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We've all been told..."stay positive," "don't let things get you down" or "look on the bright side of things" but when we are in the middle of a change in our lives, particularly a difficult change, those sayings can make us even more and more depressed and angry.

And yet, many people dismiss the notion that a positive attitude can make a difference in your life. However according to Barbara Fredrickson, a positive psychology researcher at the University of North Carolina, positive thoughts are worth their weight in gold for helping you through a change. And the benefits of positive emotions don't stop after the few minutes of good feelings. The benefits continue throughout a lifetime with an enhanced ability to build skills and develop resources.

So if positive thinking is so beneficial to us humans while we go through a change, how do we actually get ourselves to become more positive?

Below are 8 idea's for you to consider....

Don't let fear stop you. This is so easy to say and often so difficult to manage. The saying that has helped me the most came from a Tony Robbins seminar I took over 20 years ago. It's so simple and yet it's helped me in so many instances in my life. The saying is - Act as if....Act as if you can do whatever it was that you were fearful about. Act as if you have all of the confidence in the world. Act as if you are the bravest and most confident person around. Because most often the simple act of action helps you to feel more positive.

1. Live in the now! Yikes even putting that sentence down on paper makes me a bit uncomfortable. Is often so easy to worry about the future and the what if's in life that we can literally makes ourselves sick. When I feel my mind is becoming overflowing with worry, I take a deep breath and focus on what is in front of me....literally. If I'm looking out my window I'll allow my mind to see the cars, the trees, the ground, the sky, whatever is there. I'll try hard to focus on the now and not the future. After a few conscious moments of focus on the now, the worry seems to fall away.

2. My Mother In Law had some of the best quotes and this one stuck with me 30 years later...The best place to find a helping hand is at the end of your own arm. And how true that saying is. Often during times of stress and change we want to blame others, we rant and rave and we can easily feel sorry for ourselves. But more often than not, the only way out is through our own hard work, effort and dedication.

3. Let Maureen be Maureen. (put your name where my name is) I read a study recently that said the average one year old child hears the word "no" 400 times a day!Yes a day! If you think about it even when you are trying to soften the word and say "no, no, no" gently, that's three no's right there! By the time they hit 6 years old they have often learned to question what they do for fear of being judged. As we grow into adulthood we often wear masks and do things we don't really want to do as our fear of being judged is even greater. How many of us have said "yes" to something when we really wanted to say no. How many of us have stayed in a job or a relationship when you really wanted something else. Today when I begin to question myself, when I feel outside pressure to do/be/act/say something that is not the true me, I realize that I have the ability and in fact the right to be myself. I understand that if I do say no, if I do what I really want to do and someone is unhappy with me, that is their problem, not mine! It's become a very freeing feeling and one that took me 50 years of practice to finally get (most days!).

4. Be Grateful! You must have known this one would be on the list! Being grateful creates warm and fuzzy feelings which magnify over and over again. Even when I struggle to find something to be grateful about, I resort to the tried and true "I am breathing, I am alive" thought. Wow, that really is something to be grateful about!

5. Build a Support Network and Use it! Find a few people in a similar situation as you now find yourself and see how you can support one another. Often times you'll be able to see other situations with greater clarity than you can see your own. Just beware to keep things to finding a solution to your problems, not wallowing in self pity and get more and more depressed.

6. Often times we allow our pride to stand in the way of ourselves. If you are struggling with a change and can't seem to find the answers, the peace of mind or the way out, please Seek Help. And often we see the greater the need, the more hesitant people often are about asking for help. Requesting support can often make us feel vulnerable. We often think that we "should" be able to do everything ourselves or that by admitting we need help, we are somehow being weak We may also feel nervous about being rejected or told "no" to our request for help. But when we give ourselves permission and remind ourselves that it's perfectly OK to ask for help - we can create a true sense of support and empowerment in our lives and in our relationships!

7. Do the rocking chair test and ask yourself the following question. When I'm 95 and sitting on my rocking chair...will this be as important as it seems today? I love this questions because when I'm worried or fearful and then think about myself in my rocking chair when I'm 95, it often puts things into perspective foe me. Do I really need to spend all of this time and energy worrying about this? Most of the time the answer is NO!

Maureen Dobranski is a change expert, trainer and professional speaker. For more information contact Maureen at 403 452-3416 or 1-888-819-8004 or maureen@maximizechange.com.

Follow Maureen at twitter @maureenspeaking Facebook.com/maureenspeaking

Linkedin.com/in/maureenspeaking www.maximizechange.com

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8 Idea's to Stay Positive During Change!

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We've all been told..."stay positive," "don't let things get you down" or "look on the bright side of things" but when we are in the middle of a change in our lives, particularly a difficult change, those sayings can make us even more and more depressed and angry.

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Maintaining a positive mindset in times of change - Illuminate You

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Our approach at work can make all of the difference, if you are keen to understand how to cultivate a positive mindset, read on.

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Strategies to Stay Positive through Change

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Strategies to Stay Positive through Change

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Strategies to Stay Positive Through Challenges and Change

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How to Stay Positive in Change with Bestselling Author Jon Gordon

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It is an accepted principle of organizational change: Change is hard. We are told that the process of change includes stages of recognition, denial, grief, and eventual progress, much like the steps we undergo to overcome loss or addiction. I disagree. One of the central findings of my work with well over 100 schools in the last several years is that, relative to the really hard obstacles and events in life that we all face, changing most school organizations is not hard -- it is uncomfortable. There is a big difference.

School communities need to build both a comfort and capacity for change, and a large part of this process is to become increasingly comfortable with discomfort. Here are three key ways that school stakeholders can begin to significantly -- perhaps even radically -- become more comfortable with the discomfort of change.

Busting Silos

Traditional schools operate in four types of silo:

Physical: classrooms, offices, wings, and campuses

Disciplinary: grade level, subject, department

Operational or titular: teacher, staff, administrator, support staff, parent, student, district officer

Mindset: the rigidity that comes with having done the same thing for many years, often very successfully

Connectivity, the antithesis of silos, is the greatest key to innovation and creativity, which are key drivers of change.

Discuss and redefine the term "collegial."

Teacher professional growth plans can be public and celebrated. We should look forward to, not fear, frequent visitors in our classrooms for feedback on our own goals. I have visited schools where, rather than fearing classroom observations, teachers are upset when colleagues don't visit and provide feedback daily or weekly.

Expect frequent collaboration across traditional silo boundaries.

Create time and processes that allow for networks to flourish in ways that breach traditional boundaries of schools, regions, and countries. Schools are starting to realize that subject-based departments and strict age-based grade levels often misalign with 21st-century learning goals.

Publicly support and encourage developing professional learning networks.

A wide range of PLNs will lead to imagining new pilot programs or teaching strategies. Thousands of educators, for example, filter and share resources during weekly common-interest Twitter chats.

Offer more interdisciplinary and non-disciplinary courses.

My crowd-sourced collection of "what if" queries from 2,000 stakeholders indicates that many educators' highest priority is to engage in interdisciplinary collaboration.

Taking Risks

In most schools, for everyone from students to trustees, there has always been a vastly greater downside than upside to taking a risk. While we ask our students to take risks in their academic work, the adults in the system stay frozen into comfort zones, only infrequently changing pedagogy, materials, curriculum, or goals. Yet it is impossible to change an organization without taking some risks. We have to engage in a much broader conversation about what risk entails at a school, and how to embed appropriate risk taking, across all stakeholder groups, as an essential expectation of our jobs:

Model risk taking and learning from failure.

Our students look to their teachers as role models, teachers look to site leaders, and so on up the line. Titular leaders must model risk taking in their own growth-focused practices.

Expect the community to take risks that promote innovation.

At schools that are both serious and intentional about innovative change, the mindset that "what I do next year is probably going to be different than what I did this year" becomes a part of the educators' job description.

Develop an all-school "risk profile."

This profile outlines what risks are acceptable and desirable. A "risk portfolio" consists of pilots that span a range on the risk-reward matrix. Schools generally find that they can tolerate higher risk levels than they thought (in terms of a changing pedagogy or program) when stakeholders are part of designing and testing new ideas.

Shifting Resources

All organizations consume resources in order to produce something. Schools use a limited range of resources (time, space, people, money, and knowledge) to produce students, who are (hopefully) well prepared to successfully find opportunities and overcome the challenges they will encounter in life after school. The outdated model of "school" allocates these resources within a quantum packet into which we try to place each student. If we want to disrupt the assembly-line model of learning, we can't do what we have always done and hope for a different outcome -- that is Einstein's definition of insanity. Shifting resources in a school isn't hard, but it often involves uncomfortable choices.

Create a matrix of your school's learning goals and basic resources.

Whatever these key goals are, they'll require some combination of time, space, people, and money. Fill in the matrix to see how those resources align in direct support of your highest learning goals -- and where they do not. Shifting resources to align with our highest learning goals may require uncomfortable but essential choices.

Design daily schedules that have fewer time boundaries.

This always leads to more opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration among teachers and students. Almost all schools cite time as their most precious resource and the most uncomfortable to redistribute. Schools like Design 39 Campus have as few as three periods during the day, allowing essential questions and broad, interest-based themes to guide curricula.

None of these strategies are new. In education, we freely share and steal from each other. Also, almost all individuals and organizations overestimate the discomfort of change when it is ahead of us. Other schools have already invented these best practices and successfully came through with fewer traumas than they feared. After we tackle our comfort zone and conquer the fears of change, we find that the next time and the next are easier. It is through doing that we build this comfort and capacity for change -- just like we tell our students!

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The Key to School Change: Getting Comfortable With Discomfort

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It is an accepted principle of organizational change: Change is hard. We are told that the process of change includes stages of recognition, denial, grief, and eventual progress, much like the steps we undergo to overcome loss or addiction. I disagree.

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Administration & Leadership

Leading from the 'tragic gap' between how we'd like things to be and how they are is tough but can be done with the right mindset.

Gillian Blease / Ikon Images

Leaders are inundated with competing pressures: a viral tweet about the latest innovation, a new source of funding, interim benchmark data, an observation in a classroom, a complaint, another book someone wants to ban, and the messaging about a successful intervention from a neighboring school. These pressures can cause leaders to struggle with navigating what Parker J. Palmer, author of The Courage to Teach, coined "the tragic gap."

Palmer defines the tragic gap as "the gap between the way things are and the way we know they could and should be..." The tragic gap is the tension between the tendency of humans to profess and plan for an idyllic future and the tendency to profess and plan for addressing the insurmountable reality they face today. Palmer argues that leaders "must learn to stand in the tragic gap, faithfully holding the tension between reality and possibility."

With the constant barrage of competing interests and stressful dynamics of educational leadership, school leaders sometimes fail to live within the gap and lead. Leaders, like all humans, want to escape the tension and stand on the side of describing their current reality or prescribing what everyone should do to make an ideal future. Both approaches take leaders out of the action and move them to planning, professing, and panicking rather than focusing on calm progress toward a better future. Here are a few keys to successfully navigating the tragic gap.

Living in the Tragic Gap

1. Name and clarify the challenges and aspirations that teachers share by paraphrasing and checking for understanding: What I am hearing you say is...? Is that correct?

2. Affirm that their challenges are real, difficult, and important to understand and solve. This is an important problem and one that is difficult to address.

3. Use questions to make the problem observable. What does the problem look like and sound like for the student and for you, the teacher? What evidence are you using to understand this problem?

4. Use questioning that generates criteria for a solution that is observable. Given these challenges, what would be a few criteria that we would use for selecting a solution?

5. Use questioning that generates solutions that are manageable. What would be a doable next step for you and your students that would move toward a positive future by 1 percent?

6. We stay calm when people engage in the tragic gap. When others speak in absolutes by stating either that there is one solution to a problem or that the problem is outside of the school, leaders listen and recognize the challenges they face. Leaders then use questions to move the team back toward the middle of the tragic gap.

7. Leaders do not offer their own solution to the problem. If teachers are asking leaders for a solution, then leaders should go back to the solutions the team has drafted, use a protocol to explore research or practices from other departments, or offer a few different strategies and ask the team to review them.

A good place for leaders to start is engaging in small, doable habits that require compassion, courage, and curiosity.

1. The problem everyone is trying to solve is observable. Leaders should continually ask, what are we actually observing in relationship to students, teachers, and tasks? What can we see students doing? What can we actually see teachers doing? What are the actual tasks that students are working on?

2. The solution that everyone is thinking of using is observable in the next few weeks. What would we actually observe in relationship to students, teachers, and tasks in a few weeks? What would we see students doing? What can we actually see teachers doing? What are the actual tasks that students are working on? How will we know our impact?

3. The solution is part of a daily habit or routine. Ask, would this practice be routine for students and teachers each day?

4. Staff should start with a sample before scaling. Who will we start with? Where can you try this with a small group (10-20 students) in one section or content area?

Lead with compassion. Leaders must realize that their staff are also facing the tragic gap with the challenging problems in their classrooms. They must have empathy for this experience as well as the expectation that staff must stay within the gap as they work to solve the problem. Here are a few strategies leaders can use to support staff in navigating the tragic gap:

Lead with courage. One of the most courageous things a leader can do is focus on what Simon Breakspear, co-author of Teaching Sprints, calls making "calm progress" the expectation of the school. The idea is that leaders make sure that staff slows down while implementing initiatives. A leader can do this by ensuring the following:

Leaders stick with the mantra "Go slow to go fast."

Lead with creativity. Leaders must demonstrate the instructional practices they wish to see in the classroom. If the school is working on increasing quality classroom discussions, then they need to demonstrate classroom discussion in their staff meetings. For instance, a principal may use a protocol such as the final word to discuss an article related to the impact of ensuring that students are clear on expectations, a chalk talk to generate ideas for co-constructing expectations, or a tuning protocol to give and receive feedback.

Each protocol illustrates specific strategies that could be used to increase the frequency and quality of classroom discussion. Lastly, leaders should ensure that staff are aware of the leader's modeling by reflecting on the process of the meeting, which includes the types of strategies the leader implemented, the impact of those strategies on staff understanding, and how such strategies could serve as a model for potential strategies to use in the classroom.

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Using the Power of Compassion, Curiosity, and Creativity to Lead During Times of Change

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Administration & Leadership Leading from the 'tragic gap' between how we'd like things to be and how they are is tough but can be done with the right mindset.

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Administration & Leadership

A former administrator explains how to apply tips from leadership expert John Maxwell in the context of your school.

Whether you're a first-year principal or experienced and starting a new assignment, you've likely been told or read about the importance of forming strong relationships with staff, students, and parents. That's critical advice, but how and when do you accomplish that?

In his book Leadership 101: What Every Leader Needs to Know, best-selling author, coach, and speaker John Maxwell outlines how the formation of relationships occurs during a five-step process of influence development. Relationships are built and solidified during the second step of that process.

Maxwell identified the five steps of leadership as (1) position, (2) permission, (3) production, (4) people development, and (5) pinnacle. Those steps apply to principals, preachers, project managers, and anyone wanting to grow in a position of influence.

When you meet your new teaching staff, at first they'll be mostly concerned that you'll be competent in your new role. Remember, most of them will have had experience at the school and will compare your performance with those of your predecessor and others.

Step one: Position

At the position level, people follow you because you're their assigned boss, and they must listen to you. The position skills they expect to observe should be identified in your job description. Among the most important are the ability to speak effectively in public; command a presence of confidence; make good, timely decisions; maintain order and safety; and ensure that day-to-day school operations run smoothly.

You can be the most charismatic person ever to inhabit a principal's office, but if people detect weaknesses in your positional skills or a façade to your relationships, chances are the relationships you hope are being formed will be superficial. People will listen to you only because you have stated authority.

When principals lack confidence, people lack commitment; morale will be low. Make sure you have a mentor, and have regular talks with them about the development and growth of your positional skills.

Step two: Permission

With the permission level, people decide for themselves to follow you and choose to work with you. During this step, people begin to give you permission to be their leader. One of the most important pieces of advice I ever received from my mentor was to "do what you say you will do when you say you will do it." Follow through. Otherwise, people will think you're wishy-washy or unreliable, and your influence development will stall.

Once staff, students, parents, colleagues, and other stakeholders assess that your competencies are solid, they'll notice that you care. They'll want to work for you. Commitment will become a two-way street. As a result, the relationships you form will likely be solid and long-lasting, and your influence as a leader will continue to evolve effectively.

Never abandon what you must know and be able to do at the base levels. If you stop showing people that you care at step two, relationships will sour. If you try to force results without giving attention to positional and relational skill building, you'll likely fail.

Step three: Production

At the production level, people follow and work with you because they like the results they get. At this level, principals have figured out what they must do to get the highest returns. They understand timing. They become excellent communicators. They unleash the superstars among their staff to become change agents for growth. As they guide and support effective teachers, they're unafraid to make difficult decisions that will produce positive outcomes.

When you attain this level of influence and growth as a principal, everyone will notice, and quite often principals with a record of producing results are sought after by other districts or transferred internally to turn around another school. And then, they start their process of influence development again from step one.

Step four: People Development

When you're focused on people development, you're investing in the long-term health and wealth of your school. People follow and work with you because of what you've done for them.

As you win over hearts, people will develop a sense of loyalty to you that forges the strongest type of relationship. Quite often, principals form mentoring partnerships at this level. They realize the importance of developing a new generation of leaders to follow them when they vacate their position.

Step five: Pinnacle

If you reach the pinnacle stage of your career, you'll be revered because of who you are and what you represent. It takes years to get to the top, and if you do, the rewards are extremely satisfying and long-lasting.

Whether you're a first-year principal or one who is starting a new assignment at the position level, be mindful that as you progress up the steps, it takes longer at each level to move higher.

Don't try to skip any steps. And remember, the longer you maintain tenure in a position, the more likely you'll need to focus with different people at varying steps. As new teachers, students, parents, etc., join your school community, they'll start at the first level assessing the environment and school culture, searching for comfort, finding their fit, and then forming relationships-and you must, too.

As your competencies strengthen and your relationships solidify, you should begin to see good things happen. For instance, you'll know you've reached the production stage of your leadership influence when people choose to be at your school-as an employee, student, and stakeholder. They'll talk about the positive results they experience, and that will drive positive morale with low turnover.

And someday, when you reach the pinnacle, people might name the school after you.

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5 Steps in Your Path to Becoming a Successful Principal

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A former administrator explains how to apply tips from leadership expert John Maxwell in the context of your school.

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Great Article on Reframing Complaints for Effective Meetings!

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Great Article on Reframing Complaints for Effective Meetings!

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Science Says This Toxic Phrase Can Instantly Ruin a Meeting: The 1 Thing Smart Leaders Do to Make Every Meeting Remarkably Effective

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Want to hold more effective meetings? Start by doing a little reframing.

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Brené with Dr. Angela Duckworth on Grit and the Importance of Trying New Things

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Listen to this episode from Dare to Lead with Brené Brown on Spotify. This week I'm talking to Dr. Angela Duckworth, professor, founder and CEO of Character Lab, and author of Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance. We dig into what grit is, but also what grit is not.

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Managing Change in Education TEDTalk by JT Rehill

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Managing Change in Education TEDTalk by JT Rehill

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Managing Change in Education | JT Rehill | TEDxYouth@KIS

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Five Insights for Leading and Managing Change in Your School from New Leaders

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Five Insights for Leading and Managing Change in Your School from New Leaders

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Change in K-12 education can be a bit of a paradox. For many schools and districts, change is challenging because of the complex system in which they operate. Education is a people-centric system. In addition to simply adopting a new process or tool, a large part of managing change is helping to evolve the mindsets and perspectives of a diverse audience-teachers, staff, parents, and students in addition to community members. Add to that, the shifting local, state, and federal guidelines and accountability measures that need to be upheld.

With these challenges comes great responsibility-and opportunity. As a transformational leader, you're aware of the need to embrace change to serve your students and prepare them for the future, but you also empathize with how tough change can be when the stakes are high. How can you move through your change management initiatives as seamlessly as possible? It starts by understanding the stages of change.

As a transformational leader, you're aware of the need to embrace change to serve your students and prepare them for the future, but you also empathize with how tough change can be when the stakes are high.

The seven stages of change

As you begin to implement new educational practices or new technologies relative to improving teacher practice or student achievement, the members of your school community will respond in various ways at different stages of the process. It helps to understand these stages of change so that as a school leader, you're able to respond-be it with information, resources, or professional learning opportunities. Here are the seven stages of change that we share with education leaders:

Becoming aware. Through an event, experience, or data, the need for change is signaled. An example might be that data from your annual district assessment shows declines in certain grades for ELA and math.

Denial. Your school community might defend the current situation. They might also feel the problem identified really isn't that big of a deal.

Frustration. This is usually directed at the person pushing for the change. Some of this frustration is rooted in anxiety and self-doubt-perhaps your teachers are concerned about the need to acquire new skills, or worry they're no longer proficient.

Depression. Here, the feelings of self-doubt and worry might deepen. Your team might notice the implications of the behavior that needs to change, but there's still resentment.

Exploration. A group begins to make a commitment to change. They've started to realize there's pain in staying the same, so they begin to research and gather information.

Acceptance. This is when groups begin to take action. They believe they possess the ability to change. Self-confidence increases and action steps are planned.

Commitment. The group is fully committed to continuing change efforts, buoyed by successes and clear goals.

We've outlined a few strategies to keep in mind as you're managing large-scale change at your school-and making it a vital and necessary part of your school culture.

Assess understanding of the change

The usual framework of changemanagement-communication strategy, stakeholder engagement, and project management-only works if those who are part of the process have an awareness of the need for change. If the goal is to embark on a curriculum mapping journey to address academic gaps, for example, does the rest of your team have the qualitative data to understand why the current curriculum isn't working?

Understanding the reason for the change is critical, but it's only one part of the equation when leading change. You also need to create the desire for change. Your team might know there's an issue, but it may not be important to them to do things differently. After all, change is hard-and it's especially tough to change one's own behavior.

Understanding the reason for the change is critical, but it's only one part of the equation. School leaders also need to create the desire for change.

To create desire for the change, lean into the "why" behind the new way forward. Helping your teachers and staff to see what's possible as a result of the change will make it easier for them to embrace what's coming.

Define your vision

The "why" behind the change is also a critical part of defining what success looks like when the initiative has been completed. Achieving better student outcomes is not specific enough. Using the curriculum example, make sure you can articulate the future: what does the end-result look like in classrooms? How will it improve student learning and engagement? What positive changes can your teachers and staff expect to see?

Knowing what success looks like can give you something to measure against.

Ask for input-and do plenty of listening

Even if you're able to explain the reason for the change-and the vision of what it means for your school community-it's still a one-sided conversation. Everyone who will be affected by the change needs the chance to share their opinion and insights, which is why asking for input is a valuable part of any change management process.

Everyone who will be affected by the change needs the chance to share their opinion and insights, which is why asking for input is a valuable part of any change management process.

Take the time to gather input from all of your school stakeholders through a variety of mediums: online surveys, in-person listening sessions, and one-off conversations. This input may also reveal potential issues and roadblocks you might not have considered-making it well worth your time.

Remain adaptable-and lean on your team

To truly affect change, school leaders need to continually flex their adaptive leadership and distributed leadership muscles. While we might collectively point to the pandemic as an example of crisis and unpredictability, it's worth noting that education has been-and will continue to be-unpredictable, independent of the pandemic. Technology will continue to advance, new ways of learning will be adopted, and we may have teacher and staff shortages in many areas of the country for the foreseeable future.

We need leaders-like you-who can continue to guide their communities through both unexpected and planned change by providing the needed scaffolding and support to their teams to build the same resilience. When there's resilience, it's easier to distribute leadership among your team. You'll be able to leverage their varied perspectives and chart a course for change together. When there's shared ownership, leading change is no longer something that's happening from the top down.

Remember that slow and steady wins the race

Of course, you don't want to live in the "messy middle" of change forever. That said, it doesn't mean you have to roll out your initiatives at warp speed either.

Consider if there are ways to take a staggered approach to the change in question. If it's a change in curriculum, is there an opportunity to pilot with a specific grade level or content area before it gets implemented school-wide?

We need leaders-like you-who can continue to guide their communities through both unexpected and planned change by providing the needed scaffolding and support to their teams to build the same resilience.

Keep all change in perspective

Change is uncomfortable and necessary. There is a bright light: the changes you and your school community master now will make it easier to embrace change in the future and will help today's students be that much more prepared for the challenges of tomorrow.

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Five Insights for Leading and Managing Change in Your School | New Leaders Blog

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Change in K-12 education can be a bit of a paradox. For many schools and districts, change is challenging because of the complex system in which they operate. Education is a people-centric system.

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Resources include The Habits Cheat Sheet, Champion Reading Guide, and a Habit Tracker Template

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Let Me Tell You More About The Book...

Atomic Habits is the most comprehensive and practical guide on how to create good habits, break bad ones, and get 1 percent better every day. I do not believe you will find a more actionable book on the subject of habits and improvement.

If you're having trouble changing your habits, the problem isn't you. The problem is your system.

Bad habits repeat themselves not because you don't want to change but because you have the wrong system for change. This is one of the core philosophies of Atomic Habits: You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems. In this book, you'll get a proven plan that can take you to new heights.

James Clear, one of the world's leading experts on habit formation, is known for his ability to distill complex topics into simple behaviors that can be easily applied to daily life and work. Here, he draws on the most proven ideas from biology, psychology, and neuroscience to create an easy-to-understand guide for making good habits inevitable and bad habits impossible.

Along the way, readers will be inspired and entertained with true stories about Olympic gold medalists, award-winning artists, business leaders, life-saving physicians, and star comedians who have used the science of small habits to master their craft and vault to the top of their field.

Atomic Habits will reshape the way you think about progress and success and give you the tools and strategies you need to transform your habits-whether you are a team looking to win a championship, an organization hoping to redefine an industry, or simply an individual who wishes to quit smoking, lose weight, reduce stress, and achieve success that lasts.

Browse our selection of the best Atomic Habits quotes or read the official Atomic Habits summary here.

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Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones

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Packed with evidence-based strategies, Atomic Habits will teach you how to make small changes that will transform your habits and deliver amazing results.

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This hub of resources leads you through a book study of Dare to Lead by Bréne Brown. There is a Daring Leadership Assessment to take before you read the book, videos to watch as you read, and a workbook to help track your thoughts.

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I've spent twenty years studying courage, vulnerability, shame, and empathy, and I recently completed a seven-year study on brave leadership. The goal of Dare to Lead is to share everything we've learned about taking off the armor and showing up as leaders in a skills-based and actionable playbook. Here are a few of the big ideas that emerged from this research:

You can't get to courage without rumbling with vulnerability. Embrace the suck.

Daring leadership is a collection of four skill sets that are 100% teachable, observable, and measurable. The foundational skill set of courage-building is "rumbling with vulnerability." Once we have built these rumbling skills, we can move on to the other three skill sets: Living into Our Values, Braving Trust, and Learning to Rise. Our ability to be daring leaders will never be greater than our capacity for vulnerability.

Self-awareness and self-love matter. Who we are is how we lead.

The greatest barrier to courageous leadership is not fear-it's how we respond to our fear. Our armor-the thoughts, emotions, and behaviors that we use to protect ourselves when we aren't willing and able to rumble with vulnerability-move us out of alignment with our values, corrode trust with our colleagues and teams, and prevent us from being our most courageous selves.

To scale daring leadership and build courage in teams and organizations, we have to cultivate a culture in which brave work, tough conversations, and whole hearts are the expectation, and armor is not necessary or rewarded. We have to be vigilant about creating a culture in which people feel safe, seen, heard, and respected.

The skill sets that make up courage are not new; they've been aspirational leadership skills for as long as there have been leaders. We just haven't had the courage for real talk about courage. But it's time. And if you want to call these "soft skills" after you've tried putting them into practice-go for it. I dare you. Until then, find a home for your armor, and I'll see you in the arena.

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Daring leadership requires brave work, tough conversations, and showing up with our whole hearts.

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Interesting article that can be applied to educational change.

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There is also an episode with James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits that we can focus on too!

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The Suffers

The song you hear on the Dare to Lead podcast is "Take Me to the Good Times." The Suffers are an American soul, funk, and R&B group from Houston, Texas. Inspired by the Cajun, African American, Mexican, and Caribbean influences that shape Houston, they define their sound as Gulf Coast soul. Their music is an incredible combination of the blues, soul, country, Caribbean music, Cajun styles, hip-hop, and their own unique sound.

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Conversations with change-catalysts, culture-shifters, and more than a few troublemakers who are innovating, creating, and daring to lead.