In my early thirties, I used to walk during my lunch breaks and listen to audiobooks. I was teaching at the time, and one of the books I listened to was Stephen Covey’s Principle-Centered Leadership.
More than thirty years later, I couldn’t give you a detailed account of that book. But I remember its impact. It changed how I thought about my life, how I taught, who I wanted to become, and the influence I wanted to have.
What reached me most deeply was the idea of personal leadership. I remember recognizing that what he was describing applied to me. It applied to everyone. We could bring leadership into our own lives, into our relationships, into the everyday ways we affected one another.
That recognition felt enormously important.
At the time, several things were coming together. I had always been interested in human behaviour, and I had already experienced very different forms of leadership. I had worked with principals whose approach was controlling or manipulative, or whose insecurity seemed to shape how they treated people. I also knew authoritarian control from my personal life.
I knew something about what it felt like to be on the receiving end.
But I also had a principal who became an incredible mentor to me. She was encouraging, humane, and inspirational. She saw potential in me during a time when I was deeply insecure.
I remember sitting in her office and telling her I was thinking about doing my master’s degree. Somewhere in that possibility was the thought that I might eventually become a principal myself, although I don’t remember whether I had the courage to say that aloud.
She told me, “Joanne, I’m going to be honest with you. You have to develop your self-confidence.”
I knew she was right.
What I remember, though, is that her words didn’t stop me. I thought, Well, I’ll start by doing my master’s, and we’ll see what happens.
Confidence was something I needed to develop, and I could take that next step while I was still developing it. About ten years later, I became a principal.
Looking back, I can see how her example and my reading were speaking to one another. I was encountering ideas about leadership while working with someone who helped me experience their possibilities. She could recognize something I needed to work on and still encourage my aspirations. Her honesty existed within a relationship in which I felt she believed in me.
That mattered.
Over time, leadership became a powerful word for me because it brought together questions I cared deeply about: What guides how I live? How do I treat people? What do I do with the influence I have? What kind of impact am I working toward?
Influence itself can take many forms. Someone can be charismatic, persuasive, and very effective at getting others to follow them. My interest was always in the values guiding that influence. I wanted to lead in ways that were humane, compassionate, and encouraging. I wanted my actions to reflect what I believed mattered.
That aspiration extended into my life as a parent, a teacher, a principal, and as a woman—in all my roles. My understanding of what it meant continued to develop through those experiences.
It was also a work in progress. Understanding the value of compassion doesn’t automatically teach us how to respond compassionately during conflict. Wanting to encourage others doesn’t mean we have already learned how to do so. Our histories, habits, fears, and insecurities come with us. There were things I needed to understand about myself and skills I needed to learn.
Personal leadership meant becoming accountable for that learning and for how I participated in my own life.
I can see this thread running through The Damselfly Path today: entering into a deeper relationship with our lives and exploring our relationship with qualities such as compassion, love, peace, and courage.
What do these qualities mean to us? What place do they actually have in how we live? How might we come to understand and practise them more deeply within our particular circumstances and relationships?
For me, this is the seed of possibility. As we become more intimately acquainted with our lives and with the values we profess, we begin to recognize what we might cultivate, what we might change, and what we might contribute. Here are seeds of purpose and meaning, with possibilities we can bring to life through how we participate in the world.
These qualities can change what happens between people. They can shape how a child experiences a classroom, how someone receives difficult feedback, or whether a person feels encouraged enough to take a next step.
My mentor did that for me.
And somewhere on those lunchtime walks, listening to Covey, I began to recognize that I could develop that capacity too.
Perhaps that is why the word leadership still holds so much meaning for me. It asks me to consider who I am becoming, what guides my actions, and what becomes possible through the way I live.
Joanne 💗
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