Healing to Transform: A New Model for the Inner Work of Leadership

Each year, L+D host events focused on the inner work of leadership. One of the core ideas that we explore each year is the fact that leadership is partly your skills, experience, mindset and the outcomes of your decisions, but it is also how you embody those things. Leadership, in schools, will quickly expose the limits of simply working hard, and one of the most common challenges we see when working with newer leaders is how humbling and hard the experience can be when leaders exhibit high effort and then are seen as unsuccessful or in need of growth and improvement. These leaders have often been viewed in their career up to this point as successful, and they wrongly assume that the same skills that landed them the job, will be sufficient. Experientially discovering this delta can be painful, and often leads to self doubt and even questioning whether leadership is really a path that has the same rewards that they may have imagined when they decided to pursue it. Beyond the initial shaking of the foundation that can occur, how does a leader lean into a new period of growth where outcomes and performance are less self-centered. As the goalposts change from personal to institutional, how does one continue to learn and change as the field of outcomes becomes more complex and systemic?     

- Leaders need help to do their job well -   

The question is not whether help is needed, but at Leadership + Design, we have spent some time thinking about how to help people get help, and one thing we discovered along the way is that when getting help, it can be supportive to have frameworks and models to figure out what supports are best, and we wanted to share a framework that we are developing. We welcome discussion, feedback and we rely on our network to help us refine our thinking and ultimately provide tools and frameworks that are helpful to leaders. 



Healing to Transform Model

This model is centered around a tension between two continuums:  

Y Axis: How much a leader is resisting or feeling challenged by issues, problems, challenges or the circumstances/people attached to a challenge. This is labeled Low Resistance Internally to High Resistance Internally and is on the Y Axis of the visual.  

X Axis: How new/novel vs. pattern-based the issues, problems, challenges, people or circumstances feel to the leader. This is labeled Novel to Pattern on the X Axis.   

How to use the Model: The first step is to place a challenge, issue, person, circumstance or anything else you are struggling with on these two continuums. To do this, you ask two simple questions:

1. Question 1: Am I feeling open to having this problem, issue, challenge or deal with this person or circumstance? If the answer is sure, I am game for this, then you know that your resistance level is low on the Y Axis. If you are avoiding this problem, issue, challenge, person or circumstance, and if you wish you didn’t have to deal with it, then you know your resistance is higher. It isn’t bad to resist, but as with many models, the real work is becoming self-aware as to where the challenge is on this continuum.   

2. Question 2: Is this problem something I am seeing or experiencing for the first time, or is this a challenge that feels like a pattern for me? A pattern would be defined as a problem, challenge, issue, personality type or circumstance that keeps showing up in your professional life. Depending on the coexisting level of resistance a pattern can be experienced as interesting (low resistance) to highly aggravating (high resistance).    

Once you ask these two questions, it should help you place the issue, challenge, personality type or circumstance in one of four zones. Each zone has different characteristics and points to different exploratory questions to ask yourself.  

The Comfort Zone: This is the zone that we hope our challenges fall into. This zone is a great place to experiment, try out your skills, and reflect on what you are learning. As you experience problems and issues for the first time, and you feel open and are not resistant to the work, you can use the following questions to ensure you are avoiding blindspots associated with this zone. The comfort zone is the most comfortable, but comfort also has inherent drawbacks including bias, naivety and a lack of perspective or experience. In addition, issues or challenges in this zone can often be delegated or used to help others develop their skills. It can feel good to solve these issues, but feeling good can sometimes be at the expense of not developing other people, and then when things get harder, you don’t have the benefit of having invested that time in others who could help. Ask these questions in this zone: 

• What am I missing or whose perspective have I not considered?  

• Am I working to solve for a symptom of a bigger issue or am I working on a root level issue or problem?  

• How might I delegate or help build the skills of someone else by letting them take some responsibility with these issues?

• Is my comfort at anyone's else's expense?

The Perspective Zone: This zone is characterized by a challenge or issue that is a pattern or frequently occurs, but you are not resistant to dealing with it. You wake up knowing you may see this challenge, and you are open to this work. In this zone, the challenge is how to work systemically and try and address solutions that work to eliminate the pattern nature of the challenge. This zone is called the perspective zone because often you need to get different perspectives to see these issues differently. Questions to ask in this zone: 

• Who might I ask to help me see this problem differently?

• How am I a part of the pattern that needs solving for?  

• How can I solve a different problem that may eliminate the pattern? For example, if the pattern is confused and angry parents, after any immediate issues are addressed, you might ask, how is the school creating confusion for these parents, and how might we create a systemic solution for all parents who ________?   

• Who might I team up with to help create different solutions?   

The Mentorship Zone: This zone is characterized by problems or issues that feel acute and hard, and they immediately feel like they are above your pay grade. You haven’t seen these types of issues before, and either one aspect or multiple aspects of the challenge produce fear, challenge or resistance in you. Your resistance could be experienced as fear, doubt or a belief that somebody more experienced or seasoned would be better suited to address this type of challenge. I never thought my job would mean dealing with __________, and I don’t think I agreed to this. It is called the Mentorship Zone because often this zone requires partnership with others who can help you without becoming overly involved or rescuing and solving for you. Questions to ask in this zone: 

• Who can help me without solving for me?  

• Who can coach me and push me to try new things that I may not have as much experience with?  

• Who can support me when I make mistakes and help me see how to learn from my mistakes instead of giving up or becoming closed to what I can learn?  

• What skills, tools or methods could I learn to help in these types of situations, and who can I learn those things from?   

• What types of habits do I need to cultivate to show up capable of hard and novel challenges without shutting down or becoming emotionally overwhelmed? 

• Who am I resisting asking for help, but could really be helpful to me?

• Do I ask for help, and if not, why not? Do I see getting help as weakness? How might I reframe this?   

The Healing Zone: This zone is characterized by challenges, problems, issues, people and circumstances that we resist. Resistance can look many ways, but primarily we know we are resistant because we wish these problems would go away, we wish someone else could solve these problems or deal with these types of people, and we may even resist getting out of bed in the morning because of these challenges. We may carry stress, anxiety or worse, we may create unhealthy patterns to avoid thinking about, feeling or dealing with these issues. Worse, this zone is characterized by issues, challenges, people, or circumstances that we can’t seem to eliminate. We resist these challenges and they are a pattern. If you leave your job to get a new job, these challenges show up at your new school in your new job, and while they may look different or have different context, you recognize them, and they recognize you. If we solve one problem in this category, a similar problem shows up, and this zone is the reason we developed this model.

Before we get to the questions you can ask in this zone, we wanted to highlight a key reframe that is paramount to this model:  

These problems, issues, challenges, people, circumstances are not to be avoided, they are a gift, and they show up in your professional or personal life to help you heal and transform into the fullest and most authentic version of yourself.  

This reframe is at the core of this model. When you identify challenges in this zone, it can be extremely hard to see the solution as something inside of one’s self instead of trying to eliminate the issue or problem from occurring, but the gift of challenges in this zone is that they are sent to help you heal your inner world. This is not growth or skill-building, this is transformation, and the beauty of this work is the possibility of creating purpose-driven paths of hope, creativity and an entirely authentic set of options without having to solve or eliminate anything hard from your day to day experience. Questions in this zone worth considering: 

• Do I need a therapist, coach, spiritual guide, sensei, or some other form of professional help? Or, if you have already tried this, do I need a different type of help or person? If you have seen the same therapist for years, you may consider that they are a part of the pattern, and admitting that seeing a certain person is more comfortable than helpful can be hard and necessary.   

• What would my spouse, partner or closest friend recommend?  

• How am I causing this problem or how am I to blame for how this problem is being experienced?  

• Am I willing to own and become 100% responsible for the fact that the one consistent variable with this issue is me?   

• What is at stake if I don’t address this issue in a transformative way? Will I lose my marriage, my happiness, my job, my sense of self or will I have regret in the future? 

• What beliefs or patterns of thinking might I let go of in order to make space for new beliefs and new patterns?

• What practices, habits or rituals do I engage in that feed my inner world?   

Why healing? My colleague asked me this question, and the answer is embedded in the fact that sometimes, the challenges and impact they have on us goes deeper than our thinking. Our leadership is connected to our personhood, and to heal parts of one's self does not mean we are broken, but simply that when faced with challenges that we resist, and that reoccur, we are being shown a signal. This signal tells us to go deeper, and to entertain what might be possible if we don't just learn or grow, but transform. We look forward to hearing what you think.