Socrates said the unexamined life isn’t worth living. He said it in a courtroom, defending his life’s work to a jury that would sentence him to death for it. That’s not a man being clever. That’s a man who meant it. I think about that line more as a former superintendent than as anything else. Because here’s the truth about the job: you learn to hold your cards close. Boards are elected. Communities are political. The confident, everything’s-under-control face isn’t vanity —

I spent twenty years being the person with the answers. That's the job. A staff member has a problem, a board has a question, a parent is upset — they come to the superintendent's office because they expect someone in that chair to know what to do. So when I started building an executive coaching practice, I assumed the switch would be simple. Trade one kind of expertise for another. Instead of answering “what do we do about the boiler,” I'd answer “what do we do about your l

There’s a book called Eat That Frog, by Brian Tracy. The idea is simple: find the task you least want to do, and do it first. Eat the frog before breakfast, and the rest of the day gets easier. I built a real practice around this years ago. Frogs get deferred, delegated, or deleted — deliberately, never by accident. It made me more productive than almost anything else I’ve tried. There’s an older adage about a different frog. Put it in tepid water and raise the heat slowly en