The holiday decorations are coming down, the page is turned on the calendar, and reality is setting in. You're standing at the threshold of January with months of school stretching ahead, and you can already feel that subtle shift in the building's energy. Although there’s a refreshing start to the calendar year, you quickly notice your teachers are tired. You're tired. The Sunday-night jitters are no joke. And the finish line feels impossibly far away.
Here's what no one tells you about principal burnout: you'll see it coming in your staff long before you recognize it in yourself. You'll notice their exhaustion, their shortened fuses, their thousand-yard stares in faculty meetings. But your own depletion? That creeps up quietly while you're too busy taking care of everyone else.
This is the moment that separates good principals from great ones, and the moment when you need to save yourself first.
Choose Your Focus
Here's an uncomfortable truth: you cannot do everything, and trying to do so is burning you out along with your staff.
Take an honest inventory right now. Review the initiatives you launched in the early months of school this year. How many are genuinely moving the needle? How many have you lying awake at 2 AM, wondering how you'll keep all the plates spinning?
This is your opportunity to prune, not just for your staff, but for yourself. Be bold here. Choose 2-3 priorities that truly matter, and give yourself permission to let other things go. That’s right, let’s read that again: give yourself permission to let other things go. Every initiative you try to sustain is drawing from your finite reservoir of energy, decision-making capacity, and emotional bandwidth.
Share this focus with your staff explicitly: "Here's what we're concentrating on between now and June. Everything else is secondary." Don’t sabotage it with a list of more than 2 things. When you say this out loud, you're not just giving them relief, you're also permitting yourself to stop carrying everything.
Protect the Rhythm
Burnout doesn't happen because of one overwhelming week. It happens when there's no recovery built into the system. And principals? You have the worst recovery ratio of anyone in the building.
Look at your calendar for February through the end of the school year. You're probably seeing back-to-back meetings, observations, parent conferences, district check-ins, and community events all pulling at your bandwidth.
Here's your challenge: build in release valves for your staff and yourself. Create a "no-meeting day" each month. But also block time on your calendar that's non-negotiable. Pending any true emergencies, protect this time when your door is closed, your administrative assistant knows not to forward calls, and you can actually think, plan, or just breathe. It doesn’t have to be long. Start with 10 or 15 minutes. Your staff doesn't need you to be a martyr. They need you to be present, grounded, and sustainable.
You Can't Lead from Empty
By February, purpose gets buried under compliance deadlines and discipline referrals. You probably remember why you became an educator. Do you remember why you became a principal? Your staff is watching you. When you're frantic, they absorb that energy. When you're sending emails at 10 PM, you're teaching them that this job requires sacrificing everything. When you skip lunch to handle the crisis du jour, you're modeling that self-care is optional.
What does groundedness look like for you? Leaving by 5 PM twice a week? Not checking email on Sundays? Actually eating a lunch that’s not a cup of coffee? A weekly walk around the building that's just for you, not for observation or visibility?
Choose one practice that would help you stay centered, and commit to it as if your effectiveness depends on it…because it does. You cannot pour from an empty cup, and you cannot lead a building through the marathon of the second half if you're running on fumes.
The Invitation
The second half of the school year will happen whether you approach it with intentionality or not. Your staff will either finish the school year depleted or challenged but sustained. And so will you. Choose focus over frenzy. Choose protection over perfection.
Your building is watching.
