“I knew I was going to have to tell a complicated story. I don’t think I anticipated the silence.”Scott McCue spent twenty-five years in education. He was on track to become a doctor until a college friend asked him to tutor kids at the Mission Hill housing project in Roxbury. At 28 he founded Boston Prep, a charter school in Boston, and led it for ten years. He then spent eight years training new teachers at Sposato, a program that made the cover of The Economist and closed five years after he left. In 2020 he walked away from education to work on climate and nature. Today he is at the Charles River Conservancy, caring for the parks and the river in Boston and Cambridge.

Scott talks about the years when the job and the person were the same thing. He greeted every school bus on Hyde Park Avenue, handpicked every teacher, and ran on what he calls righteous indignation. He tells the story of Shirley, a former student, and a moment in a hospital elevator during the hardest week of his life. He’s also honest about the eighteen months it took to find his next role: the applications that never got past the front door, and the two months it took him at Mass Audubon to land a joke.We also talk about impermanence, why he doesn’t believe in meditation streaks, a swim coach’s advice to stay “loose but not formless,” and the two qualities he thinks anyone in a midlife transition can build: humility and curiosity. And he explains why, after all of it, he feels lucky to paddle out to a floating wetland on the Charles and call it work.If you’ve built an identity you’re proud of and you feel pulled toward something new, this one is for you.

Guest: Scott McCue, Charles River Conservancy

Host: Steven Miyao, executive coach and founder of Coaching Mettahttps://coachingmetta.com

Chapters

0:00 Meet Scott McCue

1:02 Pre-med to the classroom

5:45 Starting a school at 28

12:07 ”It's who I am”

21:25 Shirley at the elevator

24:45 Knowing when to leave

30:40 Pivoting to the planet

32:49 Eighteen months of silence

39:31 Why it's worth it

46:24 Meditation without a scorecard

56:21 Humility and curiosity

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