Hello, Empowered Principals. Welcome to episode 387. 

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. Welcome to today’s podcast. So happy to be here with you today and to be celebrating the end of the school year with you. So, let’s fire it up. Let’s talk about creating closure for the year.

Now, I know, it’s the end of May. You are running yourself ragged. You’re rushing around. There’s a lot going on. There are exceptional tasks that happen only at the end of the year. Most of you have wrapped up testing. You are in the process of finalizing hiring and closing out the end-of-year celebrations. There’s a lot going on. And it can be a very tiring and exhausting few weeks at the end of the year, but it’s also an uplifting energy.

When you are focused on all that’s happened, all you’ve accomplished and looking forward to the end of the school year and the summer break and looking forward to all of the festivities that come with the summer of fun. And shameless plug here, Summer of Fun challenge is starting in June. If you are on Facebook, join the Empowered Principal Facebook group. We’re doing our annual Summer of Fun challenge where we challenge ourselves and we support each other and cheer each other on to engage in life, to feel alive, to be alive, to be engaged, to have fun, to rest, to recover from the year, to reconnect with ourselves, with our friends, families, loved ones, and to do things that we love, to spend time embracing things that make us feel good.

The goal is to feel good, ladies and gentlemen. We aren’t here on the planet to suffer. And I know that during the school year, it can feel like you’re suffering. So, I invite you in to the Empowered Principal Facebook group. It’s a public group. It’s open to all school administrators or aspiring administrators. Hey, if you want to be in the energy of empowered principals, come on over. We’d love to have you.

Now, there is busyness and although I coach my clients to not use the word busy or to try and refrain from using the word busy, the energy output, the effort output at this time of year can be more intense than other parts of the year. And we can still decide to take stock of the year. To give yourself the luxury of reflecting back on the year and acknowledging at least one thing per month that you’ve accomplished.

Take a look at your calendar. Go back to August. Look at all you accomplished in the month of August, and then September, and then October, and how you got through the fall dip, and then November, you made it to Thanksgiving. And then we had December and the magic of the holiday season and all of the fun and festivities and the mid-year reboot and the celebrations and the reinvigoration and the rest and recovery, hopefully, that you achieved in the month of December and January.

And then we got into the winter season and we might have had a winter dip, but then we got back up and then it was March and here you are finishing observations and completing all of your evaluation work and coaching and mentoring your new teachers. All of that onboarding you did back in the fall. All of the coaching and mentorship you did, all of the conversations you had with staff and students and families.

All of the meetings you went to, the IEPs you were able to achieve and accomplish and connect with families and students. You have done an incredible amount of service for your community. And I want you to give yourself the luxury of acknowledging that. What felt good for you? What are you proud of in terms of how you handled something or just grateful that you had the perseverance to overcome something? Give yourself credit for the work you’ve done.

And I know the urge is to give credit to your staff or to the team because we don’t do this job alone. And that is correct. It is true and it’s lovely and it feels good to celebrate, but I invite you to shower yourself with celebrations and acknowledgment and praise. Because we don’t often give ourselves credit for the work we’ve done. Basically, we give other people credit for the work that we’ve done and we give them credit for the work they’ve done. We celebrate them. But it feels very uncomfortable to give it to ourselves. And I want you to question why that is. And this really matters. It matters as a leader and it matters as a coach and mentor to your teachers and it matters for student learning. Hear me out here, okay?

Think about this. Why do we not celebrate ourselves? Why do we not allow ourselves the luxury of closure, of acknowledgment, of closure, of being at peace with this school year and bringing the best memories with us and then moving forward and planning for next year? Why do we not do this? I’ve studied this. It doesn’t feel comfortable to celebrate. We’re taught that if you celebrate, particularly if you celebrate yourself, that it’s unbecoming and that we should be humble. It’s not socially acceptable. You’re egotistical or self-centered or self-absorbed or narcissist. You know, you only care about yourself or you’re looking for attention. It has a negative connotation.

We also think that, oh my gosh, other people are going to feel bad. They’re going to judge you for celebrating. They’re going to resent you for celebrating. I had a client say to me, “I can’t celebrate myself because the teachers will feel bad about themselves because they’re not happy and they will be resentful. Oh, it must be easy for you to celebrate the end of the year. You weren’t in a classroom teaching all year.” And so we worry what other people will think if we celebrate our success and bring some finality to this school year.

So, if that holds you back, if that’s an obstacle in your way, I want you to consider that. What are the objections in your mind when it comes to celebrating? Is it your fear of being seen in a certain way by other people? Are you worried you’re going to hurt their feelings? Does it feel like I get to celebrate, if I win, you lose? Is it an all or none thinking? What’s holding you back? But I also really want you to consider your definition of celebrating. What does celebration mean to you? What does acknowledgment and validation and honoring your wins, what does that mean to you? What do you consider to be celebration? Do you envision throwing a great big party? Are you walking around campus wearing a tiara and a cape and asking everyone to clap for you?

Think about what it is when you say like, I don’t feel comfortable celebrating or it’s not polite to celebrate. What does celebration look like? Because celebration, true celebration is not about flaunting or tooting one’s horn. And I think we get this image of, I think about sporting events where there is a win and a loss. There is a definite line in the sand. One team is considered to have won, the other team is to considered to have lost and the fans of the winning team celebrate while the fans of the losing team mourn. And we go out and we flaunt and we toot our horns and we get in people’s face and yeah, you lost, you were a loser. We’re the winner. It feels so good.

But does it feel good? Like to get in somebody’s face who’s not feeling happy about the outcome of a game, to get into their face and say like you’re the loser and I’m the winner? A lot of people feel that, feel very justified in that. But when you watch it, it’s not a celebration in the sense of I feel good and I get to feel good on my own accord and somebody else doesn’t have to feel bad for me to feel good.

So true celebration is just feeling good, being proud, being happy with the outcomes. It’s not about flaunting and acknowledging yourself so that others are in the shadow or in the loss of or in pain because of it. We think that if we celebrate ourselves, we’re going to make other people feel bad. But you can see this is a very classic case of all or none thinking. Celebration is about the acknowledgment. You acknowledge yourself for the work.

If acknowledging yourself feels too uncomfortable for you, let’s try this. You can acknowledge the outcome that you’ve created. Celebrate the results that you have created, that you have produced, the lessons you have learned, the skills you have gained, the wisdom you have collected. Celebrate the lessons and the skills and the wisdom and the results and the outcomes. If it feels too close to home, too uncomfortable to celebrate you or you envision yourself celebrating in a way that might make other people feel offended or hurt or resentful, celebrate the outcomes.

And the other thing about celebrations is that you don’t have to have other people witness you celebrating. You can celebrate your wins in complete isolation if you want to. You can celebrate them internally if you want to. You can have celebrations in private if you desire. Or if you want to, you can also celebrate publicly.

It is not criminal to celebrate. It’s not criminal to honor and acknowledge your efforts, your work, your accomplishments, your goals, your outcomes. You can acknowledge it in any way that feels good. That’s the key, acknowledging yourself in whatever way feels good for you, but to acknowledge it in some way, shape, or form. You can simply write it down if you want. But be sure this year, as you’re closing out the year, to recognize yourself and the effort and your wins and your accomplishments and your gains.

And here’s the truth. As you’re creating awareness around self-celebration and acknowledging your outcomes and your wins for the year, it’s going to feel a little uncomfortable at first, and that’s okay. It’s just because you’re not used to it. It’s new to feel celebratory about yourself if you have been told that it’s not okay or it’s not socially acceptable. So, the reason this is important is that you want to model self-celebration. You want to model what it looks like to bring closure to a task or an event or a program or a process or a school year. Right?

We go through the year and we want other people to celebrate themselves. We want our teachers to look back and say, what am I most proud of about this year? What feels good? What did I learn as a teacher? How did I grow? We want to practice self-reflection, not because we are egotistical, but because it’s how we learn, it’s how we grow. And acknowledging our skills that we’ve gained and the hardships we’ve overcome and the times where we did it right and we won and we accomplished something we didn’t think we could accomplish, it feels good. We want to model this as leaders. We want to model this in classrooms.

Imagine students who went back through the year and looked at where they were in August, the skills they’ve learned, the friends they’ve made, the good times they’ve had. It’s like looking through a memory book, a photo book where you’re looking back at the year and celebrating, “Oh, I remember that great time. I remember this. Ooh, this one was really hard. Oh, I remember when we had this conflict and we solved it and I remember when our teacher did this and that.” Creating memories with kids and creating celebrations to remind them of their growth and their development and their progress and the hardships that they have overcome.

So, when you’re bringing closure to the end of this year, it’s not just about us. And we tend to feel very uncomfortable when we think we’re doing an activity or an exercise or practicing some kind of ritual or celebration. When we think it’s self-centered and we think it’s just for us, that feels very uncomfortable and we don’t really understand the value of it. But when we look at when we do it and we invite others to do it and we see the value of closure, the value of celebration and its impact on our identity as leaders, as teachers, as students, then you will be more open to that discomfort. And I promise you this, you will get better at this. It’s like being new. It’s when you’re new to celebrating, you will be uncomfortable at first because it feels a little clumsy, it feels a little awkward, but it will get easier because it feels very good to acknowledge ourselves.

And doing so builds up your confidence. It builds up your belief in yourself and it builds up what you believe is possible to accomplish. When you look back and you see all of the things that you’ve done, you’re like, “Holy cow, look at all that I did.” It builds up your belief in what’s possible to accomplish in the future. You gain momentum when you celebrate and you look back and you acknowledge and honor yourself and validate, that was really hard and I did it. That year, this situation, that conversation, those meetings or this, you know, maybe you were fundraising to try and get a new playground or to get, I don’t know, so many things schools need, right? Maybe you needed a new roof or you needed, you needed new safety measures put in or you needed a new platform and you’re, you worked with your community and they were able to work with you and accomplish this. That wouldn’t have happened without your leadership.

So as you acknowledge yourself and the wins, you expand what’s possible for you and you tap into a greater potential. It becomes a win, win, win, win. A win for you, a win for teachers, a win for students, a win for the community, for the district. So it’s worth going through the initial discomfort of celebration, even though it feels a little bit awkward.

Because here’s what’s true. There is a difference between arrogance and celebrating what is true. Celebrating the delight of the accomplishment is not about your ego or stroking your ego or as people will say like toot your own horn or focus on yourself. It’s not that. There’s a difference between celebrating what has actually been accomplished. That’s not arrogance. Arrogance is maybe enhancing the accomplishment or celebrating it so that you can receive status, title, attention, and validation externally.

So just notice that there is a difference in celebrating out of arrogance and the need to be externally validated and celebrating what’s just honest to goodness truth, what you have accomplished, what you have done, what you are proud of, what feels good, and being delighted in all that you were able to do this year.

Now, sometimes we fail to celebrate ourselves because we feel jaded. I want to point this out because it is a difference in where the celebration is coming from and the reason behind the celebration and what we’re actually trying to accomplish in the art of celebration. Sometimes we feel jaded. We’re like, “Well, I don’t want to celebrate because others didn’t celebrate me. I did so much throughout the year that went unrecognized or uncelebrated.

So I have to just sit here and celebrate myself for all the things I did and nobody even cared, nobody even acknowledged it.” We feel a little jaded. And if you think about that, that’s where our ego’s kind of stepping in and saying like, “Hey, I worked so hard for you as your servant leader. I would like you to celebrate me and acknowledge me for all the hard work that I did.” We want other people to celebrate us, but we’re not willing to celebrate it ourselves. Just notice that. We want other people to acknowledge our efforts.

And I’ve thought about this. Like, it does feel so good when somebody acknowledges you or validates you or appreciates you. It’s not that we need to avoid the receiving of compliments, the receiving of celebration from other people. But when we celebrate ourselves and acknowledge it, we are more likely to attract and receive external validation. So when we don’t validate ourselves, we’re kind of saying energetically, I don’t really need celebration. I don’t need acknowledgment, I don’t need validation because I’m not willing to do it myself. And so other people kind of get a vibe like this, you know, no celebration, no validation, no accomplishments or accolades required.

I’ve contemplated this. Why do we crave acknowledgment from others? I believe that we crave the acknowledgment when the actions that we took were not taken from our own personal desire to take the action, but rather from the energy of having to or obligated to. When you think about that, when I have to do this job, I’m obligated to do this, I’m responsible for this. That feels very heavy, but we’re doing it because of other people’s expectations, of what other people desire of, of what we think other people want us to do. So stay with me on this. It’s very sneaky and it’s very subtle, but you will be able to start catching yourself doing this and you’ll see it from within.

Let me use an example outside of the context of education so that it’s easier to see. This is something that I’ve observed in my personal life. I’ve observed people who donate extensive amounts of money and time to their favorite organizations. They choose to donate time and money because they want to do it. It feels good for them. They enjoy donating their time and their money. They take personal delight in doing so because it feels aligned for them. They decide to gift their resources because it’s what they value. They are doing it from the mindset of this is what I want to do. This feels good. This feels right. It feels aligned for me. I would choose to donate my time and money to this organization for myself regardless of what other people think.

I consider resources in leadership, your time, your energy, your attention, your focus, how you prioritize based on what you value. When it’s in alignment, you will do that work, you will take those actions, you will put in the effort, the energy, the time because it’s what you want to do, it’s what feels good for you, it’s what you value, regardless of what other people think. And when you’re very aligned, and I’ve seen this outside of the context of education, other people’s opinion doesn’t matter.

Someone could say, “Hey, you’re giving so much energy and time to X organization. Why are you doing that? Or why don’t you give less or maybe you need more or maybe give it over here.” Other people have other values, other opinions. When someone’s aligned to the way that they spend their resources, it doesn’t matter what other people think. They do it because it feels good to them. I serve in this way because I want to serve in this way.

And believe me, people out in the world are going to have their thoughts and opinions about what you are doing no matter what. Some will agree, some will not agree. The people who love it tend to be the people who are receiving those resources and the people who dislike it very much tend to be the people who are not receiving the resources. Right?

So if you’re donating to cause A or to institution A because that’s what you love or you’re spending a lot of time and energy as a leader on this priority, the people who love that priority, the people who also are in alignment with that value of what you are doing and what you’re working on will be in agreement and they will support you, they will clap for you and they will cheer you on and give you external validation.

But the people who aren’t in alignment with that value or with that priority or with that project or task or however you’re spending your time and your effort, your energy, your focus and attention and money and resources and human resources and all of those things are not going to be clapping for you. They’re going to be trying to convince you to sell you to shift your focus, to shift what you value.

So you have to be in alignment with yourself because there will always be somebody who loves it and always be somebody who dislikes it. But the person, you, the person who’s choosing to donate their resources and in leadership terms, how you spend your time, your energy, your focus, your attention, what you work on, where you put your work isn’t interested or swayed by the opinions of others because they are in alignment with themselves. They are in tune with what they value and they are acting in alignment with what they value.

So when you’re doing what you love people and when you’re doing what you value, even though it’s hard work, even though it’s frustrating at times, even though you fail, even though you fall down, even though you get sucker punched or you there’s a huge plot twist and you didn’t see it coming, you still get up in the day and you go do the work not because other people are clapping for you. It’s fine to receive that. And when you can allow that and receive that and not need it at the same time, double win. But you still get up and do it because it’s what you value. It’s an alignment.

So, I’ve seen this where when people are in tune with what they value and they’re acting in alignment with what they value, no one has to acknowledge them or clap for them or list their name in the newsletter or the weekly bulletin or pat them on the back or have a celebration or bring them up on stage or give them a certificate.

In fact, when somebody’s truly doing it for themselves, they often resist that external acknowledgment. There are people who donate millions of dollars and they do it anonymously because it’s what they value and quite frankly, they don’t want the clapping, the people who love it, they don’t want the external validation, but they also don’t want the hate from the people who aren’t getting it, right? So they do it for peace because it’s what they align to.

Then there are people who donate excessive amounts of their time, money, energy, attention, focus to an organization because they believe it’s what other people want them to do. They’re chasing the clap, the appreciation, the acknowledgment. They feel it’s what they should do with their time or money or what they believe they have to do because it’s what their parents did or what family members did or what they were told to do.

They do it because it’s tradition. They do it out of fear. If they don’t do it, what will happen to them? It’s always been done this way. They do it because they want to help other people, even though they don’t get personal enjoyment out of it. They feel that they should help in this way because it’s the right way to help. They feel like they don’t have another choice or that there isn’t another way to serve in a way that they want to serve or to help people in a way that also feels good for them.

So it’s not that they are not aligned to the cause, like they want to help people, but they feel pressured to do it or they feel compelled because of other people’s opinions or because of tradition or because they have been told this is the right way to do it or the only way to do it or this is what you need to value. That’s really what it comes down to. When you’re told what to value and you’re told how to honor what you are supposed to value. And they end up saying yes to things, not because it feels good for them.

They say yes to things because they don’t want to disappoint others. They feel like they can’t say no. And they want to be seen externally as helpful and generous and gracious and nice and obedient. They want to feel helpful and generous and gracious and nice and in service, but internally, that’s not how it feels. It feels frustrating. It feels controlled. It feels exasperated and it feels resentful.

And when you’re in this zone, you’re taking actions because you believe you have to instead of truly internally wanting to. And you’ve seen this. People donate publicly with the intention of other people noticing them. They volunteer because they want to be recognized in the bulletin or in the newsletter and they are not pleased if they don’t get acknowledged. If they don’t see their name on that list or they don’t get a call out on the intercom or they don’t get called up to stage or they don’t get that certificate or somebody omits them, whether it’s accidental or they just failed to acknowledge them, these people will be very upset and they might not choose to volunteer next time because they weren’t acknowledged. And the reason that they would be upset or they would maybe pout a little bit or they would be offended is that ultimately, the reason they decided to take the actions of volunteering or putting in their time and effort was they wanted that external recognition.

And I’ve noticed this when I coach school leaders. Sometimes we find ourselves in the mindset of doing the work and showing up out of obligation or responsibility or because we have to and because the teachers are complaining so we try to fix it or the parent has a complaint, we try to fix it, or the kids are out of control so we try to fix it. And we’re out there fixing all the things trying to make the people happy so that we can be happy and then we’re frustrated because we’re doing it for the people.

Now, we all got into this job because we were called to it. We love children, we love to teach. We enjoy being in the energy of a school environment. We value education and we feel good about the work that we do and the way that we contribute. But we also have moments where we tell ourselves, “Oh, I have to do this. I have to do that. There’s no other way. I just have to do it. I can’t say no to them. I have to do it. The teachers will be upset. Then they’ll complain, then they’ll file a grievance.” And we start doing things that we feel we have to do, not because we value it, but because we don’t want other people to get upset.

Or we do things that we value having done, like the volunteer tea. We want the volunteers to be appreciated and acknowledged and recognized, but we feel obligated to throw the volunteer tea and to throw ourselves in and spend hours prepping and decorating, picking up all the sodas and the beverages and the snacks and the teas and the sweets and the treats because we worry that if we don’t validate and acknowledge them externally, that they won’t come back or that other people should appreciate that we are appreciating them, right?

So just take a look. How have you been recently spending your resources? And I mean your leadership resources, your time, your attention, your energy, and your effort.

And think about this year as you’re closing out the year and bringing closure to create a little memory, a mental memory book for this year. What actions have you been taking and what was fueling them? Was it alignment to what you value? Was the task completed in alignment for the duration or did your mind shift a little bit at some point into doing it for the recognition versus doing it for your personal satisfaction and your personal fulfillment?

I think about all the times where I went above and beyond for the end of the year events and it started with me enjoying the planning and the preparation, but as I dove into the event, my OCD mind and my little attention to detail and perfectionism tendencies mind started to add details and add tasks and create higher and higher goals and higher, higher expectations and standards for this event that shifted my energy.

I was no longer fueled by just personal enjoyment and letting it be what it was, shifted into perfection energy. What would others think? What if I miss something? Then I got fearful of was I doing this wrong? And I was thinking about what other people were going to think about the event, about me and it got into actions based on not wanting to disappoint others versus the joy and satisfaction of hosting the end of the year events that felt good for me, for us, for them, for the greater good, right?

So, as the school year ends, give yourself the luxury of personal closure. Celebrate what worked, what you accomplished, the effort you gave, the care and concern you put into each day, the conversations you held, the tasks that you completed, the love that you felt and shared, the happiness, the days that went great, acknowledge all of it.

And you can acknowledge what you didn’t get done or what didn’t go as planned or the hardships and things you learned, the sorrow, the disappointments, the mistakes, but they provided wisdom and knowledge so you can celebrate the outcome of those hardships. And there’s a list of we didn’t get to them or to-dos that didn’t get done. That’s okay. There’s always next year. So let yourself acknowledge and appreciate and validate who you are, what you’ve accomplished, how you’ve grown, and the fact that you are an Empowered Principal.

Happy end of the school year. I love you all so much. Join us for Summer of Fun challenge. Be sure to join up for EPC. We are taking a break in June and July for rest and recovery and fun and we’re going to get started the 1st of August. Can’t wait to see you there. Looking forward to working with you. Have a wonderful week. Take care. Talk to you next week. 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. 

Hello Empowered Principals. Welcome to episode 385. 

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 podcast. Hey, if you’re new around here, we are so excited you are here. Welcome, welcome, welcome. I absolutely love this podcast. I love having these conversations with you, and I want to invite you to contact me. 

I would love to ask you, what are the hardest things that you’re facing in school leadership? What’s a challenge you don’t feel you can solve? What is a problem that you are noodling on that you can’t see a solution? Or maybe it’s just a situation that feels unmanageable.

With all that’s going on in education, all of the conversations in education, perhaps it’s staffing, perhaps it’s the politics of education right now, perhaps it is a superintendent you’re working with or another boss, perhaps it’s your school board, perhaps it’s, it could be anything.

It could be a legal issue, it could be a specific student situation, a specific staff situation. There are situations that we face as a school leader that feel complicated and overwhelming and unmanageable, whether that is you’re physically not able to manage it, you’re mentally not able to handle it or manage it, or emotionally you don’t feel that you’re capable of handling it or managing it, or something feels so out of your control and you feel defeated or you feel helpless in your ability to navigate the situation.

If you have something like that, I invite you to come in to the free group, the Empowered Principal Facebook group, join in our Facebook group and ask me the questions. I want to know what your struggle is. I want to help you in any way that I can. I honestly believe with all of my heart and soul that coaching provides a solution, a path, a way to navigate anything that comes your way. I believe it with all my heart.

I don’t think coaching is the only answer on the planet, but I do believe it’s a powerful answer on the planet. Strategies, tools, perspective, the wisdom, the knowledge, the courage to step in and to question and to be open to different trains of thought or new perspectives or new identities, ways where the old version of you couldn’t imagine knowing how to handle something, but this newer version of you can imagine it being done, or you being able to navigate it in a way that feels good to you, that feels empowering for you.

So come on into the Facebook group, let us know. What is it that you don’t think you can handle? And let me give coaching a shot. Let’s see if I can throw something your way that will give you a tool, a strategy, a thought, an approach that can help you feel better about this situation or feel like you have some agency over your approach to handling the situation or coming up with a solution, okay?

Come on into the Facebook group. That’s primarily where we’re doing these conversations. There’s a free Facebook group, and then if you’re in EPC, there’s a private Facebook group for EPC members. And that is where we hold all of our resources, all of our replays. I do special trainings and I offer them in EPC. You have special access, kind of a, you know, a paid access to all of my tools, all of my past trainings, all of my future trainings, all of that. So, come on into the Facebook group.

Ask me your questions. Let me see if I can provide that support for you, just to show you and for you to experience the power of coaching. Coaching has transformed my life in such a way that is very difficult for me to articulate into words because the transformation has happened internally. It’s happened in who I am, how I perceive myself, what I believe about myself.

I have gone through things in my life that I did not think I would be able to handle. Things that felt so scary to me that I wanted to die. And emotions that I had to feel and process that actually felt like death. I felt like I was going to die. I wanted to. I felt like just take me out of this pain. I can’t handle it. But the truth was, I could handle it. And when I stopped telling myself, I can’t handle this, I can’t take this anymore, and I started to say, I can handle this, I can take this, I can handle this, I’m getting stronger, this is conditioning, I can do this, I can handle this. This won’t last forever. When I switched my story that I was telling myself, I realized the level of empowerment that was available to me.

And through my personal experiences, I honestly believe there is nothing that I cannot handle. Now, it doesn’t mean that there’s no pain. It doesn’t mean that I won’t make mistakes. It doesn’t mean I’m not going to fail. It doesn’t mean that I won’t feel negative emotion ever again or have another round of really hard times, so to speak. But it does mean that I am not going to be afraid to live my biggest life, to step into my empowerment, and to be the brightest, boldest version of myself and own who I am and not apologize for who I am, and show up in this capacity as the Empowered Principal supporting site and district leaders and state leaders. I’ve got some state leaders in here too.

However, I’m not going to dim my light because it, you know, it makes somebody else uncomfortable or because I’m afraid that I won’t be able to handle it, that I won’t be able to engage in disagreement or in discourse or conversation. Maybe somebody doesn’t believe in the Empowered Principle or the strategies and tools and the concepts that I teach. That’s okay. I’m open to hearing what it’s all about. So I invite you in. I invite you in to say, can I apply coaching to this? But what about this? Or I tried to apply your coaching. I listened to the podcast. I tried to apply this coaching, and it’s not working. What’s going on for me? How can I make this work? Come on into the Facebook group. I will help you.

I want you to experience the power of coaching for yourself. It’s one thing for somebody to say to you, “Hey, do you know how amazing it feels to have a baby and to have your own child?” And if you have your own children, you can say, “Yes, I do understand that experience. I’ve gone through it. I’ve experienced it myself. It’s amazing. It’s incredible. I love it. There’s no love like that. It’s just so unimaginable not to have had the experience.” But then if you were to say to somebody who maybe hasn’t had a child yet, and you were to say, “Do you know what it feels like? It’s like this and this and this.” And if you haven’t had the experience, it’s different in the way you relate to it. You can listen to somebody else’s experience.

Like, have you ever been on a roller coaster? If you’ve been on one, yes, you can say, “I’ve ridden a roller coaster. I’ve had that experience.” I haven’t ridden a roller coaster. I can watch other people. I can hear them screaming. I can see them laughing. I can hear, I can hear them, you know, either loving it or hating it or crying or being exhilarated. I can observe the experience. I can observe who they were before their first ride on the roller coaster and then after their first ride on a roller coaster. I can witness that, but it isn’t my internal experience because I haven’t had it yet.

And I want to offer to you that this Facebook group that I have, got about 2,500 of us principals in there, and we are discussing and sharing what it’s like to be in the experience of empowerment, to be in the identity of an Empowered Principal, to come up against a roadblock and not know how to solve it, but have the belief in yourself to be able to overcome it. So come on in. I would love, love, love to have you guys in there.

So shifting gears here a little bit, I’m going to jump into the today’s topic and talk about a coaching session I had. It brought it to my attention. It’s not something I had thought about before, and when my client brought it to me, I thought, “Whoa, I need to have this on the podcast because I do think this is an issue that without awareness, we don’t even realize we’re facing it, but once you see it, it’s hard to unsee.” Okay? So, my client was saying to me, “Oh, you know, we have several staffing changes coming up.” Lots of people are moving. There’s going to be a lot of staff changes, like reassignments or people leaving and coming and going and all of that.

And she said, “I’m a little nervous about how the families are going to respond.” And we got into a conversation about that. And I said, “Well, how do you think that they will respond?” And she said, “Well, they’re going to be upset.” I said, “Why?” And she said, “Well, because they want to have certain teachers. They’re expecting that certain teachers are going to be in this grade level when their child gets there because they want this teacher or they want that experience.” So, we have a lot of amazing teachers, and because there will be some adjustments, I think people will be upset.

And we just got into this very interesting conversation around this expectation. You know, if you go to, I don’t know, let’s think of a brand, like Nike. You go into a Nike store and you want to buy a pair of running shoes, and Nike is your brand and you love them and they fit your feet perfectly. You go into Nike, and you’ve been to Nike several times before and there was a favorite sales representative that you worked with in the store.

And let’s say this lady’s name was Jennifer. Okay, Jennifer. Jennifer was your favorite salesperson. You would go in and she would always hook you up with the perfect shoe and she would show you the latest and greatest and you always got the great pair of Nikes with her and you love her. She knows your feet, she knows your style. She’s got you.

And then you go into Nike, you’re going to get your new pair of shoes, and Jennifer’s not there. And you’re like, “Oh, where’s Jennifer?” Oh, Jennifer got promoted. Jennifer’s now working as a director or she’s a sales trainer or she’s a trainer of trainers or who knows? Jennifer went on and her career evolved. Okay? 

She moved or maybe she just moved towns. Maybe she went to the big city or maybe she went to a smaller town. Jennifer made a decision in her life and she made a career decision and a personal decision about her career and her experience. Jennifer loved you as a customer, as a client, and Jennifer made her own decision. Okay? That happens. We’re like, “Oh, we’re disappointed. Oh, bummed, we really miss her.” Okay. Meet the next person and we go on.

Or your hair stylist, right? You have a hair stylist you love, and they get a big promotion or they get called to go to New York City and style the celebrities or something, right? In other situations, or let’s say Target. You go into Target, and when you shop at Target, you have certain expectations. You expect to walk in and have an experience. You walk in and there’s going to be a little Starbucks and there’s going to be the registers and the people, and you’re expecting a certain experience, but you aren’t expecting that the exact person is going to serve you. But you are expecting a certain standard of service. Okay? I’ve been thinking about this.

In education, we don’t think about people being people, teachers being teachers, and them having career paths and them wanting to move up and to expand or maybe they take a break because they’re having a family. There’s an outdated expectation in many communities that revolves around this assumption that teachers who are assigned in a particular position this school year are going to be in that position next year. And teachers who have been in that position for several years, there is definitely an expectation that teacher will remain in that position for the unforeseeable future.

Understandably, I understand that parents have thoughts and opinions and feelings about staffing because it impacts them. It impacts their children and it’s their job as parents to protect and maintain the integrity of their children’s education. I understand that. 

However, if you’ve been a principal for one year, what you have probably noticed is that for some parents, the teacher that their child is assigned or the classroom that their child is assigned to can create a significant amount of angst, especially when they’re fixated on having a particular teacher or not having a particular teacher for the upcoming year. They get hyper focused on, I want this teacher for K and this teacher for first and second grade, and they have it picked out K through 12th grade by the time the child’s 5, okay?

So, we were talking about this and it’s interesting because I asked this principal that I was coaching. I said, “Have you had people backlash at you in the past?” You have a little nervous trauma coming up? Is there something being triggered in you? She said, “Yes. I’ve had experiences where teachers have moved or they’ve gone on leave or they’ve been promoted or they’ve got another job somewhere else or they wanted just a new experience. They had taught a certain grade level for a while. They wanted to try something new.” And she said, some parents are highly offended when a teacher chooses to move a grade level or a position or maybe shift from full-time to part-time while they’re raising their children or job sharing, whatever.

And we were talking about how interesting it is that in our profession as education, where the public has a very strong opinion about an adult’s professional decision relating to their career path. They’re very attached to what teachers should do and shouldn’t do. They have the mental manuals as I call them, about what a teacher should and shouldn’t do with her, his, their professional journey. 

Most professions are not like this. They’re not as complicated. If you’re working at corporate Nike, the average customer, they don’t care if you move up from an assistant director to a director position, or if you move locations. They care about the product, they care about the brand, they care about the quality of service they receive, the quality of care. They care about the experience that they have with the shoe and the sales process. When you walk into Nike, there’s a brand. There’s a feel, there’s a vibe. Just do it, right? It’s empowerment. You go in to get your Nike on, to get your empowerment on, to just do it. That’s what we want. We want to have the experience when we walk in and walk out and then have this shoe honor the brand, honor how they’re selling it.

It’s not about the individual who’s selling the product. It’s about the brand and the product and the experience that you have as a customer of Nike. And in education, we have attached the experience that children have, students and parents have, families with the individual. Now, it makes sense if you look at it, you know, objectively or neutrally, we’re like, it makes sense because the teacher in a classroom is the one person who creates the experience. They set up the environment. They are the ones who engage with the students. They’re the ones who set up that classroom environment, the peer environment, the learning environment, the instructional environment, and the parental experience, how they engage with parents, the communication style, the method, what they share, how often they share it. All of that is pretty much in the individual control of the teacher.

So, people will get attached to the individual because of the individual brand of that teacher, the individual marketing style of that teacher, the communication style of that teacher, the teaching style, the classroom management style. A teacher has an individual style. So I was thinking about this, kind of meta, right? Where there in other organizations, it doesn’t really matter if people change positions or advance themselves. It’s really about the quality of service and customer care regardless of who’s in the position. And in education, we’re very attached to the service because we equate and connect that service, correlate that service to a particular individual.

So as school leaders, we must navigate and balance the needs of our staff members who are humans, who are adults, who need to make decisions regarding their professional career and advancement and allow them that freedom and that agency to have the professional experience they desire to have, whether that’s staying in the same position for 30 years or whether that’s moving about every couple of years because they desire to learn and grow and evolve and change it up, or they want to climb the ladder and go from assistant teaching to teaching to coaching to leadership to whatever they want to do, superintendency, run for school boards. You know, there’s all kinds of jobs in education, county level, state levels. You can be on boards, you can work for professional organizations that are in education. Endless, there’s endless career opportunities.

And yet, when the public comes in and says, “We have an opinion about your professional journey,” we can get caught off guard. It can be very jarring to the system, and it can feel like they have the right to their opinion or they have the right to tell you kind of what to do and what not to do. It can feel very uncomfortable for you as the leader to balance out the needs of the families and protect the rights of your staff.

So I was helping this client navigate this situation back in March. And one of the things we talked about was how antiquated the mindset is regarding our teachers, particularly strong, empowered, successful teachers that are well liked in the community, that they should be expected to stay in that position forever and serve for as long as the community wants them to because it works for the community.

And because parents are focused on that individual providing the service to their child and counting on that person to be the service provider for their child, when that expectation is jarred for the parent, when the reality shifts and it’s met with change, parents can find it difficult to accept that the teacher that they expected to have, that they anticipated in having has desired to move on or has chosen to move on or is having a life change or is having a professional shift in their… who knows? Anything could happen.

But when it no longer becomes an option to have the individual that the parents want, they lose it. I dealt with this every year. Every year, there was a group of parents that would come in and be like, “I just want to talk to you about next year.” And they were very sweet about it and they wanted to be nice and kind of kiss up and plant the seed in advance just to let me know. This is what they’re thinking and this is why, or, you know, this is who my child is and this is the personality fit for them. 

Every year that happened. And also, every year at class list posting time, we had a big lemonade social for the class list to be posted and every single year, you know, “I really want to talk to you about this. This isn’t the right match. It’s not going to be a good fit for my child. This isn’t going to work for us.” Meeting, meeting, meeting, I need to talk with you.

So their expectations did not match the reality of their situation. It caused cognitive dissonance and they felt like they deserved the right to have their expectations met by having this teacher. Now, some of them, the teacher’s there and they just didn’t get the teacher and you have to have a conversation about not always getting your way. We’re going to give it a try.

So, this is not an unusual situation. It happens every year. You want to prepare for it, whether you’re a brand new leader or whether you’ve been doing this 10 years, you know it’s coming, okay? It happens in schools all over the place. As I was working with this client, what we realized is that there is something within our sphere of control. We have some empowerment here. We don’t have to be just taking it every year and feeling like we can’t control this and feeling like we can’t get a grip of this narrative and this expectation.

So, I want you to consider this. As school leaders, we can start to update the mindset and the expectation and the conversations that we have around staffing to set a different culture around teachers’ professional growth, teachers’ professional decisions, professional expansion and evolution, and their ability to have free will and agency over their careers. I want you to think about this. This antiquated way of thinking is teachers probably did used to stay a little more stagnant. The K team was the K team and the fourth grade team was the fourth grade team and the sixth grade team was the sixth grade team, right? And you had high school teachers who taught math for 30 years. I had them. I look back at my yearbook. I saw it on Facebook where these teachers, they taught until they retired. They taught until they retired.

The world is more dynamic. The world is more mobile. And people have the freedom and the will and the free agency to expand and evolve their experience many times over. We are no longer a stagnant society. We are very mobile. We are very active. We’re very dynamic. And as leaders, we want to bring this conversation to our communities and discuss it.

And we can navigate this narrative in a way that highlights the positive aspects of teachers who desire to evolve themselves and professionally grow and develop and to move themselves up. We want dynamic teachers. We want people engaging and being alive, not just rinse and repeat for 40, 50 years when one position.

So one of the things I suggested to my client was that she create this new narrative and share it with her community in advance, talking about it now. So this was back in March when all of the changes were starting. She had these conversations throughout the month of April and May, but we’re setting a tone.

We’re inviting people into a new mindset, into a new way of thinking about teaching, a new way of thinking about class assignments and teacher assignments. And this is true on both ends, like from the teacher’s perspective, the leader’s perspective, and the parent’s perspective, where we’re looking at the experience of the student, just like a customer, where no matter what grade level you’re in or who’s teaching, we want to have a standard of experience and we cultivate that, where our school is a brand, where our school, when you walk in, regardless of who’s serving your student, you’re going to get, hopefully, ideally, a similar experience, a standard of experience.

And then parents can expect, regardless of which teacher I have in, you know, the math department, I’m going to get the math experience. There’s an expectation of learning that will occur regardless of who’s teaching it. Or if you’re in elementary school, in the first grade, no matter what first grade teacher, who’s teaching first grade, our goal as a school and as a team is to provide a standard of experience, just like Nike does, regardless of who’s selling you the shoe for the corporate, you know, world, for the directors or for the managers, what they hope to obtain. And of course, it’s not perfect because we’re humans. We train people to have, these are the standards, these are the expectations, and this is the desire.

And we want to celebrate and embrace the fact that teachers are moving and changing, and we don’t know from year to year. Person A is teaching first grade this year, but they might be teaching fifth grade next year. And we honor and celebrate people who want to grow and learn. So as leaders, we have the option to set a new narrative when it comes to the expectations around staffing changes from year to year and create it in a way that is an empowering outcome, not just for teachers, but also a positive outcome for students and families.

And the key to sharing this new narrative with your community is to first think about how this updated perspective is better for them from their perspective. So, I think about this all the time, like, in order for people to get on board with something, they have to see the benefit of the change for themselves. Like, why would I change my mindset? Why would I change my belief system? Why would I change a behavior? Or why would I evolve my perspective if I don’t see the benefit of it? If it doesn’t serve me? I know that sounds like maybe people are being myopic or selfish or egotistical. It’s none of that. It’s just the way the brain works.

So what we have to see is in order for somebody to genuinely embrace a new perspective or understanding, a new mindset, they have to see what’s in this for me? Why would it be better for my child to have, you know, teachers who change grade levels every two or three years? Think about the answer to that. Imagine teachers who are willing to move grade levels or they want to advance themselves.

Think of the quality of instruction. Think of the perspective building. Think of the ability to classroom manage when you’ve taught kindergarten and you’ve taught sixth grade. You know, I don’t know exactly how it works in high school, but maybe you taught English, but now you’re also teaching history or you teach math and you teach science, whatever credentials. I know single subjects a little different, but expanding your capacity to teach different grade levels, ninth graders versus 12th graders, very different breed of human, 14 and 18 year olds, right? And the same is true with kinders and fifth graders.

So a teacher who can engage in different grade levels, in different curriculums, in different mindsets, contacts, work with different people, it expands their capacity professionally for them, which is better for kids. And imagine if you as a parent felt that no matter who was with your kid, there was a level of competency, a level of standard. And if we don’t get it right, just like if you go into Nike and there’s a defect in the shoe or you had a rude, you know, salesperson or maybe someone was having an off day or somebody was brand new and just didn’t know and your customer experience wasn’t great. It’s not that the goal is to be perfect and to always get it right. It’s not perfection, it’s intention.

And if somebody comes in, a parent and says, “Hey, this is not the experience I wanted. This is not working.” Okay, let’s work together to get it right. Let’s, you know, see what we can do. Let’s see what support we can provide to the teacher. Let’s see what support we can provide in the classroom. What is it from your child’s perspective? Do we do to enhance this experience? How can we solve this? And we look at all the ways. It shifts this focus from I have to have this individual to I want to create this experience. I want my child to have this experience, not this teacher.

So the reason a parent would want their child to have a particular teacher is because of the experience. Let’s separate out the person from the experience, and then as a staff, talk about what’s the experience that we want our children to have, our students to have, and our parents to have in every classroom, no matter what. Like there’s a standard of experience as they are basically our clients.

So think about this as you’re contemplating over the summer. I know you’ve just got a few weeks to go. Congratulations. But why would it be better for students if teachers were dynamic in their careers? Why would it be better for parents? How is it better for the school at large? The community at large when teachers are actively engaging in different capacities and that there are different assignments each year. Some people stay for a few years, some people stay for shorter time, longer time. That can even be dynamic.

But helping your community expand their perspective from the individual to the experience. So think about that over the summer, contemplate that. And what would you like your school experience to be, the set of standards, the brand you want to sell to your community? What’s the level of service we’re providing here regardless of the individual? One of the things I’m going to be taking EPC clients through in the fall is the teacher experience journey and the student experience journey and developing your approach to the upcoming year through the lens of the experience that you want to offer for students and staff members, and for yourself as well.

We’re doing this for everybody, for us, for them, for the greater good. It has to be a triple win here. So, think on this. Let me know your thoughts. I would love to hear the comments that parents have made and how you’ve handled it. I’d love to get your insights and perspective and wisdom. So come on in again to the Facebook group. Tell us everything. I want to hear from you. I look forward to meeting you online. And I will talk with you all next week. Take great care of yourselves. Talk to you soon. 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.