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.

Carlos R. Moreno has been a teacher, a principal, and a director, and is now an executive director. A proud native New Yorker, Carlos is a passionate educational trailblazer committed to supporting school and district leaders to create high-quality, innovative schools designed to tackle systemic equity issues. He currently serves as co-executive director for Big Picture Learning, a nonprofit organization that has developed more than 200 such schools in the United States and around the world. He cofounded and leads the Deeper Learning Equity Fellowship, in partnership with the Internationals Network for Public Schools, and the newly created Ashé Leaders Fellowship. Carlos is also the founder and coproducer of the highly acclaimed Leadership Journeys storytelling initiative, which has featured inspirational figures such as Christopher Emdin, Dena Simmons, Kaya Henderson, Nancy Gutiérrez, Meisha Porter, and Sharif El-Mekki. Carlos holds undergraduate degrees in marketing and business and a master's degree in educational leadership.But those are merely Carlos's credentials. At heart, Carlos is an observer, a family man, a learner, a builder of community, a student, and a teacher—someone who has simultaneously found and continues to seek his own Leadership Soul.