Fasting from Leadership and Other Self-Inflicted Sabbaticals

James Robinson • August 15, 2024

What are you doing to renew, relearn, and reprioritize?

I remember listening to an interview between Tim Ferris and Jerry Colonna, the famed CEO coach. I was excited to listen to the conversation as Jerry's book Reboot set the stage for me to enroll in an ICF program for Jungian Coaching. During the interview, I learned that Jerry goes on sabbaticals to recharge, refresh, and rejuvenate. It helps him be a better coach, a more present human, a better father, and loyal friend.


From June- November, I fasted from leadership and focused my energy  on becoming a Jungian Coach and to review and study  leadership and  charter schools-- where I've spent the last 14 years of my life.  While I’ve not taken time off to rest, per se, fasting from educational leadership– has been a powerful experience. Stepping away does helped me feel rested, but also allows newer perspectives to emerge as I worked through my days. 


Many of the insights and learnings helped me identify an organization I could serve authentically while also finding  ways to apply lessons from my six-month hiatus and fast . Some of those changes are based on a series of talks I posted on my YouTube Channel-- The Courage Gap. 

The channel itself is not for the faint of heart nor is it entertaining-- but it served its purpose in helping me readjust.


One of those perspectives is, why don’t more organizations prioritize sabbaticals or leadership fasts for leaders? 


In my day industry, an 8-week sabbatical, on a cycle of three-years, could do wonders for school leaders, district leaders and network leaders alike.


Yes, there’s the rest and rejuvenation element– but there’s also the perspective you gain about yourself, the people around you and the field of education with all of its complexities and nuanced challenges. 


Sometimes engaging in the day-to-day , the urgent, and the tactical just doesn’t allow enough space to evaluate current tactics and strategies – and so we continue on autopilot, and sometimes get burnt out. Allowing leaders a sabbatical helps them observe the sector from a distance, and more objectively.  With that comes new opportunities to do things better and differently because you take the time to see things that way. 


And the public doesn’t necessarily need to foot the bill for school leader sabbaticals. There are a lot of creative people in the world, and I’m sure there’s some finance team that could build a fast growing fund for leaders to invest in their sabbaticals in some pretax way. 


We just have to think differently. 


If that’s not possible, although I think it is,   then engaging in leadership micro-fasting by visiting another district , network and city works just fine.


When I was a principal and principal manager, I made it a point to visit another city and other schools just to reset, learn, and contribute. 


Here’s why it was valuable:


  1. It’s an incentive:  In order to do one of these trips to another network , school , and city, it’s imperative to make sure your own school is running well. You can’t really be absent from your school if it’s not running at a high level. This is just not just because it’s the wrong thing to do, it’s also because you want to be fully present on these trips.  If you are receiving calls and texts because things have gone awry, it’s just too hard to focus. 
  2. Learning: There’s nothing better than visiting another school and walking with different leaders– especially if their model and program is different than yours. In fact, it should be a little different– even a lot different-– because new knowledge happens when we evaluate the differences between what we know and what we encounter. Plus the perspective of other leaders is valuable.
  3. Contribute and Connect: Any time I’ve done a visit to another school, other leaders ask for feedback or some kind of debrief. It’s a generous exchange for everybody AND you just connected with somebody whom you can email in the future with a question.


So this week, ask yourself what you’re doing to renew, reflect and learn. It’s important and could save your career.


But if you want more of a cognitive and spiritual workout that affords reflection, renewal and learning, Jungian coaching might be for you. It will help you become more creative, unstuck and  may change your perspective on a lot of things– with that comes opportunities. Additionally, it helps you step away from the urgent, to settle in,  to think,  and to re-evaluate. So, it’s kind of like a micro-sabbatical every couple of weeks. You deserve at least that, don’t you?  Email me at james@miningandshining.com for a free Resilience Assessment OR persona assessment and a consultation.

Precious Metal Notes

Venturing into the Courage Gap, #1

By James Robinson • February 21, 2026
context In an earlier post, I wrote about the need for a self-inflicted sabbatical from educational leadership in 2024. The time-off allowed me to step back, read, study, think, and create at a level I've not known in years. Although we went without my salary for six-months, the data reflects it was also the most stress-free time in recent years-- likely driven by the walks, meditation, prayer and just leveling myself to a position of just learning again. The openness matters. During that time, I created a series of talks, titled The Courage Gap: Another gap in education that a consultant can't close. Originally, they were called "Career-Suicide Notebooks", the reason being my plan was to walk away from education all together. Instead, what I learned will inform my work for years. I've heard it said that Buddhist monks can see the world in a grain of rice. After being immersed in education for several years, I see the world in a school ecosystem. Often, schools enter my creative work and the way I think about creativity enters my work in schools. The first video is called 33% and it looks at the proficiency scores of 4th grade students on the NAEP Assessment. Additionally, it looks at the broad economy that works to maintain the status quo. It's a very performative video, very low-brow-- but it sets the context for the rest of the talks. Moreover, many of the issues can be extrapolated across sectors.

Lettuce Entertain You: Why Fluency Matters

By James Robinson • February 21, 2026
Lettuce Entertain You “Lettuce entertain you” is a classic line from an old reading assessment passage. When kids read it aloud, assessors listened for more than just smooth delivery—they hoped for laughter, or at least a chuckle, as a sign the pun landed. Too often, though, the reading was fluent but flat. No chuckle meant the joke flew right over their heads; students weren't picking up on the playful language. In one district, coaches and a principal were so eager for better results that they printed t-shirts featuring “Lettuce entertain you” with a cartoon head of lettuce. The goal? Prime students to spot the pun. It backfired into a perfect illustration of two broader lessons that apply far beyond reading: Fluency goes beyond word-calling and prosody—it's also about the fluency of ideas, vocabulary, and real understanding. Outcomes aren't a competition; chasing short-term wins can undermine genuine mastery. Fluency In reading instruction, we often emphasize how smoothly words flow from a student's mouth—rate, accuracy, expression. But we under-discuss the clearest marker of comprehension: real-time emotional responses. A laugh at a pun, a gasp at a twist, or a puzzled frown when something doesn't add up—these are the tells that a reader is truly processing and connecting with the text. Genre knowledge matters too. In a mystery or whodunit, fluent readers adjust tone for foreshadowing or suspense. True fluency integrates decoding, word knowledge, genre conventions, and quick comprehension. This isn't unique to reading. Fluency of ideas—the ability to recall and apply mounds of knowledge fluidly, under pressure, with little time to look things up—is a universal hallmark of expertise. A doctor in the ER doesn't have minutes to Google symptoms; they need instant recall of anatomy, pharmacology, differentials, and protocols to make life-saving calls. That's fluency in medical knowledge. A chef in a busy kitchen doesn't pause to consult recipes mid-service; they fluidly combine ingredients, techniques, flavors, and timing to plate perfect dishes under the heat of the line. That's fluency in culinary craft. An artist doesn't deliberate over every brushstroke in isolation; in flow state, they draw on a deep reservoir of techniques, composition principles, color theory, and intuition to create without hesitation. That's fluency in creative expression. States have experimented with measuring aspects of this in reading. Tennessee came close around 2020 with a foundational literacy fluency component on the TCAP ELA assessment (especially in Grade 2). It was a simple yet powerful timed task: students read short, grade-level statements and quickly marked YES or NO to indicate if each was true. In a minute or so, it gauged decoding speed, basic vocabulary, and instant comprehension—exposing gaps that many elementary programs overlook . See the snippet below: