Growing As A Leader Who Is A Reader

As a young kid I developed a love of reading.  What I enjoyed most about books was that I could disappear into the characters and the stories being told.  My imagination could wander to places I didn’t know existed, allowing me to see things from a perspective that I otherwise wouldn’t be able to have.  I went off to college and all of that changed. I started to read for the purpose of consuming as much content specific material as I could.  It didn’t take long and I had lost my joy for reading altogether.  When I entered the workforce  I remained on that path and saw reading as a chore more than an opportunity or a delight.  Once I became a principal one of the things that came up over and over again was that “leaders were readers.” I took this so seriously that my focus on reading was solely directed towards improving as a principal and a leader of people.  I was reading books on leadership, management, curriculum, instructional practices and culture, but I wasn’t going beyond those areas.  The only thing I was consuming was what I felt was helping me become a better leader from a technical and practical sense.  This strategy led to a lot of professional growth, helped me flatten the learning curve and even brought some excitement back to reading for me, however a problem was brewing.

I know you’ve all heard that “variety is the spice of life” and I certainly had variety in my professional readings. I read books and articles over the aforementioned topics, but I was neglecting some of the most important things I needed in my life.  I needed to allow my mind to be entertained so my imagination could develop.  There were lessons to be learned in reading fiction things like relationship dynamics as well as experiencing the emotions of characters that I could relate to.  Through fiction I got to experience the emotions of people that were completely different from me and that could allow me to see things from a much different perspective.  

When COVID hit us in 2020 I started to expand my reading and surprisingly discovered that some books weren’t meant to provide entertainment or an opportunity to gain knowledge.  Some of the lessons I was learning from books were simply to reaffirm the things I already knew.  Books could provide me with the comfort and confidence that I was on the right track and doing the right things to find what I was searching for or trying to achieve..  There might be several of you reading this and saying to yourself “this is pretty obvious to me, how did he not see this for himself?” I can tell you from my experience at that time I was treading water so frantically that I couldn’t see beyond my problems and fears.  I was so afraid that I wasn’t prepared enough or didn’t know enough as a new school principal that I acquired serious tunnel vision.  My only focus was on survival and what I needed to read next to keep me from drowning. 

As I sit in my office writing this I’m looking at my book shelves and I can tell you what was going on in my life when I read those books.  They are grouped on my shelves  in chronological order of when I read them.  What makes me chuckle now that I never noticed until today is that you can see exactly what my focus was because although they are in chronological order that are also ordered almost entirely by subject..  Biographies of historical figures and events, coaching biographies and manuals, books on instructional practices and curriculum, leadership books, self help books  and fiction all grouped together by those subjects.  As I look down towards the bottom of my book shelves you can see more variety in subject and content.  It is no coincidence that during the time where I had the most variety in topics and subjects I was experiencing the most growth of my life and I was also happier than I had ever been.   

I have hundreds of books and I can’t seem to get rid of a single one of them. This is a source of frustration for my wife because they do take up a lot of space and they seem to get heavier every single time we have moved to a new home..  Just this week I was talking to someone about how our books weren’t just books, they were a reference library for our lives.  We needed to have them close by so we could use them over and over again.  I may go years between looking through some of them but a conversation with someone may spark an idea or provide an opportunity for me to pass on some information from my personal library.  There isn’t a book on any of my shelves that doesn’t have things underlined, circled, dog earned or notes written in the margins.  Books are more than just books, they are a way to make us think, reflect, stimulate growth and spark ideas.  They are tools, entertainment and a catalyst for change.  If we want to lead we need to read, but more importantly we need to read beyond our chosen discipline, comfort zone or passions.  We need to read everything, from fiction to self help.  Imagine the influence actually reading books could have on us instead of being glued to our social media pages or whatever is streaming on the television.  We need to make time to read each day. Just 20 minutes could make a significant change in your outlook and attitude.  Have a great week and remember when your commitment is greater than your feelings you get results.