The King of the Goldfish

I met a school administrator the other day. A leader.

It was one of those five-minute, blink-and-you'll-miss-it conversations, yet meaningful enough that it follows you into the next day.

What he shared in those five minutes was the quiet frustration of someone who used to lead from instinct. Someone who knew how to read a room, a hallway, a kid, now navigating red tape, politics, and expectations that may have always existed, but now feel amplified into something unrecognizable.

As I drove home, I couldn't shake the image of a goldfish, swimming contentedly in its own small bowl, entirely at home in the only water it had ever known.

And it made me think about what happens when the entire environment changes around someone.

What happens when the king of the goldfish wakes up one day to find his bowl crowded with rhinos?

What if your small, clear bowl is suddenly full of things that were never meant to live there? How quickly the water goes murky. How quickly everything you could once see clearly becomes obscured.

I sat with this a full day before writing it, not because I had a strategy to offer (I don't), but because something in it wouldn't let me go.

What emerged instead was compassion. For the toll this must take, the mental and emotional weight of fighting something that wasn't there before, but has quietly become the reason behind every action, in the place where passion used to live.

And then, quietly, the Serenity Prayer surfaced.

Because what I heard underneath his frustration, underneath the fatigue, was something closer to grief. And grief has its own protective coating: a refusal to accept what is, a refusal that may feel necessary, even if it keeps you trapped in the bowl.

And if you're a fish still fighting the bowl, now crowded with rhinos, how hard do you have to work just to swim?

So what do you do?

Can you find a new way to swim these changing waters?

Can you help reshape the bowl so fish and rhinos can both thrive?

And if, after all of that, you discover the bowl can no longer hold the leader you're becoming...

What if that next body of water isn't another bowl?

What if it's an ocean?

Endless. Uncontained. Full of room to lead exactly as you were made to.

I don't know what that administrator will decide. But I hope he finds his ocean.

PS - If you're finding yourself somewhere between the bowl and the ocean, I'd love to help you navigate what's next. Send me a message if you'd like to explore the conversation together.