Ep #199: Predetermined Outcomes

Hello empowered principals. Welcome to episode 199.

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.

Well hello my empowered leaders. Happy Tuesday, and welcome to the podcast. You guys, this is episode 199. We’re one week away from 200 weeks together. I am so excited for this podcast. I’m so excited for how it’s grown and for how many people we are helping with all this free amazing content on this podcast, with all of the guests I’ve had on, all of the content I’ve created just for you.

Next week we’re going to do some celebrations with all of you who have taken the time to write a review of the podcast or who’ve reached out and celebrated the podcast. So please be sure. If you haven’t taken time yet, please write a five star review for the podcast and let us know what you love, let us know how the content is helping you, and let us celebrate each and every one of you. So I’m going to be highlighting all of you who have recently been reporting how the podcast has been helpful. So thank you so much for that.

Let me tell you this. Let’s get real for a second here. I have been sick y’all. I have been really sick. I have been down and out for an entire week, and I’ve been thinking about how much I hate being sick. So you can probably hear my voice is a little congested still, but I am on the mend. I want you to know how important it is to self-care. I know you’re tired of hearing that. I know you are.

I am tired of hearing the world self-care myself, but I will say this. In order to be the most effective version of yourself professionally and personally, you are a human first and you are a school leader second. That comes with rest. Part of the package of being human is high productivity, exclusively powerful leadership, being a mom, being a dad, being a partner, being a friend, being a colleague, being all the things. It also requires rest.

We can’t live this life without rest, without getting sick, without needing time to recover and heal ourselves. When that happens—because it happens to every human on the planet—fighting it or expecting it not to happen makes it worse. I’ve watched myself be upset that I was sick. Not want to stop my work week and my flow and take time for myself. I didn’t want to have to cancel calls. I didn’t want to have to reschedule new clients and consults. This podcast, I didn’t want to have to put it off.

The truth is that all of those things have made me a stronger coach because I coached myself through the process. What was I making it mean to be sick? What was I making it mean to not feel productive and not be on time and on task? What did I make it mean to have to reschedule for my clients? It was such beautiful coaching work for myself. I’m so much more in love with who I am as a human. I’m so much more compassionate now that I’ve done that coaching work and I offer that to you.

If and when you do not feel well to the point where you want to take time off or you can barely lift your head off the pillow or you can barely speak, I want you to consider the value of rest. How it makes you a stronger leader, a better leader. I get it. I know. You don’t want to hear self-care one more time. Throw that word out the window. I’m going to use rest because it’s essential. It’s a part of who we are as human beings, and it’s what you need.

This was a whole podcast episode now that I’m thinking about it, but it’s a PSA announcement before I get to the heart of the matter today because it’s been on my mind. So this is the season where people are getting sick, and I want you to be thinking about it and taking really good restful care of yourself.

Now if you’re not a part of the Empowered Principal Facebook group. That’s where I show this content in real time. I talk about it as real as it gets. Come on over to the empowered principal Facebook group and join us in there. You can talk about when you’re sick and what to do and how you’re feeling frustrated and how that anxiety rises, and I’ll help you. I’ll talk you through it. We’re all there together. One big happy community supporting each other. So come on over to the Facebook group.

All right, moving on. Let’s go. What are we talking about today? I’m going to talk about predetermined outcomes today. So let me preface this a little bit. I worked with a brand new client of mine, and I’m going to tell her story in a very generic way. She’s brand new, and I don’t want to put her on the spot at all.

So I’m sharing her story because it’s so powerful. The work that she did to predetermine the outcome that she wanted to experience, it was such a beautiful example that I’m going to use it in a very one way. Kind of a generic open way so that you get the gist of the story without being very specific with the details.

Now, I’m going to start and preface this by saying that predetermined outcomes sounds like something that is not available to us. It sounds like something we can’t control, can’t determine. How do you predetermine your outcome? You can’t predict the future.

So let me start with this. We think that outcomes happen to us, and that’s because we’re taught that things happen to us. We’ve watched our parents say it. We listen to teachers say it. We’ve watched the adults in our life growing up feeling like victims of their circumstances, victims of the situation they’re in. I don’t mean to throw the word victim around carelessly. I mean that in the sense of we feel out of control. We feel helpless when there are situations and circumstances happening to us in our life, and we believe that we have no agency over them.

What happens when we believe we have no control, we feel disheartened. We feel discouraged. We start to blame. We kind of feel frustrated and we blame those outside circumstances for the results that we are creating in our life. There is a lot of evidence in our brain that has built up over the years to confirm that the things that happen to us and the experiences we’ve had truly were happening to us, and that we did have no control over them.

So here’s what I’m going to say to that. I’m trying to think of an example. So we think that our parents happen to us. The way that our parents treated us just happened to us. I’m going to say yes. On one level, absolutely. How your parents raised you was out of your control. How they spoke to you, the words they used, their behaviors, their actions, what they did do, what they didn’t do, to the level of which they supported you. All of that is absolutely true.

So circumstances do happen all day every day. No, we don’t have control over them. We can’t change the weather. We can’t determine who wins the World Series, go Giants. I’m a San Francisco Giants fan. I can’t decide who gets to win the World Series. We can’t stop Grandma from bringing those candied yams every year to Thanksgiving dinner that nobody eats. We can’t do it, right. We cannot control external situations. This is true. You are right about that. Your brain is correct about that.

Because of that, it’s easy to lean into that and feel helpless and believe that you have no agency over what happens during the course of your day at work or the work week or the year for that matter. Because you think and you believe that you don’t have control over things that you want to have control over.

What do we want to have control over? We want to have control over people. We want to have control over the weather, the traffic, politics, our in-laws, our children, our staff. We want to have control over those things. When we don’t, we get frustrated. Then we throw our hands up in the air because the truth is we don’t.

But if you go beyond the surface, you will find that we also believe that we do have influence over the outcomes we experience. How do we know this to be true? We know this is true because of the decisions we make, the actions we take, the thoughts and feelings we have. It’s all so true that we do have control over our outcomes and the results in our life.

This is the reason we do what we do. We are in education because we believe that we have an influence over the results and the outcomes that we’re created for ourselves, for students, for staff, for our career, for our family. All of it. That’s why we do what we do.

Let’s look at it this way. Why did you decide to go to college and shell out thousands of dollars and stick to it, going to school when it was hard and when it was boring and when you wanted to be out having fun? Why did you stick to it for four more years? You went to college because you believed that that choice that you made would ultimately and positively impact your life down the road. It might have been hard in the moment, but you believed that in the future it was going to positively have an impact. It would be a net positive impact on your life.

You had thoughts about your future. You had visions of what you wanted your future to look like, feel like, and be like. You could physically feel those accomplishments of landing that degree and landing your first real job and making an actual living and having a lifestyle doing something you enjoy. Just by thinking about it.

So while you’re a college, you’re 18/20 years old and you’re going through the hoops of university, you’re already believing that those actions are going to be the result of having a job, having a paycheck, having a career you enjoy, having an impact in that career, making a name for yourself. Whatever your vision was for your decisions.

So you are taking action in the present moment because you predetermined the outcome you were going for was a college degree. You wanted the piece of paper, yes, but what you really wanted was the career, the paycheck, the income, the title status and influence that you would have as a teacher and as an educator. You only took those actions based on a belief that you do have some agency and control over the results that you’re creating in your life.

So there is a balance to approaching outcomes that I want to share with you today. I’m going to use the example of my client to highlight and illustrate what this looks like, and the difference between things you can’t control versus things you can. How you use your mind to predetermine the outcomes that you desire, the outcomes you want to achieve. That it’s possible to have those outcomes by predetermining them ahead of time. So I’m going to give you a little clip of this story here, and then I’m going to interject.

So my new client works for a large district and has a unique position because it has multiple roles. One of which she’s an administrator. So this client was offered an incredible career opportunity, and it’s a great fit for her. It’s a great fit for her skillset. It peaks her interest. It’s a great next step for her. She really wanted to say yes, but she felt extremely obligated to the work that she’s currently doing in her district.

She was very afraid to disappoint her boss and her colleagues and the teachers that she’s supporting. That stress, her thoughts about disappointing them. She was having thoughts about how they would feel. She was having thoughts about how she would feel about how they felt. She was having thoughts about what they might do or say or think as a result. That stress was consuming her. It was paralyzing her from making a decision about how to tell them and when to tell them.

So she believed she had no control over the outcome of telling her boss and her colleagues about her decision to pursue this new opportunity. She thought she had no control over their reaction to the news. She was thinking about that aspect of it. That led her to question whether or not she should tell them in person or via email. Fortunately she reached out to me for coaching prior to making that decision.

So let me interject the story here for a moment and explain predetermined outcomes. So in this moment, my client was feeling that her colleague’s response was completely outside of her control. She was worried how her colleagues would feel and how she would feel about their reaction.

This was being driven by the belief that the situation was going to be a series of reactions from people and then a series of reactions to the reactions, right. Basically this spiral of unmanaged thoughts, unmanaged emotions, unmanaged actions. Each person was going to be just a reaction to her reaction, and then it was going to be this spiral downward.

Here’s the truth. Number one, we actually don’t control how others react, and we can’t ever know with certainty how they will react ahead of time. We don’t know. That is true. Two, many situations like this are a series of reactions because we, as human beings, have not been taught how to manage our thoughts and emotions intentionally before we approach a situation. Three, we can influence a situation based on how we are thinking and feeling and how we approach it.

When we believe the entire situation is out of our hands, of course our instinct is to avoid the discomfort of telling people how we’re feeling, what we’re thinking, what we want to do. We want to avoid that. That’s why my client’s brain offered her just go email them. Don’t tell them face to face. It will be easier. She didn’t want to deal with the lack of control she was going to have over the way that they responded to her.

Now, here’s what I had to offer my client. No, you do not have control over how people are going to think and feel about your announcement that you are accepting another job and that you’re leaving. However, you do get to predetermine the outcome you would like to experience, that you would desire to have happen.

You get to imagine what it would be like to have that outcome occur, and then think about how would you be thinking and feeling, and how would you approach people if that were the guaranteed outcome? If you just believe that people were going to be super happy for you and excited for you and cheering you on and congratulating you, how would you show up and how would you approach it?

So the solution to predetermining outcomes is that you have to decide ahead of time what outcome you actually are looking for and why. So what outcome do you desire? What outcome do you want to feel? Why do you want to feel that way? How do you want to handle yourself? How do you want to approach things? What is the desired outcome you’re looking for? You want to predetermine your outcome.

Not because it’s a 100% guarantee, but because when you believe that that predetermined outcome is a possibility, you show up differently. You talk to people differently. The energy that you use to share your news and your information is different than when you think, “Oh my gosh, they’re going to explode. They’re going to be upset with me. They’re going to be mad. They’re going to not like me. They’re going to judge me.” You’re going to show up differently.

When you decide, wait a minute. How do I want to feel? What do I want to be thinking? What do I think about this decision? What do I think? What outcome do I want? I would love for people to be supportive. I would love for people to believe that yes, even though I’m leaving, I’m also here 100% for them for the rest of the time that I am here.

In my client’s case, my client gave 60 days’ notice. So she has 60 days to celebrate her new success and her new opportunity and be 100% available to her current job. She’s not abandoning them. She’s giving them 60 days to prepare herself and to prepare them. So you can determine what outcome you want. How you want to experience this situation. I’m using my client as an example here, but you can do this with any outcome that you want.

So in my client’s case, what she wanted as an outcome was number one, she wanted to feel great about telling her colleagues of the new opportunity. She wanted them to be excited for her and to congratulate her. She wanted them to be sold on the idea that number one, she was going to an amazing opportunity that was a best fit for her.

Two, she was going to be there for them the entire rest of her time, and that she would set them up for success. That she was going to withhold her high work ethic all the way through until her very last day. She did not want the outcome to be that they thought she was dropping the ball or that she was not 100% in on her job. She wanted them to believe that she was all in until the very last day.

So she pre-decided this. She decided that this is the outcome I would love to have happen. This is how I would be thinking and feeling if I knew this was going to be the outcome. This is how I want to approach them. What she did was she became so excited herself about her new job that she ended up selling them on how great it was for not just her but for them. How she was going to set them up for success and how she was going to be giving them all of the information that they needed in order to be successful even without her.

She was setting them up for success without her. That was her goal. It’s amazing to me to watch my clients predetermine their outcomes ahead of time because it changes the way they show up in this moment right here today.

So if there is an outcome that you would like to create. Let’s say you have to have a conversation with a teacher, and you’re afraid to have that conversation because you’re afraid of the way they might feel during that conversation or you’re afraid they’re going to go out after the conversation and talk negatively about you or cry to their colleagues or something, right. So you’re hesitant to have that conversation.

Now if you go into that conversation with your unmanaged mind and you’re thinking, “I’m worried this person is going to be upset. They’re going to cry. I’m going to feel bad. They’re going to feel bad. They’re going to go out and tell the world about what we talked about. If you go in and approach that conversation with that mindset, yeah. That’s the result that happens. This is why so many times we have evidence to prove that we have no control over other people.

I want to invite you that you do have influence. You don’t have control, but you do have influence. So you can predetermine your outcome and you can decide ahead of time how am I going to think and feel? How do I want to experience this? How do I have to approach this person or this situation so that the outcome I want is more likely to occur.

This is empowered principalship at its best. When you look to what you have to do and you decide ahead of time, you predetermine the outcome that you want to experience, you’re much more likely to experience that outcome versus if you go in completely unmanaged. Predetermining your outcome is such a powerful concept and a powerful tool that you can use to actually have influence and impact over the way you experience a situation, and the way other people experience a situation.

In the case of my client, she was able to slow herself down and look at how did she want to experience this? How did she want other people to experience this? The way that she told her news ended up changing as a result of that. It felt so much better for her. Everybody did in fact celebrate her.

What her boss said to her, which was so amazing, was, “As a friend and a colleague, I’m celebrating you. I applaud you. Congratulations. I’m so excited and happy for you. But as a boss, I’m losing one of my best employees. Of course I’m disappointed, but I know that you will set us up for continued success even after you’re gone.” How amazing is that? That’s exactly what she wanted. The reason that that happened is because she predetermined that outcome ahead of time.

Now, I’m not here to say that 100% of this time, this will be true. I am here to say that it’s much more likely for it to occur when you take a moment to predetermine that outcome ahead of time. So I want to hear about your predetermined outcomes. Let me know how you are predetermining the outcomes that you want, how you’re applying this coaching work to your everyday work as a school leader, go out there and be empowered. Have an empowered week, and I’ll talk to you next week. Take care. Bye.

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