When the Invitations Stop
What happens to your friendships when you take the job, and what to do about it
The Friday text thread at your old school used to include you. Three years teaching down the same hallway, and every few weeks someone started a chain about the sand volleyball league, or wings after the game, or whose backyard on Saturday.
Then you took the principal job. The thread kept going. You just didn’t get invited to the one at the new school.
No one decided to leave you out. It happened the way weather happens. The first invitation that still came felt a little careful, and when you showed up the room went quieter until you left early to make it easy on everyone. You told yourself you were busy. You were. Busy was never the reason the room changed.
You got promoted out of the friendships, and no one announced it
You moved from the peer group to the corner office over a single summer. Teachers who used to vent to you now choose their words around you, because you sign their evaluations. Parents who used to be neighbors now read your face for information. The people who do stay close often want something, and you learn to notice which hat they are wearing before you answer.
New principals are the most blindsided by this. You braced for the budget. You braced for the board. You did not brace for eating lunch alone in your office because sitting in the staff room changes the staff room.
You might tell yourself this is just the cost of leadership, and that you should be strong enough to carry it alone. Plenty of principals believe exactly that. It is also how good leaders quietly come apart.
The one person left is the one who cannot be neutral
When the old friendships thin out, most principals fall back on the person still fully in their corner. Their spouse.
That is a gift, and it is also a trap, because your spouse is not a neutral party. They have skin in the game. They watch what the job does to you at ten o’clock at night. They carry the fallout of a board meeting they never sat in. When your only outlet is the person who shares your last name and your mortgage, you are not setting the weight down. You are sliding it across the kitchen table onto the one relationship your whole mission depends on.
If the job has quietly turned your marriage into your only counseling office, it has already cost you more than you meant to spend.
You need people with no stake in your school
Talk to your spouse. Just stop asking one person to be everyone.
Principals who last eventually find a circle of other Christian school leaders who lead somewhere else. People who know the exact weight, and who gain nothing and lose nothing from your enrollment numbers. No skin in your game. They can hear the honest version because they are not living inside it with you.
These circles take two shapes, and you will know which one you need. If you are carrying too much and mostly need people who understand, find an open circle where leaders talk honestly about the week. Rhonda Rogers runs one of the best I know of. If you already know the work and need someone in it with you, find a directed cohort that forms around your school and moves you through it a step at a time. That is the kind I run.
Choose based on what this season is asking of you. Just get in one!
Even Paul, near the end of his life and writing from a prison cell, told Timothy to come quickly and to bring Mark, because the most effective leader in the early church still would not do it without his people.
Change the chair, expect the room to change
You did not lose your friends because you did something wrong. You changed chairs, and the room changed with you. It is a new reality to lead inside of, on purpose.
So this week, name one leader outside your school and reach out. Not to fix anything. Just to start the circle you will need long before the year gets hard. The strongest principals are not the ones who carry it alone. They are the ones who stopped trying to.
