Ep #240: The Value of Trust

Hello empowered principals. Welcome to episode 240.

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 Happy Tuesday. Welcome to August. Here we are. This month I’m going to spend a lot of time talking about coaching your teachers coachability. Today we’re going to talk about the value of trust. But throughout the month of August, I really want to set you up for success. In June and July, we’ve been talking about creating a three month plan for the fall.

Now we’re moving into thinking about how we’re going to create our vision into reality, how we’re going to set the tone with our teachers and our staff around our vision, around school culture. We’re going to talk about how we build that we’re going to talk about our thoughts and feelings around teachers and coaching them, mentoring them, coachability in ourselves, coachability for them.

So this entire month of August is all about setting you up as the school leader who knows how to bring your vision into life. To bring it to reality, to create a culture and climate with your staff that involves putting this vision into reality. Okay, so let’s get started. Let’s dive in.

Today we’re going to talk about the value of trust. We’re going to talk about trusting ourselves, trusting other people, and why trust is an essential muscle as a school leader that you want to build up within yourselves. So we’re going to talk about the benefit and the value of trust, and the impact that trust has as a school leader.

So for those of you who followed my work, you know that I talked about the trust triad. There are three things that a school leader needs to be able to trust in in order to be a successful leader. Number one, you have to trust in yourself. You have to evolve your self-concept and believe in yourself, believe that you have the capacity to be a school leader.

How do we know? You got hired for the job. Congratulations, you’re in the job. Whether it’s your first year or your 10th year, you are a school leader. You have to trust that you’re going to know how to lead, and that you don’t have to know the how right now. That the how is presented to you throughout the journey.

Okay, trusting in yourself that you know how to make decisions, you know how to create clarity, you know how to delegate, you know how to constrain, you know how to time manage, you know how to get problems solved, you know how to create solutions, you know how to manage people, you know how to manage your time. Those are all of the things that we work on in the Empowered Principal™ program. I need you as the principal to lean into that trust. Even when you feel like you don’t know how, you want to trust that you have the capacity to figure out how. Okay.

Step two is trusting other people. This is very hard as a school leader because we can trust ourselves. We know our patterns, our habits, our routines, the way we get things done. We know that we’re going to step up and do whatever’s needed in order to get the job done. Okay.

Sometimes we lack trust in our teachers to do the same. If a teacher comes to you and complains about overworking or being exhausted or being burnt out, it almost makes us less likely to trust because we’re afraid that they don’t have the capacity to do their job or to get the job done or to step up or whatever. So our brain goes into this little bit of scarcity around our teacher’s capacity.

What I do is I help you build the muscle to trust in your teachers, to trust your staff, to delegate to them, to not expect that they can’t do something. You want to believe in your teachers’ resourcefulness. You want to believe in their capacity to solve problems. You want to believe in their capacity to step up and do a job that you would like them to do. You want to be able to Hand over tasks to them. You have to trust them in order to do that, okay?

So you’ve got to trust yourself, you’ve got to trust other people, and then you have to trust your leadership. You have to trust the process of leadership and the process of coaching and mentoring both ways. You have to trust that you know how to mentor and coach and guide your staff and your teachers and your school community.

Then you have to trust and be open and be vulnerable to receiving feedback. You have to trust the process of coaching and mentoring coming your way. That the people who are mentoring and coaching you are offering you feedback that’s for you. That you’re not being defensive about it, or you’re not avoiding it, or you’re not resistant to it. That you’re open to it.

I’m going to talk more about how to be coachable and to increase your coach ability for your own benefit in a future podcast, but I wanted to plant that seed that we have to be able to trust ourselves, other people, and the process of leadership and coaching. Okay, that’s the trust triad.

So what is trust? Let’s define it. I’ve thought a lot about this. To me, this is what I believe trust is. I believe trust is confidence. When you trust something or someone, you have confidence in it. I believe trust is resilience. When you believe that you are resilient, you trust yourself to have the capacity to lead and to try new things and to take on new challenges that you’re not sure how to solve before you take them on, and having the resiliency to problem solve until you figure it out.

I believe that trust is reliance. When you trust in something or in someone, you believe that you can rely on it or on them. Trust is faith. It’s believing in something you cannot tangibly hold or touch or control. It’s having faith in the process. It’s having faith in other people when maybe they haven’t exhibited trust or faith that you have evidence you can be tangible and hold on to. Okay.

Trust is certainty. When we trust people or we trust something, we feel safe and secure. We feel certain that things are going to be okay. Trust is conviction. When we trust something, we are committed to it and our opinion of it. Trust is responsibility. When we trust someone, we believe that they will take responsibility and ownership. This includes trusting ourselves to take ownership and responsibility for our part, our work, and trusting other people that they have the capacity to do the same.

So when you think about trust, what it really comes down to, trust is a belief that generates emotional safety and comfort. Think of the feeling words, the emotion words that I used to describe trust. Confidence, resilience, reliance, faith, certainty, conviction, responsibility, commitment, safe, secure, certainty.

Why do we want to trust? Trust is what gives us the comfort to live our lives with intention, and take the risks necessary to accomplish the goals and dreams that we have for ourselves and our school. So trusting is what gives us the ability to go for big goals, to go for our dreams, to keep that determination high, to keep that commitment high even when we are failing, even when we’re falling down, even when we don’t know, even when we have bad days. Trusting is giving us the space to be able to go for that goal even though we haven’t yet achieved it. To give ourselves the patience to achieve a goal before we have accomplished it. Okay.

The ability to trust ourselves and others and the process is very valuable. I want you to think about the long term and short term benefits of trust. When you trust yourself, you believe that the short term pain you have to go through, like the learning curve, or being new and being afraid or getting up on a stage and speaking to the school community when you’re super afraid of public speaking but having the trust that it’s going to be okay. When you think about leaning into trust, imagine the outcomes that you create when you trust.

So when I think about the outcomes of trust, trust creates confidence. When you have the courage to trust yourself and to get up and do something you’ve never done before but to trust that you’ll be okay, even though you feel scared, you get to hold space for that fear and for the potential outcome that it’s going to create.

When you hold space and trust in somebody else, when you’re willing to delegate even though that result might be B minus of how you would do it, you’re holding space for that person to learn how to do that task for you and how they will do it better next time. You’re holding space for their learning curve when you trust them.

So we want to build systems in place to grow our capacity to trust. In the beginning, especially when you’re new, you’re going to want to hold on to everything. You’re not going to trust. You’re not going to trust yourself to make decisions, which means you’re going to go out and ask a bunch of other people what they think you should do. You’re going to research a lot. You’re going to depend on having research based decisions and research based curriculum because you want to be able to back it up by somebody else’s opinion. Versus believing in your own opinion.

I was talking to one of my clients, and she was like, “Well, I like to show research based evidence for every decision that I make.” I said for the next week, you can’t do any research. You just have to show yourself why your decision is the best decision because of your own opinion. What is your knowledge? What is your area of expertise? What do you know about your school that makes your opinion the expert opinion? That is when you’re leaning into trusting your own decisions, your own thoughts, your own opinions, your own judgement of what your school needs, and how to lead your school.

So in the beginning, you don’t have the capacity to trust your own decisions because you’ve never done them before. So it’s okay to go out and ask for help and get the support you need. But throughout that process, you want to build up systems where you’re able to hold more and more space for your thoughts and opinions for you to be able to trust yourself and your decisions.

And to know that even if a decision you make doesn’t turn out the way you thought it would, you’re going to learn from that. You’re not going to beat yourself up. You’re going to take what you learned and evolve your thinking process and your decision making process to make a more informed, more expert decision the next time. That is how you build systems in for trusting yourself.

Then the same is true for trusting other people. In the beginning, you might not want to delegate anything because you don’t trust people to do it the way you would want them to do it, or you want it done a certain way. Or maybe you just like doing the task, and you don’t want to delegate it. But in order to scale up as a leader, you’re not going to be able to hold on to every favorite pet project and being able to print out your own certificates and do all the little details of every little party and event.

You’re not going to be able to scale yourself as a leader and have greater impact and influence and legacy if you try to hold on to all of the little detail tasks. You want to start building systems in place so that you can inch into trusting people to take on different roles in smaller capacity. Then eventually growing in capacity where you’re actually handing off big events, big tasks, big projects.

Because what you’re doing as a school leader is you’re trying to build up the capacity of your team to take on bigger and bolder projects. That is how you expedite transformation in your students. The bigger your teachers can be, the bigger your staff can evolve themselves and take on projects. You train them, right? You’re gonna delegate. You’re not just going to abdicate it and throw it at them with no expectations.

You’re gonna give them a handbook. You’re going to create a handbook. You’re going to train them. You’re gonna give them feedback, and eventually they’re going to be able to run with it on their own, which frees your time and space up to be able to do more and more as a school leader. That gives you more think time. It gives you more planning time. It gives you more time to create new solutions to bigger and bigger problems because now you’ve got other people taking on the tasks that you once had to do.

Building trust in yourself for other people is one of the most valuable things you can do. It feels scary in the beginning. You don’t think you’re going to be able to handle it if somebody else fails you. But I want to offer you the cost of not doing that.

The cost of not doing that is you doing everything, you overworking, you being the bottleneck where everything clogs up because it has to run through you. You have to know everything. You have to do everything. You’re the only one that can make decisions. You are never going to expand yourself as a leader. You’re not going to be able to scale your school and your leadership ability. Okay? This is why trust and building up your trust in yourself and others is so important.

Finally, you need to put systems into place in order to build your capacity to trust the process. Trusting the process means being able to hold space and give it time to work. To trust that it’s working even though the indicators haven’t caught up yet.

As you know, in education, there are immediate indicators like oh, that’s working. That’s working. You get some immediate feedback as to your decisions and your action plan working. Then there are lagging indicators like test scores or the involvement of a teacher and her ability to manage her classroom effectively. Things take time.

You have to trust the process of coaching them and mentoring them and giving them space and time, which means you having the capacity to trust the process enough to hold space to give teachers time for the learning curve required to learn the craft of teaching and the art of classroom management and the science of instructional strategies and best practices and how to know when to push kids and when to give them space. When to teach whole group and when to teach small group and when to teach at an individual level and when to let kids have a day off and when to really push them hard.

All of that requires you to hold space and trust the process. To trust your leadership vision, to trust the approach that you have decided on, to trust that the primary focus that you developed in your three month plan is working, and to trust that it’s okay to give things time. That the three month plan and your vision allows time for mistakes and for failures and for interruptions and for unexpected things. That’s all a part of the game plan in the big picture.

When you trust the process, you trust being coached and being open to coaching and open to feedback from your mentors and your bosses and your district. Or like a lot of my clients like trusting me to help them. When they can’t see where I’m going with them, to trust me enough to just do, to apply the coaching and to put it into practice.

Then afterwards, they’re like oh, now I get what you were saying. Once I tried it, now I see it. That willingness to trust when you don’t know the solution or you’re not sure what outcome it’s going to create. That is how you expand your capacity to lead your school.

Now, if you think about the systems that we have in place, there are systems built in place that we trust. Education is huge on trusting credentials and degrees and licenses. We value credentials. We make them mean that the person who owns the credential or the degree is very credible. That they’re trustworthy. It puts a set of checks and balances in place. The purpose of credentialing systems is to establish trust. To trust that teachers are qualified. To trust that we’re qualified to lead.

There’s merit to this, but it doesn’t always make it 100% true. People can be credentialed and fail to be credible, right? We’ve experienced this. So I just want you to see the balance of there are systems in place in society, in education, that allow us to believe in something, but I want you to see that you’re trusting a process that it’s not fail proof. It’s not 100% certainty. Which gives you permission to create trust on your own accord. Right?

Now, is every person that we meet in the world going to be fully trustworthy all of the time? No, I actually have a podcast about how to work with people you don’t trust. I’ll make sure that we put that link in the show notes. There are people that you’re not going to feel trust with. It’s okay. You still have to work with them, and that podcast will teach you how to do that. But as a leader, you want to start with trust. You want your start line of this race to be grounded and landed in trust, okay.

So think of things you trust in the world. You trust pilots. You get on airplanes all the time, and we trust that pilot. We have never seen their credential. We just know that there’s a credentialing process. That we trust that person to not kill us and to not crash that plane. Right? We trust other drivers when we get on the road. We trust our car not to break down. My husband is a climber. He trusts his climbing gear. He goes out and climbs mountains, and he trusts that gear to protect him and save him from falling. Right?

I think about ziplining. That’s the scariest thing I’ve ever done in my life. I’m super afraid of heights. I was absolutely miserable. But I trusted the coaches and the guides who were up there on the zipline. I trusted them with my life as I’m ziplining in the Hawaiian rainforest, scared to death. But I trusted the gear and I trusted the people, and I faced that fear. Even though I felt the fear, I did it anyway. Okay. I just want you to notice that you can trust even when you’re feeling completely freaked out, okay? It’s okay to trust. You’ve got to put systems in place to trust. All right.

I want you to think about people that you already trust. So if you’re having a hard time trusting your staff or some of your teachers, I want you to think about people you do trust. What is it about them? Meaning what thoughts do you think about those people? You trust your close friends. You trust your some of your family members. You trust your loved ones. Think about that.

Think about the teachers you do trust. What thoughts are you having about them? Are there any of those thoughts that you can cultivate to be able to lean into trusting new teachers or new people or people you just don’t know yet? How can you establish trust with them from an early stage?

The earlier you can establish trust in yourself, you deciding I’m going to trust people ahead of time. They don’t have to earn my trust before I trust them. I’m going to trust them first. In that decision to trust them ahead of time, what happens is they have the opportunity to build trust with you and to show you and demonstrate to you why they are trustworthy of your delegation. Okay.

Think about trusting in a higher power, whether you believe in God or another type of god, any kind of spirituality, universe, higher power, anything that you trust that’s not tangible or concrete. Think about the thoughts you think about when you’re trusting in something bigger and higher of a power than you. Okay?

Why is trusting hard? Trusting is hard because when we’ve trusted somebody and we feel that trust has been broken, we have to experience a negative emotion. We feel disappointed. We feel let down. We might feel upset or frustrated or angry or sad. When we say or we think the thought my trust has been broken or I can’t trust that person, and we’re feeling mistrustful, right. We’re questioning them. We’re doubting them. We’re judging them. We’re accusing them, or we’re just genuinely disappointed. Somebody did let us down, and we’re disappointed.

What we want is to not experience that emotion. We want to avoid being disappointed. We want to avoid somebody not meeting our expectations. Right? Our thoughts change when our expectations are broken. When we say we’ve lost trust in something or someone, what we’re saying is that what we expected from that person or that thing is not what occurred. What’s happening is there is an incongruence between our thoughts of what we thought would happen, what would have happened, or should have happened, and what did or did not happen. There is a discrepancy.

We also don’t trust when we’ve been hurt physically, mentally, or emotionally. We don’t trust when we think other people have lied to us or not delivered on a promise. It’s hard to trust something again because we don’t want to experience the mental, emotional, or physical pain that we have experienced in our past. So we mistrust the brain offers you like a warning signal. Don’t trust this person or don’t trust this thing in an effort to protect yourself.

I think this is a brilliant mechanism. Our brain is designed to protect us. It does it helps us protect ourselves from painful situations. Therefore, at times, it is very wise not to trust. I want to acknowledge that. If you’ve been in trauma, if you’ve experienced any kind of trauma, you want to be cautious before you decide to trust, okay? Know that.

However, in many cases, especially in school leadership, we decide not to trust ahead of time. That ends up being to our demise. We don’t want to take risks because we’re afraid. We don’t want to delegate because we want to feel in control. We don’t trust because we don’t like someone. We don’t go for what we most desire because we don’t believe that we’ll be able to have it, or we don’t think that will follow through enough for long enough and for hard enough as it takes to achieve what we want. We’re afraid that we will lose determination and motivation and commitment to our goal, and we are going to disappoint ourselves. So we don’t go for it.

I hear this. So many times in my consult calls. An aspiring principal will call. She’ll schedule a meeting with me, a constant call, and they want so badly to work with me. But they talk themselves out of saying yes because they don’t trust that they’re actually going to land an offer in school leadership.

Or a brand new principal, they just got hired. They jumped on the call with me, and they’re like, yes, yes, yes. I want this so bad. But they fear they’re going to be so overwhelmed, and they’re not going to be able to implement the coaching strategies that I teach. Or they get on the call, and they’re a yes. But they’re so afraid to spend the money because they’re afraid they’re not going to trust themselves enough to show up and do all of the work and to become the version of themselves that they want to be.

So they disappoint themselves, and they mistrust themselves ahead of time. They let the trust, the lack of trust I should say, in themselves make the decision for them. But then they don’t love that reason. Then they’re disappointed. Okay.

The biggest obstacle aspiring leaders and new principals face is their lack of trust in themselves. The second biggest obstacle is their lack of trust in others. Their third obstacle is their lack of trust in the process. They don’t trust that the process will work. They are afraid to give the process time. They’re afraid to give it energy. They’re afraid to invest their resources, their time and their energy, into the process because they’re not sure that the process will work.

Those three obstacles are what holds most school leaders back. One of those three things. Either the lack of trust in themselves, lack of trust in other people, or lack of trust in the process.

Being new requires you to trust in yourself, even though you’re new, and to know that you don’t know. And to know there are things that you’re not even aware that you need to know. They’re not even on the radar, right? It requires you to tell yourself I know I’m going to come across things that are brand new to me that I had no idea of that were coming that came out of the blue. But in that moment, I trust myself to be able to handle it. I know that I will handle it the best way I can at the time it comes into my attention.

Being new requires you to trust other people even when you don’t know them, or they don’t know you or they have maybe not been as trustworthy in the past. So many new leaders come to me thinking they have to know someone before they can trust them. I say to them, in order to know them, you have to trust them. If you don’t start with trust, how else are you going to get to know them?

Now, of course, if your Spidey senses tell you that someone isn’t safe, please do not ignore your intuition and put yourself at risk of harm. Investigate where the sense of not trusting them is coming from and listen to your intuition.

Look, I have done this work on trust very deeply in myself over the past few months. Trust is very difficult for me. For people who have experienced trauma in their past or in their childhood, and many of us have in some form, trust can be extremely challenging. I am one of those people.

I grew up in an environment where I was not physically safe a lot of the time. I wasn’t emotionally safe. I wasn’t psychologically safe. To this day, I have a really hard time trusting an any activity or person that I think is going to cause me especially physical harm or physical pain. I’m very physical pain averse.

So if you have been exposed to any kind of physical, mental, or emotional pain for a long period of time or as a young child, trust might be challenging for you. Your belief system, when it comes to trusting, it’s really ingrained, and it can be a challenge to unwind.

But I invite you to explore this anyway because for many people, our unwillingness to trust does not serve us now. It doesn’t serve our future self, and it doesn’t serve the people we are leading. We’re holding ourselves and other people back when we don’t explore where the mistrust is coming from.

So with something as seemingly simple as delegating a task, the thought of delegating even the smallest of tasks can trigger some people’s fear. Take, for example, printing the student certificates. I keep using this one because I love it and so many people had issue with it. It’s so relatable, right?

I talked with three different principals who did not trust another person on their campus to print out the certificates correctly the way they wanted them to. They were worried. Either they were worried that there would be misspellings, they were worried they were going to be smeared, they were worried they were gonna be handwritten. They were worried something wasn’t gonna go right, right?

When I asked these principals their thoughts about their certificates, what they said was it’s easier to do them myself. It’s faster for me to do them right the first time. I want them done right for my students. It’s important to me. Now, those are all lovely things, but I want you to notice what they didn’t take into account.

What does easier mean? Could it also be easier to type out directions and expectations for that task? To make it clear and easy for someone else to do that job for you? Could it also be faster in the long run to train someone else how to print those certificates in the way that you want them so that it’s off your plate, and they meet your expectations? Is it possible to trust that someone else might be able to do them, right?

I love this example because it demonstrates how much easier it is to just jump in and take action and do the thing versus taking the time and the action to understand why you don’t trust someone else enough to delegate a task like printing certificates. Our brain knows what has to be done and how we want it done. Maybe it even likes the task because it feels really easy and fun for us.

But as a school leader, as I said earlier, you do not have the luxury of time to do everything yourself. You need to scale your impact. You want to find ways to maximize your output to reach your goals and complete tasks faster. Because when you do that, you increase your value as a school leader.

One of the ways we maximize our value as a school leader is to maximize how we use our time. What worked as a teacher will not necessarily work as a principal. You are functioning on a much larger scale now, and you want to leverage trust as a tool to help you get more done for your school.

So what is the cost of not trusting? When you aren’t willing to trust yourself, you miss opportunities. The opportunity to grow, evolve, and achieve. The opportunity to accomplish big things and feel proud of yourself. The opportunity to experience your career and the life that you want.

When you aren’t willing to trust others, they miss opportunities as well. They miss the opportunity to try new things. They stagnate under your leadership because they’re not given the opportunity to learn new skills and to grow as an individual and as a professional and to take on things that you could be delegating to them.

There are teachers who want you to give them opportunities to experience. They want to grow and learn under you through delegation. They want the chance to take ownership of something, and they’re willing to get it wrong in order to learn how to get it right. When you aren’t willing to trust others, you also stagnate. You build a glass ceiling for yourself. You can only do so much in a day. When you’re not willing to trust others and take things on, you max out as a leader very quickly.

This is why people burn out. They think they are the one who is responsible, the one who should do it, the one who has to do it, or the only one who can do it right. I’m here to challenge those questions, those thoughts, okay.

When we aren’t willing to trust others ahead of time, we never learn their capacity, and they never learn their capacity. Yes, sometimes we trust people and we become disappointed, and we have to clean up after them after a failure. But we’re never going to know where the line is if we don’t assume and try out trust in the beginning.

I think many of us have felt hurt or burned from trusting and being disappointed. Or remember a time where trusting somebody led to a really hard, uncomfortable, or messy situation to handle. That’s fair. I totally understand that. I just want you to explore that and be sure that we reconcile that moment. We learn from it, and we find ways to continue leveraging trust in the future.

So how do we trust ourselves? When we don’t trust others, I find that this is oftentimes a reflection in a lack of trust in ourselves. We project our distrust of ourselves onto other people. If we don’t follow through on certain things, we think other people won’t follow through as well. If we have failed over and over again, we certainly can’t see how somebody else could help us finally succeed. We don’t trust them. We doubt them when we doubt ourselves.

If a process hasn’t worked out, then we don’t trust that it’s going to work for somebody else. If we think of it failed us, it’s going to fail others. Or the flip. We think oh it worked for them, but it’s not going to work for me. Then we’re back into that lack of trust in ourselves.

This is why I teach what I call that trust triad right? Belief in ourself, others, and in the process of coaching and leadership. You’re going to need to work on building up trust in all three areas. The more a leader can trust him or herself, the faster you make decisions, the faster you take action, and the faster you reach goals.

The more you can trust in other people, the more influence and impact you create in other people’s careers, and in your own career, and in the accomplishments that you and other people can achieve. The more a leader can trust in the process of coaching and leadership, the greater experience you have professionally and personally.

So this week, answer the question for yourself, what is the value of trust? Why is it better to trust? How does trust make my life easier? How does it feel better to trust? The value of trust, for me, includes things like trusting allows me to accomplish more in less time. It gives others the opportunity to grow and thrive. It feels better to trust than to mistrust. Trusting creates safety. Safety allows me and other people to be vulnerable. When I’m vulnerable, I experience life more deeply. I grow and learn. I evolve my thoughts and experiences. Same is true for others.

Trust takes away stress and anxiety. When I trust, what happens is I feel calm and centered and certain and grounded and stable. Whenever I forget to trust, I have coaching tools to bring me back into trust. When trust has been broken, I have coaching tools to heal myself and reconcile my ability to trust again.

I want you to think about the lifetime value of trust. When you trust yourself, you are willing to go for any goal because you have to trust yourself to keep going no matter how many fails. No matter how many times you fall down, how many times you get hurt along the way. When you trust yourself to follow through, you have your own back.

When you trust your decisions, you make them more quickly. Decisions are how results are created. Decisions lead to actions. When you trust your decisions, you can trust your actions. When you trust your actions, you trust that you’ll get the results you want.

Allowing ourselves to trust is like learning to fall in love again. You’ve been heartbroken, but you want to be in love. You have to reconcile the past and be willing to feel the fear of potential disappointment and heartbreak again. You have to put yourself out there. But when you do find the right person, it was totally worth it. When you trust yourself, you are loving yourself.

Remember what I said about trust at the beginning of this podcast. Trust is confidence. When you trust something or someone, you have confidence in it. Trust is reliance. It’s resilience. It’s faith. It’s certainty. It’s conviction. It’s responsibility, and it’s ownership. When you allow yourself to trust, you are allowing yourself to feel good. When you feel good, you do good work. When you do good work, you create exceptional results.

This is what I help people do through coaching. I teach you how to trust yourself, to trust other people, and to trust your leadership process. You cannot buy trust, but you can invest in a coach that will teach you how to trust, how to heal from mistrust, and how to trust again. How to trust deeper and deeper in yourself and in others and in the process, and how to trust in every area of your life. How to trust money and time and family and friends and partners and spouses and resources and yourself, your own resourcefulness.

If there is one gift that I could wrap up and give to every school leader on the planet, it is the ability to lean into trust. I trust you all. Have a beautiful week. I will 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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