Ep #379: Raise the Bar

Hello Empowered Principals. Welcome to episode 379. 

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. 

Well hello, my Empowered Principals. Happy Tuesday. Welcome to the Empowered Principal Podcast. Here we are. It’s the beginning of March. And did you realize we are 25% through 2025 already? Three months of the year has gone by. It’s amazing! One full season! 

It made me really stop and ponder how quickly time goes in a calendar year. Just a few months ago, we were celebrating the Mid-Year Reboot. We were celebrating New Year’s Eve. We were celebrating the beginning of 2025 and here we are now, April 1st, ready to go into the second season of the calendar year and the third season of the school year, which is spring. It’s the last season of this school year, and it really amazes me how quickly time passes and why it’s important to be intentional with who we are and how we spend our time and where our energy goes and planning. 

So for those of you who feel overwhelmed, if you feel that there’s too much to do and not enough time, if you’re rushing around and you’re feeling like you’re busy at home and you’re busy at work and you’re not being a good enough mom or a good enough dad or a good enough partner or a good enough friend or a good enough child to your parents or a good enough friend to your friends. If there’s something you’re doing that just feels like it’s not quite good enough? Probably because we are trying to spread ourselves too thin. 

And one of the ways that we can counter this is by slowing down just for a minute and getting very intentional with our lives. To see how quickly one, two, three months have gone in 2025, it made me personally want to deepen my presence in life. To live each day with much more intentionality and much more mindfulness. 

Not in a way that prevents me from getting things done. I don’t want to sit around and just meditate all day and be present like that, although that is a wonderful thing to do, but we want to be alive. We want to live. We want to be engaged, but we want to do so from intention, not out of automation or what I call like robotic living, where we are just living a life as a robot, getting up, doing the same thing over and over again, feeling okay, feeling like we did a good job, but also feeling this kind of flatline, unfulfilled, like automated response to life or reacting to life.

So I want to invite you in to this idea of raising the bar, raising the bar for our experience on the planet, raising the bar for our joy and our fulfillment and our satisfaction, our enjoyment of life, that being alive as a human on the planet, feeling all of the feels, going to the things, doing the fun things, taking time out to rest, taking time out for fun, really being present. What am I doing today and why? Waking up and deciding ahead of time, this is the experience that I want to have today.

I want to expand the experiences that I want. I want to appreciate the connections in my life and the relationships I have developed. I want to raise the bar for my experience as a school leader. We’re not raising the bar out of insufficiency. We’re not telling ourselves, we’re not meeting standards, we’re not good enough, we’re not doing enough, we’re not being enough, therefore I’m raising the bar so that I get disciplined and I get more, you know, on top of my game. It’s not about raising that bar.

It’s about raising the level of expectation and standard for the satisfaction we want out of our careers, for the connections we want to build, for the interactions we want to have. For the joy that we want to experience. For just the pure pleasure of being alive on the planet as a human. Really squeezing out all that life has to offer. Squeezing out the joy and the love and the pleasure and the laughter and the fun and all of the things.

I want to raise the bar for myself. I would love to raise the bar for education in terms of raising the bar for the experience that students have, raising the bar for the experience that teachers have, actually engaging people in a way that feels good, coming to school because it feels good, showing up as a teacher because it feels good.

Leading schools, leading education, pioneering the way for an experience of learning and developing humans in a way that can feel good. We can feel alive. It doesn’t mean we’re going to be happy all the time. Feeling good is about being in alignment with the truth of who we are. When we’re in grief, we’re in grief, when we are in pain, we are in pain. And when we are in joy and delight, we are experiencing joy and delight. It’s being in alignment with the experience that feels most true for us.

So as we’re going into this second season of 2025, so that would be April, May, June. I had to think about that for a second. April, May, and June. We’re going into spring, skidding into summer here, right? I want to invite you to have more fun. Insist it upon yourself. 

If you had to have more fun, if it was your assignment for the day, what would you do? If you had to make life more fun, if you had to squeeze out more pleasure in your day, if you had to rest more, if you had to laugh more, if you had to connect more, if that was your assignment, which, by the way, it is, it’s your life assignment, to enjoy your life, to experience as much as possible.

And I’m not saying you’re running around to the point of running yourself ragged, that’s not the experience we’re looking for. Exhaustion, overwhelm, burnout, that does not equal to an invigorating human experience. I’m talking about raising the bar on the balance of life, getting the rest we need, getting the play that we crave, and contributing to work in a way that feels good.

Think about this as you go into your spring season and into the last season of school. Insist upon yourself to look for ways to have more fun, to laugh more, to rest more, to play more, to infuse pleasure into your workday, to see the collaboration between rest and play and work, and to see how in collaboration when you’re balancing rest with play with work you get this beautiful combination we call life. And you contribute in a way that maximizes your potential. 

When you’re exhausted all the time, your contributing goes down. If you’re only playing, your contributing goes down. If you’re only working, your balance goes up and the experience you have becomes automatic and robotic and you’re not actually living. You’re just automated through the day, robotically moving about. 

So raise the bar for yourself. If there were no limits, if you could purely just design your life the way you wanted to, with no strings attached, what would you be capable of experiencing? What would the bar be? How much fun is possible? How much laughter is possible? How much delight is possible? How much contribution is possible? How much connection and collaboration is possible? How many solutions could we create in this lifetime? How much rest can we embrace to give ourselves the energy required for play and for work?

Using play, rest, and work in collaboration with one another is how you raise the bar. So going into spring season, it’s April. Many of you are just getting hired on as brand new principals. Be looking out for my new school leadership series coming out in April.

Number two, if you are a seasoned principal and you’re heading into testing season, the end of the year, all of the chaos and you’re exhausted and tired, I invite you to join EPC now. EPC for brand new leaders, it’s going to get you on track because you’re going to be thinking about tying up the old job and getting excited and wanting to jump into the new one. And for my seasoned empowered principals who might not be feeling super empowered this time of year, this is a time to reinvigorate.

Come on into EPC now, get your spring season planned. I’ll run you through the three month plan. We’ll get you up and running there. And you can actually enjoy the last eight weeks, 12 weeks of the year. It’s going to be amazing should you decide to raise the bar. Come on in, EPC, now’s the time. Happy Spring everybody! Enjoy, enjoy, enjoy. We’ll talk to you next week. Take good care. Bye.

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Hey you guys, calling all first-year site and district leaders. As you know, I hosted a free master course for those aspiring to land a job in school leadership. This was a four-day course that covers what you need to prepare yourself before, during, and after the interview process. So for those of you who are interested, you can find the YouTube links below in the show notes. The Aspiring School Leader series is completely free. 

Now, for those of you who landed that job, I have a brand-new program. Let’s make your first impression in school leadership your best impression. Let’s lead your school with confidence in year one and nail your first year as a school leader. You’ve got what it takes to make an impressive first impression, so come on in. 

I’ve got a brand-new program called Essentials for New School Leaders. It is three months of professional and personal development to give you the strategies, the mindset, and the skill set to lead your school to the next level of success.

There is a gap between the time you get hired and the time you start your contract. Let’s get ahead of the curve, three months in advance, you’ll be ready to go on day one of your brand-new contract. Join Essentials for New School Leaders. For more information, click the link in the show notes.

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.