Welcome back to another episode of the origination point podcast. In this episode, Bill brings in a guest and long time friend, Michael Johnson. On this podcast Bill dives into the changes in the world that we are seeing today, and how it has affected people differently. Enjoy and don’t forget to like, subscribe and share!

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I’m excited to introduce our guest. He’s a good old friend, an old soul, a buddy of mine named Micheal Johnson. Micheal and I met when we were both in Denver. Now, neither one of us is in Denver. Micheal is out in Florida, and I’m in Portland living our best life. I wanted to bring Micheal on because when we talk about hope and healing, I don’t know too many other men whose life has been filled with hope and healing to get him to where he is now. Let’s start by telling us about who you are, how you live your life, what you believe in, and what are some of the things that are important to you.

Thank you, Bill. First of all, it’s good to sit down with you. As I said, we’re a few miles apart, but it seems quite near. That’s the great thing about the human spirit. When we connect with people, it doesn’t matter how far they are. Once you make that connection, it’s always near. Thanks for giving me some time to sit with you and share a little bit of me and some of the stories that you heard that other people hopefully will benefit from.

To answer that, I always tell people, “I’m a country boy from Arkansas.” Sometimes the simplicity of life is what grounds us for the complexity of life. My parents taught me and my four other siblings a lesson grounded around treating people how you want to be treated. It’s the real simple thing and we’ve all heard that. The biggest lesson is you reap what you sow. Karma is real. What’s done in the dark comes to the light. Those are real simple lessons. The biggest one for me is you treat people the way you want to be treated and the universe circles it back around to you. It’s not always as quickly as we want to.

I was raised in the Baptist church. Every now and then, you’ll hear that come out of me, but I grew up in what I hope and desire a lot of folks would feel, and it doesn’t matter how it’s constructed. I grew up in a family of people who cared about me and not about how far I went in my educational career, but me being a good human being and sowing good seeds into other people. They would have good situations come out of that. It’s nothing complex about who I am and what I do. The complexity is how you react to what happens to you.

I’ve always known that about you. You and I had different experiences growing up when my parents were divorced when I was young. There wasn’t a lot of closeness and that loving feeling that you’ve described in sharing about your family, but the values that we share around what you give is what you get, being your best, and sharing are things that we both have a strong belief in.

I’ll be curious to get your thoughts as we came into this time that we’re in with this pandemic. The first thing I saw was empty store shelves and people overbuying. We’re talking about treating others like you would like to be treated. How have you seen that or witnessed that? I did go to the store and saw that it’s been restocked with toilet paper.

Congratulations to Oregon because in Florida, you might as well dig for gold. It’s interesting because my wife and I got up early and went to the grocery store. I’ll be very honest with you and just utter ignorance. I did not understand the toilet paper issue. It may have been before 8:00 when we were in and I pulled one of the stock workers over and said, “Help me understand this whole toilet paper issue.” She said, “People feel like that if they get the coronavirus and their stomach is upset with diarrhea that they’re going to need toilet paper.” My mind automatically flipped. If you need that much toilet paper, I hope you can get to the hospital.

I stood, looked at my wife, and walked behind her, and it automatically clipped into my brain, “Is this who we are as people that we take more than we need and we give less of who we are?” It’s been an interesting phenomenon. I’ve read a few articles about hoarding syndrome, and how people think it makes them will feel better. Is it a reflection of our selfishness as people and caring about other folks? If you have 80 rolls of toilet paper and run out of that in two weeks, God bless you and your illness. It is showing who some of us are at the core as long as I get mine, everyone else can fend for themselves. I feel like we’re better people than that. Society has grown us to think differently about who we are as a human race.

 

It’s an interesting conversation. I had a dialogue with a group of folks who were on a shared call about what was happening. I brought up that America is one of the most individualistic countries in the world. One of the participants wanted to debate that because he didn’t believe that. It’s proven that we are, compared to other countries that are more familial and more community. It’s an interesting dichotomy when we think we’re individualistic, but to survive this, we have to work together. How do we work together effectively if our mindset is, “I need to take care of me and mine?”

You and I have talked about this, and other people are sinking in their chairs when we say this, but it even shows our ignorance even around race, ethnicity, and gender. “I’ve got to take care of who I am if anything is going to be different or it is going to press against who I believe I am and my ideology.” It’s like 9/11 and everyone became American and together. A few years later, it went back to individuality as you were stating. This is a lot different, and 9/11 was horrible.

As my wife and I talked about it, Prince Charles came back positive for the Coronavirus. I told my wife, “This is one of the things in my era that power, money, and race cannot influence and change.” Even our president gets up and says, “In Easter, we’re going to move on.” That’s a power move that you don’t have any control over because this is not discriminating. I’m hoping that this is going to push on the human element for us to say this one issue showed that it can impact us regardless of who we think we are and the situation is because it’s not discriminating as we do as humans. It’s attacking all of us.

It’s an interesting perspective. I want to know more about the connection between race and gender. We are crisis-oriented. It’s interesting how it happens, “We’re in a crisis. Let’s all come together. Let’s work together and support each other.” To your point, a few years later, the crisis is over, and we all go back to that which is comfortable and this idea of normal. I’ve been listening a lot to Eckhart Tolle and his new book, A New Earth. He talks about normal as being patterns, rituals, and behaviors of individuals. It’s raising the question, is there such a thing as a collective normal or are we a bunch of individuals who are living our pattern lives?

When I hear people say, “I can’t wait till we can get back to normal,” I think about it on those levels. Individually, I could understand that the patterns and the routines, the rituals, and the ability to see my grandkids would be nice. When I think about the collective normal, the racial divisions that we’ve had in our country and world, and the ways that we divide and separate ourselves, I don’t want to go back to that. To me, this is an opportunity to reset everything that we’re doing. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

I’m going to backtrack. The president made the comment early on and was giving data about who this was impacting and who wasn’t. One of the statements that I remember was how it wasn’t impacting the African American community. I work now in a predominantly African American community. It ran rampant on how this doesn’t impact African Americans and how African Americans were safe from this virus.

We see now that’s not true, but that’s how ignorance permeates communities and feeds off of our ignorance. That’s the same thing race does. When we don’t truly inform people of who and what another individual is, we end up walking into some ignorance. One of the things that were said quickly about this virus going on is it didn’t impact the African American community. I will say again that it was not true.

 

When you back up and think about race and what we’re living at right now, it shows how ignorance and uninformed the impact things can have. I wonder now when the president makes a comment like that and people feel like they’re safe or free from it, how has that now impacted or what are the results from that impact now?

The other reference was about the China flu. There are a number of examples of how people say things that exacerbates it or creates this notion that this particular group of people caused it or aren’t affected by it. How do we counter those messages? That’s going on also in this scarcity mentality in terms of people saying there’s not enough. You got to go out and get not just enough for you, but enough to last forever. No one knows how long this is going to last.

The question is how much we need or what. That’s what is pushed against people. How much do we need of whatever is out there? My hope at this will push us into a thought process around our own selfishness and individuality as you spoke in the opening. As an individual, what do I need versus what do I want?

What are some of the things that you’re doing to support yourself and your family? The next thing I want to get into is talking about your role as a leader as well. As a superintendent, you have this other added responsibility that other people may not. I’d love to hear how you are moving through this with your family, your own emotions, and the narratives that come up for you.

For our family, it’s not the norm. You got dogs and kids. My wife’s working from home, and my kids are doing school from home. The dog is thinking, “What are you all doing at home? This is my nap time.” It’s a different time. I don’t know for other folks, but I can feel the difference in time. Sometimes, we’re taught how we should be as men. You try to lead through this as a father and husband with a courageous piece, but it’s not a fearful time but a scary time because how much of this do we control?

I asked my wife, “How does this end? How does this come to a closing point?” What my wife and I try to do is keep our kids informed. We watch the news with them. The tough part is watching like a New Year’s countdown going reverse. You watch numbers go up. You sit and watch it scroll on the side of the television, and we talk about it. Our kids have been in the house for about 95% of the time for the last few weeks.

As for my job, I have to go out and check on schools and the essential people who are out there, but in the back of my mind, I still carry the concern of, “How is my family doing? Are we safe from this?” I don’t know any of us that don’t think about those components. With your wife being a leader, I’m sure she’s had to jump out there in the field as well. You got to come home to your family and hope and pray that everyone is okay.

One of the things my wife and I don’t do is we don’t try to shelter information from our kids. We want to be informed on why we are staying at home and cooking at home now. One is it’s forcing us to do things that families used to do more often. I’m not saying that’s aligning in there. My son and my wife cooked dinner together.

With the crazy world we live in, as far as what has been defined on how we work, the time we put at work, and how much time my children were in school, that never ever happens. I remember sitting at our bar stool area and watching my wife and son going, “That’s great because we don’t get to do it.” We’re sitting down watching TV together, but in the same sense, we know that we’re not doing it just because it’s fun. Some of it is because we have to do it.

Are all of your kids at home?

Yes. My daughter is a rising senior in high school and my son’s a rising sophomore. They’re both here. My wife is working 100% from home. I’m about 50% at home. We’re here from the morning, and my kids have a routine with their online schoolwork. My wife is working from about 8:00 to 5:00 every day. I leave in the mornings at about 7:30 and get back at about 1:00 or 2:00 every day and go from there.

I’m going to say that’s a blessing because my kids are scattered. It’s myself and my wife here in Portland. We have a son in Los Angeles, which is a pretty hard-hit space. We have a daughter in New York, at the epicenter. We then have two in Colorado, which is still starting to blow up. We had trips planned to see all of them that we had to cancel.

That’s why I say it’s a blessing to have your kids at home because that’s the one thing that we miss. If something happens to them, I would get in my car and start driving to get to them. For folks who have their family around, it is a blessing. It’s thinking about who we’re around. I also think about people who are sheltered by people that you may not like. Maybe this is a good time to practice forgiveness, saying, “I’m sorry,” or looking at what is it that divided us.

They showed a statistic in Portland that while major crime has gone down, domestic violence has gone up in the last few weeks because you have people who may not like being with each other that are being forced to shelter together. There’s a whole other conversation about what we hold onto so fiercely that creates a division between each other.

For us, we FaceTime our kids and our two grandkids almost every day. I never thought I would have to do this, but we mailed our son in Colorado eight rolls of toilet paper because he couldn’t find any. It’s doing things that we never thought we’d be doing. It’s doing the same thing you did about not being afraid, but also each day that it goes on, realizing that our schools are closed until April 17th, 2020 and everything is shut down. We’re barely at the end of March 2020.

Although I have my children here, it’s like what you said about my parents. They’re 75 and 76 years old, and I’m FaceTiming them every night to make sure, “Are you guys feeling okay? How are things going?” As we talked about individuality, one of the points for me, and I would pray and hope for other folks is at the end of the day, family is what’s important. With all the chaos going on outside and this virus sweeping through, it feels like you’re in some Marvel comic. You got this evil spirit floating around attacking people. The people in your house or the people that are on the other end of that computer or phone when you’re FaceTiming are what’s important.

With all the chaos going on outside and this virus sweeping through, the people in your house or the people that are on the other end of that computer or phone when you're FaceTiming are what's important. Share on X

When I talk to my parents back in Arkansas, when we sit down as a family, we don’t discuss the material piece of things. We’re discussing values and what’s important to our human spirit more than anything. To FaceTime my parents and have a laugh with them is what’s important in these times. We think when all is well in the world of what we need to survive or what we want to survive, but now, we’re seeing what we need more than anything is the ones we love around us and to be able to care for them and allow them to care for us in these very uncertain and uncharted waters.

You and I met when we were both working with Denver Public Schools, but we’re not going to talk about that. You were a principal and then became an instructional superintendent. You always wanted to go further. You then got hired into the job that took you to Florida to be a superintendent. Before I ask you how this has affected your role as the leader, I would love to know a little bit about something prior to this. What was the day like for you before the pandemic started?

During pre-pandemic was pretty much an ideal of what being a superintendent is. You left home, and every day is never the same. It’s pretty much like a teacher, but it’s different outside the walls. I’m in community meetings, school meetings, and meeting with different folks. I’m attached to Florida A&M University. I’m the superintendent of their lab schools, so I would be doing work with the university. It looked like I’m meeting with principals and talking about how he or she could make their schools better for kids and holding data conversations. It was at a point where what you think you should be doing as a leader, I am still learning what you have to do in trying times to be a leader.

In the last few weeks, my leadership has been changed and pushed into a different matter. You and I are like this. I’ve always taken care of people, but have I made sure that I was taking care of people? Where we live now, I don’t get up and go have meetings. I’m out with my cafeteria staff every morning, passing out breakfast and lunches to families who come through that need a meal for the day. We’re still ensuring that our community gets breakfast and lunch every day. I’m texting different people in my district saying, “Are you okay?” versus, “Did you guys get that report done so we can look at it?”

The conversations that I have with folks have probably only been 10% around instruction or about improving outcomes for learning versus outcomes for individuals to be safe and okay. Now, it’s pretty unorthodox. I did that, but then I was loading up 25 Chromebooks in the car to deliver them. It has pushed me to say, “It’s a call work and a heart work.” I always say it’s hard work, but it’s heart work. You got to have a heart for the people. You got to sometimes care for the people more than they care for themselves because not everyone is moved into that piece of thinking. It’s made me even more of a conscious leader than just being a leader.

Leadership is hard work, but it's heart work. Share on X

Leadership is sacrifice. It’s sacrificing getting up and saying, “I know the dangers that are out there, but I also know that a kid may be sitting in the house hungry or not having access.” We made sure we put a computer in every student’s home during this time. More or less, we haven’t said, “Do your schoolwork, but stay connected so you’ll know what’s going on around you as well.” It’s looking at connecting with people and ensuring that people are okay.

What I’m hearing resonating from what you said is relationships. You and I over the years have had a lot of conversations about how we live in this assessment-driven culture, which is education. Even in the corporate world, it’s all about return on investment or how well you do. Now, we’re all having to focus on what I’ll call relational leadership and being more relational.

I’m curious about what you think about it as we get back to normal. How much of the interactions of those you lead will you try to keep, knowing the impact and even the shift in how you’re interacting with them? How easy do you think it’s going to be to go back to what we would call normal and all of a sudden start looking again at, “Did you get the report done and assessments?” knowing that as a leader, you’re accountable for growth and all of those things.

I don’t know now what normal is. That sounds crazy, but will it ever be “normal?” In Oregon and Colorado, we canceled state testing in a couple of sentences. “No state testing.” If they add so much value, how do you cancel it in one statement? It isn’t about testing or those results. It’s about human connection or as you say, relationships and caring.

You’ve talked about this forever on how quickly we realize right now the importance of relationships because from governors to other folks in leadership, the ideology hasn’t been around. Data or testing for results, it’s been about taking care of people. I’m hoping this will push us now to move into a mentality of, “We’ve got to take care of people.” That’s our first job. In this situation now, if we go back to not thinking about the importance of people and the value of people, that’s on us because that should be the lesson we’re pulling out of this.

The opportunity here is to start to think about how we step back into this differently. I’ve talked to superintendents and commissioners around the country, and they will say, “We’re not testing for the right thing. The tests don’t improve outcomes for students. Why are we doing them?” As you said, with three sentences, it’s completely done.

My hope is that before we start and back up, we sit down and have a conversation and say, “What are we testing for? How is it going to impact students? How does it support educators? How do we flatten that a little bit so that it’s not so onerous?” I then look at this other piece that’s happening now. All of these people are working from home and being productive, but for a lot of companies prior to this telecommuting or working from home was discouraged. In this day and age, there should be opportunities for people to be able to do that. To do that, there has to be trust that they’ll get their work done, and now we have to trust each other because we have no choice.

The last piece is when you look at all of the opportunities that we’re creating to get Chromebooks and devices for students, even our most needy students at home and companies who are saying, “We’re going to give you hotspot,” why does all of that have to go away? Why can’t we continue to support each other because that’s a community piece? My hope is that we don’t just go back and stop doing all those things that we talk about. What did we learn from this? How do we take the best of what we learned and get rid of the rest?

I was talking to one of my friends from Denver. As structural superintendent, I supervised our online school. There was such an ideology or a thought of who these online kids were. It’s funny to me now because everyone thought these were kids who can’t make it in school, they were the bad dangerous kids, or whatever. Those were some of the thoughts around online learning and online students.

As I was talking to a former colleague in Denver, I said, “Ian looks like the smartest guy in the room now because he used to always tell us how online learning was going to change the world.” Are we saying that kids now that are doing online learning are horrible or bad kids who couldn’t make it to school? No. We’re seeing that it works and we should be learning lessons from this.

We’re learning a lesson that a mother could work from home and allow them to work at home because productivity has to still be happening because the world is still turning on its axis. We got to think differently. That’s why I say, “Blame us if we don’t come out different after this experience.” My hope is that we become better and more caring people after this to learn that we’re all in the same game.

 

This work that we’re talking about is all wrapped around hope and healing. As we start to close, why don’t you talk a little bit about what are you doing for your own self-care or healing as a member of your family, a member of your community, and a leader in your community? What are some of the things that you’re doing, knowing now you can’t go to the gym and do some of the things that were part of your routine? How have you adapted so that you take care of yourself? As you and I have talked about in the past, if you don’t take care of yourself, you have less to give.

What I’m learning through this is I wasn’t taking care of myself the way that I should have been. We’ve done family walks because we can’t go to the gym. The four of us got up and went out walking. We can’t get out, so my wife and I go for a ride together. One of the things that it’s teaching me was doing self-care anyway. I was sitting on the sectional and just having conversations. That’s something I’m learning from this.

The best thing is I’ve been talking and having conversations. You would come home and have work still on your brain, but when you’re doing your work here, we see each other working and hear that. Our conversations don’t necessarily have to be about it because I don’t have to say, “Honey, how was your day?” and she needs to tell me or vice versa because we’re here living through our work together.

By taking care of myself, I’ve been escaping into the world of movies. I realize now I was paying Netflix for a reason because we watched a good share of Netflix movies together. The biggest thing has been talking, but I have enjoyed the walks that we’ve done in the morning and the evening and taking care of each other. You even ask yourself, “How well of a job were we doing taking care of each other in these times?”

The other thing is I feed off of being able to help and take care of people. You still have to do your social distancing but still be able to help and take care of other folks. The biggest thing for me now is we’re feeding kids two meals a day. They come and we give them. Doing that fills my bucket, but then I have to push because I got to make sure that I’m being safe because I still got to come home to my family as well.

My wife and I drove off before they closed the state and went to Hood River and took a nice little hike. We then went across a bridge and took a left. We took a 70-mile drive back to Portland. We both looked at each other and said, “We would’ve never done this before.” We didn’t have any timeframe. We couldn’t get out and have lunch or do anything. We sat in the car, listened to music, and took in the scenery. It’s been refreshing to connect, and it’s great to be quarantined or sheltering in place with somebody that I love and care about. That helps.

I sound like Ward Cleaver. I’m like, “Honey, let’s go for that walk.” That was never in the thought process like “Let’s go sit out on the porch.” We’ve gone to sit out on the front porch, had a glass of wine, and talked. The circumstances have forced me to do a lot more self-care.

That’s true for a lot of folks, and I hope that people take advantage of it. What are you hopeful for as we are in the midst of this and as we move through it? What are your hopes in terms of where we’re going?

It’s that we come out as better people. We know that we historically treated everyone as being a part of this, as they say, the American dream. If anything, we should walk away with this. At the end of the day, money, fame, or any of that can’t supersede the human element. I hope that we can come away as a better people and it’s not the We Are The World moment or the 9/11 moment when everybody put a flag on their lapel and said, “We’re America,” and went right back to treating people like crap. Instead of that, we go back and treat people as one human race versus who we are or what we’re tied to.

 

I told my wife, “This is one of the few things I can say now that White power infrastructure cannot control.” They can’t control it. You can’t say, “It’s going away by Easter.” Peter Cottontail has nothing to do with this. We are at the mercy of each other. Can you follow the rules that are laid out? Can you stay home? Can you keep social distance between yourself and other folks? None of us are Superman or Superwoman. This is a chain right now, and we got to play a part in the link of it and survive through it. I hope that I and everyone else walk away a little bit more humane and compassionate about other folks.

I appreciate knowing that. I’ve always done this work because I want to make the world a more humane place. I’m hoping that through conversations like this and regular people like us, sharing our insights, our lessons, and our frailties that people can realize that the human condition is not dissimilar. If we can move past labels, roles, and titles and see people for who we are as just people who wake up every day, want to have a good day, better themselves, and have something better for our families, my hope is that we can make the new normal look a lot different than where we were. I’m going to give you a minute to share any last thoughts or words. What a treat it’s been talking with you for a long time. I’m going to let you take us out.

It’s simple. As Gandhi says, “We are the change.” Now, we’ve got to be that change. We got to change our habits and our mindset. If at any time, we have to learn that we’re only as good as we are together. Together may not be standing right next to each other, but it’s about us taking care of each other and figuring that if we do that, then we get through this pandemic. If we ignore the causes, then we suffer as a group collectively. We rise together or fall together.

Together may not be standing right next to each other, but it's about us taking care of each other and figuring that if we do that, then we get through this pandemic. Share on X

Micheal, I want to thank you again for being on our inaugural hope and healing.

Thanks, Bill.

Good luck with everything. Take care of yourself and your family. Peace and blessings to everyone. Let’s stay in touch.

Brother, I love you. God bless you and your family. Keep shipping that toilet paper out.

Take care. See you later.

 

Important Links

• Micheal Johnson
• A New Earth
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