Finding Your Leadership Soul: What Our Students Can Teach Us About Love, Care, and Vulnerability

In this transformative narrative, Carlos R. Moreno explores what it means to develop Leadership Soul by approaching educational leadership with love, care, and vulnerability.In Finding Your Leadership Soul, Carlos Moreno shares his journey from a challenging childhood in the Bronx, to teaching and advising at an innovative high school, to serving as co-executive director for Big Picture Learning, an organization that works to advance equitable, student-centered education. Along the way, he introduces several young Black and Latino men he had the privilege to work with—students who came from backgrounds similar to his and who helped shape his philosophy of leadership. He mines lessons learned from his connections with these young men and distills those lessons into practical application. His aim is to inspire others to join him on the effortful but indescribably vital quest to develop Leadership Soul. Leadership Soul draws on three principles—lead with love, lead with care, and lead with vulnerability—to counter conventional leadership archetypes that promote inequity and fail to meet the needs of all students, especially those marginalized by systemic prejudice and socioeconomic circumstances. The book is a powerful and poignant guide to engaging in inclusive, equitable leadership—to developing your own Leadership Soul.