Kai Johnson on Leadership & Transformation

To Gap is to Grow. To Gap is to Transform.

My first gap year experience came during my sophomore year of University. Like so many others, I had gone on to university because it was “what you do.” After a year of excessive drinking during my freshman year, I ended up with multiple drinking tickets before starting my sophmore year, and a court mandated drinking education class. I was confused, depressed, and lost. I had no idea why I was in school, no idea what I wanted to study, and no idea who I really was. I had spent my highschool years fitting into a predefined friendship mold and without the same friend group in University, without the mold to hold me together, I splintered and fractured and broke.

I needed to get away. I needed to escape. I needed to change. So I decided to study abroad. I fell into a new study abroad program in Fiji. And it changed my life and set the stage for the next 12 years of my life, leading to where I am now.

Four days after arriving in Fiji, I found myself waking up in a tin hut, in the bed of my Fijian homestay parents – which they had given me for the night. They slept on the floor. My mother gave me tea and breakfast and then took me to church, where we sat in a funeral service for a young woman who had recently passed away. The eulogy was in Fijian. After the service, we followed the casket through the village. As we passed by huts and houses and chickens and pigs, more and more people joined the procession. We wound our way into a forest and came to a sun dappled clearing, where a fresh grave awaited the casket. They lowered the casket into the grave, and as the first handful of dirt was thrown on top the entire congregation began to sing. The voices were angelic.

And in that moment, at a funeral, in a forest, in a village, in Fiji, something changed in me and I realized that life would never quite be the same.

My heart opened to see things my eyes could not and I began a process that would re-introduce me to myself and to the world.

I came back from Fiji having learned more about life, about myself, and about the world than I had learned in the previous 19 years put together. To appease my mother, I continued going to college, but was lucky enough to study abroad again, the last semester of my Senior year, in India.

Where Fiji supported and nurtured me like a calm dip in the ocean, India challenged my deepest assumptions and rubbed away layers of assumptions like sandpaper, leaving me raw and exposed. I graduated university while in India and stayed for another six months at an internship in New Delhi – trying to understand the incredible country of a billion plus people and 5000 years of history.

Fast Forward.

I started leading gap year programs shortly after my year in India. I spent five years as a program leader on gap year, high school, and college programs in India, Nepal, and Bhutan. Seeking more stability, I went to work with Rustic Pathways, as their India & Nepal Country Director, and spent another five years managing and directing their high school and gap year programs in South Asia.

Through this process, I realized that leaders – the people who are on the ground, with the students, executing the programs – are incredibly special people. They have a spectacular array of skills and an incredible depth of knowledge, patience, humor, compassion, and love.

Talk with any company and you will quickly realize that leaders are the lifeblood of the company. They are the essential component that make or break programs – that truly enable students to explore, expand, and grow on gap programming. Leaders are mentors, friends, siblings, educators, first responders, seekers, and sages. At the most basic level leaders keep students safe and help them get from place to place while having the necessities (food, shelter, and healthy bodies) sorted out. But that is just the start.

Leaders craft the group dynamic. Leaders till the soil in which seeds of experience will be planted. Leaders create the environment in which learning, growth, and transformation can grow. They nurture that growth like careful gardeners, giving sun and water, protection, and nutrients. Leaders give their whole selves – their whole souls – to programs and to students.

From the outside, leader life looks incredibly glamorous – getting paid to travel the world, learn amazing things, and do exciting activities. It’s the social media view of life. It’s a life of adventure, challenge, and growth.

That view is completely true – there are absolutely amazing opportunities and joys that leaders experience. But, just like social media, that view is unidimensional. There’s also some very deep, very unique challenges that leaders face as well – particularly post-program.

Support for Leaders is Lacking.

Support for most leaders generally ends with the program, and leaders return “home” to a place that may no longer be home: to a community that may or may not exist and to friends and family who have no real understanding of what that leader did for the past 3, 6, 12 months.

Just as students change, transform, and grow from their experiences – so too do leaders! This itself is one of the great joys of leading. In this process, leaders return home different from when they started – their identities, their values, their perspectives on the world indelibly changed by their experiences. Repeat this process over, and over, and over again, however, and it’s easy to see how a leader might get lost.

This is what lead me to my next project. Having gone through these experiences myself, and having witnessed many leaders go through these struggles over the course of my career, I wanted to change things. I want to create a world in which leaders have support before, during, and after programs; a world that understands the incredible skills leaders bring to the table; a world in which leaders can transition easily into full time jobs inside and outside of the industry; a world where leaders have a deep and extensive community that truly understands their life.

So I created Act Normal, which developed leader-niche knowledge, connections, and resources to make life better for leaders.  We launched a leader job board, company database, and online leader community. 

I also started the Gap Year Association (GYA)’s Field Leaders Committee to improve conditions for leaders across the gap year movement, especially considering that field leaders serve as the mentoring, guiding, facilitating back-bone of our field.