"Being a principal is like cooking Christmas dinner. Every day."
A fellow principal shared this warning when I began leading an Irish secondary school. Experience has proven the comparison remarkably accurate.
Like Christmas, principals face squabbling siblings—teachers who feel Santa hasn't delivered on their carefully worded requests. There are unexpected guests: Department of Education inspectors who arrive unannounced, forcing you to scrap your entire plan. Yet it's the hardworking elves—the students—who remind me why I took this job.
Every day is the big day in secondary school. The role demands constant shape-shifting: parish priest, counselor, Irish mammy, plumber, PR consultant, financial adviser, doctor.
One colleague keeps a spare white shirt in his office after repeatedly staining his clothes with students' blood from sporting injuries. He once accidentally attended a parent-teacher meeting blood-smeared, feeling caught between a disoriented butcher and Macbeth realizing too late: "I am in blood, stepp'd in so far that ... returning were as tedious as go o'er."
How do principals prepare for this increasingly "vuca" world—volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous?
Some complete leadership courses before taking the role. Many don't—it's not mandatory. The gap between training and reality renders most courses ineffective. It's like studying firefighting in a classroom without ever feeling the heat. No course truly prepares you, just as no parenting class prepares you for actual parenthood.
Both involve cleaning up daily messes distinctly not of your making.
One leadership exam, however, struck me as valuable. It began predictably—questions from the course material, agreed duration. Then it unraveled. Students were suddenly informed of changes mid-exam and handed additional questions to complete within the original timeframe. The principal who shared this story had initially been refused entry to teacher training. He passed that exam and has proven adept at cooking daily Christmas dinners ever since.
How do principals cope with the daily onslaught—Hamlet's "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, a sea of troubles"—that we sometimes choose to fight or endure?
I tried group counseling for principals. It offered little practical help but provided perspective: every principal works in isolation, managing the same magnitude of problems.
The sessions revealed that beyond our individual offices, every principal is a cowboy or girl on a daily Buckaroo horse, ready to buck if one last weight is added.
It made me laugh occasionally—both from release and because, as Beckett observed, "nothing is funnier than unhappiness."
The sessions resembled what I imagine AA meetings feel like.
We met in a high-ceilinged Georgian hotel room in Dublin on stifling summer afternoons, sitting in a circle. Each week, one principal shared a problem. The rest could ask clarifying questions but couldn't—against every trained instinct—offer advice or solutions.
One smiling, grey-haired principal revealed she kept a photo of a donkey on her desk. Why? To remind herself not to "pull the donkey"—some staff members are like broken shopping trolley wheels, pulling you opposite to progress, making forward movement painful.
"Don't pull the donkey!" she beamed.
This sparked discussion about subtle office reminders to stay on course.
Another principal kept prickly cacti on his desk. "Do you like cacti?" someone asked. "No," he replied with an emerging smile. "But it reminds me that even prickly people can have a beautiful flower."
I didn't continue the counseling sessions. But I stopped pulling the donkey uphill.
In Michelle Obama's book Becoming, she argues that asking children what they want to be when they grow up is useless.
The same logic applies to becoming a principal. Obama writes: "I think it's one of the most useless questions an adult can ask a child – what do you want to be when you grow up? As if growing up is finite. As if at some point you become something and that's the end."
Being a principal means never fully becoming, regardless of how many years you serve.
Meanwhile, the best we can do is keep serving Christmas dinner with a grinch-like grin.
- An anonymous principal on the trials, tribulations, exhilarations and frustrations of school life in Ireland