Last August I read The Salt Path, a book written by Raynor Winn about her journey with her husband Moth. Evicted from their farm in Wales, the couple became homeless in their 50s, and with little else to do, decided to walk the 630 mile Southwest Coast Path, wild camping along the way.
Anyone who knows this route knows how tough it is, the ups and downs of headlands and inlets providing a stunning but cardiac arrest inducing opportunity to witness some of the finest countryside in the UK.
If this wasn’t enough, Moth had been diagnosed with a rare degenerative and terminal brain disease on the cusp of becoming homeless. The book is an inspiration, and stood out for me recently as a great analogy for school leadership in general.
The southwest coast path starts in the unglamorous town of Minehead. Butlins and the Bristol Channel remind me of the beginnings of some of my school leadership journeys: a desk with the previous incumbent’s credit card bills in, a distinct lack of rugby balls, a boarding house with no keys inherited from a sacked teacher.
Indeed, no office or house at the start of the toughest job I’d done to that point. Leadership does not always come with bells, whistles or even the basics.
“Stay on the path, hold on tight and enjoy the ride – you should make it to Barnstaple intact.”
From Minehead the path climbs quickly. The climbs are vertiginous, narrow and repeated for many miles along North Somerset and into Devon. Some cliff edges provide adrenaline, and as the channel turns to the Atlantic the weather smashes you.
School leadership is not easy and isn’t supposed to be. In the early days you will be experiencing the roller coaster of the North Somerset coast and feel fortunate at times not to go over the cliff edge. Stay on the path, hold on tight and enjoy the ride – you should make it to Barnstaple intact.
In this time the support you have around you is crucial. Raynor had Moth and Moth had Raynor. This unbreakable bond provided the sustenance and persistence required when times were tough.
Family and friends offer the best resource available and nurturing those relationships is key and it is always worth remembering that strong and supportive relationships are two-way processes.
Moth and Raynor had an awful lot to cope with, and throughout the book we learn about their strategies for coping. The little rebellions included trespassing when wild camping that sustained them and reminded them of their distant youth, skinny dipping in the sea, the cups of tea at seaside cafes, and just occasionally long nights sipping beer in front of roaring pub fires.
“Family and friends offer the best resource available and nurturing those relationships is key.”
Coping mechanisms are essential, but just as important is an audit of your coping mechanisms. Are they the right ones, and do they work? Alcohol is a common coping mechanism, and it does work to a certain extent, but not over long periods. A bottle of claret, Spotify and Lindt chocolate have seen me through various inspections but applied with frequency they aren’t the combination of choice for longer or healthier living
Auditing coping mechanisms sounds an odd suggestion, but it is also part of a key part of leadership for me – self awareness. Who are you, and what do you need to cope with certain situations positively? If you haven’t already, try psychometric testing – at the very least as a thought-provoking exercise, and preferably with someone trained to interpret the results.
The confidence to accept that coping mechanisms are required is also key. It is ok to find leadership tough, stressful and all-consuming and as such it is perfectly fine to dedicate time to reading, running or relaxing. This balance between work and play is key to longevity of leadership and I would argue also important to the quality of it.
“It is ok to find leadership tough, stressful and all-consuming.”
Immersion in other worlds offers an opportunity to reflect and find new perspectives. Raynor and Moth had a much more visceral experience of a new perspective. Homeless for the first time, they felt shunned and ignored. Discriminated against and abused they found interactions with many shameful and challenging.
Walking a mile in someone’s else’s shoes is often held up as a key experience when leading, and these new perspectives offer an exercise in thinking deeply about the world – something the parents who are spending a lot of money on education might expect?
One of the more staggering parts of the book is Moth’s partial recovery from the illness that was already threatening to become debilitating at an early stage. The more he walked, the stronger he got, the stronger he got the more the illness was kept at bay.
School leadership also needs you to be active. You have to experience it, you have to live it, to walk the corridors, to feel the tension of a governors meeting, to absorb the tongue lashing of the completely irrational parent.
I’m not a chest beating neanderthal that thinks “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” but I do believe that you grow resilient, hardened and more confident in leadership through a degree of adversity.
“You have to live leadership: to feel the tension of a governors meeting, to absorb the tongue lashing of the completely irrational parent.”
So what has leading through a pandemic looked like? Well, the Salt Path – long, narrow and very bumpy. It has tested every part of the leadership toolbox. Empathy and sympathy has been needed in the darkest of times, strength and courage when opportunities have presented themselves and then humour and honesty when all seems hopeless.
Moth and Raynor have a spirit that many of us in our middle aged and middle class lives could learn from. They embraced a moment and although some of the experiences were hateful, they found a way to enjoy the experience of walking 630 miles.
School leadership is a complex, open ended, frustration. You never master it. It is a slog, and in boarding can be like being on a submarine – suffocating and damp (especially in the southwest) but it is uniquely varied, filled with stunning highs and lows – cliffs and inlets, rain and sun. It will beguile and confuse, it will warm the soul and the back (especially in Thailand). It is just like the Salt Path.