The Children Are Waiting

August 2026 - Courageous Leadership Series

"The children are waiting. Your team is ready. Your courage is calling." Dr. Kim Morrison wrote those words for our upcoming book, Courageous Leadership: It's Not What You Think. They land differently in August than they will any other month. Right now, somewhere, a classroom is being set up. Schedules are being reviewed. A leader is walking empty hallways one more time before they fill with noise and motion and need.

The children waiting for you don't know your years of experience or the to-do list on your desk. What they know, almost immediately and without being told, is whether the adults around them are truly paying attention — whether someone will notice if today is different from yesterday. Educator Sean Gaillard captured this with a question so ordinary it's easy to walk past: "How are you, really?" He calls it a leadership riff — a small, repeatable move that, played consistently, opens the door to connection, trust, and belonging. A check-in, offered honestly and received with patience, can do more for a struggling student or an exhausted teacher than any program you'll roll out this fall.

That's the strange thing about mattering. It rarely announces itself. It shows up in a hallway greeting that lingers half a second longer than necessary, in a leader who asks a follow-up question instead of accepting the automatic "fine," in the decision to sit with someone's real answer instead of rushing past it toward the next task on your list. Your team already senses this. They're ready, not because every system is polished or every problem from last year has been resolved, but because readiness in this profession was never about certainty. It's about people willing to show up and figure things out together, which is a different kind of preparation than the one most strategic plans measure.

Which brings us to courage, the third piece of Dr. Morrison's line, and the one leaders most often postpone. It's tempting to imagine courage as something reserved for the dramatic moment — the crisis, the impossible decision, the public reckoning. But courage this early in the year looks almost invisible. It's asking a colleague how they're really doing and staying present for whatever answer arrives, even an uncomfortable one. It's naming a concern in week two rather than waiting until it hardens into a pattern by week twenty. Small, unremarkable acts, repeated often enough, become the culture everyone eventually lives inside.

You've walked into an August before. You know how quickly the hope of a fresh start can curdle into the same exhaustion you were carrying in May, if you let the year run you instead of the other way around. So, this time, before the halls fill and the calendar takes over, ask the real question of the people around you, and let their answers change how you lead. The children are waiting for someone who notices. Your team is ready to be asked, honestly, how they're doing. And your courage doesn't need a crisis to show up — it just needs you to say the sentence and mean it.

"The children are waiting. Your team is ready. Your courage is calling."

 — Dr. Kim Morrison, Courageous Leadership: It's Not What You Think

“Sometimes mattering begins with one simple question:  How are you, really? A check-in can open the door to connection, trust, and belonging. That is the leadership riff.”

— Sean Gaillard