Hello Colleagues and welcome to another 5 for Friday episode of The Assistant Principal Podcast!

Today I’m celebrating fall! The leaves are beginning to turn color, the nights are getting crisp – which means better sleeping for those of us who like being buried under a mound of blankets – and everything is flavored with apple or pumpkin! Fall also means the end of my garden-grown cucumbers, but we can’t have everything, can we?

Today’s episode of Five for Friday recaps the strategic leadership emails for the week of October 2-6, 2023. 

The emails:

• Sometimes you can have a bigger impact by working with the willing.
• Accepting that to be human is to be imperfect opens a world of possibilities.
• We should think about playing more. We should play more.
• Be mindful of over-investing in tasks you enjoy doing.
• Lack of presence leads to messes, with food and with humans.

The takeaway:

Another week of seemingly unrelated topics provides me with another opportunity to look for the bigger meaning. I didn’t plan it this way, but each post has an element of play to it:

• Working with competent people who trust you and want to get better can feel like play.
• Over-investing in things we are good at is a version of play.
• Accepting the imperfection of being human gives us permission to play.
• Playing helps cultivate presence.
• And of course, there was Wednesday’s message all about the need to play more.

Play takes many forms. We can play physically – at the Buskey household one of our backyard favorites is CanJam. We can play games, like Horrify, a really cool strategy game in which the players collaborate to win. We can play with ideas, which I often do while journaling in the mornings. We can play in the kitchen – but maybe not with quesadillas.

As I write this, it strikes me that the line between creativity and play is very thin, and maybe that’s a bit of insight into why play is so important.

Let’s wrap this up with a call to action, and if you can’t guess what it is, you either don’t know me very well or you haven’t been fully present to the episode.

This weekend, go play! Throw a football around, pull out your watercolors, scribble some poetry, walk in the woods. Do something for yourself, and I turn you’ll be better at serving others on Monday. Oh, and Legos. How did forget Legos?

That is this week’s Five for Friday rendition of The Assistant Principal Podcast. 

Thank you for including me on your leadership journey. 

I look forward to seeing you again next Tuesday when we begin our October emphasis on building a positive classroom culture.

Anyway, tune in on Tuesday for a great episode.

Please remember to subscribe and rate this podcast. As I record this, we have 17 ratings and 4 reviews. Increasing those numbers helps others find the show. 

I’m Frederick Buskey and thank you again for joining me on this episode of the Assistant Principal Podcast. Cheers!

Frederick’s Links:

Email: [email protected]

Website: https://www.frederickbuskey.com/ 

LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/strategicleadershipconsulting 

Daily Email subscribe: https://adept-experimenter-3588.ck.page/ff61713840