These are our stories: waving not drowning as we navigate Covid:19 as leadership 'professionals'

This feminist thinkpiece invites the reader to engage with the narratives of five women leading in education. In this piece we are ‘professing’; admitting openly our stories of leadership and the acute tensions experienced during COVID 19. Our provocation is that leadership can be done differently when the emotional dimension is valued; as women leaders we can be that change. Our stories are positioned within the dominant constructs of what it means to be a leadership ‘professional’. This is a leadership discourse that is resolutely masculine, to ‘man up’, to not acknowledge vulnerabilities, conflicts, and complexity. Consequently, stories like these are too often unheard. But the problem does not go away if you stop talking about it. We problematise the view that to profess leadership challenges is unprofessional – irrational, unobjective, emotional. Whilst the contexts of our stories are different, our narratives are united by our commitment to openness, honesty and reflection. Through our storying we begin to disrupt what it means to be ‘profess-ional’ in our education leadership lives.