I include thought leaders outside of our education profession who have much to teach us about our work. For example, you may or may not know these names: Grant and Tichy, Rath and Conchie, Goleman and Collins, Brown and Kahneman, Loehr and Schwartz, Seppälä and Spaulding, Kotter and Cohen, Sanborn and Segar, Duckworth and DePree, and Abelin and Benkler. You will meet them from time to time throughout this book.
I also include reflections and wisdom from more than forty teachers and leaders in our profession. You will meet them all during your journey through HEART!
Each part of the book represents one of five unique aspects for developing your heart for our profession. The five unique parts derive from the word heart, as the title indicates: finding happiness through engagement in meaningful alliances while taking focused risks using intelligent thought and wisdom. Each part answers an essential question.
♦ Part 1: Happiness—Are you a person of passion, positive impact, and perseverance for the education profession?
♦ Part 2: Engagement—Are you an inspiring person with the day-to-day energy required to be fully engaged in your work life?
♦ Part 3: Alliances—Are you a person open to influence and shared values, able to become relationally intelligent and collaboratively interdependent with others?
♦ Part 4: Risk—Are you a person of vision-focused risks for sustainable change, with a growth and data-driven mindset for learning and life?
♦ Part 5: Thought—Are you a person with surface and deep knowledge capacity, thought, and wisdom?
I believe all five of these HEART! elements are essential to deeper connections to your work over the lifetime of your professional career. You might be strong in one element but weak in another. You might be great at taking risks but not very emotionally positive and happy (and no one may really know). You might be positively passionate and happy in your work but lack the engagement and energy to bring the best of yourself to work each day. You might be awesome at developing your own knowledge but not very adept at creating alliances and being part of an effective collaborative team (so your great thoughts and wisdom are not shared and ultimately have limited benefit to your school and its students).
Your heartprint matters! Knowing the heartprint you are leaving on others is a reflective activity. So I ask you to be mindful of the ninety-plus My Heartprint reflections that occur throughout the book.
I suggest reading one to two chapters per week—not too quickly! My personal improvement as a teacher mostly came as a result of becoming a more reflective and mindful practitioner and by learning from and embracing my mistakes along the way.
It is my hope that HEART! will be both affirming and challenging as your teaching and leading career unfolds. No matter where you may be in the wonderful journey of this remarkably rewarding and sometimes frustrating profession, I hope the book will touch the story and the humanity of your professional life.
Please complete this book by writing in your own story along the way. Perhaps use the book in group study and discussions with colleagues. As you do so, you will discover your personal heartprint and realize the power you have to touch the hearts of all the students and colleagues in your school community and professional life.
These spaces or margins are places to write your responses and tell your story as you read your way through the book and reflect on your career progress. Use the spaces as you deem fit for your personality and style. The chapters are reasonably brief and provide space for you to take notes and be more reflective as you read, if you so choose.
PART 1
DEVELOPING HEART
Essential Heartprint Question:
Are you a person of passion, positive impact, and perseverance for the education profession?
There is no passion to be found playing small—in settling for a life that is less than the one you are capable of living.
—Nelson Mandela
In part 1 of this book, we explore the role happiness plays in our pursuit of a fully formed professional life. We explore the happiness—positive emotion-passion connection—in our day-to-day teaching and leading life, and we explore the role of compassion and love in living a more meaningful professional life.
Without passion for the profession or the desire to become a person of positive influence, character, and perseverance, your heartprint on others could result in settling for a life that is less than the one you are capable of living, as Nelson Mandela reminds us in the opening quote.5
You should carefully consider the role of happiness in the workplace as you join the teaching profession. Does our profession fire you up and align your personal passion with the nature of an educator’s work life? Does your positive emotional state serve you well through the grind of each and every day?
In this first part of the book, we explore the elements of the happiness research, what it feels like to become a wholehearted teacher of others, with the essential and necessary challenge of providing compassion, hope, and stability to others.
You will be asked about the love you have for your work and the issues in your life worth weeping over. We examine what experts can tell us about happiness and then try to apply it to the journey of our professional work and life.
If you teach young elementary school students or are in a stage of your personal life that includes younger children, you most likely know Pharrell Williams’s song “Happy.” First released as part of the Despicable Me 2 movie soundtrack, the words seem relevant to the context for this part of the book.
Here are two lines from the chorus:
Because I’m happy
Clap along if you feel like a room without a roof6
You can almost hear the tune in your head and sing along, right? If not, go to iTunes (www.apple.com/itunes) and check it out! This specific part of the chorus resonated with my heart the loudest: “Clap along if you feel like a room without a roof.” You see, in order to be meaningful, our professional life needs to feel like a room without a roof: unlimited potential and possibilities as we grow together. No ceiling on our potential and our achievement as educators, no limits to how expert we could become as practitioners within a profession we love.
In part 1, “H Is for Happiness,” we examine actions that help us to reconnect to the meaning of our life and our career as educators and professionals. We examine steps to stay connected to our calling toward the profession and maintain joy in the journey—a joy that makes it so much more than just a job—as the days unfold, the seasons come and go, and the promise of a great career rests in the rearview mirror. The following chapters describe how to find and maintain that joy!
