The Day I Almost Quit

Issue #8

The Day I Almost Quit

It was a Sunday night in February.

Not the dramatic kind of breaking point you read about in memoirs. No single catastrophic event. No screaming match. No moment you could point to and say — that’s the one that did it. Just a Sunday night, sitting at the kitchen table with a stack of unread emails, a discipline report I hadn’t finished, a parent callback I’d been avoiding since Thursday, and a feeling I couldn’t name that had been sitting on my chest for about six weeks.

My wife walked in, looked at me, and said quietly: “You haven’t laughed in a month.”

I didn’t argue with her. Because she was right. And because somewhere underneath the exhaustion I already knew what I hadn’t been willing to say out loud.

I was burning out. And I had been so busy performing competence that I hadn’t told a single person.

Burnout in school leadership is uniquely dangerous because the job selects for people who push through. Every principal, every CEO, every leader who rises to the top of a demanding organization got there partly by ignoring their own limits. The same trait that makes you effective makes you blind to the moment when effectiveness becomes depletion.

I had been running on obligation for months. Not purpose — obligation. There’s a difference, and your body knows it even when your calendar doesn’t.

What pulled me back wasn’t a wellness seminar or a self-care weekend. It was a conversation with my assistant principal — a woman I trusted completely — in which I said out loud for the first time: I’m not okay. Three words. Twelve seconds. The hardest thing I said all year.

She didn’t fix it. She couldn’t. But she did two things that mattered more than any solution. She listened without advice for the first ten minutes. And then she said: “What’s one thing you’ve stopped doing that used to fill you back up?”

I hadn’t played piano in four months. I know that sounds small. It wasn’t small. It was the thing I had quietly surrendered to the weight of the job, and I hadn’t even noticed it was gone until she asked.

I went home that night and played for forty minutes. Nothing changed at school the next morning. The emails were still there. The parent callback was still waiting. But something in me had shifted — a small recalibration that reminded me I was a person before I was a principal.

The leaders who sustain themselves over decades are not the ones who never burn out. They’re the ones who learn to recognize the early signs, name what’s happening before it becomes a crisis, and build the habit of refilling — not as a luxury, but as a professional responsibility.

THE TRANSFERABLE PRINCIPLE THIS WEEK

Burnout doesn’t announce itself. It accumulates quietly in the gap between what the job demands and what you allow yourself to need. Name it early. Tell one person you trust. Then ask yourself: what have you stopped doing that used to fill you back up? Start there. A leader who is empty has nothing left to give the people who are counting on them.

Until next time — the chair is yours.