A cancelled conference... But! Yay! A new book!

I'd been waiting for the email, assuming it would come.  Coronavirus fear kept building, and all the media output, opinions, and cancellations were piling up.  On the phone, my sister said it was coming.  She was making pancakes for her kids, so I heard the rattle of the spatula and the sizzle of the butter behind her words, and I could picture her shrug.  "They have to cancel, Jen.  They can't not.  It's too scary."  My friends and colleagues said it was coming; one of them, in particular, should be in Austin right now at the SXSW conference, a trip she'd been excited about for over a year. She'd gotten an email twelve hours before her flight telling her it was off. Ahh, but I held on: Maybe cancellation wouldn't happen.  Not to me.  Not to me, to us, the thousands of people who love ASCD's Empower20, one of the best-known and highest-attended school leadership conferences in the world.  Hope isn't a strategy, of course, but it's all I had:  I so hoped this virus would run its course by the time a decision had to be made.

Alas, the email came at noon yesterday:  Empower20 was cancelled.  Contact your airline and hotel, they said.  They were sorry, they said.  Give us a minute, they didn't say.  Give us a hot freakin' minute and don't flip out and please, please understand, they didn't say.  I was overcome thinking of the people scrambling to unravel all the strands of planning—and then cancelling—such a gigantic undertaking.  There was much to do. Much to unpack, undo, unthink.  I ached, too, for the people who'd had to decide to actually pull the plug, of the Board of Directors who had to raise their hands in an aye vote. The impact of that vote was enormous.

On hold with the Renaissance Hotel in Los Angeles, trying to find a human being who could cancel my three-night reservation, I tried to calculate how many people were affected.  Tens and tens of thousands.  Hundreds of thousands. More?  And all the conferences, really, all over the world—all the meetings, events, performances, all the years of planning, buying, ordering, consulting, scheduling, shuffling, marketing, organizing...

Sheesh.  My head spun.

Sheepish admission:  Yes, I took a selfish moment to mourn the death of my presentation.  It was titled No Way, Not Me:  Disrupting the Path to Principal Burnout.  I was really proud of it.  Finally I'd mastered Google Slides, and finally was going into a presentation with full confidence. But my presentation was—is— an itty bitty microscopic casualty of this whole thing, and I didn't let myself be bummed, because my bummed-out-ness was inconsequential in scale, and of course would do nothing to contribute to fixing a single part of this mess.  So I'll keep washing my hands, walking my dog, and look forward to this virus doing what it needs to do so we can do the next right and fun thing.

Besides, I have something to look forward to!  This!  Yay!  Late next week my new book will be released!

  
Like my first one, it is published by ASCD and is called The Principal Reboot:  Eight Ways to Revitalize your School Leadership.  The book covers eight categories that tend to get pretty tricky-and-sticky for principals, and holds a bunch of ideas for how to start to have a bit more fun with the job.  It's a book for veteran principals, sure, but it's also for anyone who works in a school and is looking for innovative ideas to boost things a little.  Bring some shine and sass to an immensely complicated and exhausting job.  Avoid burnout.  Be inspired.  Have fun.  Laugh.

So far, I'm unspeakably blessed that coronavirus has only marginally affected my life and my plans.  But a lot of people have lost a lot.  I'm thinking of them all.