A Little More Heart

At 7:47 this morning, sitting in a senior leadership meeting, my phone pinged with the message I had been expecting.

My grandad had died.

I knew it was coming. I had been waiting for the message all morning.

But I didn’t open it.

Not because I didn’t want to know. I already knew.

I just needed to get through the room first.

So I put my phone away, carried on with the meeting, contributed to the conversation and tried to put the grief somewhere else for a while. Then I stepped outside, opened the message and took a breath.

Later, around 8:30, my dad messaged me.

“Don’t be sad. He was a good man who reached a good age, lived a great life, worked hard and shaped my values.”

And I think that’s what has stayed with me today. Of course I’m grieving. But more than anything, I’ve felt a strange sort of clarity.

The emails can wait.

The meeting will happen.

The thing I was worrying about at 6pm yesterday? I can barely remember what it was.

Grief has a funny way of stripping all of that away.

When your heart breaks a little before the working day has even properly started, you see things differently.

Love matters.

Kindness matters.

People matter.

And walking into school carrying that feeling made me think differently about the people around me too.

I pride myself on being relational in the way I lead, but today I realised there is still more I can do. More moments where I could pause for another second, ask one more question or simply pay a little more attention to the person standing in front of me.

Because when your own heart is a little more exposed, you notice things differently.

Today, that looked like a child in the canteen trying to use his iPad to translate what he was trying to say.

A colleague telling me some sad news about their partner.

A parent crying because they didn’t know what to do next.

Three completely different moments, but each one made me pause.

And perhaps that is what today has made me think about most. How easy it is to move through a busy day thinking about what needs doing, where we need to be next and what hasn’t been finished yet.

But these moments matter too. The tiny moments where someone needs you to stop, listen and be there. Just to be present.

And then I had a slightly uncomfortable thought:

Gosh, what if I’m still missing things?

I do think I’m pretty in tune with people. I notice changes. I care about how people are doing.

But none of us get it right all of the time.

We can all be more present.

A little slower.

A little more curious.

Some people really do need to practise how to be kind. Kindness isn’t always instinctive. Neither are listening, patience or noticing.

We can get better at all of them. That matters because we have no idea what the person in front of us is carrying.

Schools are full of people carrying things.

Grief. Fear. Exhaustion. Worries about their children. Ill parents. Difficult relationships. Things happening at home that nobody else knows about.

Today, I still did my job. I had conversations. I made decisions. I dealt with problems.

But I felt things differently.

And maybe that’s what my dad’s message has reminded me of.

The children matter enormously. But so do the people standing alongside them, teaching them, supporting them and trying to get everything right every day.

So I keep coming back to one question:

Did the people around me feel seen today?

Not managed.

Not measured.

Just seen.

We can have high expectations and still have an open heart. We can hold people accountable without forgetting the human being standing in front of us.

I don’t think we ever really know what we leave behind in other people.

Maybe it’s a value.

Maybe it’s something they remember years later without even knowing why.

We just all need to have a little more heart.

♥️