Daniel Bauer: The Remarkable Vision Formula: A Guided School Leader Retreat

[00:01] Announcer:

Welcome to Principal Center Radio, helping you build capacity for instructional leadership. Here's your host, Director of the Principal Center, Dr. Justin Baeder. Welcome, everyone, to Principal Center Radio.

[00:13] Justin Baeder:

I'm your host, Justin Baeder, and I'm honored to welcome back to the program my good friend, Daniel Bauer. Daniel is a principal development and retention expert, a bestselling author of four books, and the host of two of the world's most downloaded podcasts. In 2015, he founded Better Leaders, Better Schools to transform how school leaders experience professional learning by creating the ABCs of powerful professional development. And you probably have heard about the Better Leaders, Better Schools masterminds, as well as Daniel's bestselling book, Mastermind. And we're here today to talk about his latest book, The Remarkable Vision Formula, a guided school leader retreat.

[00:54] Announcer:

And now, our feature presentation.

[00:57] Justin Baeder:

Danny, welcome back to Principal Center Radio.

[00:59] Daniel Bauer: The Remarkable Vision Formula: A Guided School Leader Retreat:

Justin, this is super exciting to be here. You're one of my favorite people, legit, to talk to. I always feel like I walk away from our conversations smarter than when I entered it. Yeah, just thank you for having me.

[01:12] Justin Baeder:

Well, the feeling is mutual and thank you for coming back. I'm interested to talk about this because it's not just a book. It says right on the cover, it is a retreat and a quick look inside reveals why. Talk to us a little bit about the idea of a retreat in a book. And before we get into the contents, how do people use this as a retreat?

[01:29] Daniel Bauer: The Remarkable Vision Formula: A Guided School Leader Retreat:

Yeah, for sure. That's a great question too. Thanks for picking up on the subtitle. So the Remarkable Vision Formula is something that I've taught live, right? Because that's actually my superpower is live experiences. And creating environments where people can dig deep and thrive and in this case, make a great solid plan for the future.

[01:48]

So doing this for people in person or virtually over multiple days and seeing how much they grew, you know, I thought it's a shame that, you know, how do we make an impact at scale? Right. And this book, the last book, the next two coming out are all under this new label, Ruckus Maker Media, which, of course, I founded. But I want to do things that are, of course, making a ruckus out of the box unique. And so, for example, the next run of four books, they're all about 100 pages, right? You could read it on a short flight.

[02:21]

You could read them in about an hour. And really, the way I frame it is like if you give yourself the gift of three to four hours to do deep work, you can legitimately... get the ideas and concepts, and then apply them in that block of time and see a positive result. But back to your original question, like, how is it a retreat?

[02:41]

That's how I framed, you know, the live experiences. And because I published the book, I thought, all right, well, the things that I teach during the live experiences, we'll put that in there. But then what if this book also became a journal? And I just encourage people, take it out to the mountains, take it out to the you know, to the forest, to the lake, to the ocean or whatever. And as you're reading, actually write the vision down right there while you're reading it. And again, you get that result They're kind of a cool thing, too, at the end of the book.

[03:12]

There's three years of annual progress reflection questions. Because to me, you know, I love to say ideas are great, but not the greatest. Well, what's greater than an idea? Taking action. So, yes, you'll be entertained in the book. Yeah, there's good ideas.

[03:26]

But all that really doesn't matter. What matters is how do you put these ideas into practice and create a result for your campus?

[03:34] Justin Baeder:

So people have been through this process in person with you. People can go through this process in person or in some cases online, but you wanted to make it something that people could also do on their own schedule, take with them. Let's talk first about why retreating is so important because we all have nice furniture in our offices. We have chairs and desks. We have kitchen tables. Why is it important to go somewhere else to craft your remarkable vision?

[04:00] Daniel Bauer: The Remarkable Vision Formula: A Guided School Leader Retreat:

I think we get so caught up in the automatic, right? And honestly, if we're not very careful, Justin, we're unaware of why we do what we do, the significance, how it's moving the metaphorical needle and so on and so forth. So to me, retreating is so important is because it gets you out of your element, right? If you like drinking tea or coffee or whatever out of a red mug, what would it be like to use a purple mug today? It might be just a small shift like that. But, you know, we're creatures of habit, right?

[04:35]

There's a certain type of coffee that I make in the morning and all this stuff, right? And there's a rhythm to my day. And that's good a lot of times for processing because we don't want to make all these small decisions within a day, right? We do have a very limited bandwidth of choices we can make. However, when we're dreaming about the future and setting a destination three years out with progress that we would be proud to see on our campus, I think we should break from the routine on those days so we can really open up the mind and open up experience for what is to come.

[05:08] Justin Baeder:

I was thinking about that this summer when we had the opportunity to go out to Yosemite National Park. And I remember I'd been dealing with this kind of thorny problem of how we design a particular feature in our app. and had not really come up with anything that worked for me. And it was the weirdest thing just to be, and honestly, I wasn't alone nearly to the extent I would want to be if I was going through the whole process. But just the aspect of being in a different place and looking up at the mountains at El Capitan and Half Dome, I remember literally I was looking at the top of the mountain when it hit me. Like, this is how we need to solve this problem.

[05:46]

This is how we need to implement this feature. And maybe I could have had that thought at my desk, but it was a whole lot nicer to have it out there and to really experience the power of just being in a different place. So what are some different kind of budget options? If we can't travel around the world to our preferred destination, give us some kind of low, medium and dream budget options for where to go. And then we can get into the retreat itself.

[06:13] Daniel Bauer: The Remarkable Vision Formula: A Guided School Leader Retreat:

Yeah, low would be just get out of your house or your office or your school, right? And go to like local coffee shops, something like that. Medium, I guess, would be a short flight or a decent drive away somewhere you like and get an affordable place. And then dream would be Call me at 312-788-7595. Say, Danny, I want to work with you one-on-one on the vision. And I want to go to the Bahamas while we do it.

[06:39]

And I'll create a package where we do it. And that would be the dream scenario, right? Like we could go somewhere really fun and warm and dream about your three-year remarkable vision for sure.

[06:51] Justin Baeder:

Well, let's get into the vision itself. You know, we think about vision in terms of some sort of school document or even just a slogan. You mean a lot more than that and something quite different, though, by vision. What do you mean by remarkable vision?

[07:05] Daniel Bauer: The Remarkable Vision Formula: A Guided School Leader Retreat:

You know, I was really inspired ages ago. I read a book and came across an idea from Cameron Herald, and he talks about this vivid vision, and he mostly works for profit companies, right? And so I started chewing on that, what I know about school visions and other vision stuff that I've come across over the years, and put in my own creativity, too, and came up with this remarkable vision formula. So in my view, you know, attacking sort of the category of traditional visions, they're just not inspiring. You know, if we're honest, right? I have yet to come across a school vision that stops me in my tracks, that's provocative, that, you know, would be something that would really excite me to get up every day and live out.

[07:52]

In my view, again, this is my opinion. You look at these three to four sentence vision statements. They're all very generic. They're all filled with a bunch of jargon. It sounds like what you think people want to hear, you know, 21st century learning and preparing kids for the future and blah, blah. Oh, yeah.

[08:11]

And don't forget, all means all. Every single kid is going to get it. Right. Cool. How you do that. So with a remarkable vision formula, really what you create is a robust multi-page document that you're not going to memorize.

[08:27]

People are not going to recite this thing at your leadership meeting, and you're not going to be able to read it all to your parents when you gather them. However, it is something that you're super proud to hand out in the main office when you have visitors or post on your website. And because it is so robust, you can sprinkle different parts of the vision into every interaction. Whether that is a parent meeting, teacher observation, feedback, just an impromptu connection in the hallway. And again, it covers a lot of ground. And hopefully, basically, every part of school that touches a stakeholder is discussed in your remarkable vision.

[09:10] Justin Baeder:

So this is not something that is just for yourself. This is something that ultimately is communicated, is made public, but not in a kind of slogan way, not in an overly concise to the point of meaninglessness kind of way.

[09:23] Daniel Bauer: The Remarkable Vision Formula: A Guided School Leader Retreat:

So it is like in three years, what would you be proud of seeing in terms of progress on your campus? And it's a detailed plan, a vivid picture of that reality. And so you're not going to fit it in three to four sentences. One other part of the approach too, I'm sure we'll talk about it, but just a brief note, you know, in this, you see this in all my work, but it always starts with you, the individual, right? So the school part isn't even until the last third of the book. So we talk about what do you want to see in yourself in the next three years?

[09:54]

Then we go to remarkable family too, right? And what do you want to have happen within your family in the next three years? And then we eventually get to the school and that's a very detailed part. But that's also a different approach because to me, you can't pour from an empty cup. It's called self-care, not district care, right? For a reason.

[10:13]

And if you're frustrated with not seeing your kids or missing out on stuff or whatever, Sorry to tell you this truth, but I'm here to tell it to you. You're the only one to blame. Those are your boundaries, right? This is an awesome profession. And there are people who face this very difficult work and still have a life and still get to see their family. I'll never forget one ruckus maker in the mastermind.

[10:38]

She told me that I'm a better mom to my students than to my own children. So I was like, wow, right? You want to talk about that offline, like one-on-one? And we did, and we created a plan and she's turned all that around. But in the moment, you could really hear the pain, right, of her heart. And I think that's the reality of too many school leaders out there.

[10:59]

So that's why the approach matters too.

[11:02] Justin Baeder:

Yeah. To put first things first and get those kind of big picture life priorities in line. You have some great stories about, you know, a couple that met and prior to getting married, they set their vision and they revisit that vision. frequently and keep their overall lives on track as well. Well, Danny, one thing that you encourage people to do pretty early on in the book in chapter two is to think about kind of the flow of their life. If you make a chart of each year and each week of your life and kind of see where you are in the overall arc of your life, it can be sobering and it can be maybe discouraging in a way, but it can also be very eye opening and very liberating to kind of see, okay, maybe if I'm, you know, in my mid 40s, maybe about, you know, halfway through my life, or about halfway through this year, What do I want to do with the time that is given to me knowing that it's not infinite?

[11:53]

And you talk about the Dream 100 list. Tell us about that idea.

[11:56] Daniel Bauer: The Remarkable Vision Formula: A Guided School Leader Retreat:

Yeah, so that graph and that image, you know, I paid for that so I could use it in the book. It comes from a really awesome blog called Wait But Why. And Tim Urban is the one who started that. He writes very detailed, in-depth posts that are super interesting. But I'll never forget seeing that chart for the first time. And essentially it is, it's the average American life, just a graph of years and weeks.

[12:21]

And on his website, not in the book, but he might show like, here's where Beethoven was or Kurt Cobain, or you know what I mean? Like all different sort of people that you might be familiar with. And it is sobering, right? People are either going to love me or hate me for using that image, but But, you know, to be honest, I really like reflecting on my finitude and mortality because it is a gift today, right? To speak with you, Justin, and to serve listeners of Principal Center Radio. In this time, we're not going to get back.

[12:56]

All we have is right now. So I'm very intentional about how I choose to use my time. And that's aligned with creating a vision for the next three years. You mentioned the Dream 100. The Dream 100 is a part. Now, the great thing is it's for you, the reader, you, the ruckus maker.

[13:16]

And it's also for your staff. Let me explain. So it's like, I think, 20 categories, if I remember correctly, I wrote down. And they're just like anything, you know, and I tell people this when I do workshops. Rule number one, don't believe a single word I say. And why do I say that?

[13:35]

Because it's just my perspective. Yes, it's worked for me, what I teach. Yes, it's worked for hundreds, thousands of school leaders that I've supported. But I don't know if it'll work for you. You got to try it out and see if you get a result. So anyways, this is a list of 20 categories about life from adventure to health goals, family goals, financial goals, and everything in between.

[13:57]

And essentially, if you wrote five dreams per category, you'd have 100 dreams that should be exciting for you and motivating to achieve over the years, right? So that's super cool and hopefully something that you do in your remarkable life. How does this relate to your staff, Danny? Well, I would assert that if you know the dreams, hopes, and aspirations of your staff, and you check in on how progress is going towards those things, and maybe you even help people move along in that direction, they're probably going to like really have a lot of positive feelings and trust, right? With you as a leader that cares about where they're going, right? And so, you know, One example would be, at least in the context of how I serve school leaders in the mastermind, I remember when we did the Dream 100 activity, there was a principal, veteran, who wanted to mentor a novice principal.

[14:56]

And she was telling me, right, put it under Dream 100, wow, I don't even know how to go find a mentee, right? Well, lucky for you, I know quite a few principals. So I remember this was years ago. I put out an application. kind of described the gist, said it's free mentorship from a really highly effective principal. Who's in?

[15:16]

A bunch of people filled out the app, gave the results to the person we're talking about. She read through them, identified who her top mentee was, reached out, and they built a really beautiful, strong relationship. And the cool thing, too, was a few years later, that mentee ended up joining the mastermind as well because of the mentors, you know, just... great pouring into her life and helping her develop.

[15:41]

So yeah, it's a tool for you and exciting. It'd be great to do a family, but you could do it actually with staff too, if you're open to that.

[15:48] Justin Baeder:

Love it. I love it. And that's the kind of thing that we feel a resistance to doing because it feels like it's not student centered enough to think about ourselves. Like we, we even, we actively resist, you know, and you even talk in the book about people who realized, you know, they were maybe sacrificing their own families in order to prioritize students and Help us make a student-centered rationale for this work that on its surface is a step or two removed from students. How does this help us serve students better in the long run?

[16:18] Daniel Bauer: The Remarkable Vision Formula: A Guided School Leader Retreat:

Well, there's this story of a CEO who really put a lot of resources into training his staff, right? And one of the other CEO buddies of his said, why are you doing that? Aren't you afraid you're going to pour so much time and resources in terms of money too? into these people and they leave. And the guy responded, no, I'm more afraid if I don't do that and they stay. So my view is by creating those strong relationships, that strong culture, helping people feel fulfilled, right, and excited about their lives is only going to impact the classroom and ultimately students in a positive way, right?

[17:00]

You can't argue the opposite, that somebody less fulfilled is going to out-teach somebody who is fulfilled in life. So that's To me, that's how I see it. Very well said.

[17:11] Justin Baeder:

The better shape we're in, the better results we're going to get for students.

[17:15] Daniel Bauer: The Remarkable Vision Formula: A Guided School Leader Retreat:

Yeah. I don't have data, right? It's just my gut. But I've learned to trust my gut. And as a 3393 Colby assessment guy, my gut I've learned is like a superpower of mine. So, you know, my mind is always evolving.

[17:29]

And obviously, you know, I think as a leader, I think folks should reserve the right to change their mind as data comes in and their learning grows and perspectives change. And I've been thinking a lot about how we serve school leaders and that kind of thing and why the Remarkable Vision formula works. And it works, I believe, partly because it is robust and all that. But at the fundamental level, it's new and it's different. There's not many schools doing this kind of work. And it's a great way to actually differentiate yourself when we're competing, right, for students, for staff, for other resources as well.

[18:10]

And, you know, I've been thinking about these days why many schools might fail. I believe that many schools think they fail because they have a people problem. That's what they think. But they're wrong. The problem isn't actually your people, even if your staff is ineffective in some ways. I think the real root issue that challenges and makes schools struggle is the paradigm that the people exist in.

[18:42]

And so that's why we're trying to do school different. And how we do that one way is a remarkable vision, right? From a three to four vision statement to a remarkable vision formula that's a multi-page document. or taking talent treadmills, right? That many school districts feel like they're on. And how do we turn those into talent incubators?

[19:02]

I've done that before in the past. I'll do it again in the future. Schools these days often are very analog, you know, in terms of how they are set up in an analog place. I think schools of the future will be analog and digital spaces, right? Like more and more so. There's some doing that, some less so.

[19:20]

There's sometimes schools that are, I think imparting knowledge versus co-creating wisdom, right? So back in the day, like when I defined what does it mean to be a ruckus maker, I had a much longer answer. And now I just say it's you do school different, like creating a remarkable vision formula. So I think it's a robust answer to a paradigm challenge, right? And if you want to dream big about what school could be, this is a great way to approach that.

[19:50] Justin Baeder:

Dan, you tell a story in the book about one of your mastermind members who took a job out of state, moved across the country to lead a school that was new to him and found out after he got there that it had been misrepresented to him and it was being kind of used as a dumping ground or as an alternative placement when that was not what he was told. Talk to us a little bit about what he did to respond to that situation in a productive way and where he took that, because I think that's such a cool story.

[20:18] Daniel Bauer: The Remarkable Vision Formula: A Guided School Leader Retreat:

Well, Joe's an interesting guy. I love him so much. And yeah, I mean, the goods that he was sold was a really innovative, exciting place to be. And he finds out it is the dumping ground and it wasn't even accredited. Right. So it might not have many, many days left.

[20:34]

Right. For having the doors open. Um, I mean, the first thing he did, a lot of leaders might do this, but he really evaluated, do we have the right staff? You know what I mean? And that was a hard decision to make, but he had to build his own team. So that was something he did.

[20:48]

But more important than that, he wanted the school to have a very real vision for the future. And, you know, it was this supposed to be a charter school that was focused on architecture, construction, and engineering, you know, very hands-on. very real world experiences. But at the time you didn't really see that right on campus. What's wrong with this picture? So when he was making those hiring decisions and designing curriculum, this needs to be, you know, very focused on real world, you know, problems that kids are solving through project-based learning and skill sets, you know, that they can use tomorrow.

[21:26]

These days, his school, uh, he's no longer the principal, but, um, His school, kids actually graduate. They're in California, but they're entering the workforce, 60K, 75K jobs, right? And I've visited the campus numerous times. Joe and his AP were in the mastermind. Now he's moved on. His principal's in the mastermind.

[21:47]

But anyways, a long story short, the kids have built everything there besides the foundation of the school. So the school that Joe got when he was first there, that was there. Everything else. And it's tremendously expanded. And there's some really cool stuff they're doing. The kids have built everything.

[22:03]

That's what we're talking about, right? Like that was his vision for his school. And another lesson there, and I don't think I talk about this enough in the book, if at all. But I think schools make a mistake when they try to be everything to everyone. Right. Here's a leader saying we're going to go all in on this architecture, construction, engineering stuff.

[22:24]

And that's what we're going to be great at. And that's what they are great at. Right. So now they're making a name for themselves. They were the first school to have some type of the IB program, you know, connected to. architecture, construction, engineering.

[22:38]

I don't remember the exact title, but these were things that they did and things that they're super excited about. And that staff that he hired, they're still there, right? And thriving. So that's another side effect or good consequence of the remarkable vision formula. When you have something that inspiring, you keep your great teachers, right? You get more and more students.

[22:59]

You don't have the enrollment issues, you know, because it's an exciting place to be. Folks clearly know where you're headed, and they decide, like, I want to be a part of this or not, versus a rudderless ship. You know, who knows where you're going? You might just end up there.

[23:13] Justin Baeder:

And I love that story of kind of the sustainability that, you know, those changes outlast a leader. And I think we see that a lot when a leader has really put the people in place and put the systems in place and put the culture in place. That leader doesn't have to personally – Steer that ship throughout the rest of time, right? That leader can move on because the leader is no longer essential to what's happening. And we maybe are afraid of working our way out of a job or of not being so needed. We get used to being needed and used to fighting fires that it can be even threatening to think about how to get to that point.

[23:50] Daniel Bauer: The Remarkable Vision Formula: A Guided School Leader Retreat:

Well, how cool if you become known for the person who takes over a campus and aligns everybody with an exciting vision for the future. You're going to have so much opportunity as a school leader, right? You'll have more jobs, opportunities than you can actually take on, right? And there's definitely people who are starters, people who come in in the middle, right, and are executors, and then the finishers, the closers. You see that in sports, you know, if you want to use an analogy. But that's a really interesting thing that you brought up, and I'm glad you added it to the conversation.

[24:22] Justin Baeder:

That's a great metaphor, thinking about, you know, like special teams and the kickers and all the different roles that people play with it. And I feel like people need permission. I think one thing that your book does for people is it gives them permission to think about something other than what currently exists. You know, my life is the way it is now. It doesn't have to be that way. I have the job I have now.

[24:43]

But that job can change. I can remake my school, my job in various ways. I can envision myself in a different role. And I think there's so much power and potential there. Well, Danny, toward the end of the book, you get very specific about communicating and implementing the vision. And we've been talking about how traditional school visions, you know, a slogan or a one sentence phrase that has a bunch of buzzwords, you know, like that tends to be a process that where the committee spends too long on it and everybody's just ready to get it over with.

[25:15]

And you end up with something that offends nobody, but inspires nobody either. It's just a kind of a collection of buzzwords. So we've all seen that process of collaboration on a vision not really work. And it's interesting to think about the idea of retreating and developing a vision for yourself, for your family, for your life and for your school, and then coming back and engaging with your staff and with your community to refine that vision, to roll out that vision, to execute that vision. What does that look like? And how is that even possible if we're doing a lot of the thinking for it in a retreat, right?

[25:50]

If I run away to Yosemite National Park and come up with a vision- Or the Bahamas with Danny. Or the Bahamas with Danny, yeah. My staff didn't come with me. How do we make that a shared vision? And what does that look like a little bit?

[26:05] Daniel Bauer: The Remarkable Vision Formula: A Guided School Leader Retreat:

You know, educators are so nice. They have such big hearts, which helps them serve. And it's also their greatest weakness, you know, because it's like death by committee so often within a school. And like you said, you come up with this thing that inspires nobody and offends nobody. And then it's utterly useless. And you wasted a lot of time that you could be focused on student outcomes, right?

[26:29]

So that's the great irony there. My view is you're hired to lead. You're a principal. So lead, right? What people...

[26:38]

My mistake here is to say that, oh, you come up with the vision and then you come down from the mountaintop. It's written in stone and it can't change. Nothing could be further from the truth. My point is you've been hired to lead, so lead. Get out of your normal routine, retreat, and you craft a draft of where you think the school can go because you are the chief vision officer of your school. And once you have that robust draft, Then you just start going out into larger and larger concentric circles, right?

[27:11]

I call it the concentric circle method. But you might meet with the leadership team first, right? Then go to department heads and grade level chairs. Then the rest of teachers and the school staff and ultimately parents and all your stakeholders. But again, I'm a truth teller. Like not everybody on your staff wants to be a part of this process, right?

[27:33]

And we all have different strengths. You know, I mentioned I'm a three, three, nine, three Colby. That nine is under what's called quick start, which means my superpower is to take risks and be a visionary and inspire people. Right. Knowing that you would want somebody like me on the vision crafting team. There's other people that are stronger at finding facts and following through and building models.

[27:59]

Right. And stuff like that. I'm terrible at those things. Right. So you also have to know the strengths and weaknesses of your staff. And to me, it's not about, you know, drowning out any voices.

[28:11]

You over communicate. This is a draft. What have I missed? What do you see that I don't see? And then you take that feedback and you revise and bring it, represent and say, okay, do I got it? And once people say, yep, you got it, then you're in a good place.

[28:26]

You're not going to please everybody. You want to make sure that you hear everyone. But at the end of the day, you are the principal. So lead, especially if you got bigger staff too, like how are you going to do that process with that? It's just going to be a waste of time, honestly. And I think, To be really candid with you, I think your higher performing teachers will thank you for that because you're not wasting their time over discussion with a teacher over here that maybe should retire 10 years ago or something.

[28:55]

So that's another issue. But yeah, that's what I think in terms of communicating it. And there's a line that I share from the former CEO of LinkedIn, Jeff Weiner. that always hit home with me, and I memorized what he said. And the gist is this, people don't begin to hear you until you're sick of saying it, right? And I'm sorry, but school leaders need to dig in.

[29:20]

If they're really committed to the vision, you need to say it until you're sick, right? You need to say it until you're green in the face, because honestly, people have not heard you yet.

[29:32] Justin Baeder:

Well, I appreciate the way that you're challenging a lot of longstanding... norms that may go against our best interests and our students' best interests. You know, the idea that everything has to be, you know, least common denominator collaborative. We have to have an endless committee meeting to come up with something good.

[29:49]

Another norm that I think is going to be hard for some of us is to actually write in the book, but this is a write in it. I mean, you could write in a separate journal or something too, but like, but you designed this book so that people could actually write in the pages, correct?

[30:02] Daniel Bauer: The Remarkable Vision Formula: A Guided School Leader Retreat:

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, there's plenty of space to craft the vision in there. My dream too is like then in three more years, because there's those progress reflection questions. So I guess in year four, we're ready to do it again, buy it again, write in it again, right? And that would be really helpful, I think. I thought about putting it together in a journal form, but just in terms of like printing and all that kind of stuff, the best decision was to make it look like a book with the journal inside.

[30:28]

But yes, it's okay. You know, listen, I'm a former English teacher. I taught students to annotate. I write all over my books myself. That's having a conversation with the author. You're making meaning, right?

[30:42]

It's not me just talking at you. You're thinking with me and having a conversation. So Chief Ruckus Maker Danny Bauer says, write in the book. I wrote it. I give you permission, right? And if I find out you're not writing in the book and Justin tells me, you're in trouble.

[30:58]

Big, big trouble.

[31:00] Justin Baeder:

Well, and that's hard for me. If I see somebody mistreat a library book, that gets my hackles up. I'm still kind of offended by that. But yeah, this is your book. People are buying their own copy. They can fill it up.

[31:11]

And I love what you said about revisiting it every year. And I love that there's a whole section for three years of annual reviews on those goals. Maybe we could close with that. Tell us why it's so important to come back to this over a long period of time? Because we tend to like, you know, do this kind of stuff and then never look back. Why do we need to look back?

[31:29] Daniel Bauer: The Remarkable Vision Formula: A Guided School Leader Retreat:

To me, it's like, where are you headed? You're identifying, you're taking the work to read this book, to dream about this big future, you know, that should be exciting to you. And then again, ideas are great, but not the greatest. Hopefully you're taking action on actually implementing it. And do you have any sort of scorecard to say, yes, I'm happy with where things are going? Or are there changes that need to be made and adjustments that need to be made?

[31:54]

And so that's what the reflection questions are all there is just to challenge you to say, all right, yep, we are on course or we're off course. Let's get back on. You know, I don't know how you set up your goals and would love to learn from you and that kind of thing. But, you know, quarterly I have about five objectives, main goals that I'm trying to achieve. And then I measure that in key results. I use a thing called objectives and key results.

[32:19]

OK, ours. But long story short, you know, Literally every morning, I open them up just to remind myself, here's what I said is important, what I'm trying to achieve in the next 90 days, and what are the critical actions I need to take today towards those goals, and am I making progress, right? I think the last thing with looking back, Justin, is that it actually fills you with a lot of positive energy and gratitude. Dan Sullivan is one of my coaches. I'm in a program called the Strategic Coach. But he has this concept that is one of his best called the gap in the game, right?

[32:50]

So here's the thing. You do the remarkable vision formula, you have a three-year super exciting goal, and now we've just created a problem. You know what the problem is? There's a huge gap, right, between where you are now, where you want to be. And for high achievers like me, I don't know if you could relate, I actually feel crummy about myself right in that moment because I see how much – You know, distance needs to be covered. So the trick is to change perspectives, to look backward, to reflect on the things that you've accomplished.

[33:22]

And then you're like, OK, yeah, we've done it before. We'll do it again. It just fills you with so much gratitude and momentum. Wow, man, that hits me hard as someone who, you know, like that.

[33:33] Justin Baeder:

Recognizing the gain, too, I think is hard for a lot of us because we work so hard to achieve a goal. You work so hard to become a principal or finish a degree. And I personally am one of those people who took the maximum amount of time to finish my degree I was allowed to. And my faculty members were like, hey, we're retiring. And in the moment, you feel like things are taking forever. but if you look back you realize wow i actually need to set some new goals i actually need to celebrate and build on the progress that i've made because you know you might not feel that progress in the moment in the long you know like i did not feel like i was making a lot of progress in the 10 years it took me to to finish grad school but you know looking back okay now i have to think about what is next and that past experience is proof that I can do things that take a long time and that are hard.

[34:26]

And I need to continue to challenge myself with what's next and not just, you know, treat each day like it's, you know, one in a Groundhog Day series of, you know what I mean? I feel like so much as school leaders, so much is cyclical and so much feels outside of our control, right? Like every day, you're going to have some emails to answer. You're going to have some students who act up a little bit. You're going to have some parents who are angry. Like we can pretty much predict the things that are going to happen every day.

[34:51]

And then of course we have the same cycle over the course of the year. How can we look at the arc of our lives and the trajectory of our schools in a different way with that vision, bringing things to life a little bit differently, if that makes sense. You know what I mean?

[35:09] Daniel Bauer: The Remarkable Vision Formula: A Guided School Leader Retreat:

Cause like, you know, to me, like, again, we're trying to build something that's exciting, right. And, and motivating and inspiring and nothing could be worse than again, floating through automatically the same day over and over. Like, I don't know the way I'm built. I just couldn't, I couldn't do it. Right. So if you want, if you could use a bit of a different future and to add some excitement, and energy to your position.

[35:33]

I think the remarkable vision formula is a great approach to that. And, you know, you, in terms of how does that actually look in the day to day, you're right, you could kind of predict what's going to roll out. And so if you just added a little block of time, that was open, and it was about remarkable vision stuff. How would you maximize that block of time? What might be the gift for your campus if you actually took action on that stuff, right? There's other people that can support you in the operational aspects of the building, right?

[36:10]

And I don't know that principals are necessarily using their teams maximally. so that they could focus on what they can only do. And when it comes to vision and strategy and moving the school to a more ideal future, that is on you. That's on your shoulders. And if you're not crafting and protecting time for that, Ah, that just really scares me, to be honest.

[36:37] Justin Baeder:

And that reminds me, people probably want to hear more from you after this episode. Of course, we'll refer them to the book, The Remarkable Vision Formula, A Guided School Leader Retreat. Tell us about your podcast, though, because you're a huge podcaster and people can definitely connect with you that way as well.

[36:53] Daniel Bauer: The Remarkable Vision Formula: A Guided School Leader Retreat:

Thanks, Justin. That podcast changed my life starting in 2015. And I think you were around at that time and Jethro and not many other people, right? There weren't too many shows out back then. And if you fast forward, you know, just over eight years these days, you know, there's over two million downloads. And I found out that the show ranks in the top point five percent of all shows worldwide.

[37:13]

Right. So it's a weekly conversation with somebody smarter than me like you. And I just pick their brains to try to learn. Right. Stories of success and failure. And most importantly, you know, how can we take action on an idea that is taught?

[37:26]

And again, ruckus makers are about doing school different. And so how can we help design the future of school now? How can we challenge the status quo? And those are the kind of conversations that excite me. So check out the podcast, betterleadersbetterschools.com is the website.

[37:43]

I've already given you my number, but again, Bahamas Trip is calling you. So 312-788-7595. That's really my number. And we could talk about like how to do something fun like that. You think I'm joking, but I'm not. And that would be super cool.

[37:58]

So those are all the great places to connect. And, you know, from there, I'm sure there'll be other ways to figure out, you know, if you get another book or whatever. One note on the book too, Justin, like if you want it cheaper, go to Amazon or Target or something, Barnes and Noble, whatever. You could get it for like 15 bucks. But I put together a really, I think, valuable bundle on my website. And this is just an experiment, but people are enjoying it.

[38:22]

So you get the e-book, the print book, the audio book. And the last time I taught this live in a virtual setting, I recorded it. So you get just over five or six hours of coaching content on the Remarkable Vision Formula. You get that all for just one price. It's 37 bucks. So I think that's a steal because if you went and got the book and audio book by itself, it would be more and you don't get the recorded coaching.

[38:44]

So just putting it out there in case somebody wants to take advantage.

[38:48] Justin Baeder:

So again, the book is The Remarkable Vision Formula, A Guided School Leader Retreat. Daniel Bauer, thank you so much for joining me on Principal Center Radio. It's been a pleasure as always. Justin, thank you. This is always the best.

[39:00] Announcer:

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