Ep #398: Drop the Rope: How to End Power Struggles

Hello, empowered principals. Welcome to episode 398. 

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. Happy new school year. Welcome to the 2025-2026 school year. I am delighted to be here with you today. And hey, if you are new to the podcast, if you’re a brand new principal and you just found The Empowered Principal Podcast, we’re so happy you’re here. Welcome.

I adore each and every one of you. I love my listeners, love my clients, love my audience. And this podcast is so special and near and dear to my heart because it provides a space for you to think differently and expand differently and to problem solve differently and to feel differently. So, welcome to this podcast. And if you enjoy this podcast, please share it with your colleagues. We really want as many people as possible to feel their empowerment, to step into the identity of an empowered principal. And this podcast, we bring it. We bring it. We bring it.

So, a short and sweet episode on a little story I have from a client of EPC last spring. I’ve been thinking about this conversation we had and I realized I haven’t shared it on the podcast. So I wanted to briefly share this with you. I think it will be highly valuable for you to implement as you’re entering into the new year.

This past spring, during one of our EPC sessions, it was towards the end of the school year, was one of our last few sessions. One of our clients was sharing a story about an ongoing conflict that she was having with a teacher, and the teacher was stating to the principal, “I don’t trust you. I don’t trust this process.” She was blaming the process. She was blaming the principal.

And the principal came into EPC and said, “Hey, I’m doubting myself. I’m fearing that I’m making a mistake. Maybe I misspoke, misstepped. Maybe I didn’t follow a process. Maybe something I did was wrong.” So immediately as soon as the teacher was deflecting and redirecting and attempting to project her own thoughts and feelings onto the principal, the principal received that. So something I want to say right here is that when we’re engaging with other people, we are bodies of energy. We energetically feel other people’s emotions. Emotions are energy, and we can transfer that energy. That energy can transfer to us or we can transfer energy to somebody else.

If you’ve ever been kind of super excited, and you’re super really in a good mood, everything’s going great, and then you get around a womp person, their womp energy, you can be like, “Oh, bummer. Like, that’s bringing me down, man. Don’t bring down the vibe.” But it can change your energy or vice versa. Maybe you’ve been kind of having a rough day and then somebody comes in, their energy is so happy, so excited, and they cheer you right up and your energy transfers from like being down to being up. Energy is transferable.

And we want to be intentional about understanding our energy and also protecting our energy so that we are in charge of our energy and we are not victim to the whim of other people’s emotional energy, okay? So I want you to notice that this teacher was coming in with very negative energy, you could call it. She was blaming, deflecting, redirecting, projecting, and the principal was saying, “Hey, this is putting me into question mode, into contemplation mode,” which is perfect. That’s perfectly fine. That is the place to go to say, “Hey, wait a minute. What is happening here?”

So I want you to think about when people are blaming, deflecting, redirecting conversations, and projecting their energy onto you, what the intention is behind that. People deflect in an attempt to delay conversation. They’re going to say, “Hey, wait a minute. It’s you.” They’re blaming. They’re deflecting the blame back onto you and you’re like, “Whoa.” Now you have to stop, delay conversation. It’s a tactic. It’s a strategy. Now, it’s typically subconscious. They didn’t go into your office with the intention of deflecting the blame, but they might feel very defensive and in response to that defensiveness, they deflect. But they want to delay the conversation because they don’t want the experience, the emotional experience of taking ownership of that conversation that you’re going to have with them.

People will redirect to another topic or to refocus the energy to distract from the original topic. So when there’s a redirection, you’ll see this all the time where, you know, somebody’s trying to have a conversation and then it jumps topics. Why? Trying to distract from the original topic, trying to avoid the discomfort of the conversation at hand.

People will project their feelings and their own actions back onto you. “Well, you’re the one who started it.” “Oh no, you’re the one.” If you’ve ever felt like you’ve tried to bring something up with a teacher, staff member, or even a personal friend or a partner or spouse, and they say, “Well, you did this. Well, you did that.” They’re projecting back onto you, trying to redirect the conversation, trying to deflect what they’ve done, trying to go around the original conversation and start up something else. They want you to doubt yourself, question yourself so that you slow down the energy of the original conversation.

So this was happening with one of the clients in EPC, and here is what I recommended. It will feel uncomfortable to hear this recommendation, but I want you to contemplate it. Here’s what I said to her. Drop the rope. Imagine the analogy of a game of tug of war. In the game of tug of war, it takes two people to pull at the rope. For there to be tension between two people, if the rope is energy and it’s connecting you to that other person, both people on both ends must be pulling at the rope for there to be tension in the rope. If one person or the other drops the end of the rope, the tension drops. The tension in the rope lags and it goes falls to the ground.

There is a disconnect. When one person disconnects, detaches from that attachment, there is no longer energy being transferred back and forth. So when you’re in a game of tug and war, for example, when we feel we are right, we feel very justified, very self-righteous that we are right. We have facts, we have data, we have information. We have proof. We pull at the rope to prove we are accurate. We’re tugging to prove we are accurate.

When we feel we’ve been wrongly accused, when we’ve been blamed, when we feel that blame is inaccurate, we will tug with defensiveness. We will do anything to try and prove ourselves not wrong. We will tug, we will engage, we will attach to defensiveness, we will pull with defensiveness, and we will engage in a tug of war.

When we feel that somebody’s lying to us or we feel they are withholding information or there’s something we feel energetically that they’re doing that’s an omission or they’re lying to us or they’re hiding something from us, we get engaged. We pick up the rope and we pull. We tug to try and corner them. We try to catch them in their lie.

Instead of picking up the rope and pulling and engaging in a tug of war, drop the rope. Know your truth without them needing to validate it. Know your truth without them needing to validate your truth. Know your truth without you needing to defend it. Know your truth without needing them to agree with you. Know your truth without needing to attack back. Know your truth without them not dropping the rope. They’re still pulling on one end, but you’ve dropped it. What happens? If they pull hard enough, they fall on their backside. They go boom, boom on their bum, right?

Drop the rope. Dropping the rope means aligning to what feels true for you. Squeaky clean truth, taking a peek at yourself. What about what the person is saying is true? Yep, that’s true. And you know what? You can agree with them and still be in agreement with your truth. There is no one universal truth when it comes to humans. There’s perspectives. That’s it. Perspectives. You have a perspective, they have a perspective. Get clean, squeaky clean with your truth, with your perspective. Be in agreement with your perspective and be open to hearing their perspective.

You can drop the rope by saying, “Yes, I’m human. Yes, it could be true that I misspoke. It could be true that I missed.” Your perspective is valid and mine is as well. Looking for the truth in their words and looking for the truth in your words. Dropping the rope means that you have the capacity to hold space for both perspectives to be present. It doesn’t mean you back off. It means they can be upset and you can move forward. It means you may have made a mistake in the process and you need to rectify that and reconcile it, repair it, whatever, and move on.

It may mean that nothing’s gone wrong on your end and they are just in a great amount of fear, a great amount of disbelief, or rejecting the truth or a lack of any ownership of their actions and behavior. And we can understand that people are afraid, afraid of ownership, afraid of consequences, so they abdicate that responsibility by blaming, redirecting, trying to project it onto you.

If you are squeaky clean, you don’t need a tug of war game. You simply drop the rope, allow them to feel their feelings, conduct yourself in a way that feels in alignment and true for you, and allow them to have their feelings without engaging in a tug of war. So practice dropping the rope this year.

It will feel like an ego death. It will feel like you are not honoring yourself, but the truth is that you are honoring exactly yourself. When you know you are truthful, when you know you are in alignment, you do not need to pull at the rope. You’ve decided my perspective is solid. It’s on the foundation upon which I choose to believe. This is my version of my understanding of my perspective of my truth. Or maybe there is some insight from that person. Maybe there is something from their perspective you can glean to clean up your perspective.

If your perspective perhaps is clouded with a little bit of blame and abdication and projection, clean that up first. Allow yourself to hear. It goes both ways. But if you can drop the rope and just listen to the perspective, check in with your own perspective, align it to what you believe is the truth to the best of your ability for you, it will feel squeaky clean. It will feel aligned. It might not feel good, but it feels truthful. It feels aligned. You know what it’s like to be locked into your alignment. Dropping the rope is what allows you to lock into your alignment.

Give that a try this year and let us know how it goes. Come on into EPC. I will teach you how to drop the rope. Have a beautiful week. Talk to you next week. Take 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.