Joy deserves its own outfit

There is a particular kind of vertigo that comes from standing up in front of a Year 12 Music or Drama class at 8:40am, knowing that by 9:40 you will be sitting across from your Principal discussing a staffing restructure, and that somewhere between the two you are meant to have eaten breakfast…. I’ll be honest, I can’t remember the last time I ate breakfast.

This is almost every week. Deputy Principal by title, timetable by circumstance, teaching not one but three senior Music and Drama classes in the thick of their HSC year most years - the pointy end, as I've come to call it, where every lesson counts and every student is carrying just a little more than they think they can hold. I am, by any sensible measure, in two jobs at once. And for a while, I tried to do them as though they were the same job, wearing the same face, at the same pace, with the same energy. It nearly finished me off.

What I've learned, slowly, and with more than one cup of tea gone cold on my desk, is that these two worlds don't actually run on the same rhythm, and they were never meant to.

Leading a team is a wide-angle lens. It asks you to hold strategy and culture and twelve competing priorities at once, to see the whole staffroom and the whole school year stretching ahead, to make decisions today that won't show their worth for a term or more. It is, by nature, diffuse. You are managing momentum, not moments. Teaching a senior student is a close-up. It asks you to see one young person, right now, in this phrase of music or this monologue, and to give them your whole attention for the forty minutes you have. There is no "eventually" with a Year 12 in September. There is only this lesson, this feedback, this small, specific improvement that might be the difference between competent and exceptional.

A while back I’d be the leader who tried to blend these two gears into one smooth motion, and all I did was strip them both. My meetings felt rushed because I was thinking about phrasing and dynamics. My teaching felt distracted because I was thinking about an academic misconduct matter. I was present for no one, including myself.

The turning point wasn't a strategy. It was a pair of shoes.

I have a pair of heels - deep velvet burgundy, a little too high for sensible corridor-pacing, entirely impractical for a day that involves crouching beside a Year 12 as they work a scene on the floor, that I keep for one purpose only. I wear them on the days I am teaching my senior classes in masterclass. Not the days I'm chairing an executive meeting, not the days I'm walking a parent through a difficult conversation. The days I get to sit with a student and watch them find the thing they've been chasing all year.

There's a small ceremony to it now. I change into them before the lesson, and something in me changes with them. It sounds indulgent, maybe even a little theatrical – but hey, welcome to ‘me’, and to be honest – that’s actually the point. ‘The Heeled Deputy’ isn't a persona I put on to look the part. She's the version of me who has decided, quite deliberately, that joy deserves its own outfit.

When those heels go on, I am not thinking about the staffing restructure or the budget line waiting for me after lunch. I am watching a seventeen-year-old find a note they didn't know they had or land a line with a truth that raises the hair on your arms, and I am, for those minutes, simply delighted.

I think every leader needs their own pair of burgundy heels. Not literally, though you're welcome to borrow the idea - but a deliberate, physical marker that says, “this hour belongs to the work that makes you glad you do what you do”. For some of you it might be the two minutes you spend at the school gate greeting the little ones each morning. For others it's the walk between buildings, or the staffroom conversation you protect fiercely from being cancelled. Find your version of the heels. Put them on knowingly. Guard that hour the way you'd guard a board meeting.

Here is the part I had to learn the hard way, though: joy and pace are not the same thing. My HSC students are not moving as fast as I'd like. Some concepts take three attempts, then a fourth, then finally click on the fifth - and if I measure my joy against the speed of their progress, I will spend this whole year miserable, because growth in the Arts, like growth in a school culture, is stubbornly, beautifully slow. The moment I stopped tying my happiness to velocity and started tying it to presence, everything eased. I am not as frustrated by the third attempt at that semiquaver passage as I used to be. I am fascinated by what it's teaching the student about resilience - which, frankly, is a more useful HSC outcome than most rubrics admit.

The same is true on the leadership side. Change in a school moves at the speed of trust, not the speed of a Gantt chart. Once I let go of measuring my week by how much visibly moved and started measuring it by whether I'd shown up as the leader my team and my students needed, the frustration loosened its grip considerably.

So here is what I'd offer you, whoever you are, however many hats you're wearing this term: find your velvet burgundy 4-inch heels. Protect them fiercely, not guiltily. Let them recharge the version of you that shows up everywhere else - in meetings, in classrooms, in corridors, in the quiet moments when someone needs you to be steady. Joy isn't the reward you get once the priorities are sorted. It's the thing that helps you sort them, one graceful, occasionally wobbly 4-inch heeled moment at a time.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a concerto to go listen to.