One of the things I find myself talking about most often in supervision with Centre Directors, and I think it surprises them every time it comes up, is how lonely the role can feel.
It’s not the kind of loneliness people usually mean when they use the word. You’re surrounded by people all day. Educators come to your office, parents catch you at the gate, children wave at you from the playground, the phone barely stops. By any reasonable definition you are one of the least alone people in the building. And yet, when I ask Directors what their week has actually been like underneath the surface of it, the same word keeps appearing.
I’ve come to think it’s one of the most under-acknowledged parts of leading an early learning service, and one of the things that quietly wears people down before they’ve even realised what’s happening.
The shape of it
The loneliness Centre Directors describe isn’t really about a lack of company, or a lack of people in your corner. It’s about a lack of anyone in your immediate world who shares the particular weight you’re carrying in the way you’re carrying it.
Your educators are wonderful, but you can’t fully debrief with them, because some of what you’re holding is about them. You can’t share the family complaint that’s been keeping you up at night, or the staffing situation you’re trying to navigate, or the conversation with a parent that didn’t go the way you hoped. There are confidences you have to hold simply because of where you sit in the structure.
Your owners or area managers may well be supportive, and many are. But the relationship is naturally oriented toward the running of the service, and there are some things, the trauma-shaped things especially, the disclosures and the close calls and the moments that genuinely affected you, that need a different kind of conversation than the one that fits inside a leadership chat. Your peers in other services are usually so busy holding their own centres together that catching up properly feels like another thing on the list. And the people in your life outside of work, much as they love you, often don’t quite understand the texture of what early learning leadership involves. They hear “childcare” and picture something gentler than the reality.
So you end up in a strange position. You’re the person everyone else brings things to. And there isn’t always a corresponding person, with the right kind of training and the right kind of distance, who you can bring the harder things to.
Why it matters more than it sounds
I want to be careful here, because I don’t want to make this sound bigger or more dramatic than it is. Most Directors I meet are getting on with things and aren’t in any kind of crisis. But over time, this particular quietness around the role has effects that I think are worth naming.
The first is that decisions start getting heavier than they need to be. When you’ve got nowhere outside the work to think out loud, every choice has to be made internally, weighed internally, and then carried internally. That’s exhausting in a way that isn’t always obvious until you’ve had the experience of thinking something through with another person and noticed how much lighter your own head felt afterwards.
The second is that you can lose perspective on yourself without realising it. We tend to calibrate how we’re doing partly by seeing ourselves reflected in other people, and Directors often don’t have anyone outside the running of the service who can offer that reflection. Small things start to feel large, large things start to feel normal, and the line between them gets harder to find.
The third, and I think the most important one, is what happens to the harder material when it has nowhere to go. The disclosure that landed on you on a Tuesday afternoon. The incident that didn’t end badly but easily could have. The child you’re worried about whose situation you can’t quite reach. These things don’t simply pass through. They settle somewhere, and when there isn’t a properly held space for them, they tend to settle in you.
What helps
The honest answer is that company helps. Not just any company, but a particular kind of company, with someone trained in this work who can sit alongside you in it without needing anything from you in return.
That’s a big part of what Professional Supervision offers Centre Directors, and it’s a piece of the role that I don’t think gets explained well enough. Supervision is a regular, confidential conversation, usually monthly, with an external practitioner trained to hold that space for you. Someone outside your service, outside your reporting line, and trained in the trauma-shaped material that the role inevitably brings. You get to bring whatever you’re carrying, think it through with another person, and leave feeling a little less alone in it than when you walked in.
For the Directors I see, supervision often becomes the one place where they don’t have to be the leader. They don’t have to be reassuring. They don’t have to have an answer. They can say the thing they couldn’t say to their team, work through the disclosure they haven’t been able to put down, sit with the close call that they’ve quietly been replaying for a fortnight. And because the person across from them is external, trained for this, and not tangled up in the running of the centre, the conversation can actually go somewhere.
The support you get from your owners or your provider matters, and it isn’t a substitute for this, any more than this is a substitute for that. They’re different conversations, doing different jobs.
What I notice over time is that the loneliness softens. Not because the structural realities of the role change, because they don’t, but because there’s now somewhere for the heavier material to go. The month has a shape it didn’t have before. The hard things have a home.
A few smaller things in the meantime
Supervision is the longer-term piece, and I’d genuinely encourage any Director reading this to look into it. In the meantime, here are a few small things that I’ve seen help with the quieter side of the role.
One honest conversation
Find one person, somewhere in your life, that you can be properly honest with about how things are actually going. It doesn’t have to be someone in the sector, and it doesn’t have to be long or frequent. What matters is that you’re not editing yourself for them, and they’re not expecting you to be okay.
A peer outside your own service
If you don’t already have one, try to build a genuine connection with a Director at another centre. Not for networking, not for sector talk, just for the quiet relief of speaking with someone who knows what your Monday looked like without you having to explain it. A coffee every few weeks is often enough.
Something that has nothing to do with leadership
A class, a hobby, a group, a regular outing, somewhere you’re just a person and not the person responsible. The role can quietly take over your whole identity if you let it, and the antidote is having somewhere in your week where leadership isn’t part of who you are.
Noticing the urge to absorb
Centre Directors are often, by temperament, people who absorb things on behalf of others. It’s part of what makes you good at this. But it’s worth gently asking yourself, when something lands on you, whether you’re absorbing it because you need to, or out of habit. Sometimes the most useful thing you can do is leave it sitting on the table for a moment before you pick it up.
Letting people know when you’re under it
This is the hardest one, and I include it knowing how counter-intuitive it can feel. Directors often hide how hard things are, because they don’t want to worry their team or seem like they aren’t coping. But carefully chosen honesty, with the right person, almost always releases more than it costs. You don’t have to share everything. You just have to stop pretending you’re sharing nothing.
If there’s one thing I’d love Centre Directors to take from this, it’s that the loneliness isn’t a personal failing or a sign that you’re not coping. It’s a structural feature of the role, and like any structural thing, it can be worked with once it’s been named.
At Lerni, a lot of what we do is sit alongside leaders in early learning who’ve been carrying more than they’ve had anywhere to put. If any of this has resonated, we’d love to have a conversation about what Professional Supervision could look like for you.