Ep #114: Why Education Is Ready for Life Coaching

Hello, Empowered Principals. Welcome to Episode 114.

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, my empowered leaders. And welcome to the month of March. Gosh, you guys, you’re entering into the last months of the school year. I love sharing this story with my clients because I like to laugh at myself. My brain would make March such a painful month for me. I would always be sitting at the end of February where it is right now.

Today is February 21st, the day before my birthday, and I would be looking at March thinking to myself, “Oh, my gosh. It is such a long month. There are no breaks. There are no short days. There is nothing. It’s just working, working, working, and we’re not even close to the end of the year yet.” March was so exhausting for me because I was telling this story about how long it was, and how miserable it was, and spring fever was kicking in, and the kids were getting crazy, and the teachers were getting tired. That just made me tired thinking about it.

I wish I had known back then that my thoughts create my reality because every spring, I would go through this kind of slump in the month of March. I didn’t realize that I was doing it to myself. That’s why I love coaching so much. I’ve now learned that the way we interpret situations in our lives, through our thoughts, it ends up being the result that we experience.

I’m sure that you’ve witnessed this before with yourself or with students and teachers even. When a teacher believes that her class is really tough this year, and she focuses on how hard things are, and she talks about it all the time, things are going to end up being tough for her. You’ve seen people play this out, and kids do it all the time too. So, no one is exempt. Our brains all do this.

The important piece of your brain is just to be aware that your thoughts are separate from who you are, and that you can notice the thoughts and be like, “Yeah, I hear you. I see you,” but you don’t have to believe it. It’s a skill set that takes practice and time, but awareness is really the key. It’s simple to be aware. When your emotions flare up, that’s the signal, “Time to be aware. I’m thinking something crazy here.” Let me dig into this a little bit.

Every teacher, and student, and principal have thoughts that they believe to be true, and we see ourselves, and our work, and our situations through the lens of that belief. We all do this. Knowing this and continually studying it is the most important thing we can do as school leaders because it helps us understand what drives human behavior. We study it by studying ourselves.

Most people do not spend time trying to understand why they do what they do. That’s because it feels super uncomfortable when we ask ourselves, “Why did I say that? Why did I do that? No, really. Why did I just do that? What was I thinking?” We ask ourselves that, “What was I thinking?” But we don’t stop to answer the question, what was I thinking?

When we do answer the question, what was I thinking, and we see the thoughts, it feels like we’re exposing our imperfections, which are just thoughts that we believe are bad. When we have thoughts that we’re not proud of, we judge those thoughts. We believe they’re bad. We shouldn’t be thinking them, and we make the thought something about us. Then that feels really uncomfortable because we’re not just judging the thoughts, were judging ourselves.

Being willing to expose all of your thinking to yourself does require courage, but it’s worth it because once you understand yourself, you will better understand all human behavior. You will be able to relate to people’s behaviors from a different perspective, which allows you to have more influence as a leader and not be as impacted by situations outside of you. That is the real work as a school leader.

If you can handle examining your thoughts and emotions, and looking at them with truth, and honesty, and just openness, you’re going to be able to handle any leadership skill and learning any leadership skill. Anything that feels hard to you in terms of learning it as a skill, you can manage your mind around doing hard things, but if you’re not willing to be open about the thoughts you’re thinking about a skill and why it’s hard to learn, then you kind of flatline.

Anyway, I just wanted to share that because March brought up such a visceral reaction for me knowing that March was coming. I thought, “Oh, I’ve got to change the story around because now, I don’t even realize it’s March.” I’m just coaching, and recording podcasts, and writing articles, but please note that if your brain is having any doubts or thoughts about the end of the school year, that they’re just thoughts and you can change the story. Okay?

I originally planned a different topic for today’s podcast, but after attending the AASA conference, I felt compelled to share my thoughts on the topic of coaching and mentorship for school leaders. The conference was absolutely amazing. It was my first time attending this particular conference, and I admit, I was a little overwhelmed at one, the size of the conference. There were thousands of people there, maybe 3,000 people. It was huge.

I was also a little intimidated by being around so many superintendents at one time. My brain was telling me like, “Well, you haven’t been a superintendent, and they’re not going to want to listen to what you have to say. They’re going to wonder why you’re here. You’re the little guy on the block.” You’ve got massive organizations who are presenting, and giving out information, and offering mentorship.

So, yeah, it was a little intimidating, but you know what? I was determined to learn the challenges that school leaders are facing from the perspective of the superintendent because I want to understand what are superintendents struggling with? What are their school leaders struggling with? What do superintendents want for their school leaders? How can they help them?

It was a really valuable use of my time to go to the conference. Here’s something I walked away with. There is a growing recognition and understanding from the superintendents that principals are, in fact, need of support and mentorship. This is fantastic news. It’s been a long time coming.

The Wallace Foundation published a study indicating that principal influence is second only to teachers in student success. That report was released in 2004. That was 16 years ago, indicating the value of a principal. That’s six years before I even became a principal. That’s so long ago for me. My brain is just wow about that because I thought this study came out maybe in ‘17 or ‘18. No, it was 16 years ago, and it’s just now becoming a topic of education in the public mainstream forum.

There are large organizations who are just beginning to provide principal mentorship as part of their service. I fully support any programming out there that offers support to struggling leaders. Or not even struggling leaders, just leaders in general because the top of the top leader has the bad days, and it’s still an intense job no matter what.

As I was listening to a summary of the support that one of the organizations was offering, it became really apparent to me that there’s still something missing. I mean no disrespect to these organizations, or their people, or all the work they’re doing. They’re fabulous. It’s just that I noticed that the way education as an institution addresses new problems, and I can sense that today’s new problem is that need for principal support. It’s all the rage right now. It continues to be approached in the same way that we approach everything in education.

We see something’s not working. We talk about it for a long time, but nothing happens. Researchers finally dive in. They research the problem. Then they tell us what the problem is and what we should do about it. Then big companies and organizations spend tons of time creating these systemized programs to offer to districts for really big bucks.

There’s nothing wrong with this other than the fact that it takes 16 years for it to turn around. That’s a lot of people, and a lot of time, and a lot of students and teachers who have passed through, and a lot of principals who left the field because they didn’t have any support. I see it being a momentum right now, it’s definitely in full swing.

However, I am worried that the momentum of this principal mentorship is going to become another commercialized program that ends up being a lot more paperwork and a burden then a process where you just get the help that you need right here, right now.

What tends to happen is we create these big, laborious programs and mentorship trainings, and people have to do all of this paperwork, and go through the motions, and jump through a bunch of hoops, but in the end, you felt like maybe you got some support, and it was better than nothing, but it wasn’t exactly what you were looking for.

I’ve seen this with the teacher mentor programs. The theory behind the programs is excellent, and it supports teachers. When they’re provided with an excellent mentor, the relationship was beneficial, but I’ve noticed that in some cases, the funding sources of these programs often require layers and layers of documentation and data collection in order to justify the investment, which then falls onto the shoulders of the mentor and the teacher, giving them more work to do.

It ends up being a ton of paperwork, and the teachers feel caught in a program designed to be supportive, but it’s also a real burden and time consuming. It’s kind of a time suck. The nature of these programs are that people have to follow a very specific protocol for their sessions, and it does take out a degree of personalization.

My teachers would come to me saying, “Look, I love the mentor program, except that dot, dot, dot,” and it tended to be like, “Too many meetings, too much time, too much paperwork. It’s not exactly what I need. What I want to talk about is this. How can I get this support? I just want answers now. I don’t want to have to wait two weeks or a month to meet with my mentor.” Those kinds of things would come up.

No system is perfect. Totally understand that, but I want to acknowledge how education responds when there’s a problem. It’s very slow to respond. My worry is that this next big educational wave is going to become another box to check for you. School leaders, you already begin the job with so many responsibilities, and having to follow a prescribed system will not just be a support, but it’s also going to be a burden for you as well.

I’m not trying to criticize or condemn the system. I understand why it’s in place and why there are checks and balances. Totally get that. I haven’t been through any of these programs, so I’m not validating or invalidating them specifically. What I am expressing is my personal speculation based on the way that education has functioned in the past.

We thrive on trends in education, trends and curriculum, trends in strategies, trends in instructional priorities and instructional leadership. All of the things. If you’ve been to an educational conference recently, you’ll see that social, emotional learning and trauma-informed teaching is on the top of everyone’s list. Our industry, as I’m sure all industries do, focus on buzz words and trends.

Principal mentorship is coming into fashion, and I worry for you as a principal that mentorship will become another thing deemed a good idea by your district, but it will ultimately be district led. As we’ve seen in education before, what we thought was very personalized learning, such as putting kids on computers, and then having them follow an online curriculum, ends up being another institutionalized way of trying to personalize support.

My other concern is that the focus continues to be on skill set over mindset, particularly when it comes to the mental and emotional well-being of you, individual as a school leader. There is a distinct difference between having an open mindset, like being open to learning new things, which is an absolute part of becoming a skilled leader and learning how to feel the emotions that come with school leadership without succumbing to them.

Even the strongest of teachers who enter a principalship find the transition to be overwhelming. Just the other day, one of my clients said to me, “You know, this job is way harder than I thought, and I’m a pretty stable, pulled together, emotionally strong person. I was really well-liked as a teacher. I had systems in place. Parents loved me. I had really good rapport with my colleagues. Not a lot of conflict. My boss really appreciated my work. When I stepped into this role, it stresses me out, and it really has pushed me and made me question the job at times.”

So, she said, “I can’t imagine not having somebody to talk with about the transition into leadership and the stresses and demands placed on her on a daily basis. It can wear the best of the best down. This is the missing link right now. It’s not only teaching new leaders the skill of how to be a principal. It’s supporting leaders, ongoing support.

Regardless of how long you’ve been in the position, there’s going to be constant criticism. There’s going to be lots of failures, failure to obtain the goals you’ve set for yourself as a leader, or the goals you’ve set as a school campus. There’s toxic culture that wears down even the most veteran of school leaders.

So, you can learn any skill you need to learn in order to lead your school, but unless you know what triggers your emotions and how to feel them, and I don’t mean suppress them or avoid them, there will always be aspects of the job that will get to you. They’ll get in your brain, and it will make you go crazy.

People who’ve been a principal for years know the skills. They already know how to do the job. They don’t burn out because they don’t know how. They burn out because of the emotional drain and the fatigue that sets in. I call this emotional fatigue.

When we don’t know how to effectively process emotion, we end up reacting to it, which results in us being drained mentally, emotionally, and even physically because we take so much action in order to feel better, and we internalize that mental and emotional stress, and it has a negative impact on our bodies. It physically has an impact.

Then we get stuck in a loop of trying harder and harder to get more done, and we end up feeling more drained. On top of all of this, we experience failure fatigue because we get tired at not getting the results we want. You ever feel like you’re spinning your wheels over and over again, and you’re like, “What are we doing? What is this for? I’m not really getting anywhere.” It feels like every year becomes the same. That kind of feeling.

Eventually, your brain is like, “Why are we even doing this? What does this matter? We’re on a wheel.” You fatigue of not getting the results that you want. So, I’m all in for mentorships, and I believe that it is one way we learn more efficiently. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel if someone can teach you how to handle specific situations faster than learning it on your own. I’m all in for that.

I’m also 100% in for including life coaching tools and strategies because these are the tools that give you a resource for understanding why you and others think, feel, and do what you do and what they do. It helps you understand yourself and understand other people, and it’s about understanding human behavior. Isn’t that at the core of who we are and what we do all day long? We work with humans. Don’t we want to understand them?

Most of us want to be helpful, solve problems, and feel good most of the time while we’re doing these things. Right? I know that most people don’t want to stop and talk about emotions. They’re either super uncomfortable talking about it, or they don’t think that it has any value, and others maybe see it as fluffy or unnecessary. Kind of that old school way like, “We don’t talk about emotions around here. That’s weakness.”

The problem with this is that you can’t grow as a leader if you don’t understand your emotions. That’s because you cannot separate emotion from anything else that you do. You don’t come into work and drop your emotions in a suitcase at the door. You bring your thoughts and emotions with you to work, and then you take them home with you. It’s so funny to me when people say to compartmentalize and to be the leader at school, and then go home and be a mom, or be a partner, or be a friend, or whatever.

We’re all the same human. We bring home those thoughts with us, and we bring them to school. So, there is no separation in that way. One thing I want to say about life coaching is that it’s really about leaning into these emotions and observing how they impact the decisions that we make. This is not a skill that we’ve been taught before. It’s a skill that’s fairly new to us, and it makes it a little scary. It’s uncomfortable, and it’s easy to think we don’t need this. Like, “Oh, I’ve gotten along fine this far. I don’t really need a coach.”

This is where I say, “Yeah, absolutely. You can always choose to continue on with your career and your life unaware of the impact your emotions are playing on every single result that you have or you don’t have. You don’t need a coach.” But for those of you out there who do want something more, something different, you want to step into your empowerment and you want to see how you get that power back into your life and into your career, this is the way to make the change. This is the way to achieve it.

This work might be considered avant-garde and very different, but my speculation is that in 5 to 10 years, having a life coach is going to be just as normal as having a fitness trainer or having a nanny, a person who comes in and helps you with your children. Maybe you have a personal assistant who runs your errands for you because you’re so busy, you can’t get to the grocery store or whatever.

I want to tell you, if you’re listening to this podcast, that you and I are pioneers in the evolution of education. This is what is going to evolve the way we finally approach teaching, and learning, and leading. It’s a massive calling. I understand that, but I am willing to keep sharing this message for as long as I can until it gets people the true support that they need.

I think back to when meditation or mindfulness was considered super hippy dippy or a kind of woo-woo, and now it’s become more mainstream. Life coaching is the same thing, and it will be right up there. I guarantee it. So, get in while you can before my schedule is full.

Okay. One more reason why education is totally ready to adopt life coaching strategies into its current model with using the life coaching tools that I share with you guys is because actually we can solve any problem. The problem I’m going to highlight right now is attracting and maintaining quality educators, and that’s because it’s such a hot topic.

We’re in the month of March. You are in the mindset of who’s going to stay, who’s going to go, staffing for next year, hiring, recruiting, interviewing, getting people on board for next year. Your mind is in that mindset. So, I want to talk to you how life coaching tools help this process, help attract and retain people.

At the conference, a superintendent asked one of the panelists this brilliant question. If teachers are 100%, the number one factor in student success, and principals are a close number two, then why are we pulling excellent teachers out of the classroom and putting them into leadership roles without the support that they need, and then expect that they’re going to be excellent as leaders when the roles require very different skills? It’s a great question.

What he’s saying is that he sees these excellent teachers and how they’ve spent time building up their skill set as a classroom teacher. When they first came in, they weren’t awesome. They worked on their mindset, which helped them work on their skill set, and they practiced year after year and became much more competent, much more confident in who they were as a teacher.

So, now, they’re an excellent teacher making significant impact for kids. We pulled them out, and we put them in a new position. We don’t give them support. We expand what they need to do in their role as a leader, and then we don’t give them any support. We expect them to be excellent from the beginning.

Growing yourself into a more advanced aspect of your career requires you to think in very different ways. You have to approach the job differently. I believe that we have a retention problem in education because we don’t support this aspect of growth. We don’t acknowledge the mental and the emotional stamina that it takes to initiate change and personal growth. We don’t outwardly value our most important asset, which is people.

We know that people are a valuable asset, obviously, in education. No teachers were in trouble. No school leaders were in trouble. Kids are coming. We don’t prioritize the most important asset that schools have, which are the people. You and your teachers are the most important asset your district has. They need you. You don’t just need them for the paycheck. They need you to do the job.

Hiring people, and then expecting them to figure it out on their own, or suck it up, or fake it ‘till they make it is why 50% of educators leave the position within five years. Retaining people needs to include conversations about how we feel as leaders, and how it impacts the way we lead, and how it’s impacting our life.

Perhaps this approach will create a more welcoming and nurturing culture that invites people to choose this line of work and stay in the profession. Retaining principals through the process of authentic support not only impacts students and staff, it positively impacts a district’s other top assets, time and money, and you know those are the ones doing the talking.

It costs anywhere between $24,000 and $75,000 to replace one principal when you factor in all of the time and resources it takes to advertise, and recruit, and interview, and hire and train them. What if instead we invested this money on support for the people we’ve already hired? How would the culture of our work change?

If we didn’t have to solve for teacher and leader retention because we’re now investing in cultivating the people that we have with this money that we would be spending otherwise on new people, and new hires, and new recruits. Let’s say we took half of this, $50,000. We invest $50,000 to invest in all of our school leaders for the year, and get the coaching support that they need that’s truly personalized for them, and they love it, so they stay.

What else could we be solving when we’re not thinking about how to solve recruitment and retention? It’s very interesting to ponder. What can you do personally to begin getting the support you need? You can start by asking for it. You can make it known that it’s a priority for you, and how it will benefit your district. You have to let the district know what’s in it for them.

You’re going to be told no because that’s to be expected. Anytime people hear something new, their brain automatically shuts down. It’s like, “I don’t know what that is. Just say no. Let’s be safe. Let’s not get crazy.” So, they’re going to say no, and that’s okay. You keep asking. You keep showing them how the podcast is supporting you, and you keep showing them how individualized coaching has supported other clients.

People who have been willing to take the leap in, they love coaching. They don’t want coaching ever to end because there’s always something new and hard coming up for them. So, you just keep asking. You value your asset. That’s you. You are the asset, and you say, “Hey, if you want me, and I’m an amazing leader, you want me to be more amazing? Invest in me. Get me a coach. Allow me to have a coach that I want who’s going to help me personally get through what I need to get through.”

Or in a more empowering way than waiting for someone else to make the decision to pay for you is to seek out the support you need right now yourself. Do not continue to suffer in silence or believe that you need permission from anyone to get what you need. Take your career and your happiness into your own hands. Make a decision that you’re a highly valuable asset, and that your career and your mind is your most valuable asset. Invest in your mind, and here’s what will happen.

When you invest in you, you’re going to grow as a leader. You’re going to become a more valuable asset to your district, and if not, to any district. Any district would love to have somebody with a very well-managed mental and emotional state.

They want somebody who can handle their emotions, who can handle situations, and think through them without reacting to them, and somebody who’s willing to learn hard skills and practice them in addition to being honest, and open, and authentic, and willing. So, make a decision. You are ready. Education is ready, and I’m ready. Let’s do this. Have an empowered week.

Thanks for listening to this episode of The Empowered Principal Podcast. If you enjoyed this episode and want to learn more, please visit 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.