initial plan. This is as far as you can get on your own. As you know, the plan means nothing if it doesn’t meet the needs of the people you’re trying to serve. You have to ask for their input and get their buy-in.

We recommend getting feedback on your plan in concentric circles—a process we’ll cover more in Chapter 5. First, send it to your closest colleagues. Ask them to comment on the vision. Ask:

●      What could make this better?

●      What am I missing?

Give them a clear deadline for input, and then listen and discuss with an open mind. Implement as much of their feedback as you can—even if you don’t love their suggestions.

Then, expand the circle of feedback a little bit wider. Send it to the department heads and team leaders you work with. Implement their input as well. Repeat the process, eventually sending your vision to your students, parents, and community. Overcommunicate that this is a draft and you welcome their thoughts.

Reflect

Consider the following questions and write down your responses below or in your journal:

●      Are you in the habit of seeking feedback from your team?

●      Have you tried the concentric circles of feedback approach? If so, how did it turn out?

●      How do you typically respond to feedback? Does that response serve you and those around you well?

Implement the Vision

When the vision is ready, it’s time to put it into action. In the Bible, God told the prophet Habakkuk, “Write the vision, make it plain on tablets, so he may run who reads it.” Your vision should not only be communicated plainly, but it should be actionable and exciting so that those who read it can (and will want to) “run” with it.

How do you do that? We’ll discuss this more in Chapter 5 when we talk about Remarkable Execution, but the first step is identifying the “vision keepers.” In your family, the vision keepers are all of you—your spouse/partner, children, and whoever else you consider to be an essential part of your family. At school, your vision keepers are the people who believe in the vision most ardently.

It’s easy for people to say of your dreams and your vision, “That will never work.” The vision keepers make it their personal mission to prove those people wrong. They become the guardians of the vision and help hold the rest of the community accountable for continuing to make progress towards that vision. Using our rowing analogy from the Introduction, they are like the coxswain, steering the boat and encouraging the rest of the team to work together. In Chapter 5, you’ll learn more about how to find these people and equip them to lead.

Reflect

Consider the following questions and write down your responses below or in your journal:

●      Think of other visions that you’ve supported. What inspired you about those visions?

●      How did you become a cheerleader for those visions?

●      Who do you trust to be a vision keeper?

That’s it! Congratulations. You have everything you need to craft a Remarkable Vision for arguably the most important relationships in your life: your family and your school. But you know that trying to cast a vision for life with others means nothing if you haven’t turned your attention inward to who you are and who you want to be.

That’s why we’ll start by creating a vision for a Remarkable Life first.

Part 2 of 3 coming in a few days …