Ep #37: Actually Loving the Job

Hello, Empowered Principals, welcome to episode 37.

Welcome to The Empowered Principal Podcast, a not so typical, educational resource that will teach you how to gain control of your career and get emotionally fit to lead your school and your life with joy, by refining your most powerful tool: your mind. Here’s your host, certified life coach, Angela Kelly Robeck.

Hello, Empowered Principals, how are you this fine day? I am overabundant with gratitude. I just, today this morning, had an amazing coaching call with my coach and I had such a massive realization from our 30-minute chat that I had to sit down and record this podcast right now.

So Stacey, who you guys know, is my business coach. And she helps me create the mindset that I want and need to upscale my business from a solo-preneurship into a full-on company that supports school districts in bringing emotional fitness to school leaders, the teachers, the staff, the parents, the students, everyone. I have massive vision.

And my massive vision feels pretty daunting at times, I will admit, but I still believe and feel, in my heart and in my soul, that this vision is absolutely attainable. And not just attainable, but necessary. And one thing that I’ve learned along the way us that thought work is never completed.

I have to work every day to create thoughts that support the results I want in both my personal life and my business. A part of mindset work is to peel back the layers of our subconscious thinking and question those thoughts. Is the thought true? Do I want to believe this thought? Is there another thought that might serve me better? And so on…

The way that I answer these questions for myself is to feel, physically feel, the answer. What I mean by this is that when I uncover a thought that I’ve been holding onto and believing in for a while and I think that it’s true, I examine the thought as an observer from a neutral space and I wait to see how it feels inside my body.

If the thought brings about negative vibrations, which are just called emotions, if that negative vibration is intense in my body, then I know the thought I’m thinking is false for me personally. It’s just not true, it doesn’t ring true in my body.

Byron Katie says that any thought that does not feel good in the body is a lie. And I believe this to be true because whenever we think a thought that feels good, my brain and my body get into alignment. My brain agrees that the thought is true and my body gets this warm fuzzy vibration sensation that says, “Yes, it is true for you, Angela.”

So remember, your thoughts just appear and they have no meaning until you attach meaning to them. And thoughts are not universal. There’s not a universal true or false, yes or no, all or none type of thought. Thoughts just appear and they simply are either true or false depending on how they feel to you. So keep that in mind as you explore your own layers of thought.

So back to today, as I was explaining to my coach the ways in which I could expand my reach out to people, my awareness for my cause, I was telling her that for so long, I was very resistant to reaching out directly to school leaders and school districts. And the excuse that I was telling myself and using, which was basically just a thought I was choosing to believe, right, was that I’m much more articulate as a writer than a speaker.

I didn’t see myself being well received if I offered speaking events as part of my coaching program because I didn’t believe that I was a good speaker or a good presenter. I was basically hiding behind this excuse as a way to avoid being uncomfortable up on stage and being potentially rejected by people.

So she asked me a brilliant question. She said, “If you were in a dire situation, and I mean dire, like if someone was holding your son hostage and they were holding him for ransom and the only way to get him back was to do a live speaking gig, would you do it?” And I was like, “Duh, absolutely, not even a question, of course I would.”

And then I said this, “I loved presenting as a principal. One of my favorite things to do was be onstage. I love presenting to my staff. I loved sharing information at principal’s coffees. I loved being the MC at our school’s weekly leopard launch. I loved hosting school-wide events. I loved speaking to the entire school body and the school community. I just loved it. It was my jam. And when I was in those moments, it was those times that I felt the most myself, the most empowered and the most magical as a principal. I loved being a principal.”

And when those words came out of my mouth, “I loved being a principal.” It was as if I had just been released from prison. Saying those words never felt so true and I cried with joy as I explained to Stacey how much I loved my job as principal. I told her how much I loved the kids, how much I loved the staff and the parents. I told her about how much I adored my office staff and how well they took care of me and how much I loved my custodial staff.

I told her about how I used to run Diet Cokes out to our school bus driver, Theresa, on hot days and I would tell her, “Just hang in there, girl. Here’s something nice and cold to drink.” She loved me for that. I said that my campus was a second home to me and that I had been at that school – actually, this is still true to this day – I have been at that school longer than any home I have ever lived in, in my entire life.

I told her the story of the day that my sister accompanied me onto campus and when we got home that night she said, “Wow, oh my gosh, when you set foot onto that campus, you became a complete rock star. Kids were running up to you, parents were coming up to you. Your energy shifted into the most empowered and confident woman I have ever met and everyone wanted a piece of you. You were smiling. You were glowing. You were beaming. You were talking to people, shaking their hands. You were an absolute star. You were totally in your element.”

And I just cried to Stacey this morning knowing that all of this was true for me. It felt so good to acknowledge the truth in that statement. I actually loved my job. I felt my brain and my body align like I have not felt before when I thought of my work as a school leader.

You see, the negative emotions that built up over the parts of the job I didn’t care for started to rob me of the positive emotions that were also a part of my experience. I focused so much on what was not working and what wasn’t going well, what I had not accomplished and the lack of control that I had. But what I was doing is just creating more lack.

My belief in negative thoughts and in my negative thoughts created more emotion and more negative experiences. My stewing in those experiences and that negativity brought more and more and more negativity, to the point that the good parts actually faded away and left me with the belief that none of it was good.

I was at a girl’s weekend with a group of women who I met teaching at my beloved school. I call them my old guard and I even made sure that they made it into my book acknowledgment. So for all of you listening, be sure to read my acknowledgments because I have so many people in there that I love. That was one of my favorite parts about the book.

We’ve been friends, this group and I, have been friends for over 20 years and they are some of my dearest friends on the planet. At this girl’s weekend, we were talking about education, as we often do, and my sweet always ever so positive friend, Karen, asked me this question.

You talk about what isn’t going well in schools, and I understand all of that, but I’m curious to know what you think is going well in schools. Her question stunned me. First of all, I was shocked that she, of all people, was the one to ask me that, because she’s just such a positive mindset. But two – I was really speechless.

I was left without an answer. I struggled to say one positive thing. And it took me a while to squeeze out some lame response, which I don’t even remember what I said; something about I love the community or something. Not that that’s lame, but it was sad to me that I could not come up with a list of positive things about schools.

That happened back in November and that experience has stuck with me ever since. I have been focusing on what was going wrong versus what was going right. I was in a scarcity mindset versus an abundance mindset. I have been creating evidence for my thoughts by choosing to only focus on the problems and the pain points of school leadership.

And what I realized in today’s coaching session is that I love the role of school leader. I love anybody who is out there doing it. I want the world to know how amazing it is to be in the position and what an honor it is to be able to do so.

I want to support my clients and create programming from a place of loving the job. I want to honor how much I loved the job and how much it loved me back. I want to empower all of you to know that no one else has to tell you whether you’re a good principal for you to love the work you do. Your boss doesn’t have to pat you on the back. Your teachers don’t have to give you the gold star every day of the week and your parents don’t have to approach you with gratitude and gracefulness; that’s just not going to happen.

But you can choose to believe that you love the job, in spite of all of its challenges. You can let it ring true for you that you are enough, that you are capable, and that you really do enjoy parts of the job. You don’t have to pretend you love it all.

The way to feeling better is not the whole faking it ‘til you make it routine. The way to feel better is to let your truth vibrate through you. Love what you love, dislike what you dislike. That authenticity will feel so good to you as it rings true in who you are and being comfortable in your own skin.

Each one of us likes different aspects of the job and each of us dislikes different aspects of the job. It doesn’t matter what you love and what you don’t. The key is to allow yourself to feel the vibration in your body of what rings true for you.

More than ever, it seems that emotional resiliency and wellbeing is needed throughout our schools and our country. In a time when we have so many external options for buffering our emotions, we need to shed light on the idea that the worst thing that can ever happen to us is an emotion and we are all capable of handling our emotions; the good and the bad.

I am so happy that I unveiled that pretty little lie that has been hiding in the back of my mind that told me I hated being a principal. That one thought has created so much anguish for me. And now that it has been exposed and I know the truth, I will never allow it to become true for me again. May you have an amazing and empowered week. I will talk with you guys next week. Take care, bye-bye.

Thanks for listening to this episode of The Empowered Principal Podcast. If you enjoyed this episode and want to learn more, please visit www.angelakellycoaching.com where you can sign up for weekly updates and learn more about the tools that will help you become an emotionally fit school leader.