Vital Mental Medicine.

The men salvage what they can.

He throws his gold watch into the snow.

His cigarette case too.

No room for luxury in survival.

But one thing stays.

A banjo.

Leonard Hussey’s banjo.

Shackleton called it 'vital mental medicine'.

From the outside, it looked absurd.

A banjo over rations?

Music over supplies?

But Shackleton understood something deeper:

Survival isn’t just physical.

The spirit must endure too.

Each night, as temperatures fell and hope thinned, Hussey played.

Laughter followed.

Songs spread.

And through that rhythm, belief returned.

Optimism, not circumstance, kept them alive.

Shackleton demanded it.

“Optimism,” he said, “is true moral courage.”

Every organisation faces its own endurance test.

When systems fail.

When plans sink.

When certainty disappears.

That’s when leadership is revealed;

not by what we hold on to,

but by what we let go of.

The Endurance was their ship.

Their plan.

Their structure.

When it sank, Shackleton didn’t cling to it.

He redirected his men toward what mattered most: each other.

In schools, it’s the same.

Culture isn’t built from policies or displays.

It’s built from belief;

in purpose, in people, in the work itself.

When conditions are tough,

resources tight, change constant,

the instinct is to cling to structure.

But real leadership knows what to carry forward,

and what to leave behind.

Every school needs its banjo.

Something that sustains spirit when the ship is gone.

A shared ritual.

A laugh in the staffroom.

A moment of kindness under pressure.

Because hope isn’t a byproduct of progress.

It’s the fuel that makes progress possible.

Systems evolve.

Structures change.

But optimism, trust, and human connection,

those are the things that endure.

When everything else must be left behind…

culture is the banjo you keep.

I can help, want to know how?