Start a revolution... And Become the Leader You are Meant to Be!

I am winding down for the semester. One more week and one more 12-page paper to write before Winter break... before I finally get a little down time in what has been a crazy 7 months.

 It was May when I sat in that first PROPEL meeting. Little did I know the challenges and frustrations that awaited me. I have missed funerals and weddings, births and birthdays. I have mourned and celebrated with other members of my Cohort. We have become a family, often spending more time with each other then we have with our own real families... AND we still have another 8 months before we need to decide whether we will continue on for phase 2 of the program. Phase 1 will have provided us with our degree in Educational Leadership and our credentials to be an Assistant Principal.

But if we decide to continue... to stay in the program and go on to Phase 2....We will have received specialized training to become "Change Agents" ready to Turn Around some us of our district's neediest schools. We are being trained to make wide scale, systemic change to schools and a system that is broken, that is failing to meet the needs of many of this district's children. We are the one's being trained to take over schools and lead our district into 21st century learning.

When I first started this journey, I was really a little uncomfortable with the idea of being a Change Agent. Me? A Change Agent... I am the one that has always gone to great lengths to avoid confrontation and change, so to find myself in the position where I am responsible for leading the change. It is still so strange to think about it... but here I am... on my way... A Change Agent in Training!

Umair Haque, from the Harvard Business Review often writes about changing society. In many of his recent writings he proposes that such a change needs to begin with us.

"I don't want a revolution. I want a million tiny revolutions. Awakenings to the heart-stopping commandment life gives to the living: to believe in life. Weary and directionless in the desert we may be — yet, the future, a sunlit ocean, never ceases singing. Sometimes, all we have to do is listen.
Each and every one of us is a leader. Some of us just don't know it yet."
Umair Haque

For many, change is seen as something huge- like being a Change Agent. But in the previous quote, Haque talks about making change by starting a million tiny revolutions. Perhaps Haque has the right idea, it doesn't require grand acts to create a change. Sometimes it takes just a lot of little things... a kind word, a friendly gesture, a call or hug when someone is in need. We can all be change agents if we choose to be, we can make the change we want to see, just by starting with the little things. So...

Start a revolution, believe in life, listen to the sea, becoming the leader that you are meant to be... the leader that is within each of us.