We Move Forward and Upward — What That Phrase Actually Costs the Person Saying It

I have said it more times than I can count. In staff meetings when the news was bad and the work needed to continue anyway. In conversations with teachers who were exhausted and needed direction more than sympathy. In my own head in the car on the way to school on the days when I was not certain I had what the day was going to ask for.

We move forward and upward.

I believe it. The belief is genuine — it has held through situations that would have tested anything that was not genuinely rooted. But I want to be honest about something that the phrase, in its clean forward momentum, does not always acknowledge: it costs something to mean it. And the person who says it without naming the cost is telling part of the truth.

Every time I said ‘we move forward and upward,’ I was also asking for something from the people around me and from myself. I was asking for the faith that the direction was worth the distance. That the current difficulty was not the permanent condition. That what we were building was real even when the evidence was not yet visible. That is not a small ask. It deserves to be made with full knowledge of what it requires.

What Moving Forward Costs

It costs the backward glance — the time you are not given to fully process what went wrong before you are expected to be moving again. The program that did not hold. The staff member whose departure hurt more than it should have professionally. The year that asked things of you that you have not fully accounted for. Moving forward means carrying those things alongside the new direction rather than waiting for them to resolve before you lead again.

It costs the certainty. Moving forward in school leadership is almost always moving toward something that is not yet fully visible. The principal who says ‘we move forward and upward’ in October of a difficult year is making a bet — not on a guaranteed outcome, but on the belief that the direction is worth the effort before the results confirm it. That bet has genuine psychological costs. The comfort of certainty is not available to the person who has committed to keeping going.

It costs some relationships. The move forward and upward posture is not universally welcomed. There are staff members in every building who have organized their professional identity around the explanation for why things cannot change — around the district, the community, the student population, the resources. The principal who refuses to let the explanation be the final word and keeps insisting on forward movement is, from a certain angle, refusing to validate a worldview that some people have built their professional lives around. That refusal creates friction.

What Moving Upward Costs

Movement upward in leadership creates distance from the things that originally generated the investment. The direct student relationship. The instructional ownership. The bounded world of the classroom where the evidence of your work was immediate and personal and yours. The further into leadership you move, the more the work happens through other people, through systems, through culture — which means the direct evidence of impact is deferred, indirect, and often invisible.

This is the appropriate trade. The scale of influence available through leadership genuinely exceeds what any individual classroom can produce. But the trade is real and the cost of it is real, and the principal who never mourns what they left behind when they moved upward has not fully reckoned with what the move asked of them.

Why I Still Mean It

Because the alternative is to stay still or to move backward, and both of those choices produce their own costs. The cost of the unbuilt school. The student trajectory that did not change. The teacher who was not developed. The community that was not reached.

I have seen both costs from the inside. The forward and upward posture, with full knowledge of what it asks, is still the posture I believe in. Not because it is easy. Because what it builds is worth what it costs.

We move forward and upward. I mean that completely. And I also want every principal who says it to know: you are allowed to name what it costs. The naming does not cancel the direction. It honors the person sustaining it.