Letting go of the fun part

Some teachers like to collect the art supplies as much as they like to teach art. (Image by L Gould)

A leader I know is way too busy to do all of the stuff she's doing.

Still, she wants to continue to perform a certain administrative task that takes a few hours per week.

"That stuff is fun and easy for me," she said. "I enjoy it."

I understand that — I do that. Most of us do. The transition from doing a project or process to managing one is tricky, and there's usually no one around to show you how to do it. So it's easier to hold onto the work instead of delegating it.

That's fine for awhile, until we get to the point where we're overloaded with all of the "fun and easy" stuff we figured that we might as well do. By then, we have no time to build the process for someone else to be able to do the work, so we end up trapped.

Plenty of stuff is fun when you are doing it by choice; it's a lot less fun when you have no other options and wish you could take a vacation without your laptop.

Of course, this problem isn't limited to business — it also shows up when parents and teachers continue to do stuff for kids who would benefit greatly from learning how to do the work themselves.

So at a certain point, it doesn't matter whether the work is fun and enjoyable for you. You've still got to give it up, for your own good and sometimes for the good of those you're mentoring.

For my part, I love teaching music. When I returned to The Little Middle School, that was one of the things I was really looking forward to.

However, it was a bit confusing for the students. Is this our music teacher or the head of school?

It was a bit confusing for me, too. More than once, I got deeply involved in a music class and ended up late to a Zoom meeting I was supposed to lead.

So after several weeks, I handed off the music teaching duties to a capable educator; as a result, I'll have the time and energy to coach this person to be an even better one.

It's ironic that some of the things we have to let go of, for our own growth and development, are the things we dearly love to do. But that's not the whole story. Some of these things, we've only convinced ourselves that we love to do because they make us feel a sense of satisfaction and forward momentum in our work. We feel productive when we do them, and we wouldn't know what to do if we didn't have to do them. While it's not always financially feasible to, say, hire someone to do these things, we should at least consider what life would look like without them.

For instance, a fellow music school owner said that he would never hand off the hard work of pairing students and teachers together. He said that there was no one else who could do this important work. I had to laugh because there was a time when I said the same thing, and the person I hired to do this work for me said the same thing.

Do the parents who call in looking for music lessons care exactly who is doing the teacher/student pairings? Probably not. Could a computer algorithm do it just as well? Probably. But if we've wrapped up our identity and value in the work we're doing ("I always make lunches for my kids! It's how I show that I love them!") it's really hard to hear that there might be another perspective. That's why we double down and cling to the thing that is giving us our sense of purpose, even when it's no longer serving us.

In order to move forward and achieve goals beyond that which we are currently reaching, we have to change. It would be convenient if all of those changes were easy and comfortable, but they are probably not. To get to the next level, we probably have to learn new skills and stop practicing others. We can comfort ourselves with the notion that when we are willing to let go of the fun part, we are making room for some new fun stuff we don't even know about yet.

What is the fun thing that you could let go of to better serve the people you're leading or to free up some much-needed time and energy? If you took this step, what would it allow you to do?