This guest post appears as part of our Conference Sessions Continued series, following up on Dr. Timothy Kanold’s Fall NCSM conference session titled: Heart, Soul, & Joy: Leading a Fully Engaged, High-Energy, Well-Balanced Professional Life!
Ahh, welcome back!
Are you rested yet? Just a few more weeks before a new school year settles into the rhythm, newness, excitement, challenge, and the benefit of ramping up your mathematics leadership life anew, once again. There is always a certain magic to the start of the school year—an optimism, right?
You and your colleagues are one year stronger and wiser as you reflect on the math leadership lessons learned from previous school years, you adjust to new policies and procedures, and as always, you yearn once again for a leadership life that really matters. Relationships and bonds left alone during the summer are quickly rebuilt as friendships with those you lead are once again renewed.
And you start the new school year with intention toward joy. “This will be my best year yet”, you think and maybe say out loud, too. You are living momentarily within a high-energy-level zone as the drain from the “last school year” dissipates into the summer sun.
Yet, you know it won’t take too long before your stress levels rise and your high-energy recedes. You intuitively know that your heart and your joy, if not intentionally protected, can fade away during the fall season of the school year. You embrace the teaching and leading journey ahead anyway. It is who you are, and what you do.
And so, you hold onto the idea of joy as your internal decision. You draw upon a few joy hacks that intuitively you know work. Actions you can take toward an intentional escape from the busyness of your daily work and home life ramps up, once again.
You take walks outside, using your senses to see and breathe and smell the signals of the late summer/early fall season. You play music and sing your favorite songs on the way to and from work each day. You remember to take time for moments of quiet in each day, to balance your time spent building relationships in and outside of school. You remember to build into your daily work life 2–3-minute brain resting micro-breaks away from the daily relational demands.
You remember too that joy is the residue of a well-balanced life and you make a promise to yourself to be better at balancing those home and work life energy demands as this new school year begins. So, this school year, you sustain some of those joy-building physical and mental wellness weekly routines you started this summer. Routines that help you to bring your best leadership self to work each day, as the renewed pace of life settles in.
Take a minute, grab a notebook, and answer the questions in Parts A, B, and C. Then write about your results. As the new school year begins, to how many of the nine routines can you answer “yes”?
A. How many of these physical well-being routines can you check off at least 5-6 times per week.
1. Getting 7-9 hours of sleep per night.
2. Moving, exercising, playing sports, or other activities.
3. Drinking at least 6 cups (that’s 2 standard size 16.9 oz bottles) of water a day.
B. How many of these mental/emotional well-being routines can you check off at least 3-4 times per week.
1. Pursuing hobbies in art, music, cooking, gaming, gardening, reading, etc.
2. Mindfulness routines such as journaling, practiced breathing, or pausing before you speak at a team meeting or around the dinner table.
3. Sitting/standing/walking in silence and solitude for 15 minutes or more away from the constant stream of noise pounding away at your brain.
C. How many of these social well-being routines can you check off at least 1-2 times per week.
1. Spending time with family members outside of your household.
2. Spending time with friends outside of your workplace.
3. Spending time outside in nature.
Pursuing these weekly routines will help you to write a 2026-2027 mathematics leadership story of perseverance. Perseverance is the continued effort to do or achieve something despite difficulties, failure, or opposition(1). I have yet to experience a new school year where adversity of some kind at work or at home did not eventually appear.
Perseverance as a leadership skill navigates the challenges and setbacks of your work life and empowers you to embrace adversity, overcome obstacles, and keep moving forward. The result is a deep-seated sense of accomplishment and often a profound joy. Essentially, perseverance is your long-term mental wellness response – developed over time – to adverse events in your work and home life.
Somewhat counter-intuitively when you experience a moderate level of adversity, better mental health and well-being and higher life satisfaction will be the result(2). It is through perseverance we experience joy – not as something fleeting, but as a steadfast companion on our journey. Sounds great, right?
The question then is, how do we persevere through a successful school year?
Re-frame your challenges: When you experience adversity, you can “re-frame” it into a challenge response. Which in turn, increases your energy and provides an increase in adrenaline toward overcoming the obstacle. You feel focused instead of fearful. You release a different ratio of stress hormones to access mental and physical resources(3).
You harness a challenge response to adversity when reflecting on questions such as:
1. Where do I have control or influence in the situation?
2. What are my strengths? How can I use them to overcome the obstacle?
3. What human resources do I have? And how can I use the support from others?
4. How do I know I can handle this? What are my experiences of the past?
5. How can my self-care physical wellness strategies help me process the adversity and persevere?
What is something really hard you are persevering through right now? Write about it. Provide some detail to your story of determination. And when ready, and as appropriate, share with a trusted companion.
As you lead others this year, remember:
Leadership courage faces fear.
Leadership patience endures delay.
Leadership perseverance is rooted in the belief there is meaning in the struggle.
As the summer ends, savor the moments of rest and recovery, and embrace the anticipation of what lies ahead. Charge into it as you re-member with colleagues once again and be sure to model a balanced leadership life others will want to follow!
Notes:
This blog is an adapted excerpt from the book JOY! Growing Strong Throughout Your Seasons of Life as a Teacher and Leader (Kanold, 2026) and is an extension of Dr. Kanold’s message at the 2025 NCSM conference in Atlanta, Georgia.
(1) Merriam-Webster. (n.d.). Perseverance. In Merriam-Webster.com dictionary. Retrieved April 16, 2024, from https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/perseverance
(2) Seery, M., Holman, E., & Silver, R. (2010). Whatever does not kill us: cumulative lifetime adversity, vulnerability, and resilience. Journal of personality and social psychology, 99(6), 1025-1041. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0021344 Accessed at https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4b6787gk on June 10th, 2026.
(3) IBID.
Dr. Timothy Kanold
