The Mirror We Carry

What if the leaders we become are shaped, in part, by the people willing to reflect us with honesty, care, and courage? 

In this episode, Don reflects on the power of being mirrored in relationships that call us forward and is joined by Dr. Ruth Kermish, Executive Director of the Maine Math and Science Alliance, for a rich conversation about leadership, learning, and creating the conditions where people can grow. Together, they explore how trust, reflection, and the right environment help shape both strong leaders and confident learners. 

To learn more about Don's work, upcoming offerings, and leadership resources, visit carpentercompanyconsulting.com

 If something in today’s episode spoke to you, I hope you’ll subscribe and continue the journey with me — because leadership begins within. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:12

Welcome to Meditations on Leadership. I'm Don Carpenter. Let me ask you: who has helped you see yourself more clearly? Who has spoken truth into your life in a way that did not crush you, but called you forward? And what happens to our leadership when we learn not to fear that kind of mirror, but to welcome it? Those questions bring us into one of the more humbling realities of leadership, that we often grow through the people willing to reflect us honestly, not just through affirmation, but through relationships that help us see where we are still being formed, where we need to soften, and where we are being invited to grow. That is the heart of this podcast. And each week begins with a meditation, followed by a reflection, and then a conversation with somebody I admire. And all in the service of the inner formation leadership asks of us. And today I get to explore all of this with my guest, Dr. Ruth Kermish. Ruth is the executive director of the Maine Math and Science Alliance, a nonprofit committed to expanding equitable access to STEM learning for all students through research, innovation, and high-quality professional development for educators. Ruth and her team are helping create the kind of learning environments where young people can grow in confidence, deepen their curiosity, and develop the skills to take on environmental and social challenges they care most about. I first got to know Ruth many years ago during her time as education director at the Island Institute in Rockland, Maine. We were both working to build stronger partnerships between schools and out-of-school time initiatives to better serve young people in the Mid Coast. And we hit it off right away. Her love for education was contagious, and her deep desire to create environments where youth could truly grow and learn was right up my alley. She brought both vision and heart to that work, and I've admired her ever since. Before leading the Maine Math and Science Alliance, Ruth spent more than a decade helping advance education in coastal Maine. And earlier in her career, she taught high school science and math. Across her 25-year career, she's helped bring more than$20 million in STEM education research funding to benefit Maine students and teachers. She currently serves on the governor's artificial intelligence task force and has also contributed her experience to the National Science Foundation, the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine, and the Governor's Permanent Commission for the Status of Women in Maine. Ruth lives in Camden, Maine, where she is raising two amazing teenage daughters. Ruth, welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_01 3:30

Thank you so much, Don. It's an absolute honor to be here with you and to connect with you again.

SPEAKER_00 3:35

I know it's I think it's been 15 years or somewhere thereabouts since we've run into each other.

SPEAKER_01 3:40

So too long. So this is a fantastic opportunity.

SPEAKER_00 3:44

Well, I'm looking forward to it. And uh, I guess before we jump into our conversation, let me share from Meditation Seven from my forthcoming book. The title is The Mirror We Carry. And it's a theme that Ruth picked for our conversation today. The quote I wrote down in the journal months ago was this. It's from Richard Rohr. I mentioned him on the last episode of the podcast, and he wrote a book called Falling Forward. And his quote was this we can normally mirror to the degree we have been mirrored. We can normally mirror to the degree we have been mirrored. One of the most humbling truths I've learned in leadership is this we cannot offer others a depth of reflection. We have not first received ourselves. For much of my early life in leadership, honest feedback was hard for me to receive. Not because I rejected it, but because I was carrying such a fierce inner standard. I lived with a quiet pressure to stay above reproach, to get it right, to be good enough before anyone had to tell me otherwise. So when critique came, even gently, it did not feel like guidance. Honestly, it felt like exposure. Like something in me had been found out. At times it felt earth-shattering. But over time, I began to understand that honest feedback is not the same as condemnation. It is not destruction, it is refinement. It is one of the ways we are shaped into people who can lead with greater truth, humility, and freedom. What changed for me was not simply learning to quote take feedback better. It was coming to believe that I was still being formed. That leadership is not a finished state we achieve, but an ongoing process of becoming. I did not need to protect an image of myself as fully formed. I needed to remain open to growth. And I could not do that alone. Over the years, I came to rely on what I think of as a challenge team, a circle of people with the courage to love me honestly. Sometimes that looked like my monthly men's group gathered around a meal and a real conversation. Sometimes it was a trusted therapist, sometimes elder mentors who asked hard questions without apology. Sometimes close friends and family members who knew when to affirm me and when to confront me. Not of them trying to fix me, but they reflected me. They helped me see what I could not always see on my own, not to shame me, but to free me. And in being mirrored with honesty and care, I slowly became more able to offer that same kind of presence and reflection to others. We live in a time when many leaders avoid the mirror. Critique is treated like threat. Image management replaces self-examination. Public personas are polished to look strong while the inner life remains untouched. But real leadership requires another kind of courage. It asks us to let ourselves be seen, to welcome truth, even when it unsettles us, to trust that being confronted is not the end of leadership, but often the beginning of a deeper style of leadership. Because the mirror does does more than show us what we've done. It reveals who we are becoming. And about eight years into my tenure as the founding executive director of Trekkers, I found myself feeling increasingly isolated in the role. And if I'm honest, a bit stagnant in my own growth as a leader. Part of that was simply the pace. My days were full and the work was demanding. But part of it was something deeper. I hadn't made a real commitment to my own professional development. Maybe because I was too busy, maybe because underneath that I was afraid that of what might happen if I opened up the hood and let other people take a look inside. Afraid they might see that I wasn't leading at the level I hoped I was. Afraid the gap between who I wanted to be and who I actually was might become visible. So I started looking for ways to grow, the same way I had done years earlier when I was learning on the front lines as a youth worker. That's when I came across a program called Paddling the Rapids. It brought together eight executive directors from across the state of organizations of all sizes. And one day a month for eight months, we would meet. And what I found there was far more than professional development. I found a circle of peers willing to speak honestly, listen deeply, and reflect one another with both candor and care. We talked about the friction points of leadership, the hidden burdens, the missteps, the questions we carried about, but rarely voiced out loud. And over time, that group became one of the most powerful gifts of my early executive leadership. They didn't just give me advice, they became my mirror. And I think that's part of the invitation in this meditation to resist leading in isolation, to make sure we are not surrounded only by affirmation, but also by people who can help us see clearly, grow honestly, and keep becoming. And that feels like a really fitting way to turn the conversation back to Ruth. So, Ruth, as you heard the meditation reflection, what stayed in you, what stirred in you, what are you thinking about?

SPEAKER_01 10:31

Well, first off, it was absolutely beautiful. And I'm so um eager and excited to be talking about this topic because when I think about my leadership style and the lessons that I've learned over time, I'm the kind I'm I'm a very relational leader where kind of I am in need of feedback to be able to understand how am I doing? Where am I, where are things going well? Where are things that I thought going well not really going well? So I've always been very hungry for that feedback. Um, and so thinking through the the meditation and hearing your reflections on it, it it helps me recognize number one, not not everybody's always willing to listen to that and to hear that, right? And so it kind of makes like, oh, this is another rationale for how it makes me a little different than others. And number two, it makes me recognize what a joy and a strength that hunger for feedback and my willingness to seek that out has been for my trajectory as a as a leader as well. Um, for me, hearing you say that you're that you have this very, very high standard for yourself and you're afraid that it's not necessarily that somebody might see something. For me, I have a very high standard for myself and I never believe I'm doing enough. You know, and so I'm always looking for like, what else could I be doing? Um, which sometimes to my advantage, to my advantage, sometimes to my detriment, where it becomes too much and you get towards burnout really, really quickly. So that was my uh initial reaction to it, is just thinking about it in those different ways and how how it always astounds me how so many of us have gotten to different leadership roles in our lives in very different pathways. But also the the way that we digest and understand how we got there, like the different um information that we're each taking in to allow us to be the leader that we are. The translation process is so, so different for everyone. Um, and it's just it's fantastic. It's it's really um unique to see.

SPEAKER_00 12:47

Yeah. Well, I really appreciate the concept of like being super hungry for feedback because you don't meet too many leaders that are hungry for feedback. But as you look back on your own leadership journey, could you name the people or circles that have helped you see yourself more clearly? And like, how did that shape you?

SPEAKER_01 13:11

Yeah, yeah, most definitely. I would, I'm actually gonna have to say I um am very blessed that I have been given the opportunity to work with some amazing people. And I wouldn't necessarily say that the majority of them were my supervisors. I would actually say that the majority of them have been folks under my leadership, where you know, we just build this realm of transparency where they know that I'm looking for feedback. They know that I'm not going to, you know, share untruths with them, they know that I'm going to be pushing them towards something that I understand that they want. And so that back and forth, I think, has really, really um helped. So I'm actually gonna say, in addition to some supervisors, um, folks that have been on my team and have been willing to be honest with me about what's working and what's not working for them in the role, in myself as a supervisor and as a leader and as a team member, that has really, really been transformational for me. In in folks that I have been under the leadership of, I've seen very, very different reflections of that. So, for example, when I was in the public school sector, I had one administrator that they were not understanding of how I believed children should be taught, which was very hands-on, very experiential, very out in the community, really working with sticky, potentially controversial topics. And that administrator was very uncomfortable with that. And um, being a young uh female uh teacher who was probably only, you know, maybe five years older than the kids, it was a really difficult position to be in, trying to have these innovative um teaching styles and feeling that pushback actively from your administrator. But then I would have I had the pleasure and joy and opportunity of having to work um under Barney Hallowell at North Haven Community School, where he reveled in that stickiness of controversial topics. And no matter what, he was there to back me up. And so I had these two very opposing leadership styles in very similar contexts. And I would say, like, that juxtaposition really cemented who I was as a leader and what I was, what I was willing to do to push the needle on what is possible in both innovation and leadership and education, because I saw both sides of what was possible and I saw how I could play a role in making the lives of educators better so that they could teach the way that they wanted to teach, because I was given that gift myself.

SPEAKER_00 15:55

Yeah. Yeah, well, a lot there. And I just want to acknowledge that I don't know Barney well, but I had a few copies with him and I was um had never seen him in action, but I can I could visualize him in action after meeting him because he's such a kind soul. Well, was there a particular moment uh somewhere along the way when someone reflected something back to you, maybe through encouragement challenge or insight that kind of stayed with you to help you grow? Like, was there a moment where like this hunger became insatiable? Like all of a sudden it was like I even though that was tough, it it gave me direction.

SPEAKER_01 16:38

Yeah, yeah. Um, very recently I've been doing um, I've been in this um fantastic group called Anu Shu Group, and it's just women in the How do you spell that? N-U-S-H-U. And it is, it's all women, and we're all women in leadership. Most of us are executive directors or development directors or something like that. And it's facilitated by someone who you probably know, um, Susan Bates. She's also a St. George resident. I do. And it's almost like a support group for female executive directors. And once a week we come together, and there's no, you can't respond to anybody. It's just a prompt, and then you share where you land, whether you want to share something professionally or personally, but it's just allowed for us to really build this network over the past really since COVID started. So it's it's pretty, well, maybe not so new anymore. And in that space, I came to recognize how much of my leadership style was driven not by my innate strengths and intuition. Actually, over the years, because I had been in the STEM education, you know, space, which was very male-oriented, I took on a lot of the leadership characteristics that I had seen in others, like, you know, very specific, very logical. I never got too, you know, aggressive, but certainly kind of like, nope, it is this way, it's gonna be this way, right? But I also within like by going through these different meditations um with the NUSHA group, I realized like, oh my gosh, that isn't necessarily me. That's what I've been taught, that's what I've observed. And if I really lean into who I am and what makes me be a good leader and a good executive director, it's my intuition. It's the things I didn't necessarily know how to name, but they were in my gut. And in times of significant stress, I would lean on them. Like I wouldn't necessarily be able to talk about why I was making a decision or not. I just knew that it was really the right decision or not. And over the these conversations with these other female executive directors, I came to recognize like, no, intuition is a strength. We have that in us. And there's something there that um I'm now beginning to put words to. Like it's that I am able to build really strong relationships. And so I'm a very relational leader. And instead of seeing my capacity to build those relationships as something negative, it's actually something super positive to, you know, have that want to connect at that level. And then when you connect with someone, you understand where they're coming from, you understand what drives them, and therefore you can help motivate them better and connect with them better.

SPEAKER_00 19:36

Yeah. So let me see if I I'm gonna try to repeat back to you what I heard because I think it's really super important. When you first started out in leadership, you began to implement styles that you that had been modeled for you. And as you got into the nitty-gritty of leading a team or leading an org, you recognized, like, whoa, that didn't feel like me, or that that was perhaps outside of what I normally would react to. And what is that about? And then as you began to entertain this group of women that you have been meeting with for almost six years now, you began to see a much different style, which was more integrated of your own intuition rather than modeling what you had seen over the years. Is that kind of what you would say?

SPEAKER_01 20:34

Yeah, I would say that this group has helped me name it and has helped me recognize it. When in when kind of in the past, when my leadership style wouldn't match others, I wouldn't necessarily shift mine, but I I would, what's the right way to say it? It made me feel more isolated, that I saw what a different leadership and boundary pusher I was. That I didn't it seemed amorphous and alien compared to the other things that I was seeing. That it made me question myself more so than I probably should have. And so my leadership style, I've instead of uh veering away from it or questioning that aspect of myself, I no longer need to do that given this reflection from others.

SPEAKER_00 21:17

Yeah, that I mean I think that's such an important insight. And I want to ask do you think that without this group, you would have been able to name it as quickly as you did?

SPEAKER_01 21:34

That's a great question. I don't think so. No, I don't think so. I think the combination of this group and simply just so here's what made that group so special. You know, as an executive director, you're super isolated, right? Like even though you have a fantastic team and you've got all these people that you're working with, some of those aspects are still super, super isolating. And so until I began speaking with other executive directors, especially, you know, women in this role, it was always like a, nope, that's a me problem. Like there's the, there aren't other people dealing with this. I've got to figure it out on my own. And that simply isn't the case. And so this group certainly helped me name it and it helped me feel not as alone, that there are other examples and other people out there. They're struggling with the same exact thing. And we can lean on each other to be able to figure out what to do next.

SPEAKER_00 22:32

Yeah. Well, I asked that because I I just getting back to the meditation of the mirror, that mirror doesn't always have to reflect the things that we're not doing, but it can reflect the things that we are and who we are. It's this wonderful, wonderful way. You've spent so much of your career, what I would call like creating environments where young people, educators can thrive. And I'm curious about what first taught you how much the right environment matters in helping people grow.

SPEAKER_01 23:09

That's a fantastic question. From my own experience and from being a teacher and from understanding the needs of teach of the needs of teachers across mostly rural environments, both in Maine and across the country. First, it was my own experience where, you know, I was very much an experiential learner. Like I needed to do things and understand things. And I and I love, I'm, I'm I love learning. I'm a first generation American. So like my family education was top, top, top, top, top priority. And I just felt that when I was doing something to make better the issues that I was concerned about, that's when I felt the most powerful. That's when I personally felt the most driven and that I was able to offer the most to the world around me. I'm also like very, very service-driven. And so for me, learning that what I was learning in bio class could be applied when I was doing ecosystem research in my own hometown. Or I, when I was a kid, I started my first uh uh environmental education after school group. And we would go as high school kids, we would, as a high school kid, I loved making lesson plans about recycling, and I want to go down to the elementary school and I would teach it at the elementary school with my best friends. Like that's what we did for fun. So that tells you a little bit about how I ended up being who I am. And so that experience really kind of made me recognize my personal love of it. And then as I kind of left the more forestry research component, which is where I started thinking I was gonna focus my career in, and I moved more into environmental and science education, I'm like, oh wow, there's a lot of kids like me. So how can I grow this experience for other kids? And so I started doing that in my lessons. And then as I kind of figured out, man, it's kind of really difficult to do this every day in a public school environment. How can I shift the levers of that system to enable both myself and others to do that more and more was really the core driver in what I do and why I do it.

SPEAKER_00 25:18

So, in many ways, as I'm thinking about what you just shared and a couple of your other answers as well, is that in terms of creating an environment where people could grow, you tended to see the the environment of the classroom connected to the community as a way to enlarge the classroom to take the cognitive lessons being taught to balance a way to do hands-on learning as a way to make it come alive. Would that be fair?

SPEAKER_01 25:55

Very, very fair. And that's kind of always been my driver's is how do we take this sometimes unconnected content that kids have to learn and make it real for them by making it matter, by making it something that they can talk about with their parents around the dinner table, around a topic that they really care about. Um, because there are always those applications.

SPEAKER_00 26:15

Yeah, yeah, that's great. Uh, I mean, it is why I uh always felt so connected to you as uh in our conversations, because of course I believe in that as well. But um, so I want to go in a time capsule here and go back to your early years in the classroom as a teacher. Uh, what did teaching teach you about how people build confidence, like about the power and responsibility reflecting someone well?

SPEAKER_01 26:49

Yeah. Well, there's no better mirror than a classroom of teenagers, right? Like they will tell you everything you're doing wrong, they will tell you everything that's cringe. It's it's fantastic. It's fantastic. And so I love that energy. And to for the teachers that we work with, they love that energy too. As I know you do as well, Don. Yeah. And so I think thinking about what I learned in that classroom, you know, you have to put out the energy to these children that you're hoping they can put out to the world, that they can put back to you. So, you know, if if you are really excited about a topic, if you really zero in on the more complex ideas that are often difficult to understand and find a way to make it relatable and understandable, it's gonna make it a lot more approachable for these kids, right? And it's gonna make it a lot more enjoyable, hopefully, for these children.

SPEAKER_00 27:51

So in in terms of um, I'm gonna provide a uh particular quote that I love on this topic and see kind of where it goes in your mind. But I I'll say to anybody that will listen, and this goes to youth workers or parents or teachers, but that before we seek to inspire who's ever in front of us, we first have to seek to understand. And in that understanding, our ability to win the right to be heard, to reflect back to the teenagers or whomever we're working with can land a lot better. Um, maybe not all the time, but most of the time. And I'm just wondering when you hear that, what comes to mind?

SPEAKER_01 28:40

Number one, it's beautifully stated. And when you really understand, whether it's the people that you're working with or the students that you're trying to connect with and teach, you need to understand where they're coming from. You need to understand what drives them. You need to understand what their goals or aspirations are in life. And only at that point, when you understand where they're coming from, to you know, you're never gonna understand fully. But to some degree, at that point can you then really connect with them and help them move along in whatever pathway that your role is in that time, whether it's to help them become a better student, whether it is to help them uh really learn a particular topic, um, whether it is to, you know, uh lead an ecosystem rehabilitation uh program, or whether it is to help your staff members really flower and grow in the professional ways that they're hoping to, you've gotta understand where they're coming from and what their core drivers are. And so that is, I believe, one of the core threads across the entirety of my career is just that ability to listen, that ability to understand, and translate it into the support and guidance that I'm able to provide to get them to where they want to get.

SPEAKER_00 30:02

Yeah, so really uh making a commitment to kind of meeting others where they are.

SPEAKER_01 30:08

A hundred percent.

SPEAKER_00 30:09

Well, this next question has to do with style, not just substance. But I'm wondering about this is that like a lot of leaders learn how to give feedback before they learn how to receive it. And so I'm wondering about what have you learned over the years about what helps truth land in a way that is what I would say developmental versus discouraging.

SPEAKER_01 30:40

So there was a experience that I had to go through when I was a very, very new mother that really blindsided me. And I got some feedback from an employer that essentially said, um, well, what's a nice way of saying this? Figure out where your priorities lie. And my priorities always lie with my children, right? And so I said, okay, if my priorities lie with my children, being such a new mom, how am I going to level out being a mom and being an employee and eventually a leader? And so what I think was so blindsiding to me was that there wasn't any feedback up and up until that point that was negative in any way, shape, or form. And so for me, being transparent with people, sometimes you can, sometimes you can't, but in every situation where you can be as transparent as possible with people to help them understand what is happening, how is their performance coming across, um, what is working, what isn't working, it's a lot better than keeping everything in and seething and then not being truthful with where things are going wrong or how things are going wrong. I'm I'm advocating both within my own team, in my leadership team, like, don't let it sit, folks. Like we always need to talk about it rather than letting it stir and fester. Because I have never seen one situation where someone holds back. And if you hold back, then you can't express it in a kind way, you can't express it in a productive way. You've got to express it in a way that is again hopefully in a way that that individual or that team are gonna be able to hear it.

SPEAKER_00 32:29

Yeah. Well, so I like to say that, you know, employees, mission-driven organizations or companies tend to not leave the company, they leave the supervisor. And I'm wondering about I'm always surprised by how few opportunities people have, if that's true, which I think it is, how what a lack of concentration there has been on developing those who actually be step into a management or supervisory role. And just curious about like, have you thought that through in your own teams and like how do you model that across sectors and systems within your org? And I forget how large the organization is. So maybe for the listeners, you could share a little bit about that too.

SPEAKER_01 33:25

Yeah, definitely. It's it's actually been something that I've been thinking a lot about, um, especially within the last, I'd probably say six or seven, five years, especially, but probably six or seven uh more greater than that. So when I first joined the Maine Math and Science Alliance, we were at like a$1.5,$1.6 million annual operating budget. We had about 11 or 12 employees. Today we're at over six million dollars operating. Um, and I've got about 32 staff members right now. So the organization has grown.

SPEAKER_00 33:58

Congratulations.

SPEAKER_01 33:58

Thank you, thank you. Yeah, it's it's it's my work and the teams. I've I've been able, it's again, I've been able to just pull fantastic people into this organization and they make it work, right? Like, I mean, it's so because we've grown so fast, I've had to really think about constantly the cycle of what do I do really well? What do what do my team members do really well? What are the different uh kind of like strengths of my team? And how can I elevate those strengths for my team members so that they can begin to step into these different leadership roles and and and that alignment of what do I do well? What do I want to do? What do I not want to do? What do my team members want to do? What do they not want to do? Is that constant, always expanding puzzle pieces, right? Of trying to fit things together. But recently I've been really thinking about we designed a brand new organized organizational structure that creates additional uh levels of leadership, where before we only had like one general leadership team that had across all of our content areas, but now we've gotten large enough where I have uh a programmatic and research director, I have an operations director, um, and then I also have a community engagement director. And that's like the executive leadership team. And then, and then within that kind of supervisory structure, now we also have the content um areas. So it just kind of over time I've been able to understand the team members that I know want to grow into leadership, what those capacities are, what their professional interests are, and over time grow the different roles to both fit them and the needs of the organization. And then I'm able to kind of mentor them and always show them all right, this is how I would write an NSF grant, here's how I would build a partnership, here's how I advocate for policy. And I always, now that as I see someone leaning into that particular interest area, I'd begin to bring them along. You know, come come with me to this meeting so you can observe and see how I do it. Tell me what was interesting to you, what would you have wanted to do? And we kind of we have those constant conversations after these opportunities where I make it pretty transparent to them. I'm like, hey, I'm gonna need some help in this particular area. Do you want to learn how to do this? Yes or no? Cool. If it's a yes, then all right, here's some things that we could begin to experiment with to see what's gonna work or not work for you. And I I've done this multiple times in multiple different ways. First by training people how to write NSF grants so that I'm not the only one writing these NSF grants. Now I'm doing it more so with uh really um sticky personality dynamics in management and like per people management's really difficult, but we're learning how to grow that capacity across the organization and share what I've learned in fundraising in a whole variety of different areas. That that model has seemed to work really, really well for me because I think I'm so transparent. I'm trying to match their interests with my needs. Sometimes my interests don't necessarily get prioritized in that, but that's okay. I can manage that.

SPEAKER_00 37:10

Well, okay, so I have a um question for you based on that. So you were at a 1 million with 11 employees, I think you said, and now you're at 6 million with 32. And as you have um scaled and grown the organization uh and rethought your you know org chart, so to speak, did you have some growing pains or did you just were you lucky? Both well, on this particular topic, and that is is that where as somebody who's was in the role for a while before it kind of took off and to the right, in terms of the sticking point of having the key decision maker, you as the leader of the organization, have to be in every conversation and then creating a work chart that flattened out that decision-making process so that people, other people were bringing other people along, and that you didn't have to be in all that. So I'm wondering about did you experience growing pains in that personally? Yeah, versus like, oh no, you just you had it down, you knew that was coming.

SPEAKER_01 38:19

Still both. Still both. You know, like it it depends. There are some, um, there are some times that I'm like, oh my God, these fantastic, like my team members are doing it way better than I ever could have, you know. So like that's fantastic. There are certainly some times where I'm like, hmm, I kind of miss that. Like it would be nice to be doing that work again. It'd be nice to be that much on the ground level again. And I think um, truthfully, there's probably also a uh a self-confidence question in there, too, of just like, oh, they're doing so great. I guess they don't really need me. You know, so I I think the the entire gamut, um, depending on on the situation. So certainly growing pains, certainly um FOMO for sure, and certainly a huge amount of pride as well, um, seeing these fantastic people grow into these roles.

SPEAKER_00 39:11

Yeah, yeah, that's well said and relatable. So you've worked across education and research and statewide leadership, as I said in your bio. And I'm wondering like what relationships or communities have helped you keep grounded, growing, and kind of on this like lifelong learner process, both from an interpersonal perspective, but also from a professional one as well.

SPEAKER_01 39:42

Yeah. Yeah, I have been really lucky in that I have been able to kind of pick out mentors along the way. Um, you know, I I call I call them either the educators or the researchers or the people that like, I want to be you when I grow up, essentially, you know. So, like my my mentor team, whether it is Patty Matry, um, has been a fantastic mentor to me. I remember she was an advisor. She's a fantastic research scientist out of Bigelow. And uh she is also a fantastic mother. And I remember she was uh my advisor for my very first um NSF grant. And she's like, you just wait, Ruth. You've got one now. You'll you're you there's gonna be a day where you've got six and you can't do this and you wanna do that. I'm like, oh, that's never gonna happen, Patty. And now here I am with like an entire organization full of multiple NSF grants. So, like helping me manage both being a mom and being a researcher and a leader is something that she helped me out a lot with. And then, of course, folks like Barney along the way. Um, I've had an educator who uh was with me for every single one of my professional development programs since I began at the Island Institute. And then she became my board chair and she just recently graduated. Um, Margot Murphy out of Camden Hills. She's been a fantastic mentor. Uh, Dave Chase out of Antioch was an evaluator, kind of teacher of mine, and then just a fantastic advisor along the way. So I've just had these, I've been very, very blessed to find these mentors to help me in these different components of my of my career and of how I wanted to grow myself professionally. And again, all of that has boiled down to relationships.

SPEAKER_00 41:25

Okay, so let me uh let me press on this a little bit. Sure. Because some of the feedback I've received from different people in the listener audience have mentioned to me that this is a recurring theme, that people who have gotten into leadership roles have come to count on these incredible mentors that they have you know picked up along the way. And I'm wondering, just as a from a strategy perspective, like A, did you ask them to be a mentor? A B, do they know that they were your mentor? Like in terms of the symbiotic relationship of just what they provided as both a mirror and a sounding board and as a model, was this um an intentional act or just uh um in terms of people knowing what role they were in versus, you know, like hey, Richard Rohr is one of my mentors, and he does have no idea. I just read his books, you know. So I you know what I'm saying? Like, I'm just curious about that because I do think that listeners have been like, I don't even know where I'd start to get a mentor.

SPEAKER_01 42:41

Yeah, I I think it's a fantastic question, right? Like for me, I look for people that are doing fantastic work that I admire. And then I want to get to know them, right? And I want to get to understand how they tick and what drives them and how in the world do they do this thing? How do they have this amazing life that they have, you know, and then kind of taking the lessons that we can along the way to get close to what we aspire to. I I think I had no idea that, you know, it that these um people, I didn't, I didn't intentionally go to them and say, I want to mentor. Will you be my mentor? No, it didn't happen like that. I think they probably knew along the way, like, yeah, I could, you know, I'm gonna help her out. She's doing great work, and I think that I have some things to offer to her. But it was never, it was never top down. You know, they always met me where I was at. They always just wanted to know how I was doing. And then from there, the questions of leadership and structure and complexity began to emerge.

SPEAKER_00 43:48

Yeah, well said. Well said. So let me just flip the script for a minute because I got one more question to ask you. It's gone fast. Is there a question you have for me on this topic?

SPEAKER_01 44:00

Plenty of them. You know, I think from my perspective, the big question that I have for you is, you know, you you've built some amazing um organizations and and leadership styles. What did you really? This is a very, very large question, but like, what did you really pull from that into what you're doing now and how you're um focusing your energies now? Well, I think what mirror did you use to bring yourself to where you are?

SPEAKER_00 44:30

Yeah, I well, I love the fact that you said in one of your answers, like, there's no better mirror than teenagers. And that is really true. You know, like I I remember someone saying I was with them, forget the exact context, but we've all been in this situation where like we've got maybe something we're at lunch in a business meeting, and and we look in the mirror later, or someone tell, you know, like I had something in my teeth. And I think like that would never happen with teenagers. If I was with them on a trip and I had something in my teeth, they'd be like, dude, you know, and um as just an example, but what why I bring that up is this what I began to recognize was that in working and mentoring a young person, I always thought about and had a vision for where they might end up. And without always knowing all the role models they had in their life, I wanted to try to figure out what the fastest way for them to understand what it meant to thrive before they had a chance to struggle. Yeah, and if that meant that that thriving, just assuming that maybe there wasn't an example in their life about what that is or what that meant or what that looked like, I had to think about like authentically in my own self, what does it mean for me to thrive? Yeah, not just be uh an adult with power of in a powerful relationship as a mentor to a mentee, but like that I'm actually living my life in an authentic way and being honest about all the different traps of that, you know, someone growing up as an adult who's a role model for a young person. What does that look like? And I just, you know, I had some really clear ideas about the various dimensions of my life that I really wanted to focus on. One was the intellectual side. I couldn't be working with young people and asking them to think about their lives and post-secondary aspirations without having a degree or two. And so I went and got a master's degree in addition to. Not to say that that was the right way or the only way, but that that was something that I committed to. So, from an emotional perspective, if I couldn't figure out how to self-regulate, which was a big challenge of mine, how in the world was I going to ask young people to self-regulate or teach them or model for that to them? You know, so emotional dimension, uh, intellectual dimension, um, spiritual dimension. And what am I doing to grow my inner life and my own spirituality in a way that created compassion and empathy and a sense of belonging in a given community? What was I doing and what would that model for someone? But as I began to look at all these different dimensions of what I felt like someone would need to actually really thrive in life, um, I felt like it was incredibly important to model that. In order to model that, then I had to be super honest and find people, as I mentioned in the meditation, where I could open that up a little bit because my own, as I mentioned, like different times of my life, the fear of letting others in and seeing like, oh, are you are you really an imposter here? Was real. And so yeah, that's how I'd answer it. Like, I I I recognized that really I could only model for youth what it meant to thrive if I truly was thriving as an adult. And most of the time I was surrounded as a young person around a lot of youth workers, and they were present, but their inner, like their personal lives were a mess. And I just, you know, I learned a lot from that.

SPEAKER_01 48:56

So I think that's beautifully stated. And and thank you for for sharing that because I think it it I think it translates both within, you know, youth worker, but then also how we model for our teams, right? Like if I'm um strung out all the time and you know, not doing something to keep myself healthy, they're gonna feel like they've got to do the same thing. And I don't want that for the people that I care about on my team, right? It's harder to do than it sounds, but I agree with you 100%. So thank you for reminding me of that.

SPEAKER_00 49:28

For well, it reminds me of the the quote, and I it I don't have the person who said it, but you know, culture mirrors leadership. And if the leadership is completely stressed out, the culture is going to be stressed out, and uh, our ability to understand our role in that uh is incredibly important. So, okay, so my final question for you as you think about the young people and educators you care so deeply about and the people that work for you, what wisdom would you offer leaders about surrounding themselves with people who could reflect themselves honestly, and then offering that same gift to others? Like what advice would you give to them?

SPEAKER_01 50:14

That is such a great question, especially right now, right? Like my team, the educators that we work with every single day, it is a rough time for educators in in our society right now. And so what I'm empowering both educators and my team and the world to try to do is think about how do we keep strong what we know works for kids? There are so many tension points and so much weight, um, especially in the public education sector, let alone the out-of-school sector right now. How do we boo each other up? Like what can we each do to help ourselves get through each day a little bit more? How can we provide that support? How can we provide and share that encouragement when we know that every day is really, really hard? And the challenges that all of us are going to be up against in the education sector feel like you're hitting your head against a wall. And so what kind of supports can we give? What kind of um just kind of love and kindness can we each give each other to make it through to know that we know how to do this? People coming from outside of education or don't really understand the communities that we serve or don't really understand how a classroom works. We know the kids that we work with, we know the teachers that we work with. There is truth in that. Don't let that be eroded away, given um the lexicon of conversation out there.

SPEAKER_00 51:49

Ruth, thank you. Thanks for joining me. Uh and reminded why I loved uh having coffee with you. So we'll make sure we do that this summer. But yeah, thanks for sharing wisdom and uh just around your own lived experience as a leader.

SPEAKER_01 52:05

Well, thank you so much, for the opportunity. It was great to to go through it and uh to share that. I'd not often that I get the opportunity to to chat about that. So it was a lot of fun and so much fun connecting with you. I definitely am looking forward to seeing you back up north.

SPEAKER_00 52:19

Yes, yes. Well, soon uh in a couple of weeks. So I'll be sure to reach out. And if you just stay with me for a couple more minutes, uh so I can close out so I can say goodbye to you at the end.

SPEAKER_01 52:30

All right. Thanks so much, Don.

SPEAKER_00 52:32

Yeah, thank you.

SPEAKER_01 52:33

Be well.

SPEAKER_00 52:34

You too. So I just want to offer a couple takeaways that I have from my time at Ruth. And there's quite a few, but I'm gonna try to narrow it down to three. One was what she opened with, which I think is incredibly aspirational for anybody working with people, which is almost all of us, but that you make an intentional decision internally to want to be hungry for feedback. Um, because I think that self-awareness, feedback creates self-awareness. And self-awareness, as you've probably heard me say many times on this podcast before, I think is the ingredient that makes good leaders transformational. And that type of self-awareness is incredibly hard to come by, but it is much more easily come by when somebody's hungry for feedback, who's asking questions, asking for truth, asking for sunlight. So that's the first thing. I think also I just appreciated her honesty talking about like as she got into this role of leadership, she was using the models around her that she saw kind of growing into the various roles that she was having. But as she began to actually implement her own strategy of leadership, she realized she needed to trust her gut more and her own intuition and know what felt aligned with who she was versus unaligned, acting in the role of a leader who was modeling something else that wasn't aligned with who she was. All of that's to say is that you can't really do that without knowing who you are. And so if you know who you are, alignment is really easy, but sometimes it's a process, and we all are in that process as leaders. I love the fact that she mentioned that there's no better mirror than teenagers. So for those of us who have kids and children, you know, that's uh for better the worse sometimes. But nonetheless, anybody working with teenagers knows this. And uh, I just loved her uh bringing that up because it it brings me great inspiration, but also some negative stimuli sometimes as I think back on it. And then finally, there's so many other things, but let me just close with this. And that is is that when I asked her about, you know, who were these leaders who and mentors that she wanted to surround herself with, her litmus test was she looked for people who, after being with them, she thought to herself, boy, those are the kind of people that I want to be when I grow up, and began to build relationships with them. And as you could hear her answers, it it's happening. The incredible um mentors she's had uh really been a great mirror for her as she's implemented her own leadership style and work. So as I end, I want to just leave the audience with just two questions. One, who are the people in your life who love you enough to tell you the truth? And have you given them permission to do it? Who are the people in your life who love you enough to tell you the truth and you've given them permission to do it? And then secondly, when you receive hard feedback, do you experience it as an invitation to grow or as a threat to who you believe you need to be? An invitation to grow or a threat. So it's really important to think about that. In closing, big thanks, Ruth, and for joining me. I uh I'm really grateful. Uh, I knew we'd pick up where we left off. So um thank you for such an inspiring conversation.

SPEAKER_01 56:37

With an absolute honor. Thank you.

SPEAKER_00 56:39

You're so welcome. Thank you. I want to thank Omar for producing the episode. If you found something meaningful here today and would consider sharing the episode with just one other person, I would be so grateful. And if you have a reflection or thought you'd like to share with me, I'd love to hear from you. You can reach me at Don at Carpenter Company Consulting dot com. Thanks for listening. And please remember that the journey of leadership begins with them.