Ep #393: An Empowerment Meditation for School Leaders

Hello, empowered principals. Welcome to episode 393. 

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.

Hello, my empowered principals. Happy Tuesday, and welcome to the podcast. If this is the first podcast of The Empowered Principal podcast that you are ever listening to, I want you to know this is a very different kind of podcast than the other 392 episodes. I typically do interviews, I have client conversations, and I do teaching and concepts and offer strategies for navigating life and school leadership.

And today, I’d like to offer something very different. A tool that I use regularly for myself, and I’ve started using it with clients. And because this podcast serves so many thousands of school leaders, I want to offer this tool on the podcast. Because the experience of this tool, the transformation that this tool provides my clients and myself, is one of the most powerful transformations. And it helps my brain remind me that there is nothing more powerful than self-coaching, self-reflection, contemplation, identity work, internal personal development to impact my external experience as a leader, as a coach, as a mentor, and in my personal life.

So this podcast is different than the other Empowered Principal podcast. This podcast is an empowerment meditation. Let me set the context for this. Starting in 2022, I began a morning practice of connection, self-connection, and reflection. I wanted to connect with myself and with the universe, with the powers that are outside of me. Whether you believe in God, Holy Spirit, universe, Mother Nature, any higher power of your understanding, I felt a calling to connect to something bigger than me.

And I did this quite honestly out of desperation, but I also wanted to be inspired. I wanted to understand myself, my relationship in the world, my purpose, what my vision meant for me, for the world, for the field of education. So I do this morning practice in many forms. Some days I journal. Other days, I just simply look out the window and breathe to ground myself. Other days, I practice immense gratitude and appreciation for all of the gifts, blessings, people, and experiences I’ve had in my life.

But most days, what I use to start my day is a guided meditation. It helps me to hear the music and the words from other people to remind myself to connect and reflect with myself in the becoming of who I am, in the evolution of my identity. I want to identify as many different ways as possible. I want to evolve my identity over and over and over again because it allows me to experience the world through so many different lenses and perspectives.

And this last few years of my personal life has invited me into the practice of grounding myself and reconnecting with a higher power of my own understanding to reflect inward on who I am and what I want to become and who I want to be in this world. 

And what is so fascinating about the human experience is that most of our mind will focus out on all of the external circumstances that are happening, the chaos that’s going all around us, the things that are outside of our control. And we believe that we are here as school leaders to fix all of that, to change it, to handle it, to improve it, to guide it, to support it, and quite honestly, to suffer through much of our human life.

And have you noticed that, especially in school leadership, but I think it’s true in all areas of life, that life can feel like a series of challenge after challenge after challenge. And our brain will focus on, “Oh, another challenge, another conflict, another problem, another person who’s upset, another chaotic moment in the world.” And we focus on the challenges, but our life is also a series of success after success after success.

This flow of success and challenge, success and challenge, it’s always occurring in our human experience. And yet our mind tends to lean over and focus on the challenges and the hardships. And when it’s stuck in that cycle of overwhelm, it feels like we’re stuck with all the hardships coming at us and these little tiny moments of success. So 90% hard, 10% success, 90% hard, 10% success.

So in 2022, when the identity of my life as I knew it began to crumble, I called this an identity quake. I felt very untethered, and I was afraid. But thankfully, because of coaching, I was tuned in enough to observe my thoughts and emotions in relation to the set of circumstances that had been presented into my life. And though this experience or this situation was presented to me and through the experience, because I don’t know that I would have had the awareness without it, I learned that coaching our mind isn’t always sufficient.

And I’m here to stand on the mountaintops and say coaching is a brilliant tool. Intellectual contemplation is a wonderful thing, but it is truly only one aspect of our journey towards becoming the version of us that we desire to be, the leader we want to be for our staff, our students, for ourselves, for our bosses, for our district, and the version that we want to be personally with our friends, our family, our loved ones, and just in relationship with ourself.

So there is an aspect of this journey that requires us to tune into our own energy and reflect as much as possible and tune into the way we’re thinking and how we’re feeling and what we’re believing and where we think our limitations are. So learning how to ground yourself and regulate yourself when the body is having that emotional experience that the mind cannot control. When your mind is in fight or flight, I can think back to so many times where my body took over. And my mind wasn’t able to regulate my nervous system, regulate my emotional experience, the vibration, the intensity I was having inside of my body.

And I can remember so many days in school leadership where that emotional reaction that my body was having inside could not be overridden by trying to just think different thoughts or trying to use my mind to control my body. The fear, the frustration, the anger, the overwhelm, the sadness, the disempowerment, those emotions that I was experiencing during my school leadership journey, they were far more powerful at times than my ability to redirect my thoughts in the moment.

So this podcast is dedicated to offering you a moment to ground yourself at any time, particularly if your nervous system and emotional energy feels that you are unable to intellectualize it and to get yourself back on track from an intellectual cognitive standpoint with your prefrontal cortex. When your amygdala has taken over and your fight or flight has kicked in, we have to go into the body. We can’t necessarily start with the mind.

So, take a moment and close the door to your office or find a quiet private spot. Maybe you have to go sit in your car, but find a place on campus where you can close the door, close the blinds, and sit down. Sit in a chair and place your feet on the ground. You can put your hands on your lap or place one hand on your heart and one hand on your belly, whichever feels most comfortable for you. Close your eyes and take a deep, slow breath in. Hold it for a couple of seconds, and then release.

Take two more deep breaths in. Hold, and slowly release. Intentionally slow down your breathing. Slow breath in, hold, slow breath out.

In this moment, you are safe. Say this to yourself. In this moment, I am safe. In this moment, I am safe. Feel the truth of this statement. In this moment, I am safe. And sit in the truth of that statement.

Now imagine that in front of you is a dial. And this dial can slide all the way up and all the way down. And right now, the dial is at the very top. I want you to imagine holding onto the dial and slowly sliding it all the way down to the bottom. As we slide the dial down, we are turning down the chaos, turning down the pressure, turning down the volume, turning down the panic, turning down the anger, the fear, the frustration, slowly turning down the intensity of the day. Turn the dial all the way down to zero.

Now take a deep breath, knowing that the volume in this moment has been turned off, giving you space to breathe and to think. Breathe. Whatever situation you are facing in this moment, you are equipped to handle it. You don’t need to know what to do right now or how to solve this problem. You simply need to know that you are capable and equipped to handle it. Just as you’ve handled other challenges, you are equipped to navigate this one as well.

The hardest part of any situation is navigating the way it feels. So in this moment, you don’t need to solve anything. Say this to yourself, “I don’t need to solve anything right this minute.” I simply need to breathe through the emotions that this situation is generating for me. Say that with me. I simply need to breathe through the emotions that this situation is generating for me.

I can feel this emotion. I can allow this emotion. I can see this emotion. I can handle this emotion. This emotion feels highly uncomfortable, and when I breathe through it, I have power over it. This vibration in my body is temporary. I can allow it to vibrate and not react to it. This emotion that I’m feeling, this stress, this pressure, this frustration, this overwhelm, this pain, this fury, this grief, this heartache, this disappointment, the vibration of these feelings are simply vibrations. I can handle vibrations in my body.

I am not my emotions. The emotional experience is a part of the human experience, and my mind and body were equipped to handle this experience. I choose to acknowledge this experience, and I choose to remain empowered through this experience. Take a deep breath in. Hold, and release.

Sit with this truth, that empowerment is the ability to breathe and validate your feelings. It is the ability to acknowledge and allow yourself to feel your feelings without reacting to them. Empowerment is the ability to ground yourself and create perspective. It is the ability to see the truth that empowerment is always available to you in any set of circumstances. Say this to yourself, “Empowerment is always available to me.”

This is what empowerment looks like. Taking time for myself to recalibrate my mind and my body is essential to my well-being. Taking time to realign with the truth of who I am and to tap into my desires and to who I am becoming. The truth is that I am an empowered principal.

Take a deep breath in. Hold and release. I am safe. I am capable. I am empowered. Have a beautiful day. I love you so much. Take care. Bye.