Ep #344: Radical Empowerment

The Empowered Principal® Podcast Angela Kelly | Radical Empowerment

As principals and administrators, it’s easy to get caught up in the day-to-day demands coming at us from all directions. We’re managing initiatives from the district, supporting our staff and students, and engaging with parents and the community – it can feel like we’re being pulled in a million directions at once.

But in the midst of all the chaos and overwhelm, how can we step into our true power as leaders? How can we take full ownership of our experience and impact? In this episode, I share my insights on radical empowerment – what it means, why it matters, and how to embody it as a school leader. Get ready for a perspective shift that will transform how you lead.

Tune in to discover how to balance being the boss with compassion, navigate difficult emotions, and see the potential in everyone on your campus. It’s time to stop seeking external validation and step into your most empowered self. Let’s go!

 

The doors to the next cohort of The Empowered Principal® Collaborative are open! This is the time to decide: do you want to lead your school for the rest of the year as you are right now, or take your leadership skills to the next level? Join us today to become a member of the only certified life and leadership coaching program for school leaders in the country by clicking here.

 

What You’ll Learn From this Episode:

  • Why taking radical ownership is the key to empowerment as a leader.
  • How to balance being in boss mode with compassion and grace.
  • The importance of allowing yourself to be human and make mistakes.
  • Why you can’t take responsibility for other people’s results and emotional experiences.
  • How to see the power and potential in your staff and students.
  • Strategies to manage your own emotions while holding space for others.

 

Listen to the Full Episode:

 

Featured on the Show:

Full Episode Transcript:

Hello empowered principals. Welcome to episode 344. 

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 principals. Happy Tuesday. How are y’all doing today? Welcome to the podcast. If you’re new, a very special welcome. If you’re new to school leadership, congratulations, kudos to you. Proud of you for your hard work. I want you to be proud of you for the hard work, and the journey has just begun. This really can be an amazing and fun experience. 

Yes, you have stepped into a new role. You are going to have to expand and evolve yourself. You’re going to be new. There will be challenges. There’s going to be some really difficult situations, but also there is amazingness and wins and celebration that come with school leadership. It’s all good. You’re in safe hands. Come on over to the EPC program. You’re going to be so supported. 

Today I want to address an aspect of empowerment and coaching that I realized I haven’t been as explicit about recently because I’ve been so focused on providing guidance on all of this self-love and compassion and worth and ease and flow and fun all summer long. That is a very important component. 

I think it’s underrepresented in school leadership and in all of the learnings and writings and conversations we’re having around school leadership, which is why I like to focus on it to give you the balance of yes, you need to develop your knowledge based on all of the topics, but you also need to be a human. You are a human as a school leader having a human experience. I want you to have the best experience possible. 

Most school leaders that I know, they push themselves to the edge professionally, mentally, physically, right? You’re out there working 10, 12, 14, 16 hour days. You work until you drop from fatigue. A lot of people who hire me, working around the clock. They are getting up and they’re going in bright and early when the sun rises, and they’re staying well after dark. 

They are exhausted because then they go home and then they fulfill their parental duties or their partnership duties or their family duties, friends, whatever. They’re so busy leading their school and leading their lives that they’re fatigued. They push until the fuel tank is empty. 

So I spend a great deal of time helping driven school leaders who love their work create perspective and balance physically, mentally, emotionally, and help them balance not just the professional life, the professional demands, but their personal life. 

I’m a certified life and leadership coach. I help coach you in leadership, but also in life because it’s all one big package. You’re one human having one experience in the game of life that you’ve chosen to play a school leadership. So I’m going to teach you the skillset for that and coach you on how to live a life you love. It’s no fun to be a school leader.

If you’re fatigued all the time, if you’re stressed all the time, if you’re overwhelmed all the time, that was the experience I had. For the six years, I was a site principal and for the year I spent up at the district office, I watched my colleagues. I watched myself be stressed, fatigued, pretend to be happy, want leadership development and not receive it.

One of my buddies, Tyler, he got hired to replace me at my first school when I got moved to another school because that principal had been promoted. So there was the shuffling around. Tyler and I became close friends, and he and I would have extensive conversations about craving leadership development, wanting to expand our leadership skills and knowledge, and really wanting to dive into what it looks and feels like to become and empowered, exceptional leader.

It was something we both wanted, but what ended up happening was a lot of stress, a lot of overwhelm, a lot of confusion, a lot of frustration, a lot of kind of whack-a-mole approach to school leadership. So I thought that it was just me. I thought I was the problem. I thought I wasn’t cut out for school leadership. 

He went on to another district, and I think is now a director at a different school district and is doing phenomenally. I decided to branch off from education to become a coach for school leaders because I felt this sweet spot of the site leader. 

It’s the ultimate middle manager experience because you’re right in the middle where you’re managing from the top down, from all of the demands from your district and your bosses up at the district level, all those administrators. They’re telling you what to do and how to do it and when to do it and why to do it. Roll this out, roll that initiative out. 

You’re managing all of that energy and then you’re managing all the energy of your staff, your teachers, your students, your families, the communities, the school board. Whatever systems or whatever structure you have in your particular district, you’re managing all of that energy. It’s all coming your way. You’re right in the middle. 

It’s like district top down, county, fed, state level. You’ve got the parents and community coming at you sideways and then you’ve got all this like from the bottom up, the energy of all the students, your support staff, your office staff, your community resource officers, your counselors, your nurses. You’ve got special education. You’ve got general education teachers, all of it. There didn’t seem to be a place for that.

So there is a component of this program, of The Empowered Principal® program,  that is what makes balance possible. It really struck me the other day when I saw several posts on social media from school leaders who were basically asking other people to think and make decisions for them. 

So a lot of times in these principal groups, I will see posts like what should I do in this case? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Here’s the case. Here’s the situation. What should I do? Or what books are you reading this summer? What PD should I provide for my staff? What interview questions do you use? Who should I hire? Who’s inspirational? Who’ve you used? 

First I want to say, I’m not condemning this practice at all. I think it’s a way to connect. I think it’s a way to collaborate, to ask these questions. I highly recommend asking questions. So I want to say there’s nothing wrong with asking these questions. I definitely recommend asking questions when in doubt, especially when you need specific information and guidance. When you need it. 

If you have a legal issue, please ask for legal advice or legal guidance. Do you have policy questions? Ask somebody who knows. Do you have a question about responding to a certain behavior or a policy or procedure that is related to behavior management and behavior responses and consequences? Ask. Questions pertaining to special education, particularly when it comes to law, ask. 

There are times and places for you to ask specific information that is going to help you decide what actions you need to take to progress forward. Then there are questions that are asked that do not give you really specific information. The answers that you receive may or may not even pertain to you or your school or your district. 

Now I understand that oftentimes people will ask questions on social media, like I said earlier, simply to generate connection and conversation. That’s totally cool. But it also made me wonder what people who ask those questions, what they are thinking. Why they’re asking the questions and what they do with the information. 

Because basically what they’re doing when they’re creating this connection conversation is they’re asking people to take time out from their fun and then pleasure and their rest or from their work and their focus on what they’re doing to slow down and say hey, let me take time to recommend this book or this product or this platform or this speaker or this program, whatever it is they’re asked for. What do they do with that information? Then what happens? 

So where does the personal responsibility and ownership come into play? Where does a principal take radical ownership of their empowerment? Is it ever appropriate to ask questions and get this feedback? Or is there a time and a place where we want to ask us to answer the question? 

Is it appropriate to accept what other people say and just go with the flow? Or do we decide for ourselves what books we’re going to read based on our own desires? What next steps we need to take, what programs we should invest in, what speaker we should hire, what professional development to prepare, what staff culture needs from us. I want you to consider the concept of radical empowerment. 

Where before you ask other people for hundreds of input, hundreds of data points of input. If you ask somebody, what book should I read this summer? You’re going to get hundreds of responses. It doesn’t mean you should read all 300 books. Now you have more information to think about. You have a bigger decision to make.

Versus what do I want to read this summer? What’s the one next thing I want to learn about? Do I want to just read for absolute pleasure? Do I need a mind candy kind of a book, or do I need some growth book? Do I want to take a program over the summer? Do I feel like compelled to learn and grow my skills, or do I want to go to the beach and just decompress? What do I want? What do I need? What does my school? Answer the question.

I feel like with social media and access to internet, it’s so easy to just divert the question out to the people and let our brain off the hook to not have to answer the question. But at the end of the day, it actually becomes harder to make the decision because we’ve asked for all of this input. What do we do with all that input? 

There are social media groups out there with tens of thousands of people in them. You’re going to get hundreds and hundreds of responses. What do you do with all that data? How do you know you’re making the right decision? How do you know that they know your school well enough to even make a recommendation for you.

To feel truly empowered, we need to take radical ownership. That is the very definition of empowerment. To embody personal power, personal knowledge, personal understanding, to tap into our own wisdom, our own strength, our own knowingness. To follow our internal compass, our guide, to really dig in. That is the work. 

When people say people do the work, the inner work, that’s what they’re talking about. They’re talking about exploring, having a conversation with their own internal compass. What do I value? What feels in alignment for me? What feels like integrity for me? How do I identify as a school leader?

 Who am I? What do I think of myself? Do I love who I am? Do I love what I’m learning? Do I feel I’m growing? What do I think my staff needs from me? What does my school culture need to evolve and expand? What do my students need? What would the community love? 

In my opinion, your opinion matters. You matter. Your thoughts matter. Your feelings matter. It all matters. You cannot be in empowerment as a school leader without taking ownership of that empowerment. You can’t take responsibility for some of your life and let the other stuff go. You’ve got to take responsibility for all of it. This is why the Summer of Fun Challenge is so much fun, but it’s also work. It requires you to take responsibility for all of it. 

To say hey, job, I love you, and I’m going to take time off. I’m going to take ownership and take control back of my time, my planning, my calendar, fill my own bucket. I’m going to take radical responsibility, radical ownership, radical empowerment of my life and my career. 

The way that you create balance, the way you develop a three month plan and stick to it, the way you build relationships, the way you learn how to communicate, the way you learn to become a visionary school leader with massive influence and impact and a legacy is to step into radical empowerment. 

Radical empowerment is when you take full ownership of your experience as a leader. It’s being emotionally mature and understanding how to manage your own emotions and hold space for other people’s emotions. It’s being able to separate your thoughts and feelings from another person’s expression of their thoughts and feelings. 

You have to be able to know that when a person is expressing emotion that you do not have the same experience. It’s separate. Your thoughts and feelings are separate from theirs, but we get entangled. We forget that. We have to be reminded. We have to create awareness around that and separate it. It’s dropping the need for validation from others. 

Look, we grow up as little kids seeking validation from our parents and our caretakers and our religious leaders and our political leaders, our grandparents, our aunties, our uncles, our friend’s parents, all the adults, the teachers in our life. We look for validation. As the adults, we tell kids, yes, it is your job to seek our external validation. When we want to grant you validation, we reward you and we celebrate you. If you don’t earn our validation, we punish you. We give you consequences until you continue to seek that out. 

Our job as adults is to drop and uncouple the need for validation from others, to learn how to validate ourselves, to understand that there are people who will validate us, but there are people who won’t. We have to process the emotion that comes with that. This is really hard stuff. It’s about owning our mistakes and acknowledging them, doing what it takes to repair and make it right. The pain of owning a mistake, acknowledging it, speaking up and saying hey, this is my mistake. I am sorry. I didn’t realize, mean to. 

You know that feeling, that remorseful feeling, you feel it’s so painful when you’ve made a mistake. We have to process those feelings. We have to acknowledge our mistakes, but also not beat ourselves up. There is a very delicate walk that has to occur. We own it. We feel it. We process it. We make it right. We take the action. We’re courageous in our action, but we also don’t make it our identity. We don’t make it mean something is wrong with us or broken inside of us.

Processing the feelings that come up when you know you have overlooked something or misspoke or miscommunicated or failed to hit the target or you’ve handled something in a way you’re not proud of. Those are really hard feelings. It’s being able to allow yourself the space and permission to feel those terrible feelings all the way through and balance them with self-love and compassion and kindness for yourself. 

We’re not trying to abdicate or create excuses when we make mistakes, but we do want to give ourselves the human permission to be human and give ourselves the grace and space of being human. That’s what it’s about.

So there’s this walk, this fine little dance that we do with radical ownership is about owning our part, our 50%, staying in our lane while also not taking on the ownership of others, not getting in their lanes and telling them who to be and how to act and how to think and how to feel and what job they should do and how they should do their job and what they shouldn’t do and what they shouldn’t think and what they shouldn’t say. 

It’s being able to hold other people accountable for the results that they have created for themselves while also having compassion for them having created those results. It’s like a teacher that you are going to let go and then you feel bad that you let them go, but they created that result for themselves. 

So as leaders, we tend to overextend our responsibility because we assume that we have the power over other people’s lives. That we damage their careers if we fire them, if we don’t bring them back. We feel responsible for what they’re thinking, how they’re feeling, how they behave. We take responsibility for their results. You cannot take responsibility for another person’s results. You didn’t create those results. It’s not your STEER cycle. 

It’s not your set of beliefs and thoughts and feelings and emotional energy and decisions and actions. You didn’t do any of that. So how could you have created it? But yet we take ownership of the results and the outcomes that other people have created and we try to fix it and change it and make them feel a certain way. There’s no way. You can’t do that. 

So here’s an example. When you decided this past spring to let someone go and not extend an offer to them to return this coming year, you did not do this to them. They created this result for themselves. A person who gets fired created that experience for themselves. Their thoughts about themselves, their ability to teach, thoughts about their students and families and colleagues, thoughts about the district, the curriculum, all of their thoughts impact their emotional state of being, their emotional energy, the fuel that they use to make decisions and actions. 

That is what impacts their approach to teaching and being an employee. The result of that might have been being released from their position. That outcome is a product of them not wanting the job. Because staff members who do want the job that they currently have, they value it. They show up for it. They work for it. They want it. They show up as though they actually want the job. They produce results. 

People who are not aligned to the position are going to subconsciously sabotage themselves. They show up late. They aren’t prepared. They call in sick. They have excuses. They blame other people. They drop the ball. They miss deadlines. They’re not engaged in the job. They don’t want it. 

Of course, I base this on the premise that if you’re letting a person go because they aren’t meeting the standards of the position they’re serving, that you are doing that out of integrity. So if you’re listening to this podcast, I’m pretty sure you’re under the assumption that you’re a highly ethical school leader who strives to be an exemplary employer. 

So a person can be fired by an employer that didn’t support them or give them the resources, training, and skill development they needed or simply just didn’t like them. That happens. But for the empowered principal out there who’s aligned to the decision, who lets somebody go and feels clean about the rationale behind the decision may still take on the emotional experience of the employee. 

This shows up in a couple of different ways. One, the principal ruminates on what else they could have done or said to support this person. This is where radical empowerment comes into play. If there was something more you could have done, you can own that and learn from it and move forward. 

But if you review all that you did to provide training and support and onboarding for the year, if you did all of that, please allow yourself to feel aligned and complete with the responsibilities and allow them to feel the discomfort of not having fulfilled their responsibilities. Two lanes. Okay? 

In EPC, I will teach you how to take radical ownership so you can experience radical empowerment. This is the balance between being in boss energy and being in loving, compassionate energy. It’s learning the delicacy of where and when to apply different energies throughout the day and throughout the school year, depending on the outcome you’re trying to achieve. 

This is the balance. It’s the balance between taking ownership for yourself and having radical self-compassion and grace. It’s knowing when to dive into curiosity instead of conflict when someone says something that ruffles your feathers. It’s feeling confident even though you don’t have all the answers or know all of the things. It’s genuinely caring about the individuals on your campus.

But as I said before, not taking responsibility for their STEAR cycles, which is just their thoughts and emotions and actions, their behaviors. Their beliefs, emotions, and behaviors. Those are not in your control. It’s having the compassion for others without allowing them to take advantage of you. It’s the courage to speak up and also to know when speaking up isn’t appropriate or will cause harm. 

It’s being convicted to your work, but allowing yourself to rest, recover, and play because you trust that everything you’re doing is working and is on track and will unfold in the time it needs to unfold. It’s having an evolved sense of self-efficacy and identifying as a leader who makes an impact, but not using your positional authority as power over others, but using that positional authority through the lens of seeing other people in their own empowerment.

Your staff doesn’t need you to fix them or save them or change them. They have just as much potential to be exceptional as we leaders do. We want to feel empowered and to take full ownership. We want them to feel empowered, to take full ownership, to think on their own, to problem solve on their own, to try new things, to feel a sense of agency and control over their careers. 

We’re not a higher power just because we’re a leader. We don’t have control over other people’s careers or emotional reactions. That’s not our sphere of control. That’s not our lane. Our goal as empowered principals is to see the power that’s in everyone, in staff, in students, in colleagues, in families. 

So if there was ever a time for you to join EPC, now is the time. I have up-leveled this content. I’m going to be teaching and coaching. I’m offering bonus workshops throughout the year. You’re going to have access to all of my online content, including past masterclasses and webinars and all of the mastery series workbooks I’ve created. 

I’m working on The Empowered Principal® community through the SKOOL platform, S-K-O-O-L where all of the content is going to be available for the participants in EPC. It’s basically like a library with the solutions and guidance on every topic I have ever coached on related to school leadership and to a balanced life. 

So in just one rotation around the sun, you are going to transform your experience of school leadership and the experience of your staff and students. You will receive 12 months of weekly coaching, bonus workshops, a monthly 30 minute one-on-one session, and access to all of the empowered principal programming for only $1,997. The best part is that you can pay in full and be done with it, or you can sign up for 10 monthly payments of $199.70.

EPC is revolutionary and beyond its price and value. I’m so proud of this program. I’m proud of the container,  and I am proud to be a coach for school leaders. You have all you need to step into radical empowerment. I can’t wait to see you in EPC. I’ll talk to you guys next week. Have an amazing week. Take good care. Bye. 

Thanks for listening to this episode of The Empowered Principal® 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.

 

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Ep #343: Leadership Development

The Empowered Principal® Podcast Angela Kelly | Leadership Development

How many of you can say you were fully trained, mentored, and supported as you were being onboarded as a school principal, all while being given the grace and space to be new and unsure of yourself? I’m willing to bet most of you would say you weren’t.

The school leader’s job description often requires being an expert in it all while doing everything at once. Whether you’re making the shift from good to great or great to exceptional, you are not alone if you feel like you don’t know what you’re doing. That’s why it’s my mission to make leadership development a mainstream practice in every school community, and I show you how I’m doing this in today’s episode.

Tune in this week to learn why we desperately need leadership development for all school principals and the common patterns and experiences I’ve witnessed among brand-new leaders. I share how The Empowered Principal Collaborative is the container you need if you’re ready to stop feeling in over your head and cultivate the confidence necessary to be the leader your school needs.

 

The doors to the next cohort of The Empowered Principal® Collaborative are open! This is the time to decide: do you want to lead your school for the rest of the year as you are right now, or take your leadership skills to the next level? Join us today to become a member of the only certified life and leadership coaching program for school leaders in the country by clicking here.

 

What You’ll Learn From this Episode:

  • My experience of making the transition from teaching to administration.
  • The commonalities all school leaders experience as they step into their new roles.
  • Why I created The Empowered Principal Collaborative.
  • What is required of you as a brand-new school leader.
  • How focus and constraint help you keep your overwhelm in check.

 

Listen to the Full Episode:

 

Featured on the Show:

Full Episode Transcript:

Hello empowered principals. Welcome to episode 343. 

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, hello, hello, my lovely empowered principals. How are you today? Happy Tuesday. Welcome to the podcast. Hey, you guys, if you’re new to the podcast, come say hi. Join the Facebook group and say hi, or drop me an email and say hello. You’re new to the podcast. Follow me on social media. Come on Instagram, Angela Kelly Coaching. You can find me on Facebook personally and professionally. Come on over and mingle. I want to get to know you. 

You could also leave a review. That helps me. I look through the reviews. If you leave a review for the podcast, I try to shout you out personally here on the podcast. So, I love meeting new people. I love meeting new leaders or aspiring leaders. You all inspire me so, so very much. 

Here we are in July. We’re ramping back up as school leaders, and we’re thinking about next year. We’re preparing. We’re planning. We are getting master calendars scheduled away, making sure everybody’s hired and in the right spot, making sure the schools are cleaned and ready for teachers to come back into those classrooms. You are thinking three months ahead of your teachers, and July, in your mind, you’re already back to school. 

So, I want to talk about you, not your school, not your vision, not your teachers, not your students, not your district admins. I want to talk about you going from being a new leader to a good leader to a great leader to an exceptional principal. 

First of all, I’m going to invite you very quickly into the Summer of Fun Challenge because we still have a couple weeks left. It’s so easy. If you’re on Facebook, all you have to do is search for The Empowered Principal®  Facebook group. You come into the group. If you are a school leader or you’re an aspiring school leader, you’re welcome to join the group. I do a little bit of an intake form because I don’t want robots coming in and ruining our space or spammers and all of that or people soliciting you. I don’t want that. This is a safe, clean space.

So, if you are an actual school leader, you’re an aspiring school leader, answer the three questions, come on into the group, and all you have to do is share photos, pics, posts of your summer fun that you’re having. Just share it in the group, and you can also cheerlead other people on. Every time you either post or comment on somebody else’s, your name is entered multiple times into a weekly drawing. For every single post and every single comment, you get one entry into the drawing for the week. 

It is the easiest way to manifest some significant cash into your life and also to check out what’s going on in the world of the Empowered Principal® programs and EPC. Because there is a $50 gift card from Amazon, which I love me some Amazon. It saves me so much time.

More importantly, the real power, the real money that you’re winning is 90% off of the EPC program for one full year of coaching. It’s normally $1,997. The winner, the weekly winner of SOF, will receive 90% off. So you are getting a full year of coaching for only $197. I think that is insane. It’s just enough to have some skin in the game, but you are going to gain so much. It’s insane. This is an epic program. 

I’m going to talk more about it in a minute, but what I want you to know is that you’re basically going to win $1,850 because you’re getting the $50 Amazon card, but you’re basically saving $1,800 in the Empowered Principal® program. You can’t lose. 

You can come in for a year, check out EPC. If it’s amazing, you can stay. If it’s not your cup of tea, I understand. I’m not everybody’s cup of tea. But for those of you who are interested, this is the perfect way to sign up and be eligible to receive 90% off your entrance fee. 

So I want to let you know that I’ve done one round of EPC and after that round, I’ve really reflected and enhanced the experience for everybody in the program. Because I want you to come into this program trusting and believing that you’re going to receive the support that you need. We’re going to celebrate your wins.

We’re going to track your progress in a way that inspires you, not in a negative way. It’s for fun. We’re doing all of this to celebrate and win and be like oh my gosh, I hadn’t realized how much I’ve grown in this area. So I’ve created some really simple ways to track and celebrate your progress. 

But what I’m going to be doing more in EPC than I did last year was teach. I’m going to teach you, mentor you, teach you the skills that you need to be an empowered principal so you know and you learn how to create the exact results that you want for yourself and your school. Okay? 

All right, let’s dive in. I want you to think about the experience that you have had in the past as you transitioned from teaching to administration, or the experience that you anticipate having as you transition from teaching to administration. I will share my experience with you and then I want you to feel free to share yours in the Facebook group, or you can share with me on social media because the stories of transitioning into leadership, they’re astounding to me, but they’re very consistent and there’s a lot of similarity and there’s a pattern, some commonalities in which we all experience. Okay? 

I was tapped on the shoulder as a kindergarten teacher. You should be a teacher leader. You’ve got great energy, great charisma. Parents love you. You get amazing results with your kids. Your classroom management’s on point. You’re doing all of the initiatives in the classroom. You’re a shining example. 

I didn’t want to go into school leadership, but my superintendent at the time was very charming. He was very charismatic himself, and I really, really followed him. I believed in him as a leader. I trusted him, he was, had his eye on the ball. He knew what he wanted, and he knew how to sell people on themselves. So I really believed in myself because he believed in me, and he sold me on me. 

So I went ahead, and I already had my master’s in education. I went ahead and got my credential in administration, but I really didn’t want to go into administration. So I was holding on to it for a while. I became an instructional, well, first I was a reading specialist. After I was in kindergarten, became an instructional coach. I did that for a year, and that was the year that I started to transition my thinking. I started to visualize myself as a potential leader. 

I was working with one of my best friends, and she was the principal at the time. I was the instructional coach, and that was the closest I’d ever been to a leadership position. So I was watching her do the job. I was listening to her process how she was doing the job, listening to all the highs, the lows, the wins, the losses, the good, bad, and ugly. But there was a moment, I can remember it, where I was standing. I can remember what I was wearing.

I remember thinking to myself I might be able to do this. She kept saying, “Oh, for sure. If I can do it, you can do it.” Everybody tells you that, but you’re like that doesn’t sound as reassuring as you might think it sounds. If I can do it, anybody can do it. It’s like yeah, but you already did it, and I haven’t done it. So there’s still this gap between where I’m at and where I would like to go. There doesn’t appear to be a bridge between here and there. I feel like if I take the first next step, I’m going to fall all the way down into the canyon and never return.

So I watched her, I listened, I really started tuning in. But what I did was I kept envisioning myself as a leader. I kept believing that it was possible for me to learn how to be a leader, for me to grow into being a leader, for me to handle it emotionally, mentally, just intellectually, skill based wise. I went from zero belief in myself to like 10% belief to maybe 25% belief. 

Then I got to a point where I was right around the 50% mark. I was like I’m pretty sure I could do this. I might fail. But what I do know is that I’m strong, I’m bold, I will figure it out. I’m confident in that I will figure it out. I’m not confident in my leadership skills, but I’m confident that I will do my best to figure it out. 

When I thought that thought, that was when I tipped over into being ready to apply, which is exactly what happened. So the spring came, positions started opening, I was asked to apply. I was so scared. Gosh, applying for leadership positions in front of people I’ve worked with for 15 years, it felt scarier than talking to strangers for some reason.

Because it felt like I couldn’t fake it until I made it. I couldn’t enhance. I couldn’t say something that wasn’t true. Not that I would ever do that. But you know how when you’re in an interview, like you’re trying to put forward your best foot, and you want to make yourself sound as enticing as possible? But these are people who knew me super well. So there was no fudging it. 

I was so nervous. I applied for an AP position at a middle school because I thought it would be easier to start out as an AP than to take on a full school by myself. I didn’t get that position. My people had to call me and give me the news that I, they thanked me for the interview, but I didn’t make it to the second round. I was devastated. I cried on the couch after school when I found out. 

I mean, it was a few days later, but I remember thinking like why did they put me through this? That was just so unnecessary. But after the tears, I was like okay, what did I learn in that interview? What worked? What didn’t? What would I say or do differently next time? 

My friend who was the principal when I was her instructional coach and I was applying said, “Just tell them what you know. Speak from your heart. You’re an educator at heart. You know what you’re doing. You’ve got this. But speak to you. Be you in that interview. Don’t try to tell them what you think they want to hear. Tell them who you are and what you know and how you’re going to bring you to the table.”

I applied for an elementary position at a brand new school. They were opening a brand new school at a brand new site with all the construction happening, and I got hired for that position. The superintendent who had encouraged me to come to the surface had an amazing leadership development program within our district, which is one of the reasons I got tapped on the shoulder for because I had participated in that two-year leadership development training program. 

Which I think was like beyond his years of wisdom and vision at the time. I didn’t know of any other school who was offering like a leadership development to develop leaders from within the district to retain the district and to have leaders who taught in the district who had already some clout and some understanding and some relationship and connections and just a deep understanding of the community, of the district, and the operations of our particular district. So it was very avant-garde to me at the time.

I went through that program. I ended up landing this position, but then that superintendent left and another superintendent stepped in. I was very scared because I didn’t have my person. This new person was coming up. I knew this person. He was an internal hire, but his style was very different. What ended up happening was we are so happy you’re here, Angela. We’re so grateful you’re taking on this brand new school as a brand new principal. Like, way to go. That’s very brave of you. Here are your keys. Here’s your office. Bye. Have a nice life. Go figure out life. 

So as you can imagine, I tried to fake it. I tried to pretend I was a leader. I tried to talk like a leader and walk like a leader and dress like a leader. That definitely did help. It boosted my confidence to a point. 

But the truth was, I didn’t have the skills to be a leader, especially to open a brand new school, to create community, to create a collaborative environment, to create a culture from nothing to something, to develop the school site council and to develop the ELAC program and to develop all of it. The PLC foundation, all of it was brand new. Not to mention, I was also doing construction management. For those of you who’ve ever had construction on your campus, you can relate to this. 

I was in over my head. I was assigned a mentor that was required to take me through these modules that I had to go through, but that program wasn’t exactly what I needed. Fortunately, my coach at the time, my mentor, she had the skill set to actually coach me and guide me. Otherwise, I’m pretty confident I would have resigned from the position and gone back to teaching or instructional coaching within the first two years of the job. I’m almost positive of that because it was so hard. But I had her. She kept me going. 

All of this to say, I figured it out the hard way, learning by doing. I felt like somebody had thrown me into a dryer, and I was just bouncing around trying to figure out life. It was learning by fire hose. You can learn that way, by the way. You can do that. It’s very painful, but you can do it, which is what I did. 

So here’s the thing I’ve noticed about school leadership. I have yet to meet a leader in my professional world or now as a coach. I coach people all across the country. I have yet to meet a leader who can refute that there is a leadership development program in the sense that when they hire you, they say, “Hi, welcome to the team. We are so happy to have hired you. You’re such a great match for us. I can’t wait to get to know you better and to work with you. Here’s your campus, here’s your office, and here are your keys.” Now that’s where most of the onboarding stops. 

But imagine, imagine a world where they say, “And we’re going to fully onboard and train you. We’re going to teach you and provide you with all the skills you need to navigate this job. We’re going to teach you how to people manage, how to time manage, how to maintain a balanced lifestyle, how to effectively plan and map out your calendar for the short and long term, how to handle parents, how to navigate students, how to emotionally manage other people and yourself so that you can stay grounded as you work through difficult situations.

“We’re going to teach you how to student manage, manage behaviors, manage IEPs, facilitate staff meetings, develop effective professional development meetings. We’re going to teach you all of this. We’re going to teach you how to be an instructional leader while also balancing the work of being an operations manager of your school.”

Because that’s what the job description is. Please do everything all at once. Be an expert at it all. That’s the job description. Can you imagine if this type of training was included in your new position? 

I wish I could do a raise of hands. How many of the listeners of this podcast have had that experience where you’ve been fully onboarded, fully supported, fully trained, fully mentored, fully coached, and you were given permission and grace and space to be new and awkward and clumsy and not know what you’re doing, to not know the answers, to gradually work up into the position, to get it right, to learn deeply. 

I don’t know, if we did a show of hands, how many people have had that experience, that kind of mentorship. Where someone says hey, here is the real truth about this job. The real truth is this. There’s always going to be too much to do and not enough time. There are always going to be conflicting priorities and demands coming at you from all directions. 

You’re going to be pulled in many directions. You’re going to feel overwhelmed almost all of the time. There’s always going to be pressure to do more, to do it better. But you know what? That’s okay. We’re going to support you in handling that. 

It feels like a dream come true. It feels like the Disneyland of school leadership, which is what I’m trying to create over here. No one offered that to me. They said, thank you so much. We needed you to fill this position. You have fulfilled a need of ours. Here are your keys. Go enjoy your life with a smile on your face. Be the face of the district. Please don’t ask us any questions because we’re too busy figuring life out for ourselves. Go do you. You need to know how to do this. Bye.

It’s like oh, okay. Wow. Let me evolve my self-concept in about two days. That is why I created EPC, the Empowered Principal® Collaborative. I needed to fill a gap. There was a void. Look, teachers, they have all kinds of resources, instructional coaches. They have grade level support. They have PLCs. They get mentors, buddy teachers, right? But we, we get the job, and then we’re expected to do the job.

You might get sent to a conference. Oh, hey, go learn how to improve school culture, or hey, go improve your practice in diversity, equity, and inclusion. Go to a weekend workshop and come back and then have that fixed. How are you supposed to do that? How do you integrate a conference into who you are, into your identity, into your practice as a school leader? 

I want you to think about the business of education. The business of education is to continue to learn and to develop and to grow. When you’re a brand new leader, there is an entirely new skill set that you’re going to have to learn. You’re going to have to decide which skill you’re going to focus on because there’s too many. You have to break it down into chunks. 

You learn a particular skill this year or this quarter or this semester. Build up your muscles one skill at a time. There’s just too many to learn at once. It’s going to require you to constrain and focus your priorities to certain skills.

You’ll also be learning by doing. There’s no way not to do that. So you’re still going to drink it from the fire hose. You’re still going to have things you don’t know. You’re not going to be able to just not handle things you don’t know how to do. 

You will grow multiple facets of your leadership repertoire, but you want to grow as quickly as possible the skill sets that require you to build the foundation of leadership that you want. Focus and constraint is the fastest way to do that. It’s how you keep your overwhelm in check. When you try to learn all of the skill sets at once, you’re only going to expand your overwhelm. 

Hey, I also want to say this. If you’re a new leader, you’re not going to feel confident if you’re in a new position. Even if you’re a leader who’s been in a different position, maybe you went from AP to principal, or you went from principal to district level admin, you’re not going to feel confident. You can’t. You can’t have the identity of a skilled school leader when you’ve never done the job before. 

You’re going to feel a certain amount of uncertainty and awkwardness and just unsure about yourself because most people aren’t getting trained. You’re going to have to learn by doing in order to figure it out. That’s normal. The goal isn’t to avoid looking or feeling new. There is no faking it until you make it when you have no idea what you’re doing.

The goal is in your finesse. It’s how you handle being new. It’s how you handle the feelings of uncertainty and unknowing and doubt when people question you or expect you to know, and they ask you and they put you on the hot seat and you don’t know. It’s not that you don’t know or the goal isn’t to know. The goal is what do I do, how do I handle, who do I be, how do I show up when I don’t know, when I am new. 

So whatever stage you are in the educational leadership experience, I want you to know it’s okay to feel like you don’t know what’s going on. If you’re aspiring, you’re not going to know how to get that job. If you’re brand new, you’re not going to know how to be good. If you’re feeling good about yourself in some areas, you’re not going to know how to make yourself great.

If you’re feeling great and you want to up-level and you want to expand and evolve yourself to exceptional, that’s going to require a stretch. There are gaps in learning. There are gaps in who you are now and where you want to be and who you want to become. That is a continuum of school leadership development that never ends. 

You want to feel good about yourself as a leader. You want to make a bigger and more profound impact as a leader. To expand your identity as an empowered principal, an empowered leader, an exceptional leader, it requires you to expand your skill set as a leader. We need leadership development. It’s a requirement for us to grow.

This is why so many people drop out of the position because they don’t have the leadership development that they yearn for, that they crave, that they want. The best of the best leaders will leave if there’s no leadership development because they’re in the position to grow, to evolve, to expand themselves, to learn. We don’t just drop learning at the door when we step into leadership. But for some reason, that’s how the current system is set up. 

As I said before, teachers have systems built into place. They have mentors and buddy teachers and grade-level collaborations and PLCs and instructional coaches to help them with whatever questions they have and guide them in their professional development journey. You create professional development experiences for your teachers.

But how many districts do you believe are offering PD days that focus specifically on leadership development in addition to teacher development? There might be some, but it is not a mainstream practice. I want to make, it is my mission to make leadership development a mainstream practice in every school community. 

If you want to become a school leader, EPC is where you learn the skills and surround yourself in the energy of fellow empowered school leaders. So if you’re new to school leadership and you don’t know where to start, EPC is where you learn to prioritize and focus your attention and your energy. 

If you feel like you’re a pretty good principal, maybe you’ve been doing this a couple of years, you’ve got some tools under your belt, but you’re working yourself to the bone to try and get it all done. I know many of you are doing this. The EPC is going to teach you how to be accomplished and balanced, to get the same amount done in less time, to add fun to your calendar, to not overwork, overexert, overschedule. 

If you’re feeling good about yourself as a principal but you want to up-level, EPC is going to teach you how to step into that next version of yourself and to evolve your self-concept. Even if you’re feeling exceptional and you want to make an even bigger impact, EPC is going to show you how to expand your legacy as a principal in your current position or how to expand and evolve into a higher level position where you create even more impact.

This program covers it all. The Empowered Principal® Collaborative is a comprehensive container. I have studied this for the last eight years. I cover everything, and I also offer individualized coaching and support. I’ve created the very container that I dreamt of having for myself. This is it. 

By you participating, by you being in this community, you contribute and you expand and enhance the leadership development of this program. You enhance the quality of leadership development by participating and adding the wisdom, the knowledge, the skills, the insights that you’ve learned. 

I’m not the guru here. I am the person who’s developed the container to hold these beautiful and deep and rich conversations about evolving our identity as school leaders, empowering ourselves, empowering our staff and students, enhancing the school leadership experience so we can enhance the teaching experience so we can enhance the student experience and the family experience. 

We want to turn the narrative around. Right now, education has a very negative narrative. Teachers are unhappy, students are unhappy, parents are unhappy, communities are unhappy, school leaders are unhappy. We want to enhance the experience. We want to look at the journey of a student, of a teacher, of a support staff, of a principal, of a parent, and ask ourselves, how do we enhance this experience to make it the best experience possible? 

So this year, for EPC, one of the things I’ve added to make it more accessible and easier for every principal who wants to participate is I’ve set up a monthly payment plan option to make it even more accessible for all levels of leadership. So you could either pay in full and just be done and have it for the full year. If that’s not an option for you, you can break the $1,997 into 10 monthly payments of $199.70. There’s no additional fee if you decide to break it up into monthly payments. Not a problem. It’s never been easier to join. 

This is your year. Come on in. You can be the mentor and the mentee because this is a mastermind experience where we all share. I teach, but I also coach. You also coach. You also teach. This is a mastermind experience. Come on into EPC. There’s never been a better time. It’s upleveled. It’s more magical than ever before. With you being here, not even the sky is the limit. So come on into EPC. I can’t wait to meet you. Love you all. You’re amazing. Go have an empowered week, and I’ll talk to you next week. Take great care. Bye.

Thanks for listening to this episode of The Empowered Principal® 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. 

 

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Ep #342: The Value of Alignment (Back to Basics)

The Empowered Principal® Podcast Angela Kelly | The Value of Alignment (Back to Basics)

What do you value as a school principal? How do you create your leadership values? And how do you tether and ground yourself in them, especially during the inevitably hard times school leadership will throw your way?

Honesty is key here. There is no one-size-fits-all approach to leadership values. That’s why, in this episode, I’m diving deep into how you can define what truly matters to you as a leader… but it doesn’t stop there. Consistently acting in accordance with the values you set out is the other half of the equation, and I’m showing you how to do that every step of the way.

Join me this week as I tackle a foundational element of school leadership: aligning yourself with your core values. You’ll learn the power of knowing you’re leading with alignment and authenticity, a framework for identifying the values that guide you as a leader, and practical tips for integrating those values into everything you do as a school leader. 

 

 

The doors to the next cohort of The Empowered Principal® Collaborative are open! This is the time to decide: do you want to lead your school for the rest of the year as you are right now, or take your leadership skills to the next level? Join us today to become a member of the only certified life and leadership coaching program for school leaders in the country by clicking here.

 

What You’ll Learn From this Episode:

  • What being an aligned school principal entails. 
  • The profound impact of value alignment.
  • Why building the skill of alignment will serve you well.
  • The pitfalls of misalignment. 
  • Why intentionality matters.
  • How to integrate your values into your everyday leadership practices.

 

Listen to the Full Episode:

 

Featured on the Show:

Full Episode Transcript:

Hello empowered principals. Welcome to episode 342. 

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 principals. Happy Tuesday and welcome to the podcast. This episode is a back-to-basics where we highlight some of the most popular or impactful episodes of The Empowered Principal® Podcast because hey, we’ve got about 400 episodes going on here at The Empowered Principal® Podcast. If you caught on midway or later, there’s a couple hundred episodes you may not have heard.

So we like to highlight and remind you there is so much content available for you as a leader, and this episode is on the value of alignment. Being an aligned principal is all about creating awareness of what you value and why you value it because that is what grounds you and tethers you in the difficult times of school leadership. 

So really consider and contemplate what you value and aligning to that value, creating your leadership values, and as you’re going into this upcoming school year, this skill will serve you so well. Welcome to the Value of Alignment. Enjoy the show. 

Today I’m going to talk about the value of alignment. So one of the first things I teach my clients when they sign up for the Empowered Principal® program is to align themselves to their leadership values. What do I mean by that? Alignment is deciding for yourself what you personally value as a leader. Professionally and personally. 

Alignment’s really about being honest with yourself and telling yourself the truth of what you value. What you want to experience in your life, what you want to live by, the values you want to live by, and the truth of what you really want for your life. What you want to experience professionally, what you want to experience personally. Putting those values down onto paper and then taking a look and noticing which of those values drives your leadership style. 

Alignment’s really about being truthful with yourself about what you believe. I want to highlight that when I say alignment, some people call it integrity. Some people call it their truth. Some people call it their values. I just call it when you feel aligned, you know it. You know what I’m talking about. That feeling of, “This feels true for me. This feels aligned. I feel in integrity. This feels right. It feels good. It feels connected to what I believe is true.”

I want to point out that there is no defined set of leadership values that you should adopt or that somebody should write a book about, and you follow all 12 values or whatever. That’s not what this is about. This has to come from within. Every human on the planet has a set of values that leads their life. Your leadership values. What drives the way you show up in your life, how you show up at school, how you make decisions, how you decide what actions to take or what not to take, and why you do that.

There is something driving all of that, and those are the things that you believe should be influencing the way that you work and live. I want you to know though that a value is truly just an opinion, right. The truth of what you believe, and I want you to notice that truth is purely an opinion of what we think is true for us.

So for example, we believe that two plus two is four. We teach this to kids. We say that that is true. We agree with others. When you hear somebody else saying that, you agree with that. You agree with other people who also believe that two plus two is four. When you hear two plus two is four, your brain feels like yes. That is truth. It’s absolute. It’s certain. I don’t question it. I don’t judge it. I don’t think negatively about it. It just is. That’s what I’m talking about in terms of value. When you have a value that feels true to you, it feels like it makes sense. It’s reasonable. It feels like alignment. 

So in the case of two plus two is four, most people in the world. You could take a poll and ask them. Is two plus two is four?  Do you believe two plus two is four? They would say yes. The majority of people believe that two plus two is four. So there’s not a lot of argument out there. This is what I call one of those universal truths that the majority of people around you would agree with you.

There are other truths, most of them actually, might feel much less universal to you. So for example, as a leader, you might believe that data drives quality instruction. This might be a truth for you. You might believe it to your core. It feels true for you. You have evidence to prove that it’s true to yourself and to other people. It feels very aligned for you to use data to make instructional decisions. 

So if you are a data driven person and you value using data to make decisions about your leadership, if that feels true for you and it feels very aligned, notice how it impacts you as a leader. If this is your truth and you’re honest with yourself, and you are very decidedly so, that data is how we make decisions at this school, then you want to be honest with the people you work with. You want to let them know that your value is data driven instruction. 

The reason you need to share this value, this truth of yours, with other people is because they need to understand that this is the value by which you are leading. They need to know, “I value data driven instruction. It feels very true for me. It feels very honest. It feels like I get results when I do this way, when I lead this way, when I teach this way. Therefore the way that I will lead this school is through data driven instruction.” Okay?

The people who are following your lead need to know what your value is so that they can follow along. That they understand. They might not agree. They might not like it, but they know. They understand because you are very clear with your alignment to your value.

Furthermore, it’s important for people who are following your lead to know because it impacts the way that you lead, the way you show up. It impacts who you hire, why you hire them, the professional development that you choose for your staff. how you plan your staff meetings, how you spend your time on campus during the week, how you measure your success, how you measure teacher improvement and growth, how you measure students, how you measure success as a school. All of your decisions and actions will go through the filter of that value of data driven instruction.

Now, that could be your truth. If that resonates with you, I want you to own it and be truthful about it. Then share that value with the people you work with and that you lead. Other leaders, on the other hand. I’m not saying these are exclusive of one another. You could value both of these. I’m just using a couple of examples to help you see what I mean by understanding what your leadership values are and then aligning yourself to them. Which means being truthful and honest to guide your leadership.

Other leaders might think that connection and relationships are the top priority. They believe that connection and relationships are what feels most true for them. That that’s the top value that they believe in. They think that that is what create quality instruction and success for students. That connection needs to come first in order to impact instructional data. 

So if that’s a leadership value for you, you also need to be true with yourself about who you are, what you believe in, what your value is. Then communicate that to those who are following your lead. They need to know this leader is a relationship based person. She’s going to spend time getting to know me, getting to know students. She’s going to expect of me that I deeply know my kids. That I understand what’s going on at home. That I’m connected with parents. That we’re interconnected as a team.

So the teachers who are following your lead really need to understand what your values are, but they can’t know if you don’t know. So you need to take time to write down what do I value? Why do I value it? Do I love the reason why I value this? Does it feel aligned and true for me? 

Now that sounds very simple, and it is very simple. It doesn’t take long for you to write down what you value, why, and then prioritize it and decide what filter you’re going to use as a school leader. Which top priority of value you’re going to lead through and lead by. But what happens as humans, all of us little humans running around on this planet. The reason that we’re not always aligned are, there’s a few reasons we’re not always aligned. 

Number one, time. We think we don’t have the time. So we don’t slow down enough to ask ourselves what do we value? What feels true for us? What drives our decisions and actions? Why did we decide what we decide? What were we thinking at that time? I don’t mean that snarky. I mean truly what were we thinking at the moment we made this decision. What do we prioritize? What do we value? 

How you spend your time tells you what you value. How you spend your money, it tells you what you value. Time and money are an exchange of value. When you pay for something, that is an exchange of money for something you value. When you spend your time on something, that is an exchange of your time for something you value. Something you value doing, something you value spending time on solving a problem, spending time with people. Whatever it is. 

Your time and your money are two very important assets along with your brain power. Those three assets, they get exchanged for what you value, what you believe in. So it’s really important, this first step of aligning to what you personally and professionally value. So take the time to do that. That’s one of the reasons we don’t stay aligned.

Another reason is that this one’s kind of tricky because the truth behind understand our values is that telling ourselves the truth and fully owning 100% of our truth doesn’t always feel positive to us. It will resonate with you. So it doesn’t always feel good, but it will resonate as truth.

Have you ever had that happen? Where you made a mistake, or you said something?  Maybe you said something to your partner that wasn’t kind, and it was harsh. They say, “You really hurt my feelings. Or I didn’t like the way you said that. Or I don’t appreciate that.” The truth of that situation is I said something unkind. I said words that I didn’t mean to hurt, but I said them. You feel badly that that’s the truth of what happened, but you also resonate with the truth. 

When you say I hear you, and I appreciate you being honest with me. I want to say my truth is that I did do that and that I am sorry. I apologize. You feel badly, but it also feels true. So that’s what I mean by sometimes telling ourselves the truth doesn’t always feel good, but it will resonate as true. 

So another example of this. I think about this with school leaders a lot. It’s we like to believe that there are many, many things outside of our control as a school leader. Our time is out of our control. The things we have to spend our time on, the things we work on, the things we don’t get. Having full control of our career and the results that we create for ourselves professionally and personally. 

We don’t want to tell ourselves the truth that we actually do have full control. Because what we make that mean, if we were to say like I have 100% full control over my life and my career and the results that I create, that truth doesn’t feel good.  

That’s because when we do believe that we have full control and we don’t yet have the results that we want, we tend to make that mean that something’s gone wrong or that something’s wrong with us. We are doing it wrong. We don’t understand something. We haven’t followed the process correctly. We’re not smart enough. We’re not good enough. We’re not capable enough. All of that. 

Which is why when we don’t take full ownership over the control over our time, the control over our money, the control over our profession, the control over our relationships. When we don’t own that, that’s not true, but we resist the truth because it doesn’t feel good to know that sometimes as humans we fail. Sometimes as humans, we don’t quite measure up to our own expectations, and that can feel disappointing and discouraging. Failure feels pretty yucky in the moment, right? 

So the truth is we do have much more control than we think. We don’t have control over external circumstances. But you do have control over how you think about them, how you choose to feel about them, and how you choose to act on them or approach them in a way that can serve you and your school or not. 

So we do need to tell ourselves the truth and just sit with it. We don’t have to do anything about it. So when you sit with it and say you know what? I don’t know what I’m doing. I really need some help. I’m scared. I’m confused. I don’t know how to do this technology thing, or I don’t understand the school budget.

Just the truth of acknowledging and admitting to ourselves we’re not perfect. We don’t know everything. We feel like a mess. We really would like some help, but we’re afraid to ask because we don’t want to look like we’re stupid or we don’t get it. All the mean things we say to ourselves inside of our minds.

I want you to know when you say those truths of who you are and what is true for you in the moment, that honesty feels like relief. It feels so much better just to say the truth than to pretend that the truth is something different than what it is. 

So when you say I don’t have control over my career. A lot of people will reach out to me like they’ve just finished their first year, and they’re like, “Oh this is not what I thought it was. I’m miserable, and now I’m stuck. I just got into school leadership. There’s no way I can quit now. I just got started.” They’re miserable. 

But I want to offer you that you actually don’t have to stay in the job. You really can go back to teaching after a year and say this isn’t for me. You can go to another district. You could try for a different leadership position. You could try to move up to the district office. You could leave education entirely. You really do have control. 

The reason we don’t like to take control of that ownership is because we don’t like the choices available. We want to be in the school leadership role, and we want to like it. But when the truth is that we’re in it and we don’t like it, and that misalignment is happening. Like I want to be a school leader and I want to like it, but the truth is I just don’t like it. Or I’m unhappy right now. Or the struggle is real. 

We do have a decision. We can decide that we’re going to figure out how to like it. We’re going to give it another year or two or three to figure it out. Or we’re going to say look. I’m going to give this two years, my full time and attention. If I grow to love it and I find a way to love it, I’ll stay. If not, I’m going to give myself the truth. I’m going to tell myself the truth, and I’m going to find a job that aligns to who I am and what I love and what my truth is.

Because guys, life is too short to be in a job you’re miserable in. There is nothing you have to prove to yourself or anybody else about sticking out a school leadership position that you do not feel aligned to. Okay. Enough on that. There’s so much deeper that you can go into this truth, but I want you to lean into what feels true for you. So take the time and then tell yourself the truth even if it doesn’t feel good in the moment.

Finally, the third reason that we don’t stay in alignment or we don’t get into alignment is the art of people pleasing, right? This is probably the top reason we don’t stay in our leadership alignment. We live out of alignment most of the time. Or I should say we live out of alignment anytime that we do or say something because of what we think other people will think or how we believe it will make them feel. 

So anytime we say yes to something when we mean no. Anytime we agree with somebody when we really internally don’t agree. When we make decisions with doubt based on what we think other people are going to think or feel versus using our internal compass. Our internal compass knows exactly what it wants. So deciding from doubt versus deciding internally from certainty. Another time we people please is when we either take or don’t take certain actions because we are spinning and thinking about what other people value versus using our own value as the filter. 

So what is the value of alignment? Saying the word value a lot today, but the word of the month is creating value. The reason that this word so resonates with me this month is because value is what we do as humans. We offer our service of school leadership to provide value to students, to staff, to our district. We are contributing value to the world. 

I want to teach you how to raise your ability to offer more value, to contribute more without doing more. Your value comes from your mindset, not through your actions. Your actions are a result of what you think about yourself, the world, other people, education. 

So when we can clean up and up level the way that you think about yourself as a leader, the way you think about your teachers and their capabilities. What you believe about students, what you think about parents, what you think about your district and your bosses, what you think about education as the institution. All of that is how you raise your value as a school leader, which then comes back to you in terms of financial growth and getting more done in less time. All of the results you want to create, you make them with your brain. 

Okay. So the value of alignment. Number one, it provides a filter to run your decisions through. When you have a decision to make, if you have listed your values and you have prioritized them, you can use those leadership values to help you guide your decision making process. 

Most school leaders get into the position and feel overwhelmed by the number of decisions they have to make. They get into decision fatigue. They feel overwhelmed by the complexity of the decisions that they have to make because there are so many competing factors, competing ideas, competing results that you’re trying to create. That can feel overwhelming and shut your brain down. 

But when you have a filter, like a criteria system through which you filter your decisions, decision making becomes very simple and clear when you use your lens of the value to run your decisions through. This is how leaders who are very empowered and very in tune with who they are and who they lead and why they’re doing what they’re doing. That’s how they’re able to make decisions very swiftly, very confidently, and very certainly. 

They don’t ask around. They don’t use other people’s value as a lens. They know what they personally want and why through that lens, and they make decisions that feel aligned and true for themselves.

The only way school leadership will ever feel good to you is when you’re making decisions based on your own set of values. Not your spouse’s values. Not your boss’s values. Not your teacher’s values. Your values. It’s really important to know what they are so that you can use them to ground you and tether you. So that’s number two. 

When you know your values, number one you have a decision. Two, that filter will tether you in conflict and disagreement. When you have made a decision that other people disagree with. When you have made that decision in alignment with yourself, you can allow space for other people to be upset or disagree or be angry or talk behind your back or throw a tantrum. You can stay tethered through that storm. 

Because you feel like I understand. They have their opinion. They have a different set of values. They are not in agreement with that, and that’s okay. Because I am. I have my own back. I trust myself. I’m aligned to this value. It feels very grounding for me, and it tethers you through that storm.

Finally, having a set of leadership values and aligning to them provides you such a clear focus and a priority system in your leadership for the short term and the long term. You really want to build your career from this place of alignment so that you can have a focus. 

You’re not going to be able to fix everything at school, but you can fix one thing. You can use one lens to make decisions to help your students, to help your staff members. You want you to know that, and you want them to know that so everybody’s on the same page. Even when they don’t agree, people will respect you when they know what that value is that’s driving your leadership style, your leadership actions, your leadership decisions. Okay. I love you guys so much. Have an amazing June week. First week of June. I will talk with you all next week. Take good care of yourselves. See you next week. Bye. 

Hey empowered principal. If you enjoyed the content in this podcast, I invite you to join the Empowered Principal® 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’ll 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 Principal® Collaborative. 

Thanks for listening to this episode of The Empowered Principal® 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. 

 

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Ep #341: Intentional PD Planning

The Empowered Principal® Podcast Angela Kelly | Intentional PD Planning

While I hope you’re resting and enjoying your summer, this time of year also involves lots of planning for school leaders. You’re probably planning out your vision for the next school year, as well as goals and topics you’re going to focus on, which might include your next Professional Development (PD) day.

Whether your PD day happens at the end of July, August, or even in September, I encourage you to start thinking about it right now. Many of you are expected to facilitate PD days for your teachers, but it can often feel like you’re being told what to do and how to do it by your district, which can be stressful. You want to lead a PD day that you believe in, and I’m showing you how.

Join me today to learn my process for intentional PD planning. You’ll hear why you have more agency than you might currently think when it comes to creating the PD experience you want your teachers to have, and my top tips for curating the most effective, efficient, and productive Professional Development day possible. 

 

The doors to the next cohort of The Empowered Principal® Collaborative are open! This is the time to decide: do you want to lead your school for the rest of the year as you are right now, or take your leadership skills to the next level? Join us today to become a member of the only certified life and leadership coaching program for school leaders in the country by clicking here.

 

What You’ll Learn From this Episode:

  • Why you must check in with yourself and question the agendas that are being passed down to you.
  • How you have more agency than you might realize when it comes to the PD experience.
  • Why outlining the intention behind your Professional Development days matters.
  • How to leverage PD days for long-lasting outcomes that benefit your school community. 

 

Listen to the Full Episode:

 

Featured on the Show:

Full Episode Transcript:

Hello empowered principals. Welcome to episode 341. 

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 July. So you were probably off last week. I hope you were out having fun, celebrating Independence Day. Maybe you were traveling or maybe you were working. I hope you were out having fun. That’s the name of the game. Have a little bit of fun, get some rest, rejuvenation, relaxation in over your summer. 

I hope you are playing in the Summer of Fun Challenge with us in the Facebook group. People are winning prizes. They’re winning spots in the EPC program for 90% off of the regular price. The regular price is $1,997. You can pay in full, or you can do 10 monthly installments of $199.70, and you can get 12 full months of coaching. So come on in. We’re having a blast and I hope you are enjoying your summer. 

Now, this topic is going to help you plan your professional development days that are coming up, whether they’re in the end of July or into August or maybe even September. But I want you thinking about this now. 

I actually coached a client on this topic back in May. She was doing an end of the year professional development training. It was basically like a training that the district had created, and she was given an agenda. She was given a PowerPoint, and she was told here are the things you have to talk about. This is what you have to teach. 

So it made me think of all of you. When you get an agenda for professional development handed down from the district, you may or may not feel exactly aligned with that agenda or with the content or with the time. Like in this case, she was told 90 minutes on this, 45 minutes for that, an hour for this and whatever. So she felt a little off with that, and we had to coach on it. 

So I want to talk about this because as you’re coming back to school for the new year and you’re planning, you’re planning your professional development. Many of you are going to be expected to facilitate professional development days for your teachers. You want them to be effective. You want them to be efficient, and you want them to have a desired outcome. 

You want them to be productive, to create a result, to create an outcome, whether that’s a plan, whether that’s actual work that gets hammered out during that day, whether it’s information and content that teachers need to know. You want to be able to facilitate and administer a professional development that you believe in, that aligns for you. It can feel like you’re being told what to do and how to do it. That can feel a little bit stressful. 

So with this time of season right here, you are doing a lot of planning. You’re planning out your vision for the school year, your site plan for the year, the goals you want to have, the topics you’re going to focus on. So I think this is a really good time to have this conversation. 

Now, when it comes to professional development, you need to keep in mind, at the end of the day, you’re investing time and energy. You are also being given the currency of your teacher’s undivided attention, right? This is a gift. You’re getting their time, their attention, their energy. We want to leverage professional development days as opportunities to inspire people into progressive action. We want to empower them, to motivate them, to inspire them, to ignite them in a way that provides long-lasting outcomes for that investment of time and energy and attention.

If you have professional development agendas being handed down to you, you can find a way, I call it the land of and, where you can find a way to take that agenda and make it your own. So the first thing you’re going to want to ask yourself is okay, what are my thoughts and opinions around this agenda item? 

This is typically what happens. We are told the agenda, we’re given the agenda, we’re given the PowerPoint, and we’re like ugh. This is so dry. This is so boring, or this isn’t what I want to talk about, or I don’t like the way they did this or said this, or I don’t think it’s going to take me that long. Or wait, this is going to take me a lot longer than that. We have our own reaction to the professional development content and materials that we’ve been given. 

Check in with yourself on that. Don’t just be disgruntled and then go into your PD day. Because if you’re not happy with the PD, it is not going to land with your teachers. It’s going to fall flat. You’re not going to be happy. They’re not going to enjoy it. It will not be productive. You will have wasted an opportunity. They’re giving you their time and attention and energy. You want it to be productive for you, for them, for the greater good. Okay? 

So when you think about the district giving you this content, sit with yourself for a minute and ask yourself what is the intention behind this PD? What does the district want as an outcome for this professional development day? What’s the intended outcome here from their perspective? Then ask yourself from your perspective, what’s the outcome for the teachers? Ultimately, what is the outcome for students? So think about the outcome of the professional development day from the lens of the district and yourself and your teachers and students. Okay? 

What comes up for you when you’re thinking about the professional development. When you’re looking at it from all these lenses, you’re going to start to see there are commonalities. We do actually want the same thing. Believe it or not, we are all on the same team. Teachers want to have a great year. They want their students to have a great year. They want there to be progress. They want to feel good about themselves as teachers. 

You want them to feel good as teachers because when they feel good about themselves, they teach better. When they teach better, students learn better. When kids feel good about themselves as students, they learn. When teachers feel good about themselves as teachers, they teach. When you feel good about yourself as a leader, you’re a better leader.

It matters how people feel about themselves, about the work they do, and about the people they’re working with. That’s the belief triad. You have to believe in yourself, believe in others, and believe in the work, in the process. Okay? 

So the intention behind the outcomes matter. You want to understand what is the intended outcome here? What am I trying to do? What am I trying to communicate? What should people know or understand or be able to do? What work, what productivity or actual tangible outcomes are we creating here? Or is it more of a mindset, or is it more information sharing? Is it an understanding that we’re trying to communicate? What is the goal? Okay? 

Think about what’s coming up for you and how you would deliver this content. What is a way that you can use this agenda but deliver it in a way that feels most aligned for you, most productive for you, and kind of curate it to the needs of your site, of your staff. You know your staff. You know what they need. You know what they don’t need. You know how to communicate with them. You know what lands for them and what doesn’t. You know the style that they prefer.

You can, and you actually have so much more agency to create the professional development experience because that’s what this is. You’re providing an experience for your teachers with an intended outcome, and you do have more agency than you realize. You can decide here’s the energy I want in this room. 

Here’s the style I want to facilitate this meeting in. I want teachers engaged and active and working and co-facilitating and discussing and time for thinking, time for planning, time for dreaming, time for imagining how good things can be this year. Talking about what is working just as often as we’re complaining about what’s not. Taking one problem and digging in deep versus trying to cover 10 miles wide worth of problems that we’re not going to be able to get to all of them. 

But this has to be customized and individualized for you so that the PD makes a difference, has an impact, and you want to take into consideration your teachers. 

So I have seen this on, I think I’ve talked about this before on the podcast, but it’s relevant to this topic. I see so many people on Facebook saying, “Hey, I have to fill a PD day. What should I do? What do you guys do? Who do you hire? What book should we read?”

I want to offer this. There is a difference between asking other people who don’t know your school and don’t know your staff and don’t know what the needs are and don’t know where you need to grow or what discussions need to be had where we need to expand ourselves, where we need to push ourselves, where we excel. Nobody out on the internet knows your school and your needs better than you. 

I invite you before you go out and ask 2,000 people’s opinion or 10,000 people’s opinion or bazillion people’s opinion about what your staff should do. I would invite you to ask yourself, what do I believe my staff needs? What do I believe I need? What do I believe my school needs? What’s the one next thing that we need?

I’ve also noticed this. When I was a principal, it was here, read this book. Here’s a great article. Here’s a resource. Okay, thanks. I would read it, and I would be inspired for five minutes, 10 minutes a day. Or I’d read the book, and it would land for me. But I didn’t oftentimes take that book and truly integrate it into my identity as a leader.

The same is true for professional development. It’s like here’s some information. Here’s a one-day course. They hear it. They feel inspired. They’re excited. They get some work done, or there’s great conversation, or maybe we problem solve a little bit. But there isn’t an integration unless the integration into the identity of the teachers is intentional, is a part of the process. 

So any kind of professional development you have, whether it’s a book or a resource or a program or a curriculum, there’s a new math curriculum, and we’re going to cover that. The reason those PDs tend to fall flat is because one, it’s just a one-way street where you’re like, here we’re walking through the book and here’s that, and there’s some questions. But until teachers get into the curriculum, they can’t integrate their expertise as a teacher of that curriculum until they’ve done it, until they get their hands into it. 

If you have initiatives that are rolling out from top down, which tends to happen. The district says this is what we’re going to do. This is what we’re going to focus on. You’ve got to go tell your people all the things. This is how we’re going to do teacher observations. This is how we’re going to do data assessments or data conversations or PLCs. You’re held accountable to rolling that out. You want to ensure that you’re not just talking at them as a one-way street. 

How can we make this integrative? How do they integrate the understanding of the purpose of teacher observations or the purpose of the PLCs or what’s in it for them when it comes to PLCs? How do we integrate PLCs into a teacher’s identity? I am a teacher who understands, who understands PLCs, understands the process, understands the value of them, the significance of them.

I get value from them. I contribute, and I receive. I find PLCs valuable. It’s an integral part of my identity as a teacher. That is different than giving them a handout on what PLCs are or read this book about PLCs or here’s an article on PLCs and here’s why they’re important. 

Do you see the difference? So as you’re planning this summer, and I know why we don’t do this. We don’t do this because it requires our brain to grind a little bit. We have to go dig deep. We have to think deeper. When we’re thinking about intention, the intention means the benefit, the short-term benefits, the long-term benefits. But what we’re trying to do is change the identity of our staff. We’re trying to evolve their identity, to expand them, to inspire them, to transform them, to enhance their identity as a teacher.

So they feel more capable, more confident, more certain, more assured, more skilled in themselves. They trust themselves. They believe in themselves. They can identify as a teacher who knows what they’re doing, who knows what to do when they get stuck, who knows where to go to get help when they get stuck, who feels confident in handling anything that comes their way and knows where to go when they don’t know how to handle what comes their way. That’s what we want. 

So as you’re planning PD, number one, I’m going to be hosting some planning sessions in August. You want to join EPC to be able to be a part of those bonus planning sessions. I’m going to be holding them in August because I want you to be able to either plan professional development that is productive and successful with intention, or you can map out your vision for the year and your top priorities. We’re going to be doing both of those kinds of workshops.

So come on into EPC so that you can learn how to plan effective PD. You can map out your staff meetings. You can map out your vision for the year. You can map out your top priorities and get in alignment with where your district is. 

I teach a process on how to align to your district’s initiatives so they feel good for you and how to present them to your teachers and help your teachers get in alignment so that we can see all on the same team. We actually do want the same things. We want to feel good about ourselves. We want to feel good about our students and the work that they’re doing. We want to feel good about the process and the approach that we’re taking with our school. Okay? 

So if this resonates with you, if it feels like something you want to participate in, please join EPC. The link to join is in the notes. You can either pay in full. I’ll put a link for pay in full. Or if you prefer, you can do the monthly payment plan. They work out to the exact same dollar amount. So there’s no penalty for paying monthly. You pay in 10 months, $199.70, and get you the $1,997 for the 12 months of coaching. 

So come on in. We’re getting started in August. I can’t wait to see you there. Have a wonderful week. Have fun planning, have fun celebrating, enjoy your summer, and come on into the Summer of Fun Challenge. We’ll see you guys soon. Take good care. Bye. 

Thanks for listening to this episode of The Empowered Principal® 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. 

 

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Ep #340: Having Courage as a First-Year Leader with Wendy Cohen (Back to Basics)

The Empowered Principal® Podcast Angela Kelly | Having Courage as a First-Year Leader with Wendy Cohen (Back to Basics)

In this Back to Basics episode, you’re hearing an interview with one of my clients that is so well-loved by The Empowered Principal podcast audience. Wendy Cohen has coached with me for several years, and in this conversation, you’re hearing her journey from classroom teacher to first-year school principal.

There are so many thoughts and emotions that happen as a first-year principal, and if, like Wendy, you’re looking for someone who really understands what you’re experiencing, this is a must-listen episode. While this is an incredibly magical time, this pivot in your career from teaching to administration also brings specific challenges that you must navigate, and I know this episode is going to inspire you, whether you’re a brand-new or aspiring leader.

Join us on this episode as Wendy shares her journey to becoming a school leader at 30 years old, and how our work together has not only transformed her career but her personal life too. We’re exploring the hesitations she had about coaching together, some of the biggest professional and personal growth she’s experienced, and how she made becoming an empowered principal an inevitability.

 

The doors to the next cohort of The Empowered Principal® Collaborative are open! This is the time to decide: do you want to lead your school for the rest of the year as you are right now, or take your leadership skills to the next level? Join us today to become a member of the only certified life and leadership coaching program for school leaders in the country by clicking here.

 

What You’ll Learn From this Episode:

  • Wendy’s journey from classroom to principal.
  • Some of the worries Wendy had about becoming a school principal.
  • The biggest lessons Wendy learned from her first year as a school leader.
  • How mindset and coaching tools have helped Wendy as a brand-new school leader.
  • What allowed Wendy to take control of her results.
  • The measurable impact Wendy has had on her school community as a result of our work together.
  • How Wendy created her ideal work-life balance.

 

Listen to the Full Episode:

 

Featured on the Show:

Full Episode Transcript:

Hello empowered principals. Welcome to episode 340. 

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. 

All right, my empowered leaders, this is a Back to Basic episode where we are taking one of our popular podcast episodes. This one is an interview with a client of mine who has worked with me for the last four years. This was an interview that happened in her very first year of school leadership, and the reason it is so well-loved by The Empowered Principal® audience is because it really taps into the feelings and emotions and thoughts that happen when you are a first-year principal. It’s such a magical year. It’s also such a pivotal year in your career when you transition from teaching into administration. 

So Wendy is one of my clients. She’s been with me since the beginning. She’s coached with me for several years. She is an outstanding principal, and she started at the ripe age of, I believe she was 28.

She has now been in the position for four years. She is a master at her craft, and I love this episode because it inspires brand new or aspiring leaders to let you know that it is possible for you to be an empowered principal. So enjoy the show.

Angela: I am so happy to share with you the story of one of my clients. Her name is Wendy Cohen, and she and I have been working together for almost a year during her first full year of school leadership. Wendy has been an A+ top notch client. She shows up to the calls. She does all the work. She really does apply the coaching and the tools that I share with her to her work, her leadership work, and her life. 

She is here today to tell her story about her experience with school leadership, her experience with coaching, what she’s learned about leadership and life and coaching. All of the great things. I am so honored to have her. Welcome Wendy. 

Wendy: Thank you so much. What an exciting introduction. I feel so special to be here and so grateful. So thank you. 

Angela: Aw, you are so special to be here. I’m so happy to have you. I’m so excited for this. I have to let you know for the listeners that I always ask my clients. When I think they’re ready to share their story, I ask them, invite them to be on the show. Some people are like, “Absolutely not. I’m too scared.” Other people are like, “I’m in.” 

What I love about Wendy is she did her contemplating and thought about it and really felt compelled to share this story with you. I’m just so honored that she’s here today. Wendy let’s just dive right in. Why don’t you tell the listeners your leadership journey? 

Wendy: Yeah. It sounds good. So this is my first full year in a school leadership position. I taught internationally for a couple of years, and then was in the classroom for five years in an elementary school. I’m in New York City, so urban environment. I taught in a bilingual classroom. I was the Spanish component of the bilingual program. Then I transitioned to an out of classroom position as a technology integration specialist. 

About three-quarters of the way through that role as a tech integration specialist is when I became an assistant principal, which happened to be like two weeks before the COVID shutdown in March of 2020. So I was in my new role for all of three weeks before closing and doing everything remotely, including building relationships with all the teachers and students and families as well as transitioning everyone to remote pretty much overnight. 

So we planned all summer to reopen, and then had a successful in-person year from September until now in June. So now I’m in just the last couple weeks of the school year and wrapping up my first full year in an assistant principalship here. 

Angela: Yes. All at the ripe age of 30. I want to add this because Wendy is my youngest client. She turned 30 during the course of our coaching work together. She has been just obviously you can tell a phenomenal educator. Always seeking to learn. Always growing. Trying new things. Being in different places, new experiences. So when she and I started working together, I was just mesmerized with her story and all that she’s accomplished in her short amount of time in education. So Wendy, how many years in total have you been in education?

Wendy: I’ve been in the Department of Education in New York City for seven years. But between my experience abroad and teaching before that, I would say more like ten years. I was in a head start. I did a Fulbright program. All of that was before I took my first full time classroom teaching position.

Angela:  Yes. 

Wendy: So about ten years I’d say.

Angela: Yeah. So you have a breadth of experience to bring to your leadership position. 

Wendy: So it’s funny that you bring my age up because I know that we’re going to talk a little bit about how I ended up in this coaching with you.

Angela: Yes.  

Wendy: The age thing, I think, was one of the biggest hurdles and one of the biggest challenges that I was coming in with because I really felt a little bit of a lack of confidence because of that. I think I just felt like well, I could easily spend another ten years in the classroom and then go into the school leadership, and I would still be learning new and different things every day. 

But, as you’re saying, when you have this skill set and you feel ready and the opportunity presents itself, it did feel like the right move. That was something that yeah. In our early coaching sessions, I think I was very concerned with well what is my staff going to think of me? Are they going to respect me as an instructional leader?

Angela:  Right. Will they listen to me? 

Wendy: Yeah. So I feel I’ve come a long way with that over the course of the years as, you know, I am definitely one of the younger members of the staff in my building, and I happen to be the assistant principal. 

Angela: Yes, yes. That is one of the reasons that brought you, us, together I should say because I remember you saying, “I’m only 29 years old. I’m in this new position.” A lot of your concern was revolving around your thought. The belief that because of my age, people won’t listen, respect, trust me, all of the things. We’ve worked through that.

So tell the listeners just on this one little note here. Wendy and I have been coaching, it’s been just about a year. I think we’re at like the 11 month mark. So after 11 months and going through COVID and going through a year of AP and a year of coaching, what is your thought now about your age and your leadership? 

Wendy: I do think that I’ve come so far. I would say that I’m starting to see where it’s a strength and an asset instead of something that could potentially alienate me from my staff or make me different from my staff. You know all the things that you say about young teachers, the same things apply. They come in with new ideas. It’s a lot of fresh energy. They see things in a different way. They can relate to the students and the families in a different way. I think I’ve seen all of those things to be true as I keep moving through this role.

Specifically to this year. I mean so much of what I offered for my staff and early on especially is that I do have a great comfort and fluency with technology. So I think I thought well, what do I know? I’m new. I’m just going to defer to the principal. I’m going to defer to the other assistant principal. They’ve been doing this so much longer. In reality, I was the one who held a lot of the expertise that was needed here. 

I think it’s just one example, the technology thing, in like a menu of leadership skills that are required. I think that one example made me realize hey, my voice actually does add a lot of value. No one cares how old I am as long as I know how to help them, and I can support them. Then no one’s really thinking about that. 

They just want to know how do I add this post on Google classroom and share the link with my kids. If I can support them and help them with that, it was a really nice reframe for me to see how valuable I was as a staff member regardless of age and regardless of experience because I bring in a special expertise. 

Angela: Absolutely. So there’s two things I have to say. So first of all, in the month of June. So this podcast will drop in June. It’s now, what, we’re recording June 2nd. So this will be within the next week or two. But I want to talk about value. Because value and our belief in the value of ourselves, what we have to offer, the value in our teachers and students, community. The value in ourselves, the value in them, and then the value in the program that we’re offering. The belief in those, that belief triad, is what creates results. 

So when you believe that you as a leader have value to offer regardless of any circumstance. Your age, years of experience, where you’ve taught, what grade level you taught. I remember thinking I can’t lead a school. I’ve only taught primary, like kindergarten and first grade. Fifth grade teachers are going to give me the hard time. Fifth grade is just big kindergarteners, right? It’s the same. I have so much to offer.

So my point being this month is all about value. What Wendy is saying about like understanding her value as a leader and taking out all those circumstances and just shining and being the example of what that value is. It really is the difference between leaders who create results and leaders who feel like the results are out of their control. 

Wendy: Yeah. I love how you said that because there’s so many things we have hard data for, right. Like this achievement and that achievement and this retention, attendance, and everything else. I think getting caught up in some of those measures and not recognizing some of the other things that you bring to the table. 

Like I am someone who cares a lot about social emotional learning. I’m rolling out a social emotional learning program because that’s one of my core values. It’s something that I bring to the school as something new and that I am adding. You’re not going to necessarily see that on the state exam reports, or you’re not going to necessarily see that on the attendance reports or anything like that. 

But I do think that when I pull back a little bit and I say what have I done this year? It’s so much easier for me now to think of all the things I have done. I think actually one of the exercises you gave me towards the end of the 2020 calendar year was actually write down some of the things that you’ve done that you should feel proud of. I think I said, “Holy cow. I did add a lot of value.” 

Maybe I don’t see it on the compliance report or maybe I don’t see it in my email inbox. But when I step back and think about all of the things that I have done over the last year, I realize I did add a huge contribution and add huge value to the building in this new role. 

Angela: Yes. So number one. If you’re an aspiring school leader but you feel like you’re too young or too inexperienced, I want you to write down all of the things that you do know that you have contributed, that you have already accomplished and use that as a springboard into believing into this next level and this next version of yourself. 

Whether you want to go from classroom to instructional coach or instructional coach up to a position of any kind of leadership, you already have skill sets and knowledge that you can take with you. So that’s a really important step to take when you’re moving forward in your career as a school leader.

I love it so much. I just could talk about this all day long. Okay. So I want to take the listeners back to the beginning because there are a lot of listeners out there who number one don’t understand what life coaching even is. Or they think it’s kind of woo-woo. Or they don’t understand it’s value or how it helps and supports us to create the results we want for ourselves. So can I kind of rewind you back to the beginning of your coaching sessions? 

Wendy: Yeah. 

Angela: Tell the listeners where you were then. Who were you then? What were your thoughts? What were your fears? What did you want to accomplish that you didn’t think was possible? What brought you to coaching? 

Wendy: Yeah. I’m so honored also to be as a guest on your podcast. Because listening to some of those episodes with your coaching clients was one of those things that helped push me to be like, “Oh my gosh. How can I not do it?” Like this is going to have such a huge impact.

So at this time last year, which is pretty much when we started off, I had been working with an LMSW who was like I had like a weekly therapy kind of check in. It was definitely helpful, but I think I was looking for someone who really understood what the job of a school building leader entails and the amount of responsibility and the relationships and the day in and day out. So I was looking for someone who really understood what I was experiencing.

Then I was also thinking like I need someone outside of my organization because I just want like anonymous. I want to be truly vulnerable. I really want someone who can just call me out on it if I need it, to just make me be really honest with myself too. After hearing some of the conversations that you had with other guests and other coaching clients, I was like, “Okay. Angela’s going to keep it real with me. She’s going to really push me.” 

Angela: Yep. 

Wendy: So I know I already talked a little bit about some of the confidence struggles that I was having just as far as if I had to make a tough decision, or I needed to be a little bit decisive about something or handle a situation. I think I was spending so much time second guessing myself and questioning if I was doing the right thing and getting in my own way about it. 

I think I wanted support with not abandoning myself in those moments and then thinking, “Well what is he going to think of it? What is she going to think of it? How am I to come across? What’s the perception of the other person?” So much so. From working with you, one of the things that I realized was I was getting so caught up in the emotions and the feelings that I didn’t even know if they were my emotions or someone else’s. 

Angela: Yeah. 

Wendy: You know? I will talk more about the STEAR cycle and how that’s been such a helpful tool for me. But to be able to separate like, “Hold on. How do I actually feel about this situation? How does the other person or the other party in this scenario feel about it? How do I feel about how they’re reacting to it? Am I still okay with my choice in spite or whatever the action’s going to be?” 

Knowing that there were tools to help me with that confidence. And that the coaching was going to help build me up to be able to really own my decisions and know that whatever was thrown at me I was going to be able to handle. So that confidence and that just trusting in myself, I think, were two of the huge things that I was looking for and wasn’t really finding in other types of coaching and therapy.

I’m a self-help enthusiast. I definitely read a lot of the books, a lot of the podcasts. Done the courses and all the things. Sometimes it’s just hard to see your own areas of weakness. Like I don’t like the term blind spots, but just having an outside perspective to be able to say, “Hey, do you notice that you’re doing this?”

I think I was just really looking for someone that who was going to be able to tailor the conversations more to my role as a building leader. Then also some of the things that I might not even be realizing that I was doing and the patterns and thinking that I was not even aware of until someone just mentioned it and I said, “Oh, you’re right. I am doing that thing again.”

Angela: Right. Because a lot of what we’ve talked about over the course of the year, and this is why the program is a full year. Because I could offer six weeks, eight weeks, 12 weeks. But to really understand ourselves and our own patterns you need that time to be able to apply this work in different situations and see how the brain has created patterns for itself. That it responds the same way at work as it does at home as it does with friends as it does with family. It feels different to us, but in reality, there is a pattern to it all.

Wendy: Yeah. I had so many of those lightbulb moments. Of course, you know, you now have coached with me on family stuff, on relationship stuff in my personal life, on work stuff. It amazes me every time where I’m like, “Oh. It’s that same thought that I had about this other scenario. Now it’s coming up here.” 

Angela: Yes. 

Wendy: Connecting the dots of, “Oh I see. It’s not just this one situation. It’s actually something that’s coming up in multiple areas of my life.” Applying it to my personal relationship with my partner or with my own family and my sisters and brothers, my parents, to my boss, to my colleagues, and the teachers I work with. Realizing hold on, it’s just my thoughts, and I actually have control over my thoughts that create my feelings about this. It’s not so different, right? It’s not just isolated to school leadership. 

Angela: Right. Exactly. So giving ourselves this, I call it the luxury. Like a luxurious amount of time to see those patterns to know. Like one of the things that I think is beautiful about this coaching package in particular is that the full year gives you the comfort of knowing, “I have an entire year with somebody who’s in my corner, who is my advocate for my dreams, who is going to help me through the day to day stuff, but also the big picture stuff. And we have plenty of time for all of that to happen and also allowing life to happen.” 

So like when things do come up like you’ve got an emergency meeting. The other day you had some big chaos happening in your parking lot, right. Like there was like something where you couldn’t come. That was, I think, the first call you ever missed. The year just allows for that flexibility for us to reschedule and adjust and to really deeply apply the work in a way that you can say to your brain like, “Look. I’ve got all year to do this. It’s my first year of school leadership, and I’ve got somebody who’s just here for me.”

Like I don’t know anybody you work with, anything about your school. We can talk about all of that, but we can bring it down to just what it means for you and how we want you to experience the relationship and to experience that moment or that situation. So that’s what’s so beautiful about the beauty of that full year of working together. 

Wendy: I, of course, was like I have to cancel a session. I, of course, was disappointed, but the flexibility is so appreciated. Because in this role, you don’t know when you’re going to have a 911 call, or a parent banging down the door who’s upset about something. 

I would say that early one of my hesitations was do I really have time to commit to a 45 minute/hour long call every week? Where I have a hundred and one things on my list that I can convince myself are more important. I think in committing to the work was also just, again, going back to the word value. Valuing my own growth and my own time. Saying that I’m going to choose to make this a priority for my own professional growth, but also as like a form of self-care, right? 

Angela: Yes. 

Wendy: Like you can be staring at a computer screen for 10 hours a day. If that’s the one period of 45 minutes where you step away and go for a walk and talk to Angela on the phone. It built in this time for myself that by choosing to move forward with coaching and invest in the process, I also had to choose to value myself enough to know that I was worth investing in. 

I had to talk myself into it. I was like oh my gosh. The time cost, the financial investment. I could just continue working with my therapist who I’m working with. Who, yes, is adding value, but this is something that’s going to take me further in the long term, I think, than some of the other things I was doing and thinking. Again really just helped me understand how I needed to not be pouring out of an empty cup, right. I needed to make sure that I was pouring into myself to be able to come here and serve every day. 

Angela: Right. So we have three assets. I love that you said this because we have three assets. We have our time, we have our money, and we have our brain. Those three assets, they’re the most powerful assets that we have full control over. We have full agency over our mind, over how we spend our money, and how we spend our time. We don’t believe that those are true, but they are truly assets that we do own and can take full responsibility for. 

So what happens is we have to decide that we are worth it. Our brain, mindset is worth it in order to invest those other resources of time and money. Because it does take time. Actually now my offer is now 30 minute calls because one, I’ve gotten so good at coaching I can get people to the heart of the matter really fast. 

Two, it just eliminates the argument. Because if your brain isn’t willing to invest 30 minutes a week in yourself, for you to be able to say, “Here’s how I’m thinking. Here’s how I’m feeling. Here’s what’s working. Here’s what’s not. This is where I’m feeling stuck.” You get 30 minutes of somebody else caring for you and listening to you. 

I can pretty much guarantee if you’re not willing to give yourself 30 minutes, you’re not willing to give yourself self-care. You’re not willing to invest in your professional growth, in any of it. You are your top asset. If you can’t invest 30 minutes in you as a leader, then that’s the reason you need coaching. Wouldn’t you say that Wendy? 

Wendy: Absolutely. I mean I think last year I was either in burnout or on the verge of burnout. One of the reasons that I said I really need to learn this lesson now as a new leader is I think I had a story that it was selfish that I didn’t answer emails at 10:00 at night. When really the best thing I could do for myself was to create that boundary and create that space, right. Taking 30 minutes/45 minutes/an hour for myself once a week, there’s nothing selfish about it. Because the purpose is so that I am my best self to show up and serve every day. 

I think something else that you helped me understand early was the return on investment of doing this work now at a young age. I would love to be blessed to be a mom one day. I don’t have a family of my own yet. But in my first year of school leadership, if I can’t learn how to find one hour once a week, how am I going to be able to create boundaries and figure out a way to balance the demands of work and a family life? How am I ever going to work towards that I have for myself if I can’t even find an hour once a week now to invest in myself, right? 

So I look forward to reaping the rewards of this and the fruits of it years and years and years into the future. Now that I am going through the process now and finishing out my first year, the way that I spend my time and the way I view my time has shifted so much. Like I do feel I’m more fresh the next day when I go home and I don’t open my laptop because I gave myself the time.  

Angela: Yes. 

Wendy: You know? I might not have known that otherwise. 

Angela: Right. So a lot of what we work on in The Empowered Principal® program is time. We talk about our beliefs around time and the scarcity around time. In education, we’re always saying we need more time. We don’t have enough time. We have a lot of conversations around time. 

Can you tell them more specifically some of the things you’ve worked on with time and how you feel more abundant with your time? How you feel you have more control and agency over how you spend your day, your evenings, your weekends, all of it. 

Wendy: Yeah. I think before starting coaching with you and even in the beginning stages, I was leaving work, I mean dismissal or my day ended at 3:00. I was leaving work at 5:00 or 5:30. Going home, shoveling a quick dinner, reopening the computer, doing another hour or two of work. Sometimes to the point where you’re falling asleep on the computer, or you open it the next day and you’re like, “What was I working on last night?” 

If you’re someone who works late into the night, you’ll know what I’m talking about. I think I was coming in depleted the next day, and then saying, “How come I’m not fresh and ready to serve again?” In understanding that I needed to give myself time to unplug and recharge, I was going to come in and be more effective with my time because I wasn’t going to be run ragged and burnt out and exhausted. I was actually going to be able to get stuff done when I showed up at work the next day. 

So now, I would say, not that I don’t ever stay late after school. I am quite frequently here until 4:00, 5:00, but when I leave, I leave. When I go home for the night, I’m not reopening my computer. I have emails on my phone, but I don’t always read them. I certainly don’t answer them in the evening hours or the weekends with very few exceptions. 

I mean there’s emergencies and things that happen. Especially in the times of COVID where you’re dealing with positive cases and there’s some follow up, and it’s time sensitive and this and this. I think I’ve put so much pressure that if that person didn’t get a response to their email today that I was going to be written off as the worst AP that ever walked the halls, right? 

I think now I’m like, “Is it so important that I answer this right now? That it can’t wait another 12 hours until the morning when I get to work. Is this going to be okay if I go for a walk after dinner instead of back on my computer?” Nothing terrible happened. There was no disaster. 

I think I had to just have like a week of experimentation with it to almost prove to myself like, “Hey, everything will go fine if you don’t answer that email. It can wait until the morning. It might seem like so urgent and so important right now, but actually nothing bad is going to happen if you take the night for yourself, pour into yourself, recharge, and come back and answer it the next day. 99.9% of the time that has worked so far. 

Angela: Right. What’s so good about that is you had to train yourself to trust that everything will be fine. Work’s going to be there in the morning, right? That not only will it still be sitting there waiting for you. Sometimes the person gets it resolved on their own. Sometimes it’s not as big of a deal as they first thought it was. Sometimes you have to deal with it. Then the 1% where okay, maybe I could have answered it, we coached through that part too, right. 

Nobody’s perfect, and nobody will get it just right. There’s no perfect email answering time. There’s no perfect way to approach any email system. There’s going to be glitches in any system that you set up for yourself when it comes to email.

What we’ve talked about is like, I just had a client the other day who’s like, “I hate emails.” We’re still working on emails. But the thing with emails is whatever system you decide to implement, you have to give it that play and experimentation and practice for it to work. It takes time to create a system that works for you. If you just go in and decide like this is what it’s going to be. I’m going to shut down at 5:30. I’m not going to open again until 7:30. It’s going to be okay. You get into a belief system where that is running true for you in your leadership life. Yeah?

Wendy: I do think that that was one of the biggest hurdles was my hang up or the story that I was telling myself about if I don’t have a good response time on my emails, then I’m going to be viewed as unsupportive or not responsive. Not being a problem solver or not being available. I had a whole story about how I’m new, and I have to make this impression that I’m going to be there when someone needs something.

In reality, it was just causing me so much additional stress and anxiety and burnout that I wasn’t able to do all of those things that I wanted to do. It was like, again, just getting in my own way of being able to perform and being able to serve with this thought that doing it the other way was going to be sending some kind of message when in reality it was not helping anyone, myself or the staff members I was trying to support. 

Angela: Exactly. So tell the listeners what are your current thoughts? Like a year into coaching, what are your current thoughts about the time you’ve invested, the money you’ve invested, and then the energy I would call it that you’ve invested in making these adjustments? Like playing around with your schedule, playing around with your email, the relationships that you’ve been working through through the course of the year in terms of building relationships with your staff, with your principal, your assistant principal. 

Talk to the listeners about that. Because people know where you were because that’s where they’re at right now, and they can’t imagine what it feels like on the other side. Like they want that so badly. Can you talk with them about how you bridge that gap? The thoughts that you think right now that you couldn’t imagine believing back then. 

Wendy: Yeah, yeah. There’s so many good ones. One of the big takeaways that, I see this shift in myself because it comes up all the time is that kind of type A perfectionist shame spiral that happens when things don’t go well or you’re not immediately successful at something the first time. Or when you have to take some feedback that maybe is constructive or like cool feedback. 

I would say a year ago, I would get a piece of feedback that was like, “This could be done a different way. Or next time try this.” Or something like that. I would immediately go in that space in my head of, “I’m not going to make it through my first year. Taking this job was a mistake. I’m not suited for this.” Some of the imposter syndrome stuff. 

I think working with you over the last year and unpacking the thoughts of, “Okay, well why? Why does it feel like this piece of feedback is so difficult or so challenging?” And realizing that it’s just my thoughts and my feelings, actually. I have total control over it, right?

So understanding that now that I have more tools to identify like I’m feeling this way because of this conversation. This is the expectation that I had for myself, and this is why I’m feeling this disappointment or this dissonance now. I think I can identify so much better where I’m allowing other people’s thoughts and feelings to kind of sneak in. 

I was getting caught up a lot in, “Well, he or she must think this if they’re giving me this piece of feedback. Now I’m questioning everything and my whole reality.” Instead it’s like do I like myself? Do I like how I showed up? Did I do my best with the information I had at that time? Can I be at peace with the things that I did even if there’s still room to improve?

There’s like this space between loving myself and accepting myself just as I am and also being a work in progress and always striving for continuous improvement. I think I was so far on the end of the spectrum where I was like, “Nothing is ever good enough.” It has to be right the first time. It has to be perfect. I can’t have any constructive notes. 

Now I’m so much more of like giving myself grace. Allowing myself space to be new. Learning some of the ropes and remembering that it’s going to take some time to figure out some of these things, and not going into the whole shame spiral of, “Oh my gosh. I didn’t get it the first time. There must be something wrong with me.” 

Angela: Right. 

Wendy: No, you’re just new. Give yourself a minute, give yourself some grace. Don’t read so far into everything where you’re coming crashing down in reality. It’s actually going to be okay.

Angela: Exactly. You know one of the things that prevents us from doing something we want to do or saying something we want to say is because of a feeling that we are trying to avoid. I’m curious. This is such a great question. I’m curious to know like what feelings were you avoiding that you are willing to feel? I’m not saying they feel good. But I’m saying what are you more willing to feel now than you were in the beginning? 

Wendy: Yeah. The processing emotions and just being present with emotions, I think that was our first six months of coaching. 

Angela: Yeah. 

Wendy: Was, “Hey, I think you’re feeling some feelings. Let’s calm down a second.” I think that now I’m more willing to show up courageously to something that I know is going to be a little bit uncomfortable instead of trying to avoid the discomfort only to end up in a different kind of discomfort later on. Some of the times it goes from like a small conflict or a small problem to a much larger thing because I wasn’t courageous enough to just show up and address it the first time.

So where before I was maybe insecure or feeling shame or feeling uncertain about something and maybe wasn’t willing to admit like, “Hey, I need help. Or hey, I don’t know something.” Instead of being like I’m going to figure everything out on my own, and I’m just not going to say anything about this. Or there’s an elephant in the room, and I’m just not going to address it because it will just magically just fix itself. 

I think now I’m like hey, I can show up courageously and address this because I know that in the long run this is going to avoid a bigger headache later on and is going to require the same amount of sitting in discomfort. It’s either I do it now or I do it later. Or I do it in this one way now where it’s maybe not such a big thing and then avoid later on it turning into some kind of bigger conflict or bigger concern. 

Angela: Right. I love that so much because we think that if we do or don’t do something that we can avoid discomfort, being unhappy. I also love that you said courage. Like the feeling you’re willing to feel is courage. Because I think people think courage feels good. But if you really think about courage, true courage is really, really scary. Like if you’re in the space of courage, you’re feeling fear, but you’re taking action anyway. 

Wendy: Yeah. They can’t see me on the podcast, but I’m shaking my head that no. Courage does not feel warm and fuzzy at all. It feels terrifying a lot of the time. One of the other things I wanted to say that relates to that is just a willingness to be vulnerable more now in a way that early on I think I was so concerned about coming out of my shell a little bit. I’m the assistant principal that has like a little altar with crystals and all of that in my office. I’m a little bit of like a nature lover and a little bit of a quirky kind of off the beaten path person. 

I think at first, I was like let me be buttoned up. Let me be really serious. Let me try and be taken seriously by other people. I think that vulnerability of, “I think this is a cute activity. I don’t know what the staff is going to think of it, but we’re just going to do it anyway and see what they think.” 

One of the things that you had me coach on was if you’re having fun and you love it, then other people probably will too. Also if they don’t, it doesn’t matter because you’re still having fun and you love it. So I think it was like a Valentine’s Day activity that I was like, “I don’t know. Is anyone going to even participate? Are they going to think it’s cheesy?” I had to say to myself I think it’s cute. I think it’s a nice thing. I want to do it. We’re going to do it. Guess what? The staff loved it. It was a smashing hit.

So I just had to take that courageous vulnerable moment of saying, “I’m not sure how this is going to go, but I’m going to commit. I’m going to just roll with it because I like it. I think it’s fun. This is who I am.” In being more myself in those moments, I think I’ve been even more warmly welcomed and received by my staff because it’s nice to see like a little bit of a human side. 

It’s nice to see that people are humans. They’re not just an assistant principal, but actually I have a family. I have feelings. I have my own struggles. I have my own techniques that I use for copings. If that’s the essential oil diffuser in my office or one of my other kind of woo-woo hippie things, I think people appreciate that. No one has written me off as like the crunchy hippie assistant principal. They just think that I’m really approachable and value social emotional learning, which is something that I hope that they would think about me. 

So overcoming that and kind of like coming out as like more of myself, I think, has taken a lot of courage and a lot of vulnerability. But I don’t think I would have the type of relationships that I’ve built over the past year. Mind you, half of it being over a Zoom screen building relationships as a new leader.

I don’t think I would be where I am if I didn’t just say, “I’m going to throw away my cool card and throw away this idea that I should be this buttoned up kind of stern administrator. I’m going to have fun with it. I’m going to be myself.” I think my relationships have benefited so much from that attitude going into it.

Angela: I love, love, love that. This leads me to my next question is what in your eyes, and I love this because everybody answers it differently. What in your eyes is the long term results of this? Yes, we’ve coached for one year together. Maybe we coach for another year together. Whatever our relationship coaching wise is, I’m talking about for you, the benefit that extends through, it’s kind of the compound effect of coaching. Where do you see the long term effect happening for you as a leader but also in your personal journey? 

Wendy: Yeah. I can’t overstate enough how transferrable I think all of the coaching work we have done is. I mentioned to you that I have a mentor who I work with through my union and through the Department of Education. 

Of course, there’s so many helpful things about that. Like online systems that I need to use, and this platform, and you enter it on this portal, whatever it is. I think in five years when they roll out a new portal or when we get a new superintendent and the expectations change, I’m going to have to relearn a lot of those things all over again. That’s not something that I’m going to take with me on my journey. 

I think some of the skills in this coaching have been transformative in a way that it’s like you can’t unlearn them. Like I now have to call myself out if I’m avoiding processing an emotion. Like oh, it’s that thing again. It happens to be with my parents or my sibling around what are we doing for Father’s Day. Or it happens to be with my boss or with my principal. Or it happens to be around my teachers who I’m working with. I think once you see those patterns playing out, you notice them come up everywhere. You have the awareness to self-coach through them, right?

So I don’t know in five years if I work in a different job, or I work in a different district, or I have a different building leader. Or if I one day become a principal one day, I think that some of these skills are, you know, it’s not surface like the online portal where you’re entering the data. It’s this deep work that no matter where you are or what the scenario is, it just builds that trust in yourself that no matter what it is, I know that I’m in control of it because these are my thoughts and my feelings. I can coach myself through it. 

Whether that’s my car is broken down on the side of the road and now I have to be a problem solver, or I’m now in a job interview and I have to speak to what my strengths are, whatever it is. Just that believe in myself that I have the capacity to manage my own emotions and deal with whatever it is that comes up. It’s all about relationships not only with other people, but with myself, right. Like in this moment, how’s my self-talk? In this moment, what is the thought that is creating this feeling that I’m having? That works in any scenario. 

It works in any situation personal, professional. I think that I have seen it again and again come up. Oh, I didn’t even know it could apply in this circumstance, but here we are again. The same pattern of either avoiding emotions or going through the shame spiral or whatever it is that has come up that I’ve identified as something I’m working on. I see it more and more now that I’m aware of it, and now I have more opportunities to self-coach myself through it as the year progresses. So it’s so transferable and has been transformative on all levels. 

Angela: It compounds exponentially because when you become a parent, you feel time crunched, and you think I don’t have the time. You can apply these tools to find and create time and decide on your priorities. Coach yourself through letting go of some of those things you used to do that now with having a baby you no longer do or you are willing to let go of, right? 

It impacts you financially because when you understand how to manage yourself and build relationships and manage your time, you become more valuable to your district, right? Which you become more attractive as an employee, and then you’re more wanted as an employee. People will say like, “Hey, I want you to move up to a principalship. Hey, I want you at a district level. Hey, I want you running as a superintendent because they see your value.” 

Your value is created through the belief that you have about yourself and other people and what you have to offer. Those three belief systems when in combination, when you work on that in all the aspects of your life, it knows no limits. 

Wendy: I look forward to it’s almost like stretching out that muscle in different ways. Like you’re saying right now it’s working great for not answering emails after 5:00 p.m., but maybe in a future time I’m going to say, “Hey, why don’t I become an adjunct professor at a university?” 

If it’s something that I have as a professional goal, I can find the time for it. I don’t have to talk myself out of it because I don’t think that I’m capable of managing it or I don’t have the time. Or whatever the scenario is. I mean I just feel like so many possibilities have opened up just by having the belief in myself that if it’s important enough to me that I can make it happen. 

Angela: Yes. Yep. Absolutely. I am thrilled. I love sharing Wendy’s story most of all because she is so young. I cannot wait to see the impact that she is going to create in the world as a result of her ability to manage her mind so well. Because if you can manage your mind, you can manage time, money, relationships, resources, challenges, 911 calls. You name it. You can manage it. 

It just has been such a pleasure working with you. I’m so honored to be your coach. I have really valued our time together and your energy and your willingness to dive into something that really is a brand new service to the world, to the field of education, to school leaders. It’s been really fun to play with you through this year, and coach you through COVID, coach you through so many amazing experiences that you’ve had. 

Is there any last words, tips, thoughts, experiences that you’d like to share with the listeners to help people who were in your shoes a year ago and help them know that they have support available to them? They don’t have to go through school leadership alone. That there is something out there that can help them enjoy the process of leadership so much more. 

Wendy: Yeah. Well, first I just have to say thank you. Because I don’t know how I would have gotten through this first year in the role if I didn’t have that hour carved out for myself and that shoulder kind of to lean on in those moments that were really challenging. I will just say that I’ve had mentors in the past. I’ve had coaches in the past. I’ve been through lots of trainings and professional development. 

If you have concerns about is this going to push me to the next level or is this going to really help or is it going to be specific to me. I will just say that every single session when I showed up, I got exactly what I needed and left that session feeling a thousand pounds lighter, really heard and listened to, and challenged in a way that felt helpful and productive even though it wasn’t always easy. I think it’s like the medicine doesn’t always taste good going down, but it is exactly what you needed. 

I think on those days when I just needed to really hear from someone who could see from an outside point of view, you offered me that and so much more. That’s not something that I had in other mentorship programs or other coaching opportunities where it was kind of, “Here’s the generic script. Here’s the generic curriculum. This is the modules that we’re going to go through in this exact order.”

Whereas in this coaching it was in the moment live. It was what’s on your mind today? What’s coming up? Just felt so authentic and so applicable in the moment that I just, again, I don’t know how I would have made it through this first year and still be standing in one piece in the light of COVID and being brand new and everything without having someone who I can go to and be really vulnerable, really open, and have that anonymity as like a nice outside point of view.  

Angela: Yes, yeah. Oh thank you.

Wendy: So I really can’t thank you enough and can’t recommend enough the coaching. I think every school leader should have something like this. Not a mentoring program where you learn how to do the online compliance program, but a real coaching program that is tailored to your needs. I think every school leader should have that. I am so, so grateful to have had the opportunity to work with you truly. 

Angela: Aw thank you. I will say too like those mentoring programs for those specific hard skills that you need to learn, like you want all of it. I would say like go for that so you can learn those technical skills, but this work is more about navigating those emotional and mental demands and building the resiliency it takes to be a school leader. To allow yourself to not be liked, to have people talk behind your back, to have to make decisions people don’t agree with, to have to stand in your truth even when it feels awkward or hard. 

I think that really speaks to the work that you’ve done, Wendy, because I coach, but you go out there and apply the work and have to stand in that practice of applying the coaching to your specific situation. So I mean, yeah. Absolutely.  

Wendy: I’ll just share one quick other final thought. The sessions, like the time in between them, sometimes the lightbulb moments and the realizations come when you least expect them. Like that time of integration. I had the one moment that I shared with you where I just heard this one specific song. And the message in the song just pushed me to realize just like everything clicked in that moment of this is why I’m doing this, and this is why it’s so worth it even though it’s sometimes uncomfortable. 

I was not expecting that in the middle of the night when I was trying to fall asleep, and that’s when the wisdom came through. I think if we hadn’t had the session prior or the session following on the books, that might never have kind of crept in. So I think the time to integrate and process over the course of the year, it is worth every moment spent and every penny invested. Absolutely. 

Angela: Oh awesome. Awesome. All right my friend. What an honor to have you on the podcast. I have been waiting on this day for so long. Here it’s come true. To hear your journey from the beginning to the end, it’s so phenomenal. I do hope as long as we coach together or not that we stay in touch, and we will. 

I will love to bring you on in the podcast in the future so that people can hear how you have continued to evolve yourself, your leadership skills, and truly how this work impacts and evolves education at large. How it involves bringing staff along, bringing students along, bringing families along, and actually alters the experience in a positive way for everybody involved. It really can have that profound of an impact. 

To see you at 30 years old applying this work at such a deep level, I can only fathom the brilliant things you are going to contribute to students and staff and families for the next years to come. So. 

Wendy: Thank you. I believe in that ripple effect and can’t wait to report back and would love to be a guest again. Would be fabulous. 

Angela: Great, awesome. Thank you so much for your time today. It was so good to see you. We will be coaching together very soon. 

Wendy: Sounds great. Thank you again. 

Angela: All right. Thanks. Bye. 

Hey empowered principal. If you enjoyed the content in this podcast, I invite you to join The Empowered Principal® 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’ll be mentored weekly and surrounded by supportive likeminded 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 Principal® Collaborative. 

Thanks for listening to this episode of The Empowered Principal® 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.

 

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