Captains & Poets – Igniting the LEADER WITHIN in Students, Teachers and Coaches

By Jennifer Johnson, B.Ed., M.A., Co-Founder, Captains & Poets [CIS Ontario 2024-2025 Principal Sponsor]

Every week we are invited in to help create braver spaces for teachers and students alike to elevate their contribution to their school community by showing up as their best, fullest selves. Teachers and coaches are reenergized and motivated to bring their gifts forward more. Students heighten self-awareness and gain a sense of agency in all that they do. All by igniting the leader within.

Who is the Leader Within?

The leader within guides us deeper into ourselves and enables us to expand who we are and elevate our contribution to the world. It is the blueprint for our true potential. The degree to which you connect with your leader within will impact your confidence, effectiveness, and how well you show up for yourself and others. It is the rudder steering the ship behind our intrinsic motivations, capabilities, and goals. It enables us to show up more fully in any given moment.

The leader within is a deeply personal aspect of identity that, when accessed, fuels our passion, heightens our performance, magnifies our impact, and brings out the best in others. Combining our collective leaders within holds the potential to ignite a healthier, more positive, and higher-performance organizational culture. The leader within also enables us to model belief in ourselves for students.

One way to access the leader within is through the language of Captain and Poet. While we each have an inner Captain and Poet, they show up differently in each of us, forming the foundation of our unique abilities and our authentic leadership style.

Who Are the Captain and Poet?

Our inner Captain is the part of us that takes charge, makes decisions, tries new things, gains confidence through experience, perseveres, rises to challenges, and takes us out of our comfort zone to help scaffold the next best version of ourselves. Our inner Poet gives us access to everything that makes us human – our emotions, capacity for empathy, our imagination and creativity, what is in our heart – our values, dreams and aspirations, our moral compass, and our intuition and gut feelings.

When the Captain and Poet are in balance and partnership, we show up as our best selves. The Captain is there to nudge the Poet to be more self-expressed and to have the emotional courage to go after our dreams. The Poet is there to guide and inspire the Captain’s actions and to take care of other Poets along the way.

You may be thinking, “Isn’t the Captain the leader?” Make a short list of qualities of good leaders (e.g., communicative, empowering, supportive, compassionate, visionary, etc.), and you will soon see that it is the partnership between the Captain and the Poet that makes a good leader. They remind us that to achieve the best outcomes possible, we must navigate the stormy seas from our whole selves.

We know we are operating from this place of partnership when we are energized, have a clear sense of direction in our role and in our life, connect easily with others – and when those around us also start to show up as their best selves. A strong connection to the leader within enables you to be a strong leader for others and inspires them to do the same.

Understanding our unique Captain and Poet combination helps ignite our leader within. We use a similar approach in our leadership workshops with both adults and youth. We deconstruct leadership and unpack our natural resistance to it. We identify our unique abilities and strengths. And we examine how we can accomplish more together than alone.

How Does It Work?

It all starts with self-awareness. When we heighten self-awareness and understand ourselves better including our orientation to the world, strengths, and limitations, we enable self-leadership. Self-leadership ignites a sense of agency in students as they take greater ownership of how they are “showing up” (or not) in the moment for themselves and others. And self-leadership is the foundation of effective leadership in the world.

When we empower young people to show up as their authentic selves, we are giving them permission to operate from the leader within. They are also liberated from the expectation that they need to emulate the prototypical leader – one who is outgoing, the first to grab the mic, the one to take charge. When we teach students to find their authentic leader within, they can see quite clearly that many people do not fit that prototype. The result? They begin to recognize the value of authentic leadership and embrace it in themselves and others:

• The empathetic Poet and the results-oriented Captain who are naturally exceptional at collaborating with others to achieve a goal or
• The reflective Poet and the organized Captain who exude competence in their thorough and thoughtful approach to things.

The impact is better alignment on committees and in group work, and greater understanding of what it takes to succeed as a team on the field or the court. Appreciation of difference is a natural byproduct of this “human curriculum” and helps contribute to braver spaces and a more inclusive culture.

We recently worked with a CIS athletic team to support a more inclusive and cohesive culture. We highlighted the active role the Poet plays as athletes show up for themselves, their team, and the game to support their performance. To strengthen the interpersonal connection amongst players we first focused on deepening connection to self. At the end of the workshop, I asked the team “What will you do differently after this workshop?” A hand shot up: “I will trust my teammates.” We won’t take credit for it but are happy to share they won the championship two weeks later. When we coach students to coach themselves, everyone wins.

Spotlight on St. Anne’s School

Our Captain is on a mission to reach as many young people (and the adults who serve them) as possible to create a better world. Our Poet’s dream is for schools to take a whole-school approach where everyone is empowered to be their best selves through the language of Captain and Poet. At St. Anne’s School we are leaning into a 360-approach engaging with both students and teachers/coaches.

We recently had the pleasure of working with 25 of their coaches to illuminate their natural gifts and promote more effective co-coaching, all while applying the Captain and Poet lens to athletes to foster greater connection and engagement. Each coach walked away with insight into their unique leader within and how they may bring impactful strategy to their sport’s practices and coaching techniques.

"The Coaching Workshop provided invaluable tools to enhance team dynamics, foster leadership, and nurture emotional intelligence in our athletes. This unique approach resonated deeply with our coaches, offering fresh perspectives on athlete development both on and off the field. I highly recommend this workshop to anyone looking to elevate their coaching strategies and create a more empowering environment.”   – Clayton Martino, Director of Athletics

And in the Grade 8 Leadership program, we aligned to the school's broader leadership framework with the goal of empowering students to explore their unique leadership portrait, which will further be developed in the Upper School.

“Captains & Poets aligns seamlessly with St. Anne’s School’s dynamic leadership program by enabling students to explore their authentic leadership strengths and skills and emphasizing the importance of both transformational leadership and emotional intelligence. In the future, we are excited to explore how Captains & Poets can be used to support other training programming.”   – Janine Franklin, Director, Middle School

It All Starts from Within

When we discover the leader within, we gain access to an intrinsic set of resources and drivers that can turn a daunting challenge into a fortuitous opportunity. The leader within reveals to us how to bring our most authentic, energized version of ourselves to our roles, our leadership, and our game. And when we understand the Captain and Poet in ourselves, we begin to see them in others.

Want to change the world around you? It all starts from within.

To learn more about our leadership programming, watch our videos at www.captainsandpoets.com/video Get a glimpse of our athletic programming here: www.captainsandpoets.com/champions

Jennifer Johnson, B.A., B.Ed., M.A, is the co-founder of Captains & Poets. She is an OISE graduate, a seasoned leader in education and the corporate world, a graduate of the Harvard Leadership Program and a CTI Coach. She is on a mission to empower people to navigate an increasingly complex world with authenticity, compassion, and resilience.