There is a particular kind of person who, when things get busy at work, responds to that busyness by taking on something else entirely. Something completely unrelated. Something large and logistically complicated and, ideally, involving the word “settlement.” I am that person.
I am, at the time of writing, in the middle of selling my home and moving Genevieve, Madeleine, the cats and I somewhere new. For those of you who have done this with children in primary school, you already know. You’re nodding. You may be staring at this sentence with the hollow eyes of someone who has recently been asked by a real estate agent to “declutter the space a little” and has had to physically restrain themselves. For those of you who haven’t done it yet: brace yourselves. It is part logistical marathon, part emotional archaeology, part negotiation masterclass, and entirely the sort of experience that can unravel a person if they let it.
Yet, here is the thing I was not expecting. It is making me better at my job.
Leadership has a long tradition of telling us to focus. You need to narrow the aperture and eliminate distraction - and for certain types of work, at certain moments, that is entirely correct. However, there is a version of that advice that if taken too literally, turns into tunnel vision. And tunnel vision, my friends, is not leadership. It is a very efficient way of missing everything that matters.
I have been thinking about this a lot lately, mostly while standing in my kitchen making mental lists of what belongs in a “maybe keep” pile versus what belongs in the bin. Which is, it turns out, an excellent warm-up exercise for the kind of discernment that executive leadership demands every single day.
The idea that we operate best when our entire identity is consumed by one domain - our job, our title, our role - is not only wrong… it is quietly dangerous. When work is the only thing, every setback at work becomes an existential threat, every difficult conversation becomes a personal referendum and every frustrating email carries a weight it was never designed to carry. I know this, because I have lived this. I have also watched it happen to leaders I deeply admire. Leaders who are smart and capable people who had slowly and unconsciously given their professional life so much real estate in their identity that when the work got hard, so did everything else.
Having something else - a meaningful and demanding something else - acts as ballast.
My something else is a move. A proper one. The kind that involves real estate listings, lawyers, surveyors, building inspections, and at least one afternoon where Genevieve and Madeleine will argue about who gets the bigger bedroom in a house I haven’t yet purchased. We are selling a home that has stories in its walls. We are looking for a new one to build different stories in, and we are doing it while also running a school term at full capacity, which means most of my serious house-hunting research happens on weekends and occasionally at 10:30pm when I am holding a property report and a cup of tea with equal levels of concentration.
It is a lot. It is also, and I say this with full awareness that it sounds slightly unhinged: genuinely energising.
Here is what I’ve noticed. The days where I spend an hour on something entirely different - researching a suburb, walking through an open home, mapping school proximity to a new address - I come back to my leadership work sharper. Not because I rested. I didn’t rest. I merely redirected. There is something about inhabiting a completely different problem space that releases the white-knuckle grip I can occasionally have on work challenges.
The brain, it turns out, is not a machine. It performs better when it is given varied terrain to navigate – not under sustained single-focus conditions.. Cross-training, coaches call it. The same principle applies to the mind.
When I walk into a Monday morning with the energy of someone who also spent part of their weekend mentally redesigning a bathroom, I am, paradoxically, more present in the leadership room. The work hasn’t shrunk but my capacity to hold it has expanded. There is simply more of me available.
This is not the same as distraction. Distraction is passive and accidental. What I am describing is deliberate, engaged investment in something that is yours. Something that has nothing to do with policy documents or performance appraisals or the seven unread emails from a parent chain that has somehow acquired a life of its own. The leadership lesson in this is quieter than it first appears.
We spend a great deal of time in educational leadership talking about what we model for students. Purpose. Resilience. A growth mindset. The courage to try hard things… but I wonder if we speak less often about what we model for our ‘teams’. And specifically, whether we model a whole life.
Not a balanced life… as if you have read my previous blogs you would know that I have already stated my position on balance as mythology… but a whole life. A life in which you are identifiably a person outside of your role. One in which you have stakes in things that have nothing to do with the school calendar. One in which you go home and care, genuinely and actively, about something that has no KPI attached to it.
Teams take their cues from leaders in ways that are sometimes invisible, and one of the things they notice - often without articulating it - is whether their leader appears to have a life. Whether there is texture to them. Whether they seem to exist beyond the role. A leader who exists only at work is, in subtle ways, a leader who places an unspoken expectation on their team to do the same. And that is not a culture anyone should be building.
Now. I want to be honest with you, because this blog has never been the place for polished untruths. The Other Project is also, occasionally, absolutely exhausting. There are evenings where I am simultaneously checking a building inspection report and approving staff communications and thinking about whether I remembered to sign a permission slip, and the cumulative weight of that is genuinely significant. Moving house is stressful. Property markets are stressful. Making large financial decisions as a single parent while running a school term requires a level of administrative dexterity that I’m fairly certain constitutes a postgraduate qualification in something.
There have been moments where I have thought: ‘why am I doing this now? Could this have waited?’
And the honest answer is probably yes, technically, it could have waited. Most big decisions probably could. But we wait, and we wait, and we wait for the right season, and then we notice with quiet alarm that there is no right season in this life we’ve chosen… there is just life. With its complexity and its overlapping demands and its refusal to be sequenced neatly.
So I have chosen to move through it, not around it, and in doing so, I have confirmed something I have long suspected. The version of me that is only ever thinking about one thing is not, in fact, the most effective version. She is the most single-channelled version. And single-channel can look like focus, but it can also look like narrowness.
The version of me with a property search open in one tab and a staff briefing draft in the other is handling a lot, but she is also holding a wider perspective. She is practising the art of contextualisation. She is being reminded, regularly and somewhat forcefully by Madeleine’s very clear opinions about which suburb she prefers, that work is not the whole of life. It is a magnificent and important part of it. But it is a part.
If you have a project outside your work life - a real one, a demanding one, one that requires actual thought and decision-making and perhaps an occasional tense phone call with a conveyancer - do not apologise for it. Do not shrink it. Do not file it neatly under “personal life” as though it is somehow lesser or inconveniently timed. It is, very possibly, the thing that is keeping you both sane and sharp.
It reminds you what it feels like to be a learner and to navigate a process you do not fully understand. To ask questions without authority and make decisions without certainty. This, incidentally, is precisely what we ask of our students and our staff. It is useful to remember what it costs. It also gives you perspective that work alone cannot provide. When you are genuinely wrestling with a decision about where your children will grow up, the difficult email from this morning recalibrates itself rather quickly.
And I find it gives you energy. Real energy. The particular electricity of someone who is ‘building something’ - even if that something is, for now, a list of suburbs ranked by proximity to a school and a coffee worth getting up for.
The girls and I are moving. I don’t know exactly where yet. I don’t know exactly when. I do know that Genevieve wants her own bathroom and Madeleine wants a pool, and the cats, Sugar and Minnie, would simply prefer not to be relocated, thank you very much, and have made their position clear by knocking things off benches with increased frequency and ripping my couches to shreds.
It is a project in progress as all the best things are… and every single week, it makes me better at the job I love. Which is, perhaps, the whole point.
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