Ep #189: Trust as a Leadership Tool

Hello empowered principals. Welcome to episode 189.

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.

Welcome to August. You’re back. How fast was that summer? I hope you enjoyed last week’s podcast with my newest client Kate. She’s amazing. She really is an inspiration to all new school leaders. She hired me before she became a principal, and we coached her on getting that job. She implemented immediately. I want to, again, reiterate the value of immediate implementation. There is never ever a good time to wait. Making a decision in the future doesn’t serve you.

If you have a goal you want to achieve, sit down and ask yourself, “What can I do today? One baby step, one tiny little thing. What can I do today to get closer to that goal? What’s one small step to that goal?” Immediate implementation is the path to achieving what you want as a leader and in your life as quickly as possible.

Now with that said, sometimes the action is not in the doing. It’s in the belief work. It’s in building up your belief in who you are and who you need to become, and then practicing becoming that person with your thoughts and your emotions. You can create energy with your mind. The energy that you use to inspire yourself to take actions towards your goals comes from your mind.

So if you’re taking action towards a goal from the place of fear or doubt or you’re thinking, “This is never going to happen.  I can’t have this. Other people can have it, but I can’t.” I want you to listen to Kate again and really hear how she took responsibility and ownership of her thoughts. She went from being so afraid to interview and not wanting to interview and being worried about not getting the job to having fun and enjoying the process and feeling like she knew exactly what to say and how to say it and answer the questions. She nailed it. So I hope you enjoyed that podcast. If you haven’t listened to it yet, it dropped last week.

Okay. Today we’re talking about building your year on trust. I have been doing a lot of thought work on trust and what trust is and what it means and how it serves us, how it benefits us, the value of trust. The reason I’ve been working on this is because so many clients over the summer have been coming to me saying, “I was so revved up.” You know you’re on that adrenaline rush at the end of May and into June while you’re finishing up the year. Then you get to the end of June, and you basically collapse from fatigue, which is fine.

You have this small window where there’s peace. You’ve closed out the end of the year. You’ve kind of wrapped it up and reflected on it and said your goodbyes until the end of that year. You’ve given yourself some space, but that space feels very small. Then your mind immediately starts worrying about next year. For some people who’ve reached out, they could not turn it off at all.

So I’ve been thinking about what is the opposite of worry. What is the opposite of anxiety? The feeling, the emotion of anxiety. Not the medical diagnosis. Just when you’re feeling a little anxious or a little nervous or worried and you’re up at night spinning, what is the opposite feeling? What is it we want to feel so we can relax and enjoy and be present in our summer moments without feeling the need and responding to that urge to work?

What I realize is that the opposite of worry. If I’m not worried at all, it’s that I’m trusting. I have a belief. I have a trust. I’m feeling certain. I’m feeling assurance that everything is going to be okay. I have trust in myself. Trust in other people. Trust in the process, and trust in faith. What I mean by faith is however you define a greater power. Whether you call it God, the universe, higher power, spirituality, or just faith in general. It’s trust in something you can’t see that’s not tangible. something that feels bigger than you.

So I’m going to talk about these four areas today, and help you understand the value of trust and why it’s so important to spend time building up your belief in yourself, your belief in others, your belief in the process, and your belief in faith. Trust and belief to me is all one in the same. So when you’re feeling trust, I feel trusting. I feel safe. When you trust somebody, you feel safe. You feel comforted. You feel supported. You feel assured that everything is going to be okay. You have a sense of certainty.

So let’s start with trusting in yourself. When you focus on all of the ways in which you trust yourself and you build a relationship with yourself and you build trust in yourself, you are thinking thoughts like this. I trust that I have what it takes to do this job. I trust I’m in the right place. I trust I’ve made good decisions. I trust that I am going to check in with myself. I’m not just going to make decisions with my prefrontal cortex. I’m going to check into my body and my heart and soul. I’m going to ask all of me what’s going on. I’m going to do the work and get it done.

I will follow through for myself because I trust myself. I trust that I do what I say I’m going to do. I trust that even when I get off track, I will get back on track. I trust that I will figure it out no matter how long it takes. I trust that I will have my own back, especially when I mess up. I trust that I will forgive myself when I make mistakes, and I trust myself to keep growing and learning and evolving.

Having trust in yourself is the most important trust of all. If you can’t trust yourself, you cannot grow your capacity to trust other people. If you’re not feeling trustworthy of others, where are you not trusting yourself? Where have you failed yourself or where do you let yourself down? How can you build that trust? You can repair that trust with yourself. You can rebuild that up. If you’re a person who doesn’t follow through or gets off track and spends a lot of time spinning out in mind drama, you can train yourself to come back a little faster.

It doesn’t mean it has to be perfect. Remember I just talked about if you’re just doing it 50% of the time, you are on track. You’re like the rest of the humans out there. So number one, trust in yourself in order to build trust on your campus and in your climate and culture.

Number two, trusting in others. When you are really leaning in and you’re believing that you trust other people, you have these thoughts. “I trust that they can and will do their jobs.” We have to believe that our teachers want to work, and that they have the capacity. We have to believe in them. We have to believe that they are good teachers. That they have great ideas. That they want children to learn, and that they have the capacity to change when there are things that need to be changed.

We have to believe that they are capable. We have to believe that they have the capacity to solve problems on their own. That they don’t need us to hold their hand every minute of the day. They can make decisions on their own. They can discern facts from stories. They can discern when somebody’s out there spreading gossip or creating drama that they have the capacity to discern for themselves.

We have to trust that they make good decisions. We have to believe in them that they do make good decisions. That we’re not the only ones who can make good decisions. We have to trust in our teachers. We have to trust that they want to follow our lead. That they’re in it for the good. That they’re on our team. We have to trust that people are rooting for us and supporting us. We have to believe in our teachers and in our support staff that everyone wants to be there, and they want to follow you, and they want to do a great job.

I want you to believe that the same is true for the admin. A lot of times we fear the admin, or we judge the admin at the district level because we don’t understand them, and we don’t know why. We don’t see what they’re doing so we question it. We judge it. We criticize it instead of believing they have my best interest in mine. They want me to succeed.

Of course they want you to succeed. They want you to succeed because it helps them succeed. If you’re a successful principal, they become a successful district. That’s how it works. Of course they want you to succeed. They are rooting for you. They do have your back. Look for all the ways that they do. If your belief is, “They don’t have my back. They never support me. They don’t give me the resources that I need.” If you’re in that mindset, you are going to look for all the ways in which they don’t support you. That’s called confirmation bias. If you search out in the ways that they do support you, you’re going to feel more supported.

Number three, trust in the process. We have to believe and trust that this learning journey that we’re on in school leadership is working. We have to believe that we’re on the right path, we’re on the right track. That when bad things happen, and they will, it’s only for learning purposes. We have to trust that the process, although it doesn’t always go smoothly, it is always working. We have to trust in all of the different processes that we are going through as a leader, that we’re creating as a school. We have to trust that the evolution of education is happening at a bigger picture. That all of the things going on in the field of education and in the world are impacting us on purpose for the right reasons.

This leads me into trusting in faith. Believing that everything is happening for you. Trusting that it’s all learning and that it all matters and that nothing matters. Having that perspective. Trusting that even when you can’t see what’s going on or you don’t know, or you don’t have the details that everything is going to be okay. This is one moment in time. This too shall pass. All of life is 50/50.

When you’re in the thick of it, in the hard part, knowing it won’t last forever but also knowing it’s supposed to be there. The contrast of our lives is supposed to be present in our careers, in our personal lives, all of it. Believing that we don’t understand something, and we perseverate on what happened and how could this be, and I don’t understand this and why did they do that? There’s always a reason.

There is always a reason. The reason is this. Every single human on the planet has a steer cycle going on in their head. That steer cycle is the reason behind their behavior. What we don’t understand is the thought or the belief system driving it or maybe the emotion. Because there is always a belief system and an emotion that’s triggering a behavior.

If we can just lean on that and understand that and use the model or the steer cycle to give us that perspective, we can trust in knowing that we don’t have control over other people and outside circumstances. We only have control back here with ourselves. It brings us back to square one, which is trusting in ourselves.

So the work to do this year and as you’re starting off the school year is to build your belief system, build up your trust. Your trust in yourself. Your trust in other people. Your trust in the process. Your trust in faith. Have an amazing week. I will talk with you guys next week. Take care. Bye.

If this podcast resonates with you, you have to sign up for the Empowered Principal coaching program. It’s my exclusive one to one coaching and mentorship program for school leaders who believe in possibility. This program is designed for principals who are hungry for the fastest transformation in the industry. If you want to create the best connections, impact, and legacy for yourself and your school, the Empowered Principal program was designed for you. Join me at angelakellycoaching.com/work-with-me to learn more. I’d love to support you in becoming an empowered school leader.

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