Working on your Self - July 2025

As the summer break approaches, education colleagues across the country will begin that familiar descent into the brief, but essential, pause. Perhaps you have plans to fill it with all the things you don’t normally get time for: things that bring you health, happiness or hedonistic indulgence? With the work you’ve put in this year, you have absolutely earned it!

But alongside the pause and the pleasure, we invite you to bring another intention to this summer break: not planning for next term, not ticking off overdue admin, but working on yourself.

Amidst the daily demands of working in or with schools, you are there for everyone else, but how often are you really there for yourself? Summer offers a rare and important opportunity to look inward, and begin the slow, meaningful work of reconnecting with who you are beyond the role, and who you are shaping-up to become.

Many of us approach personal development the way we approach school improvement: intervention plans, incremental targets and performance metrics to bring us closer to our personal goals, and move us away from undesirable habits. This is a great way to create behavioural change. 

However, deep, transformative personal growth is different. As psychologist Carl Jung’s renowned work on the Shadow Self explains, you don’t need to cut away the so-called “negative” traits or bury the parts of you you’ve been taught to hide. You are not half-light and half-dark. You are one whole. True self-development comes when you stop trying to ignore or eliminate parts of yourself and instead start owning and understanding how to harness these to shape the whole.

Maja Djikic’s book, The Possible Self, offers a helpful framework to support this intentional shaping of our self. Her ‘Wheel of Self’ encourages us to consider five interconnected elements which, when aligned, create harmonious momentum, and, when misaligned, can cause us to stall:

1. Motivations: What do you really want, beyond what’s expected of you?

2. Behaviours: Are your daily habits in harmony with your deeper values?

3. Emotions: Do you listen to your feelings as signposts, or try to override them?

4. Thoughts: What stories are you telling yourself, and are they true?

5. Body: How does your physical energy affect the rest of your life?

Summer could provide the perfect space to ask: What part of my self feels stuck or stalled? What areas would I benefit from developing? Maybe you’re exhausted in your body, or emotionally drained. Maybe you’ve forgotten what you actually want. Whatever it is, this is your chance to listen.

At Leadership Edge, we also know from our first-hand experiences of working in school leadership, and from our coaching conversations with hundreds of you, that this year will have held moments of personal pain and stress, which you have had limited opportunity to process. It can be helpful to intentionally revisit these in order to release the residual emotional, mental and physical weight they may be placing on you, consciously or subconsciously.

The proven benefits of translating difficult experiences into language include: 

• Meeting our need for completion 

• Making sense of our world, including understanding the unfathomable

• Summarising memories to relieve stress

• Self-expression

• Freeing our working memory and addressing associated social and sleep disturbances

• Creating a self-distanced perspective and more coherent narrative

• Looking for the positives

  
  

Using our holistic lens of the Self, we can see that such personal benefits will naturally bring positive impact to our professional work, too. Mark Bisson’s 'Coach Yourself First' presents a compelling case for self-awareness as the foundation of high-performing leadership. Based on interviews with elite performers, he offers a rich menu of creative self-reflective practices including journaling, metaphor development, mindfulness and drawing as tools that help you bypass surface-level thinking and access deeper insight. These aren’t ‘soft’ or ‘indulgent’; they are intentional, challenging practices that reconnect you with your own intelligence-centres of head, heart and gut.

Important: If you find that you need further support to process painful or stressful past experiences, please access professional support, from your GP, counsellor or therapist.

If you’re interested in building on your personal reflections, PURE coaching offers the space and support to turn self-awareness into solid beliefs, consistent behaviours and tangible ways of being. Your resulting confidence, clarity and resilience will then naturally translate into positive impact on the colleagues, children and communities you serve.

As you consider how you might spend your time this summer, we offer you these questions:

1. How do I currently feel about self-reflection: curious, resistant, uncertain, open?

2. Why might pausing to look inward be useful for me right now, in this particular moment of life and leadership?

3. What methods of self-reflection (quiet journaling, creative expression, mindful movement or dialogue) feel most comfortable or helpful for me to try?

   
   

So this Summer, when the temptation of doing a little 'work' calls, before you pick up your 2025-26 strategic plan or start imbibing that alluring stack of leadership books, consider carving out time to sit with yourself; not your role, not your to-do list, but you. Give yourself space to notice where you are and start to shape who you're becoming. Pay attention to what’s working, what feels off, and what parts of you need more care or adjustment, smoothing out what is not serving you, rather than cutting it off. This process is not about becoming perfect, but about becoming even more authentically you.

Warmest wishes - and take good care of yourself!

Catherine Hulme

Owner Director

catherine@leadershipedge.org.uk

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Leadership Edge is a growing team of experienced school leaders who have seen person-centred coaching create high-performing, happy and healthy cultures within our schools. Our mission is to empower other school leaders to create positive workplaces where staff are solution-focused and actively responsible for their own personal wellbeing and professional development.

Our 3-Tier Coaching Accreditation Programme is low-cost and self-sustaining, providing a systematic and structured model for staff across your school to become powerful coaches for each other, enhancing colleague relationships and their feeling of being valued as an individual within a supportive school community.