Odysseus Needed a Mentor. I Did Too.

For more than half a century, the first week of September I was always in the same place: a school.

On the first day of September this year, I was someplace else. Near a school, yes, but with no homework and no responsibilities. That evening I went to hear Angela Duckworth as she launched her new book, Situated: Find the People and Places That Bring Out Your Best. Her talk was surprisingly personal. She shared how painful it was for her, the person who made grit a household word, to learn that grit was not enough. When she was not achieving success by working 60 hours per week, she tried 70, then 80, then 100. It nearly cost her her marriage.

Later that evening I saw Ionesco’s absurdist play Rhinoceros. Early in Act I, Jean is lecturing Bérenger about discipline, effort, and making something of himself, and blares out:

“Willpower, my good man!”

Jean is ultimately the one who becomes a rhinoceros.

Cycling home that evening got me thinking about how the insights in Duckworth’s new book and Ionesco’s play are critical to being human and, in particular, to being a school leader. Duckworth is not now saying that persistence and effort don’t matter. Rather, she is arguing that the situations we place ourselves in, our environments, relationships, and routines, can matter just as much, or more. Ionesco is showing us something similar: the people and circumstances around us exert a powerful pull on who we become.

And this got me reflecting on my own career as a Head. How many of us deal with difficult situations primarily through individual willpower, hard work, and long hours?

I was good at muscling through whatever challenge surfaced at school. I worked harder. I worked longer. And when I could feel the stress building, I went on longer runs and took on more challenging hills on my bike. That helped me to sleep. Until it didn’t. Like Duckworth, who worked 100-hour weeks and nearly crashed her marriage before seeing a therapist, I was doing century bike rides and nearly crashed my body before I saw a doctor.

My cardiologist asked me a simple question, “Are you under a lot of stress?” I said yes and explained how I was handling it.

“You are going to have an irreversible event,” she said.

Not a bike crash, although I’ve had a couple of those. Something else.

“A stroke, a heart attack, or permanent damage to your organs.”

I had spent much of my life assuming that persistence was a strength professionally, personally, and athletically. Here I was being told that the very habit I had relied on to manage the stress of being a Head could end both my career and my life.

I had plenty of people around me. Family. Coaches. Colleagues. Peers. Consultants. I was actually quite good at asking for help. But most of that help began with the same question: How do we solve this? What I did not have, at least professionally, was someone who knew me well enough and stood far enough outside the immediate problems of the school to ask a different question: What is this situation doing to you?

That, looking back, may be what I missed in not having a mentor. Not another expert. Not someone to make decisions for me. Someone who had permission to notice patterns I could no longer see because I was living inside them.

A Head can be surrounded by people and still be alone in this respect. Your senior colleagues need you to be the Head. Your Board employs and evaluates you. Parents, students and staff bring you their needs. There may be surprisingly few people whose principal concern is not what you can do for the school, but who you are becoming while doing it.

On my bike ride home in the rain that night, Duckworth’s new thinking landed strongly with me. Grit was not wrong. Persistence and drive mattered enormously in my career. But perhaps we have made too much of the heroic leader who simply digs deeper. Sometimes the wiser move is not to summon more willpower, but to change the situation, including deliberately surrounding ourselves with people who bring out a better and healthier version of us.

Which takes me back to Jean shouting, “Willpower, my good man!” The unsettling thing about Rhinoceros is that people gradually accommodate themselves to what is happening around them until the extraordinary begins to feel normal. Being a Head of School can do that too. The hours, the pressures, the expectation that you will carry one more thing can become conditions you simply stop questioning.

Duckworth describes mentors as people who guide us, encourage us, and help bring out our best. As a Head, I would add that a mentor is not a transactional relationship organized around solving the problem of the moment, but someone who knows you over time, sees you as a whole person, and stands far enough outside the role to notice what you may no longer see yourself.

Mentor was a trusted friend of Odysseus, and Athena took his form when someone needed guidance, warning, or help seeing what they could not yet see for themselves.

Looking back, I wish I had had a Mentor of my own.