Journey into Leadership: "Can I have a pony?" and a Decade of Joyful Indentured Servitude

For class today we were asked to read a selection from True North and then respond to a couple of prompts about our own story. Here is what I wrote:


• People, events and experiences that have had the greatest impact on me

The lore of my childhood includes a story about being eight years old and informing my parents of my desire for a pony. While this may not an uncommon occurrence in the life of a child, my parents’ response is something that has deeply informed who I am today. Instead of smiling and nodding, changing the topic, or even conceding to getting me a pony, my parents reminded me of the horse farm down the road from our house and encouraged me to head up to the farm and see if they needed any help; the notion being that I could earn my right to equine companionship through good old fashioned labor.

For the next 14 years of my life, that farm became my home away from home. Sometimes I would venture from our house on my bike at three in the morning with a flashlight duct taped to the handlebars, or eventually gallop up the side of the rode on the pony that came to live in our front yard (after he was given to me--free of charge--from a family a few towns over). My work ranged from washing tack, to mucking stalls, to teaching day camp lessons to kids and becoming a novice trainer. The year after I graduated from college I managed the farm for the winter months while the owners were down south. The family that owned the farm became my adoptive parents, and their youngest daughter, a sister.

Childhood on a working farm ingrained in me a work ethic that has come to define the type of person I am today and greatly informs my leadership. The longer I stayed at the barn, the more I looked for chores that needed to be done, the more likely that I would get invited to big shows or allowed to ride the nicest horses. In that setting, much like in schools, months and years of hard, long days were rewarded with opportunities for more challenges and increased responsibility.

I eagerly seek work and take on a variety of tasks in schools. This characteristic of actively looking to do what needs doing, has been a great gift in my life as an educator. All of the leadership roles that I have served in schools have been-- at least in part-- born out of peoples’ recognition of this ethic.

• Experiences/learning I need to develop my leadership to the next level

This strength that others may see as a reason to award me leadership positions can also be a challenge in that it makes delegation of responsibility somewhat unnatural. This is certainly something about my leadership that needs to be developed at this stage in my career. Since I have spent the better part of the last 25 years doing and not delegating, I need to work on expanding my capability to encourage doing in others and be comfortable honoring and celebrating the work that they do without feeling a guilty urgency to do it myself.