Summary

[00:00:00] Dr. Stacey Gonzales: Welcome to today's Build in Public podcast. I'm Stacy Gonzalez, and I'm currently building two businesses simultaneously, which is not recommended for most people. However, I tend to not be most people, and so today is Friday. and it is the end of a long work week and there's been much progress made, um, in both of the businesses. But for me this week, the focus really was on the education work that I'm doing on the growth path. And that work is work to support our school leaders work to help. Um, those on the front lines, leading public education in brave, bold, and innovative ways. One of the things that I'm learning for myself through this work is that it is requiring of me to be brave, bold. And a new leader in a new way. You see, I spent 20 years inside of public education working my way up from a classroom teacher into the highest offices in some of the largest school districts in Illinois. And. While I had a really good ability to understand the nuance of education from a headspace, um, just an and, and a good ability to multitask and, and project manage and lead teams and people, and I did that at a great personal cost. To myself. And so now what's really cool is I've got myself, Renee, and John. John is the founder of the Growth Path. He's been working with corporate leaders and corporate teams on this growth path, and Renee and I have partnered with him. to bring the growth path to the education space. And the interesting thing about education is once you build a solution that is quality, that begins to have a little bit of momentum behind it. Doors. Doors begin to open. And this week I had just some really interesting doors open. And through those, through those meetings and conversations, it illuminated a bunch of things for me. But one thing that I did not anticipate was some of the missteps that I took as a new founder. Someone trying to build an entire company. And that misstep, that miscalculation was in the area of my integrity. And I have a very, I have three core values, trust, communication, and integrity. And I violated my own integrity, um, between John Renee and I. And as a result of that, I needed to, for myself and for the team, um, have some conversations with them and own, own the fact that I lacked integrity in a decision and a choice that I had made. And in the past, well, first in the past, I probably would've not even have done anything about it. I would've let it go. I would've swept it under the rug and been like, oh, it's fine. It's fine. But instead, I thought about the situation, um, reflected and knew we had this important meeting today at 10 o'clock. Um, or I can't remember what time exactly, but we had an important meeting. So half an hour before the meeting we were gonna pre-game about the meeting and I knew that I had to out myself and open myself up to sharing my misstep, make no excuses about it, and allow myself to just share that with the team. And it was so interesting cause I spent a lot of time and got some insights from my coach on how to approach this. And at the end of the day, once I actually met with the team and shared what I shared, they were like, oh, okay. I mean, it was, it was almost as if, um, they got it. They got it and they made the space for me. It was safe for me. And that was that. And the lesson for me is, and then things, things just naturally opened up, um, from that point on for the rest of my day. And it really reminded me that this whole. Business opportunity. Um, and the opportunities that I'm creating with these two businesses, is my work, my leadership, my life, my hope to have a, a restart. A new way of being, a new way of, of thinking. Um, a new way of moving forward as, as a leader. in ways that I couldn't do before because I was so busy and I was running in a a million different directions. And even if I wanted to be this kind of a leader as an educator, I, I didn't have the capacity to do it. I didn't have the awareness, I didn't have the insights. And so what I appreciate most about this opportunity, Is in these early stages, what building these businesses is doing. For me personally as a human, I am a better person who has greater integrity as a result of this work. So if you are joining me on the growth path, I invite you to self-reflect with me. I'm using this, uh, podcast as an exploration. As an experiment and I invite you to to join in with me. So thank you. Thank you for listening and being here on this Building Public podcast.