Slow it Down! I met with Woody Howard, a veteran Washington principal and current president of the Association of Washington School Principals. Woody has become a friend of mine over the past few years and we often meet to talk about leadership and just about anything else. It was a lot of fun to sit down and interview him for this! We talked about many things, but I always narrow it down to three key takeaways.

1. Adapt Your Decision Making
2. This Job is a Marathon
3. Get to Know Yourself

Top 5 Themes from 2024: I want to end the year by highlighting some of the big themes that have come from my leadership conversations. This year I did significantly fewer posts than 2023, but there were still a lot of great things I learned. It was hard to narrow it down to 5, and at the end of the post I list 8 other topics that could have been towards the top as well. These 5 topics came up the most often by the most number of leaders. Here are the top 5 themes from 2024:

1. Relationships
2. Culture is What You Allow
3. Empower Others
4. Leader Wellness and Sustainability
5. Purpose Driven and Intentional Leadership

Increase the Humanity You Have With People: I met with Jethro Jones, a veteran school leader and coach. We had an awesome conversation and we ended up spending a lot of the time talking about productivity for school leaders. You will want to listen to the full episode to hear Jethro’s ideas on getting the most done in your day, while still being able to focus on the people in your building. You can learn more about Jethro on his website: https://www.jethrojones.com/ and you can find his productivity tools here: https://jethro.site/tools. Here are 3 main takeaways I had from the conversation:

1. Be Curious
2. Get the Biggest Return on Your Time
3. Balance comes in Seasons