Hello, empowered principals. Welcome to episode 409.

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. I have an interesting topic that I would like to discuss with you because I’ve noticed a pattern of this topic in conversation throughout the years as a coach, working with clients from all across the country. People from Canada and Mexico. I’ve had people from Europe, and so really this is a global phenomenon, and that just means it’s a human phenomenon.

So, I want to talk about the anxiety or fears that we have around people in positions of authority. So, I call this superintendent anxiety, but it could be any supervisor, boss, manager, direct person above you, anybody who is a superior to you who you view as having positional authority over you professionally at work, okay?

So, many of my clients will feel nervous, anxious, uneasy, downright afraid of their boss, of the person who’s observing them or who’s overseeing them, who is their supervisor. A lot of times for site principals or district leaders, it’s the superintendent or the school board. They’re all set up differently, but the majority of you have a direct supervisor, okay?

So, throughout the years, I’ve talked with people, and I’m like, what is it that bosses do that can feel unsettling, that feels uneasy to you? So the list were things like, they micromanage. They’re all up in our business, they nitpick at little things. They’re kind of focused on the details. Every little thing, they want to tell us what to do and how to do it at our sites. So, you might have somebody who’s micromanaging or nitpicking at every little thing or wanting their hand in the decisions and actions that you take at a site level, or even if you’re at the district level, they might be all up in your department, that kind of a thing, okay?

Other concerns were criticism. This was a big one. I fear being criticized, and bosses can come in and be very critical or very judgmental about your decisions or your actions or your approach to something. And because they have positional authority, they can express their thoughts and opinions about your decisions and actions, and it may come across as harsh or critical or judgmental, okay?

Some people fear constructive feedback. So, there’s a difference, in my opinion, between constructive feedback versus opinionated feedback. So, to me, constructive feedback is when it’s in it for you. That person is sitting down with you to walk you through what’s working, what could be working better, and how we might approach that in a different way, but their intention is to support you, to help you, to make things easier for you. So when you’re sitting down with a teacher, this is a great example. You’re giving constructive feedback. You want to help them.

Here’s what I’m observing from the outside, things you might not be able to pick up or see because you’re in it, you’re the one teaching. These are things that I can see from the outside, but I want to help you. I want to make teaching easier for you or feel better for you or smoother for you, or I want you to be able to communicate with your students better or connect with them. It’s when you’re in it for them. That’s constructive feedback.

Versus, opinionated feedback is when people are giving you feedback based on what’s in it for them, what they want you to do so they feel good or it serves them in some way. So they might say, I have a little feedback for you. I don’t like it when you do XYZ this way because it makes me feel this or people don’t like it or I look bad to the school board, you know, that kind of a thing.

So, be able to discern for yourself what you feel is constructive feedback and differentiate. When is it that I’m getting feedback that’s in it for me? It still might feel uncomfortable, but it’s a different kind of feedback than somebody who’s giving you opinionated feedback that’s in it for them. Like, I need you to change so that I can feel better about myself or that my image can be protected or something, right?

So, be mindful. Now, it’s not to say that you might not be afraid of either kind of feedback. It might be hard for you to sit down and receive feedback, and I’m going to talk about that in a second. But just observe if feedback feels scary for you, if you’re like, I don’t like to get feedback. What kind of feedback are you getting? What kind of feedback are you most afraid of? Or are you just afraid of all of it and why? We’ll get into that in a minute, okay?

Another thing that bosses can do is lack communication. They lack communication, conversation, connection, maybe their timeliness of their communication or the details of their communication. They omit things, forget to tell you things, they’re not timely, or maybe they aren’t good at connecting with you or having some compassionate or understanding. And they are, again, while they’re maybe well-meaning, and we’re not trying to sit here and just bag on them or criticize them, we are here to notice these are things that humans do when they’re in a leadership position. When they’re overwhelmed or they’re not sure of how to be connected or be compassionate or be understanding or how to effectively communicate, it can come across as a disconnect between you and your boss, okay?

Another thing that bosses will do is they will leverage their personal and positional authority, right? They will leverage positional authority. Basically, they will leverage their title, they will leverage their status, they will leverage their power as leadership. They will misuse title, status, power, and leverage it as a form of leadership. And there’s a difference, right? Between leading people and then leveraging leadership, what they consider to be leadership, but it’s actually leveraging their positional authority over you. I tend to call it fear and intimidation tactics, right? Where they’re like, well, because I said so, because I’m the boss, because I have this status, because I’m the one, because I have the power, that’s why you need to do XYZ.

That’s what I’m talking about when people use their position and, in quotes, coach, mentor, guide you, or tell you what to do because they’re this, then you have to do this, or you have to be this, you have to decide this. You can’t say no, kind of thing, okay?

Another thing that people will do is they will move people. They don’t like where you’re at, they don’t like you, they don’t like what you’re doing, they move you, or they simply fire you. Or, at the very least, but still not great, they might just talk behind your back, talk to people about people and gossiping, just not being constructive with their conversations about you. You might fear that they’re talking about you to other people, okay?

So when I think about these behaviors, when I look at this list of things people have shared with me over time, I take it to the next level. I go a little bit deeper. I take off the layer, and I’m like, why are the humans doing this? Why are the human leaders behaving this way? Why might they be doing it? Of course, it’s speculation, but we’re trying to understand them so that we can work with it instead of resisting and fighting against it. So, why might they be doing this? Fear of not having control. Think about it. When your parents told you because I said so, they wanted control, right? If they were micromanaging you, they wanted control. If they were worried that there wasn’t going to be an outcome, I see teachers do this, I see principals do it, I see district leaders do it.

We see state leaders do it, we see government people do it. We see all kinds of leaders who are afraid of not being in control or not being perceived that they have control. They’re afraid they’re not going to get the outcome that they want. They will leverage tactics to try and get what they want based on that positional authority. So there’s a lot of fear about not being in control or not looking like you’re in control.

And the other side to this coin is that they genuinely believe it is their responsibility. It’s my responsibility to be in control. It’s my responsibility, it’s my job, it’s my obligation to oversee everything, to be in control. I’m the last buck, right? It stops here with me. I have to be in control. So people might not be doing it so they feel in control. They might be doing it because they believe they should be in control.

Other times, people just get focused on the minutia. If you’re a very detailed person, and maybe you were a detailed teacher and you were a detailed principal, and now you’re a superintendent, you might be in the weeds. You might be not letting go of the details and the minutia, and you are so focused on the how and all of the details that you, in a position of district-level leadership, superintendency, the price of admission to those positions are your ability to trust the people working for you and to release and to let go and to empower them to do the detail work while you’re doing the visionary work, while you are in contemplation and reflection and studying and expanding and really building upon the vision that you have and creating that vision and bringing it into practice and inspiring and empowering others to do that versus being in the weeds, right?

As the superintendent, you’re not out, the soda machine’s out of soda, and you’re not running to Costco to pick up, you know, cases of soda to fill the soda machine or whatever, right? Like, there’s people that can do that for you. But there are superintendents, district-level leaders, site principals who get so in the minutia because they’re so concerned about controlling the how the outcome happens versus focusing on the reason, the why behind the outcome. Why are we doing this in the first place? Why does it matter if the soda machine is out? Why does it matter that there’s soda in it, right? Is that the priority, right? The things that happen on campus, does it matter where the kids line up? You don’t like where they line up, but it works for the school. What’s the outcome? That kids are, there’s a system in place, kids know where to go, teachers know where kids are lining up and why. Buses lines are in order, dismissal is running fairly smoothly. Kids are getting safely on buses and getting home. The goal is safe dismissal, safe transportation, safely home into the arms of their families.

And sometimes we come and say, “Oh, this dismissal looks terrible. It’s chaotic.” But if it’s working for the school and they’re not having a problem with it, but we’re coming in as district leaders doing that, it can feel like we’re getting into that micromanaging and focusing on the minutia. So they might be doing that again because they’re more focused on the how it gets done versus the what needs to get done and why, okay?

A huge reason that we do what we do in leadership is because we have an image as a leader. We have an ego as a leader, we have a reputation as a leader. And as people who want to have a positive image, have a positive reputation, we want people to like us, we want people to believe in us, to trust us, to count on us, to value our leadership and our approach. Bosses can want to insist that you take action, make decisions, that you act in a way in accordance with their image, their ego, their reputation. They want you to align with decisions, actions, communications, behavior that aligns with what they value, what they like, their identity, their opinions, their approach, their way of doing business, okay?

It sounds like it’s very self-centered, but a lot of times it really isn’t because we all do it in a way. We all want to be liked, we all want to have a clean reputation, a clean image, meaning just that people respect us, appreciate us, value us. And so we can easily slip into making decisions based on how it might appear, what it might look like, what our reputation will become, okay?

And when people are in leadership positions and maybe they are very introverted or they’re not super people, which we have plenty of introverted people in education just because we’re in the business of human development and the business of people, doesn’t mean everybody is this super outgoing, want to talk to everybody kind of person. So sometimes, it can be that we want to keep people at arm’s length. So it can look like aloofness, it can look like distance, it can look like a disconnect.

And other times, when people are worried about thinking they should know everything when they don’t. So have you ever had a teacher or a parent or even a student ask you a question you didn’t know the answer and you felt silly and you felt kind of goofy and you felt awkward and clumsy and embarrassed that you didn’t know? And so then you kind of like acted like you knew? Or you like deflected and kind of acted like a little aggressively. I’ve seen people like go into fear and intimidation tactics when they don’t know what they’re saying and they puff up, and they’re just like trying to make it sound like they know. They don’t really know, or how dare you ask the question, or, you know, that’s not an important question. They belittled the question or they belittle the content or the conversation because they are embarrassed and don’t want people getting too close to them or they don’t want people to know they don’t know that they’re actually human and they don’t know everything.

So, again, getting very caught up in what it looks like versus what it actually is. But really what this comes down to is there are times as leaders when we don’t know. We’re supposed to be leading and we actually just, we don’t know what we’re doing. We don’t know for sure how to mentor this person, how to coach them, how to inspire them. We’re not sure how to prioritize that. There’s so many things to do, so we end up not mentoring, not coaching, not leading. It’s just easier to move people on and fire them or move them around than to actually do the work of mentoring and coaching and building somebody up. It’s easier to coach them out than to coach them up.

So, if you are a person who finds yourself afraid of your boss, what are you actually afraid of? I’m going to give you three questions to contemplate, okay? Number one, what are you afraid of? Are you afraid of you’re going to get in trouble? You’re going to do something wrong? Are you’re going to miss something, you’re going to forget something, you’re not going to do something? So, a fear of getting in trouble, doing something wrong or not doing something. Are you afraid to disappoint them? You don’t want to let them down. You want to be the A plus student, you want to get the gold star. You want to make sure, you know, like as a firstborn child that you’re doing everything right. You’re afraid to disappoint.

Is it feedback? Are you afraid of feedback? Are you afraid you’ll be harshly criticized or judged or really raked over the coals unfairly or treated unfairly somehow? Or are you afraid you might not be heard? That it’s just their way or the highway. There’s no room for voice or choice. You’re not going to be heard, you’re not going to be listened to, you’re not going to be acknowledged, you’re not going to be taken seriously?

Or are you afraid if something goes wrong, I’m going to lose my job, public scrutiny, it’s going to be in the paper, public embarrassment, public shame? This is where I say like our brains can really go to the worst-case scenario. Like, we’re going to be excommunicated off the planet. We’re going to have to move to Mars or move to the moon because we’re going to lose everything, and the end of the world will happen for us professionally, right? And it feels like that sometimes. I understand. I’m with you on that.

So question number one to contemplate, what are you afraid of? What are you actually afraid of? Get specific. Number two, what do you think will happen? If one of these things happened, let’s say you forgot something, missed something, or you disappointed them, or you got some feedback, or you weren’t allowed to speak up, or, you know, somebody said, “Maybe you’re not cut out to be a school leader. Maybe I’m going to move you.”

Let’s say the things happened. What do you think will happen as a result of your fear? So you’re afraid of something happening. What do you actually think will happen in response to that, in reaction to that? You think it’s going to be a write up? You’re going to get scolded? Are you going to have to feel emotions of inadequacy, insufficiency, incompetency, embarrassment, shame? Or do you fear that your frustration, if you’re ever being silenced, that it will turn into a deep resentment and you end up working in resentment in silence and stewing over it all the time and just being unhappy as an employee? Or are you afraid it’s going to build up to the point where you might blow up or lash out and say something that could cause an issue? Okay?

Sometimes we think that our boss is just, it’s the more work. Like, every time we go to a meeting with this person, more work. Or we need to completely change, going in a different direction. I need to change myself. We need to do more work, a lot of effort here. People are going to be unhappy. I need to people please, I need to go against my values or my vision. I have to get out of alignment in order to just do this job, right? That is a fear, fear of misalignment is a big fear for people.

And then if you go down the worst-case scenario train, oftentimes we fear like if we get fired, which feels like the worst thing that could ever happen, we’ll never land a job. We’ll never get another job. Our career is ruined, our life is ruined, our finances are ruined. So we can go down this really dark hole of life is over if something goes wrong.

So question number two is, what do you think will happen? You have to answer these specifically for you. So, what are you afraid of? What do you think will happen? And then the third question is, why might I be feeling this way? Why do I think I’m so afraid? Why am I afraid of my boss? Why am I afraid of somebody in authority? What’s coming up for me? Most likely, there’s something from your past triggering you, whether you’re experience as a kid, you had a fear of authority, you feared your parents, you feared your older siblings. Perhaps it was a coach or a teacher. Maybe you had somebody in college that was really harsh on you, but there’s a reason why that you were feeling this way. It doesn’t just come out of nowhere.

So allowing yourself to explore the truth of what’s coming up, what’s being triggered and why you’re feeling this way. Oftentimes, we’ll find like, “Oh, this person reminds me of somebody in my life who, XYZ,” or “This happened to me as a kid, or this or that.” Past experiences are coming into the current moment, and that’s where we feel disempowered. It’s where we feel almost like we are, well, literally our power’s been taken away. We are not in positions of authority, internal authority. We lose that authority. We feel like a kid where we have limits. We have limitations to what we can say, what we can do, our opinions, our ideas, who we can be based on the people in authority, the people on the pedestals, okay? We put people in positional authority positions on a pedestal.

So contemplate these three questions for yourself because it’s going to take you deeper into the emotions behind and the understanding of why you feel your nervous system feels triggered and your emotional energy is so triggered when you are interacting with your boss, your superintendent, and why you have so much anxiety around either communicating with them, being in the same room with them, having a conversation with them, or receiving some kind of feedback from them. So contemplate those three questions and see what comes up for yourself.

And if you would like to go deeper, you’ve got a couple of options. Number one, you can post in the public Facebook group, the Empowered Principal Facebook group. It’s a public group, free, open to everybody. Come on in and ask your questions in there. Number two, you can join EPC, which is the Empowered Principal Collaborative. It’s a group coaching program for site and district leaders. You’re welcome to join us in there where you can ask questions, you can get support, love, compassion. It feels like a big hug when you’re in there. We talk about really deep things. We take leadership to the next level, but we also clean up some of these things that are obstacles in our way.

And number three, if you really want to dive deep and you want a more personalized, private experience, you want to have these conversations, maybe something’s triggered you that’s very traumatic, and you want to talk in a one-on-one setting. I do offer a limited number of one-on-one coaching positions in my coaching program. So I do have private coaching, I have group coaching, and then we have the free group where you can go in and ask your questions in the Facebook group, and I will do my best to answer them, to respond to them, and to support you, okay?

All right. With that said, I know this topic actually takes you really deep into who you are as a leader, who you want to become as a leader, and what’s preventing you from expanding your empowerment, to not feel afraid, to be in collaboration and connection with your boss, to feel a level of equality as you’re speaking with your boss and collaborating and having conversations around school leadership as a team. And the ideal is that we communicate and connect with one another and we see the power in each of us and the contribution that each of us gives, not from a place of fear and intimidation or anxiety or worry or self-doubt, but from a place of empowerment and confidence and certainty and assuredness that we have something to offer, that we have something of value to give, and our opinion matters, and our voice matters, and our leadership matters.

So, contemplate these three questions. You can reach out in the Facebook group, you can join EPC, or you can connect with me for one-on-one coaching, and I would love to support you. Have a beautiful week. I love you all. Take good care of yourselves, and I will see 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 407.

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 beautiful, empowered principals. Happy Tuesday. Welcome to the podcast. If you’re new around here, we are so happy you are here. And hey, if you are in the fall dip and the burn is real right now, you’re overwhelmed, you’re fatigued, you’re discouraged, you are exhausted, just know that combination is what’s creating the fall dip. It’s a collective little funkiness that people get into. And when people are feeling discouraged, disappointed, a little fatigued or a lot fatigued, and a lot of overwhelm, you add those components together, those feelings into one, and the outcome is the fall dip.

And when people get into the fall dip, what happens is they start to vent. They might commiserate. They might blame a little bit. They might ask you to come and do the heavy lifting for them because they’re tired. Or they want you to direct them or you to tell them what to do because they’re overwhelmed. Or they try to overwork and get in the overwhelm cycle even more because they’re spinning out of control so bad.

That’s the fall dip. When collectively the energy on campus, the frequency of your campus is in a little bit of a funk. And it’s normal. You’re not alone. I haven’t talked to a school leader across this nation that hasn’t felt this experience, this phenomenon that happens. I just coined it the fall dip because I see it happen in the fall after the peak and all the hype of a brand new school year and the kickoff of the year and getting ready, and that anticipation wears off, and we get into a routine. We have the whole year ahead of us. And we’re like, whoa.

Now the work is starting. The expectations are real. The demands are mounting. The deadlines are approaching. We’ve got to get these kids learning. We’ve got to get the test scores. We’ve got to make sure they’re making progress. And all of that internal pressure and external pressure ramps up. The volume goes to level 10 and people start to worry and feel anxious and get stressed and freak out. And when they’re in that, their nervous system is in fight or flight. And they start to feel a little funky. They start to be a little crabby. They might be kind of complaining, or whiny, or venting, blaming, all of those things.

So, when that happens, first of all, know it’s normal. Second of all, join EPC. We’re talking about it. There will be other dips. Each season has a little bit of its own dip. There’s a winter dip, a spring dip, and even summer has its own dip if you can believe that or not. It happens as we’re thinking about coming back to school. Not when we’re at school, but when we’re thinking about it, we get a little bit like, oh no. No. And we grasp onto summer and we feel that little dip in feeling that summer’s not long enough, that summer needs to last longer, that we need more time, that we’re not looking forward to going back to school. You know that feeling when your angst when you open up your emails and there’s like 300 emails? Yeah. So even summer has its own dips.

Okay. So, the fall dip is right now. It’s happening. And there are ways that you can redirect it, you can reframe it, you can navigate it in a way that’s much more empowering. So, the fall dip class that I just taught, it speaks to that specifically, and in EPC, we take individual circumstances and we work through them to help you stay empowered throughout your entire week. So, I invite you in to the Empowered Principal Collaborative. You and a friend bring, bring them all. The more the merrier. We love to create community, to create a sense of safety and belongingness and love and appreciation and all of those things we’re looking for at our school from our communities, from our families, from our staff. We just create it for ourselves here. We love on each other. We support one another. It’s a beautiful community to be in. It’s a part, I believe, the empowered principal movement, which is changing the experience of education for leaders, teachers, and students.

All right. I had a client who was very upset. She scheduled a one-on-one with me because she’d had an incident with a child and it started off as a normal behavior situation. So incident occurs, it gets reported, she initiates an investigation, and eventually upon conversing with students who were directly involved, the student who was accused of the behavior admitted to the principal that yes, in fact, they did the thing that they were told on for, that they were accused of. Okay.

So, this can be any student, any behavior. We’ve seen it happening before. So, student admits it to you. You’re writing up your reports, your investigation. You’re letting people at home know, the adults at home know the situation and your perspective on it and your decision around the consequences that are going to follow that are appropriate to the behavior.

The student goes home and says to the parents or to the family members that are guardians, no, I didn’t do that. And they are adamant. They did not do it. They, I don’t know what the principal is talking about. I never said that. I never did that. And now, the adult at home is like, wait a minute. Principal said this. My kid said that. And they come to you and they confront you because they’re confused. The parent says, wait a minute, you told me this and they told me that.

Now, we’re in a situation where it’s someone’s telling the truth and someone’s not. We’ve got a right or wrong, good, bad, we’ve got an all or none situation here, and it doesn’t feel good because it feels like it’s a win loss. And when that student comes in with the parent, you say, okay, well, we can resolve this. The parent tells their version, the child tells their version and they’re saying, no, I didn’t do it. And you’re looking at the two and feeling at a loss, feeling like you’ve been called a liar, that you have not told the truth, that you are the one not telling the truth.

That can feel very confrontational. It can feel very attacking. And if we’re not mindful of our body’s reaction to that attack or to that accusation or to even the inference that we might not be telling the truth, we may react in defensiveness. I know I do. Just ask my sister. When accused, my fight or flight will kick in faster than I can even brain think and I will go right into defensiveness, and I will fight right back. Or if I feel like the attack is too threatening, I will shut down. I will literally just stop talking. I will leave the room if I can. So, my fight or flight will choose all three options if possible. It will try to fight and then it will shut down and then it will leave the room.

So, know the signals in your body, know the triggers. When somebody’s speaking in a room and a child is like, no, I never said that. I don’t know why the principal is saying that. I never did it. All of a sudden, now you feel like it’s kind of this two against one and they’re looking at you like, why are you saying this about my child? Why are you saying this? I never said that. And you start to feel a little bit like, what is happening here? Why is this turning on me? Am I being gaslit?

So, when, first of all, I want to point out that in that moment, when a child is saying something differently to a parent than to you, we want to consider why that might be happening. And I also want you to consider that in that moment, if you react and you start to get defensive, or you start to call that kid out or pressure them back and you’re in fight mode and you’re attacking back, or you’re like pedaling backwards and feeling like, well, maybe I was wrong or maybe I’m doubting myself. If you are in fight or flight mode, the person in the room at that moment who has the floor is the child. The child is owning that conversation. The child is leading that conversation, which is very important to remember because we as leaders are striving to be the most emotionally regulated person in the room.

Now, we’re humans. It doesn’t always work that way, but it’s our goal. And we take classes or we take courses, we hire a coach, we listen to podcasts like this, we jump into EPC, we read books, we do things that help us learn tricks and tips and strategies on how to emotionally regulate ourselves because we want to be in a leadership position. But in that moment, when the kid’s saying something different and you’re feeling called out, they have the floor. They’re taking the lead. They’ve got the mic. And if you attack back, you’re pressuring that kid to wait for them to speak up and put them on the hot seat and make them feel cornered.

Now, if you think about why a child would tell you one thing, and you know the truth of it and you probably documented it, but even so, they go home and tell their parents something different, a couple of reasons why this happens. The primary reason is that the child is afraid to death. Remember how when you got in trouble, you would think to yourself, my dad’s going to kill me, my mom’s going to kill me. Like we literally thought death was upon us if we did something wrong, said something wrong, behaved in a way that was unbecoming or not alignment with our family’s values. We were so afraid.

And in that childlike state, when you are that afraid, especially if you had parents who were physically punishing you or really emotionally punishing you or maybe punishments were so severe. Maybe you were over punished and so you had a legitimate fear, whether that was a physical punishment or like you were grounded for life or grounded for a month, or you had all of your technology taken away, something that felt so threatening, so fearful that in a moment of panic, the child is going to do whatever they can to try and avoid that pain, whether that’s physical pain, mental pain, emotional pain, psychological pain. We don’t know what happens to kids at home.

So, if they’re that afraid to tell the truth at home, it could be that they’re just so afraid of the consequence or they’re afraid of the reaction, or something’s going to be withdrawn from them, or they’re going to receive physical punishment. Now, there are times when that does happen and then there are times when just children are afraid of a regular punishment. They’re not in danger. They’re not in danger physically or mentally or emotionally, psychologically, but they just don’t want the consequence. They don’t want their phone taken away for a day or a week. They don’t want to have to listen to the lecture, or they don’t want to have to repair and apologize. That’s different, right?

But we want to be mindful that when a child says one thing and then goes and says another thing that they are in such fear that they are in fight or flight. They’re so afraid versus how dare you come in and call me a liar or infer that I’m lying. I would never lie. That’s on you. You’re the liar. We pick up the rope. We get in the tug of war with the child and now we’re both on the hot seat. Who’s right, who’s wrong? And we’re throwing that kid under the bus when we go into a tug of war with them. So, consider why a child would say one thing to you and then go home and say something else to their family.

Of course, they’re freaking out. They’re so afraid. They’re in that young little mindset. They don’t know an alternate way. They don’t feel that they can handle the public embarrassment of being, you know, in trouble in front of their friends. You know how embarrassing it was to be in trouble in front of your friends at school? And then to go home and get in trouble in front of your siblings or to have your parents be upset with you. That felt terrible. These are people that you love, you care about, or you’re genuinely afraid of them. You’re genuinely afraid of what they’re going to say or what they’re going to do. Are they going to withdraw emotionally? Are they going to mentally, verbally say something that’s so hurtful that causes trauma? Are they going to physically punish somebody that causes physical pain and shame and embarrassment?

We don’t know. So we want to be mindful of that, right? So when you’re accused of lying, notice your own reaction to that. Notice if the child is now trying to have the floor because they feel no power. They are so afraid. And when you stay in alignment with your truth, you know what the child said and you also understand why they might have told the story that they told at home. Then we can approach with some compassion in, tell me more. What came up for you? I’m hearing this one story here. I believe this is what I heard you say. The story sounds different. We just want to get to the bottom of it. Is there something that you’re afraid of? And approaching the question.

And what’s interesting is in this case, when I asked the principal how she ended up handling it, she actually handled it in a very empowered way. Even though she was feeling attacked on the inside and after the fact, she was stewing on, how dare that child call me a liar. The way she handled it was, tell us more, what are you afraid of? Let’s talk this through. And the parent was actually very understanding and was not overreacting, at least in front of the principal to the child. And appreciated and understood why the child was saying what they were saying. Eventually, the child, through conversation, did admit to the action, the behavior, the words that were said.

And when the principal is not trying to defend their honesty, their truth, their integrity, and worried that people are going to think that you’re lying, then you can be in the mindset of service. When you’re in empowerment, you are in the mindset of service. How can I serve this family? Let’s work with the parent and the child to work through it together hand in hand, knowing it’s just a developmental stage for kids. It’s a natural thing to want to get out of trouble. And they’ve learned that lying sometimes does work and does get them out of a pickle once in a while. Sometimes it works, which is why we lie.

And hey, when someone calls us a liar, I’m going to go 2.0 on you here. The truth is that we all lie. We don’t call it lying when we grow up. We say, oh, I’m sorry, I can’t come to that party. I’m not feeling well, when really you just want to lay on the couch and watch Netflix and you don’t want to go mingle. It’s not really a lie. I just don’t feel like it. Or our husband says, did you get the oil change in the car? You’re like, oh, yes, I was going to do that. I totally got overwhelmed at work when really you just forgot.

We do say little white lies we call them, but we are telling something we know isn’t exactly the truth or omitting the truth of the full truth. And look, it’s not to say you’re out of integrity or you’re a bad person, and we make it mean, oh, we’re a bad person when we lie. No, every human on the planet doesn’t tell the full truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help you God all of the time. We want to lean into the fact that, yes, it’s understandable that sometimes we say things in a way that makes us feel more comfortable about saying no or about forgetting or about not doing something we said we would do, or about dropping the ball. It happens.

So we can lean into, yeah, sometimes I do. Officer, why were you speeding? Oh, I really have to go to the bathroom or I’m late to or my grandmother’s dying. We say some crazy stuff. When we feel like we’re going to get in trouble, when we feel like the consequences are going to be so painful, we will say things in a way that we try to smooth it out. So, can you embrace the fact that yeah, I understand why kids try to wiggle out of pain because we try to wiggle out of pain. We try to make our answers or our choices or our forgetfulness or when we drop the ball, we try to make that more comfortable for ourselves and less uncomfortable for the others around us. When our husband’s like, oh, okay, you just got busy at work, then he’s not upset that you just dropped the ball and didn’t get the oil changed. You hear where I’m going with this? Okay.

Lean into it. There is truth in that in this moment, you are telling the full truth and you were sharing very openly. And yes, it’s also equally true that sometimes we do soften our responses or the reason behind something because we don’t want to take that full radical accountability, relentless ownership of our humanness to say, oh my gosh, you’re right. I forgot to call. Let me do that and I’ll get the oil change this weekend. Or let me make an appointment. Oh, you’re right. That was something I said I would do and I didn’t. Or I would love to come to the party, but in full honesty, I don’t feel like I have the energy to mingle. Can I take a rain check?

So I like to lean into slightly uncomfortable truth because one, it makes me remember that I am a person of truth, even when I’m also a human who might soften the truth in order to not hurt somebody’s feelings or to get out of something painful or to forgive myself for being human and forgetting and dropping the ball. So play with that this week. See how it lands for you. And we can embrace that we all don’t always tell the truth, but we can embrace the truth of our integrity knowing that we’re still a good person and we are telling the truth and we don’t need to let children take the stage, call us a liar, or infer that we’re lying, and then pick up the rope and have a tug of war with them. Okay?

Go be human, be empowered. Have the most beautiful week and I’ll talk to you next week. Take great care of yourselves. 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.