Ep #239: The Extended Value of Coaching for Your Family and School Community

Hello empowered principals. Welcome to episode 239.

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, and Happy Tuesday. I am so thrilled to be here with you today. I hope you enjoyed last week’s interview with Amy Gerber. She is a true rockstar. Here’s what I want to say about Amy. She is just a regular old gal who is a first year principal doing her thing living in the Midwest. She is not a unicorn or a butterfly, but she is an empowered principal. She is amazing. You can have that too.

So that’s why I decided to talk with you today about the extended value of coaching. So as I’m recording this it’s the middle of June. I have been spending the past month really indulging my clients in celebrating themselves, celebrating all of their wins, all of their successes, all of their accomplishments of the past school year. I’m telling you, they have had some huge wins.

Here’s what I find so interesting about accomplishment. We have a dream. We have a vision, or we have a goal that we’re desiring to achieve. We visualize this, and we think about how we will feel once we have it, once we’ve achieved it. once we have it in our possession, once we have accomplished it.

What we do as we’re visualizing this, we commit to it, and we are determined to achieve it. So we set a goal. We commit to it. We’re determined. We take action towards the goal. We run into challenges and obstacles along the way that sometimes knock us down. We feel the burn. We feel the disappointment. We feel the failures. We take good care of ourselves. We brush ourselves off, and we get back up again. We keep going over and over and over until eventually we succeed.

Here’s what I find so fascinating. The arrival of the goal, the finish line part of the goal is not where we feel the most excited and happy. I think this is such a fascinating phenomenon to point out to you. The moments when you actually feel the most energized with your success is when we think about the accomplishment in a couple of different moments.

Moment number one is when we very first realize that what we want is what we want. When we connect to that deepest desire within us. It’s the birth of the dream or the idea or the goal. We give birth to a new idea. It resonates with us at a very deep level to our gut. We are consumed with it. We think about it. We swim in the newness of it, the awe of it. We really are embracing the potential of the goal being possible, that we could achieve that goal. We really feel the energy behind the possibility of that goal. Okay.

The second time we feel the success and the most energized by our goals is when we realize that the accomplishment is inevitable. When we see the finish line in front of us and we know at that moment, this is happening. This is happening. It’s as good as done. This is my reality. You’re not even there yet, but you know it’s inevitable. That is the moment where you feel the most amazing. Most of the time this happens before you actually cross the finish line.

It’s not to say that crossing the finish line and getting to the end of the year and celebrating your accomplishments and looking back and being like wow, I did that. It’s not to say that doesn’t feel great. But the height of our emotional state in relation to the win of that accomplishment, it’s actually prior to the achievement.

What I mean by this is when you give birth to a goal that you want to accomplish, such as I’ve decided I’m going to become a school leader. Or I’ve decided it’s my first year, and I’m going to commit to a successful first year. I’m going to define what that success looks like, and I’m gonna make this happen, right? That declaration of the goal, like the decision, like this is what I want. It feels aligned for me, and this is what I’m going for, and I’m committing to it. That is the moment when your transformation in who you become begins.

It’s when you say to yourself I’m going to be a school leader. I’m going to land my first job. I’m going to have an amazing first year. I’m going to build my dream teaching team, whatever your goal is. That moment of decision is when your self-concept begins to expand and evolve. It doesn’t happen as a result of the accomplishment. The accomplishment happens as a result of your self-concept expansion.

So we think that we need to hit the goal in order to believe in ourselves. But what happens is when we declare the goal that’s what we’re going to do, we get to work at becoming and evolving our self-concept into becoming the person who has accomplished the goal. This is the journey we’re on.

Once you achieve it, it’s not that it’s not great. It’s just that it doesn’t feel like a big surprise because you have been practicing who becomes the person who is the person who accomplishes the goal. It’s just who you are now. So by the time you achieve it, it’s already done. The work is done. The evolution and the self-concept growth is done. It just feels like obviously, that’s who I am now. I’m the person who is a school leader. I’m the person who has a year under my belt.

I think this is one of the greatest gifts about coaching. Coaching teaches you how to become the person who learns how to accomplish any goal that you set, follow any dream that you have, and implement the vision that you have in your brain.

The value of coaching, I’ve said this many times before, but the value of coaching for you is that first of all, you just get the help you need to achieve your goals faster. You don’t have to figure it out all by yourself. You’ve got somebody in your corner. You have an advocate for your dreams and your desires. You’re going to gain clarity and focus.

You stop being overwhelmed and confused, and you stop spinning out in it and having it delay your progress. You stay on track. You achieve the goals faster because you’re not getting distracted by this thing and then that thing. Then you’re going down a rabbit hole over here, and then you’re having to backtrack. Then you’re then you get distracted and you’re going over here. You stay on track.

You manage your top resources effectively, your time, your energy, your brainpower, your human resources, your teachers, your staff, your financial resources, your material resources. All of the resources you have available to you, you learn how to manage them more effectively. You learn how to guide your teachers, and build a team that creates the results that you want. The team aligns to your vision. You cultivate that, through coaching.

You balance all the areas of your life, and you create sustainability as a leader, so you don’t have to burn out. You don’t overwork. You don’t overexert. You’re not over scheduled. You have plenty of time. You’re planned and prepared. You’re not freaking out all the time and feeling like you’re missing something and that you’re not doing enough because you’ve got it all planned out. You know how to handle various situations that come your way because you’ve got a coach to talk it through and to come up with a plan.

So when something throws you off, you’re not alone trying to figure it out, and you’re not having to fake it till you make it because you’ve got an expert in your corner. You make decisions, and you can trust them because you have a process. You become a solution generator. You become more valuable as a school leader, which means you can create more demand, which means you can make more money. I’m going to say this every single podcast until you understand the value that you have to offer as a school leader. You are in very high demand right now.

Ultimately what you create is a greater impact and influence as an educator, as a school leader. You increase your leadership legacy. But let me tell you this, that’s just the beginning. The value doesn’t stop out there. The value goes so far beyond just you.

Let’s talk about the value that you create for your teachers, your students, your parent community, for your school. When you have a coach, it is valuable to your school community because you are now leading your school with a managed mind, with managed emotions. You’re not reacting to your emotions. You’re not going on default.

Some of us go into fight mode where we get angry and frustrated, and we blow up at people, or we blame, or we abdicate responsibility. We’re mad. Other people shut down. They hate conflict, and they’re afraid. So they’re in flight mode. They just avoid and hide and protect themselves and defend, and they don’t create results because they’re too afraid to cause any problems, or to have conflict or to hold a conversation. So they let the status quo just kind of float on by.

But when you lead your community with managed emotions and managed mind, and you step into your mental and emotional maturity, you are able to lead your school highly effectively. You’re not over promising and under delivering, or you’re not under promising and under delivering. You’re balanced in that leadership approach. You’re balanced in your mind. You’re balanced in your body, in your heart, in your vision.

You’re choosing one primary focus at a time and sticking to that, seeing it all the way through, which support your teachers. They want you to have one primary focus because it’s easier for them. It’s easier for students. It’s easier for parents when you have one consistent primary focus.

When your emotions are managed, then you have space to hold for your teachers to learn how to manage their emotions and or students to do that for themselves, and for parents to manage their own emotions. You create space for that because you don’t have to worry about yourself. You’re good to go. Your communication becomes very clear and consistent, which is super helpful for your community when there’s one focus and it’s consistent.

Teachers appreciate a leader who makes clear decisions and communicates clearly and takes responsibility of his or her role while allowing teachers to do the same. They want you to trust them enough for them to take ownership of their part. And for you to hold them accountable, but in a very loving way. Students thrive when you are clear with your teachers, when you hold teachers accountable and have those conversations in a loving way, in a way that’s designed for them. That is about them. That’s helping them evolve and grow.

When you help teachers evolve and grow because you’re evolving and growing through the support of your coach and your coach is holding really loving space for you, you learn how to hold loving space for them. You learn how to give them time to hone their craft, and you give students time to hone their craft, and you hold space for parents who may not be in emotional maturity. Right?

Students thrive when a principal has a primary focus, when their principal isn’t overworked and exhausted and has a clear purpose and isn’t watered down by trying to solve all the problems at once. Your job here is to create that dream team and expand what is possible for your school. Coaching helps you do that. This is a benefit to your teachers, to your students and your school community at large.

But it gets even better. What’s the value to your boss? You are an employee. What value are you offering to your bosses, to the district administrators? What’s the value you’re providing as an employee? When you have a coach, you’re making your boss’s job easier because they don’t have to do all the mentoring. They don’t have to stop what they need to do and slow down and take time to mentor you.

I know that’s how many of you feel. You feel like your teachers are sucking you dry because they need so much mentoring from you specifically. Your goal is to spread that mentorship, delegation, and responsibility out so that you’re not always the only mentor available. Your boss wants the same luxury, but they don’t know that there’s a coach like me out here helping you. Right?

When you bring this to their attention and you hire a coach or you ask them to hire your coach, you’re making their life easier, their job easier because now they know there’s somebody in your corner. They don’t have to do it all. Then they get to achieve more because you’re achieving more. It behooves them for you to have a coach because your success equals as their success.

You learn how to make decisions on your own. You don’t need them to be available to run it by them 24/7, every little decision, every little detail. You learn how to solve problems before they get up to the district level. You learn how to calm parents down and talk to teachers. You learn how to solve problems together and communicate. You learn how to manage people so they’re not running up to the district and tattling on you.

You learn how to coach and mentor your teachers and how to hold conversations with them about instruction and grade level collaborations and collegial relationships and classroom management and time management and teaching assignments and expectations and boundaries and behaviors.

The result of that is there’s less turnover in the principalship because you have a balanced managed life. It’s less turnover with teachers because they have a school leader who has a balanced approach, and knows how to appreciate the work they’re doing and hold them accountable. The balance of and right?

There’s higher retention rates for teachers and principals, which means your boss’s job is easier. They don’t have to go through the recruiting process and the onboarding process and the hiring and the firing and all of that HR stuff that happens when people are exhausted, overworked, and burned out. Higher retention rates mean more experienced and skilled leaders on their campus. Your superintendent wants you to have the support you need to be successful because it means their district is successful.

They’re not spending extra money. Do you know how much money it costs to hire, onboard, train, and then have to fire, and then recruit, and go through that process over and over and over again?

For the average school leader who leaves, now this is an average across the nation, but it costs around $75,000 to recruit, to go through the hiring process, to go through the onboarding process and the trainings and the professional development and the mentorships. All of that cost the district an average of $75,000 every single time they have to hire somebody and then let them go and go through the process.

So the cost of coaching is a mere fraction of what it cost to retain and let go and onboard and hire a new principal. They gain so much when you have a coach. They love having emotionally mature and resilient principals. They want people that have strong communication skills, and they don’t want the issues having to come up to the top all the time. You become a strong representation for your school and for the district. You become a shining star for them. They are proud of you.

You’re a prodigy of them, right? They appreciate and love how well you’re doing. So you’re giving them value. You’re adding value. You’re creating higher demand for them. It’s a win/win. So coaching for principals attracts higher quality teachers and staff. It sustains your job, their job, your district’s job, teachers’ jobs, which equals less work and more achievement for your boss. Now that’s a win.

But it gets better. But wait, there’s more. What about the value of coaching to your family, to your partner or your spouse, to your friends, to your own children? Your family really wants you to have a coach. They might not know it yet, but here’s why they do.

When you have a coach, you’re less stressed when you come home because you’ve talked through the challenges that you face throughout the day. So you don’t have to vent and dump on your family and friends and talk about work all the time. Because you’re unresolved and you don’t know what to do. You’re so overloaded and you’re so overwhelmed and you’re so upset.

You’re not overworking because I teach you how to not overwork, which means you have time and energy to give to your partner, to your spouse, to your family, to your children, to your friends, to yourself. You’ve uncovered the problem behind the problem. So many times what clients will come to what they think the problem is, there’s usually something underlying, right.

I was talking to a client the other day where she was upset about a situation where a parent super angry and blaming one of her staff members for not being very kind to the parent, and she was all upset about this parent being out of control. She was trying to defend the client when in reality the truth is that this isn’t the first time it’s happened. So we had to get real about that.

So typically, there’s a problem behind the problem. I just help you find that because otherwise it goes hidden and unnoticed. When you when you understand the problem behind the problem, you aren’t distracted at home wondering what’s going on and trying to figure it out and trying to solve a problem that you can’t seem to solve because it’s so hidden in the background of your mind.

Your family loves that you’re present and available because you’ve left work at work and you’re home. You’ve made a decision to be at home and present with your kids. Right? You’ve processed the emotions in your coaching session so you’re emotionally available for your loved ones.

You learn how to coach yourself in any situation. This is one of the biggest things I’ve seen across the board with my clients. Yes, we talk about work most of the time. But with every client I’ve ever had, there is a point at which we talk about personal relationships and personal things. We take the coaching from the professional world into that personal world.

So you learn how to coach yourself through any situation, which means that you take ownership of your thoughts, your beliefs, your emotions, and your actions whether you’re at work or you’re at home. So you stop blaming your partner for the way they’re making you feel. You own your own feelings. They’re not making you feel a certain way. The things that they’re doing aren’t causing you to think and feel the way you do. Right?

You start to understand and create awareness. You stop taking frustrations out on your kids or your friends or your partner. You learn how to manage yourself in a way that is more enjoyable for you to be around. So your family loves it. You learn how to manage your time and prioritize what matters to you most, which oftentimes means spending time with the people you love the most. Because the job isn’t taking you away from them all the time.

Trust me. They want this. They want you to build a healthy relationship with money, with time so you can talk about it more honestly and with less stress. I know my husband and I have been working on this together. We’re now loving talking about our money and our spending plan and our goals and our dreams for the future. Versus hiding and being worried and nervous and being afraid or embarrassed to talk about it. Coaching helps open up a better relationship with your loved ones. They love that you have a coach for that.

Investing in coaching isn’t just about you. You’re not the only person who gets to enjoy the short and the long term benefits that coaching offers. Coaching offers compounding benefits for you. Of course it does. But it also offers compounding benefits for everybody else in your life.

This is what we don’t often take into consideration because we don’t see how big the ripple effect is. But I want to offer this to you today directly because I want you to see you’re not just buying coaching, or you’re not just being selfish and spending money on yourself because you need help.

I’m talking to anybody out there, all of you who are listening to this podcast, and you have considered booking a consult with me about the experience of coaching and the results you want to achieve in your career in your life. I’m definitely speaking to people who’ve already booked consults with me and desperately want to coach, but felt like paying for coaching was scary or uncomfortable.

Or maybe you felt like you were completely a yes, but then you talked with your partner or your boss about it. Because they didn’t understand the value and what’s in it for them, they had resistance to your investment and told you no, don’t do that. That’s crazy. That’s too much. That’s not worth the money. Because they don’t understand the value. You have to sell them on the value and show them what’s in it for them. They don’t know. They haven’t been listening to the podcast, right?

Here’s what I want to offer you. True resistance rarely comes in the form of not having any access to money for coaching. Most of the people I work with, and if you’re in school leadership, most of you have some type of access to funding or personal money in some way, shape, or form. The resistance in our brains comes up when we don’t fully understand the value of what it is that we’re receiving in return for our purchase.

So I’m going to give you an example. I’m going to take this home okay. I want you to think about buying a car. Most people on the planet, or at least in the United States, we want to have a car. Think about this. Why do you want to have a car? What is the purpose of owning a car and purchasing a car, spending your money on a car? What does having the car offer you? What is the value of that car?

What are the short term and long term benefits of that car? What do you need to spend on that car so you will have access to these outcomes and benefits? Do you feel that investment in a car provide you in return what you’re looking for? If so, are you willing to exchange money for the value that the car is providing you and your family?

Even though your brain might tell you the car is expensive, and it’s going to kind of hurt to buy that car now. Maybe you ever to get a loan or to do a payment plan or you’re going to take a big chunk of money out of your savings account or who knows where you’re accessing your money, but you’re feeling that short term burn now because you’re spending the money.

But the long term benefit is that you get to drive to work to make more money. Having access to a car saves you time. It creates more money in your life. It just adds more value than the initial expense, okay. You have to believe that the money being spent up front is going to provide you long term value in the end.

Think about that process that you use to decide a car. Because the way you make decisions about car buying is the way you make decisions about other purchases in your life. Do you go into this much detail when you make a decision to buy a car? Or do you just know in your gut, your soul, like I need a car. I know why. I know the value. I know why having a car is a good exchange of value, and you just go and buy the car. You love your reasons for the car, and you love the money you spent on the car.

Here’s why it’s so easy to go buy a car. Because, as a society, we’ve been sold on the value of having a car. Even though we don’t necessarily want to part with that money initially, we decide to do so anyway because the value of having the car far outweighs the value of the money just sitting in your savings account, the money just sitting there doesn’t get you from A to B.

In our society, some of us actually feel embarrassed if we don’t have a car because it’s really a social expectation. It’s a societal expectation that we have our own means of transportation. If you go and apply for a principalship and then you have to say to them, “Well, I don’t really have a way to get to work.” You’re not gonna get the job.

If you don’t have a means to get to work and you don’t have the resourcefulness to figure out how you’re going to get to work, they’re not going to want you to be their school leader. They need you to have a set of wheels to get yourself to work on time. Okay? They need you to be able to go to events. Or if there’s an emergency, you need to have access to a vehicle in some way, shape, or form. Now, you don’t have to own the car. That’s not the only solution. But you have to be resourceful. Okay.

So the reason that we are so tied to having vehicles is because we see the value. We know that no matter what we pay for a car, we’re getting a return on that investment with our time and being able to have access to creating more money in our lives because we can get a job, and we can go to that job. We can drive to anywhere. We can go on adventures, and we can take our kids places. Like the value of the car isn’t just for us, right?

It’s funny. I was also thinking how when we don’t have a car sometimes we buy a car because of what it means to not have the car, what other people will think if we don’t have a car, right? It’s fascinating to study what we believe has value and the impact of having it versus not having it, having almost FOMO about not having a car and how other people might judge us or criticizes or think like ooh, they don’t even have money to buy a car, right? Whatever people are gonna say about you, right?

But think back to the beginning. When cars were first invented, they were seen as like novel and maybe just for the rich only. Not everybody had them. Very few people had cars in the beginning. I’m probably going to speculate that they didn’t see the value in them fully at first because they had a means. They could walk. They could go by horse and buggy. I’m sure there were mule, whatever. I don’t know how people traveled before cars. I didn’t live then.

But in the beginning cars were new. They were novel. They were different. They weren’t clearly understood. The value of the car wasn’t understood because people were just used getting around by walking or by horseback, right. So owning a car might have felt very indulgent or unnecessary. Some people might have been embarrassed by having a car or wanting a car because it was new, and it was different. It went against the norm of what other people had, and what their neighbors would think if they had a car in the neighborhood when nobody else did, right.

But think about the people who had the courage to invest and see the value in the car ahead of time. Like the visionary people who were like, I get it. I see why a car is valuable. They were ahead of the curve. What happened is the people who got the cars first, who saw the value first, they set the tone and actually increased the value. Because once your neighbor had a car, then you’re a little more intrigued. Then you’re thinking wow, I want a car. Now I see what the value is. I see those people getting faster results. I want that too.

So the people who are, I call them the pioneers, right? The people who are willing to go out on the limb and try the new thing and get the value ahead of time before anybody else. Those people set the tone for the value, right? Those people go from A to B faster. They go to places faster and farther. They take their families to new towns and on new adventures. These are the people who visualized their success and the success they would experience from their initial investment.

Not only would they benefit, their families would benefit, their wife and children or their husband. They had more access. Their employer would benefit because they could get to work faster and be there longer because their commute was shorter. Right? They believed that they were going to get a 10x return on their value. They saw that investing in the car was also an investment in time, in their precious resource of time. They saved time. They could go farther in their lives physically.

Back in the day, right, you could drive to another town or go to another community, or your job could be further away. They save that time. That time started to compound, day after day, year after you’re giving people additional months, if not years, of their lives back to themselves because they’re not spending the hours traveling by foot or horseback.

I want you to see that coaching is the same. It’s new. Its innovative. It’s an offer that hasn’t been out there in the world before. It impacts every aspect of your life. But the rate of return, the success return, the achievement return, it’s more than 10x. Because you’re getting the value compounded for life, as is your family, your friends, your employers, and your future. Your career and the legacy you’re going to leave for students and staff and families.

I invite you to experience the value and the impact of coaching. Schedule a consult. Let’s go. Have a great rest of your week. I love you guys. I’ll talk to you 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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