πΏ Your Tuesday Email: Forward to Begin Again
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Hello Reader! How you end this year is how you begin the next one. This is the last email before summer. And rather than fill it with one more framework, one more list of questions, one more strategy for the final push, we want to offer you something quieter. A moment of honest acknowledgment and gratitude! What You Did This Year You showed up. Not perfectly, not every moment with full presence or infinite patience, or textbook professionalism. But you showed up in a role that demands more than it was ever designed to hold, in a system that often forgets to hold the people inside it. You built relationships with young people who needed an adult to believe in them. You made decisions, sometimes impossible ones, with incomplete information and real consequences. You held the social and emotional weight of a community, often without anyone noticing how heavy it was. That is not a small feat. Whatever the spreadsheets say, whatever the data cycle reports, whatever the evaluation forms captured or didn't⦠NONE of that is the full story of what you did this year. The Bridge to September What you do with the next four to six weeks matters more than most people realize. The educators who start their school year strong aren't the ones who spent their summers ignoring school entirely, or the ones who never stopped working. They're the ones who processed what happened, rested genuinely, identified what they're carrying forward and what they're releasing, and gave themselves permission to begin again. This would often take me 4-5 weeks! That bridge doesn't build itself. It requires three things:
You don't need a full strategic plan, but you do need a direction. Reflection Before summer fully arrives, sit with three questions: What am I proud of from this year? What did this year teach me that I want to carry forward? What am I finally ready to put down? Write the answers somewhere. Return to them in August. Let them do the work of bridging you forward. Podcast:
Listen to the pod on all the platforms like Apple, Spotify, iHeart Radio and YouTube. Now you can follow us on Instagram. Resources:
Reflection Which colleague (whether one you've leaned on, one you've overlooked, or one who quietly held things together) most needs a deliberate moment of acknowledgment from you this month? What specifically would you want them to know? Yours, P.S. Forward this email to colleagues who you think would enjoy the connection and resources.
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