The Things That Used to Light You Up Have Gone Quiet. Let’s Talk About That.

When was the last time you were genuinely excited about something at work?

Not satisfied. Not relieved that something went well. Not the functional okay that comes at the end of a day that didn’t produce a crisis. Actually excited — the feeling that brought you to this work in the first place, the feeling that this matters and you are the person meant to be doing it and something alive is happening here.

If you have to think for more than a moment to answer that question, this post is for you.

The slow disappearance of joy in the principal role is one of the most insidious aspects of long-term depletion — and one of the hardest to name precisely because it doesn’t happen in any one moment. There is no day where you wake up and notice that the light has gone out. It dims gradually, over months and years, in such small increments that you stop noticing the change and start accepting the dimness as the normal state of the work.

Until someone asks you when you were last excited, and you have to think about it.

How the Dimming Happens

The things that lit you up when you came to this work — being in classrooms, watching teachers grow, connecting with students, building something in a community — are still there, technically. But they get progressively crowded out by the things the role actually requires: compliance reporting, personnel management, budget navigation, district politics, crisis response, the endless volume of administrative demand that depletes cognitive capacity and leaves less and less available for the work that produces the experience of meaning.

There is also the emotional protective dimension. When you care deeply and the thing you care about keeps costing you — when the students you love have hard outcomes, when the teachers you’ve invested in leave anyway, when the school you’ve worked to build hits setbacks that feel personal — the caring itself starts to feel dangerous. Not consciously. But the nervous system learns from repeated experience. It learns that opening fully to the things that matter in this work produces loss and pain and grief with a consistency that eventually prompts a kind of protective withdrawal. You still do the work. But the part of you that was fully open to it starts to close, a little at a time, as protection.

Compassion fatigue and the dimming of joy are closely related — the numbness that characterizes compassion fatigue is the same mechanism. The nervous system protecting the person from further exposure to the cost of caring by reducing the availability of the caring itself.

The Difference Between Temporary and Chronic

Every principal goes through periods when the work feels heavy and the excitement is harder to find. A hard semester, a difficult transition, an unusually high-demand stretch — these produce temporary dimming that genuine recovery addresses. You take a break, you have a good week, and something of the original energy returns.

The chronic version is different. The break doesn’t produce the return. The good week doesn’t restore what you expected it to. You come back from summer and the flat feeling is still there, waiting. The things that used to reliably reconnect you to the Why — a great classroom visit, a breakthrough student moment, a staff meeting that actually went well — produce a response that is noticeably smaller than it used to be. You feel the objective satisfaction of things going well but not the subjective excitement that used to accompany it.

This is the signal that the dimming has reached a depth that rest alone won’t address. This is depletion, not tiredness — and it requires restoration at a deeper level than a school break provides.

The Ember That Is Still There

Here is what I know from years in this work and from the principals I have spoken with at every stage of the depletion spectrum: the ember is still there. Even when the light has dimmed significantly, the original reason — the thing that brought you here, the conviction that this work matters — is not gone. It is covered. Inaccessible. Crowded out by weight and protected behind the walls that the nervous system built to keep the caring from costing more than it already has.

Getting back to it is not a motivational exercise. It is a restoration process. It requires setting down enough of the weight that the thing underneath has space to surface again. It requires the permission to rest that the role conditions you not to give yourself. It requires reclaiming enough of yourself outside the role that the role is no longer the only source of meaning — which paradoxically makes returning to the role’s meaning more available, not less.

And it requires a daily practice of tending to the human being underneath the principal — not the performance of restoration, but the actual thing. That daily practice is what Principal Well was designed to support. Not a one-time fix. A daily return to the well — because the ember needs tending, and tending is a daily practice, not an annual event. $19.97 a month.

And for the principal whose dimming has reached the professional layer — who needs a full reset in how they’re leading alongside the personal restoration — The Principal Playbook is thirty days of doing exactly that.

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If you recognized yourself in the opening question — if the answer to “when were you last genuinely excited?” required more thought than it should — share this. The principals who need it most are not going to search for it. Someone who sees the dimness needs to send it to them.

— Dr. Tania Loyola | Principal Realities