Ep #315: Mid-Year Reboot: Creating Alignment

Hello, empowered principals. Welcome to Episode 315.

Welcome to The Empowered Principle™ 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 principals. Happy Tuesday, and welcome to the mid-year reboot series, part two. Today, you’re going to hear a clip from the mid-year reboot, session two, on alignment. 

So, what is Alignment? Alignment is knowing your life and leadership values; understanding them, articulating them, truly knowing what values drive your decisions and your actions, and the motivation behind what you do as a school leader in your life and in your career. It’s the lens through which you make your decisions. Okay?

This clip from the mid-year reboot is all about alignment, articulating what you value, what belief systems you have instilled within you that drive your decisions and actions, what feels true for you, and what feels aligned. 

Here’s the thing, guys, there are no right or wrong values, there are your values. You want to learn to embrace them and to honor them, and to give them the respect that they deserve. Because they are your internal compass guiding you down your path, not what somebody else tells you to do, but your own path. So, please enjoy this clip from the mid-year reboot.

We’re going to reboot altogether. All right? One of the things that we can do to reboot is to be insufficiency. Sufficiency is an emotion that we feel when we are having the belief that we’re doing enough, we’re being enough, we’re competent enough, we’re strong enough, and we’re resilient enough. Sufficiency is the feeling of enoughness. 

One of the things that my clients like to talk about is their schedule, their time. “I’m falling behind. I’m chronically behind. I can’t keep up.” There is a mindset of falling behind that we want to dispel. We’re going to talk about that. Also, I’m going to talk to you about there is a balance that comes with school leadership. There is goal setting and achieving goals and completing tasks; it’s the doing part of your job. 

But there is a balance here, to accomplishment. So, accomplishment is checking off the box, getting the things done, meeting the goals you set and said you were going to meet. There’s the doing part of that. But it has to couple with, and partner with, believing. 

There is an element in school leadership that we don’t talk about. We are so focused on the doing, the action, the energy that pushes us and motivates us and drives us and puts us into overdrive; we overwork, overexert, overschedule ourselves to get this part done. But what we’re not talking about, and the reason that school leadership feels so unbalanced for most school leaders, is that we aren’t in belief. 

We’re not leaning back a little bit on trust, on faith, on surrender, and trusting that our accomplishments don’t have to be forced and coerced and controlled and manipulated. That we can do a day’s work and trust that the things that were meant to get done got done, and the things that need to get done will always get done.

We balance ourselves out with doing and with believing, as one. Okay? Now, I have a program called the School Leadership Mastery series. I’m going to dabble in that in the mid-year reboot. But one of the things that school leaders want in their experience is to master certain pillars of school leadership; time, balance, planning, leadership, relationships, conversations, and emotional regulation. 

Those six pillars are what school leaders want to master, in order to feel like they’re an exceptional or expert school leader. I teach each client of mine how to do all six of those. But one of the things in the mid-year reboot that we want to keep in mind is, when we’re rebooting, we don’t have to go for all six pillars of mastery at once. We don’t have to take all the aspects of school leadership and say, “I want to master all of this, right here, right now, this year.” 

The reboot is to say, “Huh, okay. I am going to stop telling myself to do everything perfectly all at once. I’m going to pick one thing. The one next best thing for me to focus on is X. I’m going to focus on X. Once I do that, some of the other things are going to be impacted by that constraint and that focus. I can trust that it will impact all six pillars. But what I really need to focus on, what I’d like to focus on and what I’d like to master, is…” fill in the blank; time, balance, mastery, planning, relationships, communication, leadership, emotional regulation.

Now, in the end of it all, if you fast forward to the end of your career, I want you to think about that for a moment. I want you to imagine that you’re looking back at your career and you’re just pondering it, you’re reflecting. What I hear from most school leaders is they want to know that they made a difference. 

The reason they want to know they’ve made a difference, is to feel like they mattered, to feel like their effort and time and contribution mattered. And they want to feel that they contributed to the betterment of another human’s life. Whether that’s all the students, the teachers, they want to feel that they’ve left some kind of legacy. 

When you feel that you’ve contributed in the way you were meant to contribute in this world, when you feel you have helped other humans have a better human experience on the planet, you feel fulfillment. “I have fulfilled my contribution. I feel fulfilled. I feel satisfied. I feel proud. I feel pleased. I feel delighted. I feel joy. I feel proud and accomplished.”

Those feelings; capable, empowered, all of the good, juicy stuff; what we’re really looking for at the end of it all, is to be fulfilled. So, I want you to take a moment, and I want you to realize that all that we do, as a school leader, comes down to emotion. It comes down to the way that we feel. 

This really matters. This is why the work that I do with you, the teachings that I’m teaching you, the clientele that I work with, the reason that life coaching is so valuable, is because it’s grounded in emotional literacy. Understanding emotion, understanding its impact on our decisions and our actions, understanding that emotion is energy. 

That emotion is what compels us into action. Emotions are the fuel. That’s the energy that puts us into action at school. When we’re feeling like, “I’m taking all this action, but I’m not getting the results I want,” then our job is to slow down the action, to look at why. To problem solve from a mental and emotional space. 

To notice, what is the actual flavor of the fuel driving our actions? Are we getting up out of bed, jumping out of bed out of joy and delight, and ease and flow, and love and compassion, and confidence? Is that what’s energizing us and what’s fueling our actions when we come into work for the day? 

Or is the action that we’re taking, is it being fueled by fear and doubt and uncertainty and skepticism and mistrust and intimidation? Are you feeling pressure? Are you feeling scared you’re going to lose your job if you don’t get up and hustle your way from morning till night? Are you afraid of judgment or criticism? Are you afraid of rejection? 

Is the energy in which you’re leading your school, is it fueled energetically, emotionally? The action that you’re taking, is it coming from a place of fear, doubt, scarcity, lack, insufficiency, intimidation, pressure, all of those feelings? Is that what’s fueling you every day? 

Or is it out of joy and delight? Because there are different kinds of energy. It’s just like a gas, right? There are different kinds of gasoline that we can put into our car. We’ve got, I don’t know, 89 and 92, and 95, whatever the buttons; there’s different flavors, different levels. 

There are different energetic levels. There are different emotional flavors. The lowest vibe, the lowest quality fuel that you can put into your emotional tank and drive off with, that is down on the pressure, fear, doubt, scarcity, lack, worry, insufficiency, incapacity. That vibe is the low-grade fuel. 

On the high end, the premium energy that you can fuel yourself, is trust, faith, compassion, love, knowingness, certainty, safety, confidence, delight, joy, patience. Trusting is a big one. Feeling competent. Feeling sufficient. 

I want you to think about how your gas tank is being fueled every day. We’re going to talk more about that to help you simplify your work. Instead of it feeling complicated and stressful and overwhelming, let’s simplify it. Create ease and flow into your workday as a school leader. Let’s create clarity around your school vision and your goals, which is our primary focus of today. 

Let’s generate and maintain momentum; we’re going to talk about that tomorrow. Generating and maintaining momentum from a place of sufficiency and trust. Not from a place of scarcity and insufficiency, and fear, rejection, doubt, mistrust, right? 

Learn how to overcome obstacles, and allowing them to be there without making them mean that something’s gone wrong with you. Something’s wrong with you, something’s wrong with them, something’s wrong with this process. We freak out if we bump up against any problems. The brain’s like, “I don’t think there should be any problems.” 

Oh, really? There should be. How do we know? They’re there. So, we resist them. We’re upset by them. We’re frustrated by obstacles. We don’t want them to be there. But how boring would school leadership be if you walked in, grabbed a cup of coffee, and everything was perfect all day long? 

Teachers were perfectly on pace. Children were perfectly taking tests. Everybody was in line. Everybody was following the rules. Nobody had any issues. Everybody was grade level and above. Birds are singing. Right? We think we want perfection. No, we don’t, we want flavor to life. 

We love to solve a problem. Think of the energy that you get when you finally solve a problem. When you figure it out, or when you have this very productive conversation and you know the plan and you know the next steps, and they feel right. When you’ve hit a goal, how good does that feel? 

Obstacles are what we thrive on. And if you notice something about obstacles, what’s interesting is, we actually like the being in the solving of the problem or the obstacle, or overcoming that objection or obstacle in our mind or in our environment. We like to actually be solving it.

Once we’ve solved it, our brain moves on to the next thing already. It dismisses the joy of having accomplished it. So, just be mindful that your brain is going to say to you, “I want no problems. I just want a day of peace.” But the only reason you want the peace is because we’ve been swimming in all drama and putting out fires, in all this scarcity and lack and fear and feeling the need to fix everything. 

We want to uncomplicate the job, uncomplicate communication, uncomplicate adult interactions and conversations, uncomplicate goal accomplishment. So, if you’re watching this live right now, we’re in December of 2023. 

I want you to set an intention for this month, that instead of trying to do more out of insufficiency, feeling like you’re insufficient, feeling like you’re not doing enough, we want to decide, with intention from an energetic place, putting in healthy fuel into our day, into our gas tank. Using healthy emotions, positive emotion, ease, flow, connection, love, compassion. 

Along with some vulnerability, along with honesty, we’re going to keep that balance. Set your intention for how you’re going to experience this day, throughout the month of December. Today is the eighth of December. How do you want to feel from now until December 31st? 

And while you’re on your holiday break, how do you want to feel on that break? How do you want to think about yourself? How do you want to think about your accomplishments between July and now? And then, we’ll take another moment to think about, how good could the rest of this year get? 

If I’m in this place of sufficiency, like, “We’re on track. I’ve got amazing teachers, amazing students. We’re going in the right direction. How good can this get? What is working well at my school? How can I get into this energetic fuel?” 

You’re going to put healthy energy into your body. What’s working? What am I grateful for? What have we accomplished? What can I celebrate? How can I feel my school from a place of sufficiency, versus insufficiency? 

Yesterday, we talked about creating awareness and acknowledgement. We have to acknowledge where we’re at right now, and be sufficient with where we are right now. It has to be okay that you’ve got some problems you’re facing on your campus. It has to be okay that this test scores aren’t 100%. 

We’ve got to just accept and allow them to be where they’re at; teachers are where they’re at, students are where they’re at, district office is where they’re at, parents are where they’re at. And you are where you’re at. It’s okay. This is okay, where you’re at right now. You have to see the beauty in this. Do you realize where you’re at right now, here on December 8th, was your dream six months ago? Your dream even three months ago? To be here, right now.

This moment is magical. This moment is the success. You want to wrap that around you like a fuzzy blanket. You’re in this success that you created for yourself three, six months ago. All that hard work that you did was to get to this moment. I want you to really see that right now. 

So, it’s about where you’re currently at today, and saying to yourself, “Wow, I’m so proud of myself. Look at all that work I’ve done over the last six months to be here right now.” 

Now, once you’ve acknowledged that and said, “Well, here’s where I’m at now. I’m going to give myself a lot of pats on the back and gratitude for all the work I’ve done here. I’m going to take this lovely break that’s coming up. And then, I’m going to move forward. I’m going to create a plan to move myself another six months forward, with my school, with my staff. I’m going to do that three months at a time, down to one month at a time, down to one week at a time.”

Today, we’re going to get to the fun part. Yesterday, we talked about where we’re at right now. Today, is where your brain loves to go, my brain loves to go. It’s, where do we want to be? What do we want to feel? Let’s dive into the pool and the portal of possibility. This is all about swimming in the luxuriousness of what could be. 

Our brain wants to default to the worst-case scenario. “What if this happens? What if that happens? What if this doesn’t work? What if I don’t like this? What if I fail?” Then it goes into, okay, fair enough. The brain just wants to have a plan for that worst-case scenario. Fair enough. Let it do that.

Come up with a plan. What if this happens? What if we fail? What if the test scores go down? What’s our plan? How will we address it? How will we approach moving forward? What will we adjust? Okay, create that plan. 

But very, very few schools say, “What are we going to do if we actually succeed? What is our plan for the best-case scenario?” Have we even considered that the best case is possible? What if today went better than you thought it was going to go? What’s your plan for that? Are you going to celebrate that? Or are you going to be like, “Yeah, whatever. It was fine,” and just dismiss the magic of it?

What if we, as school leaders, as part of this reboot decided we are going to create a best-case scenario plan. How good can school get? How much can I enjoy my job? How many people can I support and influence with the energy and time that I have today? What if it was totally okay to go home at a decent hour, and let work wait? What if we empowered people on our campus to solve their own problems, and we stopped feeling responsible for solving everybody else’s problems? 

Imagine. Imagine how good it could feel. So, how do you want to feel as a school leader? Confident, certain, clear, calm, connected, centered, compassionate, productive, successful, impactful, proud, honored, grateful, ease, joy, flow. That is where the sweet spot is. That’s the high-octane fuel. It’s the high energy fuel that you want fueling yourself. 

Hey, empowered principle. If you enjoy the content in this podcast, I invite you to join The Empowered Principle Collaborative. It’s my latest offer for aspiring and current school leaders who want to experience exceptional impact and enjoy the school leadership experience. 

Look, you don’t have to overwork and overexert to be a successful school leader. You will be mentored weekly, and surrounded by supportive like-minded colleagues who truly understand what it means to be a school leader. So, join us today and become a member of the only certified life and leadership coaching program for school leaders in the country. 

Just head on over to AngelaKellyCoaching.com/work-with-me to learn more and join. I’ll see you inside of The Empowered Principle Collaborative.

Thanks for listening to this episode of The Empowered Principle™ Podcast. If you enjoyed this episode and want to learn more, please visit AngelaKellyCoaching.com, where you can sign up for weekly updates and learn more about the tools that will help you become an emotionally fit school leader.