Ep #414: It’s Time to Talk About What’s Happening in Education

Hello, empowered principals. Welcome to episode 414.

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 and, I can’t believe I’m saying this, but happy December. December 2025 is here. The end of the calendar year. My goodness. Wow.

There is so much to reflect on, so much to celebrate, and I can’t wait to chat with you about all of the things coming up in the world of the Empowered Principal, the Empowered Principal Collaborative. I have a couple of great programs that are dropping, a brand new one that’s coming out this coming week. So, if you’re listening to this on Tuesday, my new program called Luxury Leadership for School Leaders, hosted by the Empowered Principal. I have just created this. I am so excited about it. It has so much energy, so much depth in such a short period of time. It’s a three-day masterclass that will take you through the concept of empowering yourself through a luxurious school leadership experience.

Now, I know luxury and school leadership don’t often go together. Your brain does not connect those two dots, but my brain has, and I’m inviting you into luxury leadership, creating a luxurious experience as a school leader. There is so much that I have learned about the value of luxury and the acknowledgment of luxury in my life, personally and professionally, and I want to share it with you. I want to enhance your experience as school leaders. I want you to love your life and your career. This three-day masterclass is going to do that.

And we’re also launching The Empowered Principal Mid-Year Reboot. You guys have heard of this before. I do this every year in January. It’s the mid-year for us. Actually, not even quite. We still have six months to go. And the mid-year reboot is happening in January. You can sign up for that. I’ll have the links down below for you to sign up for those two courses. If you sign up for EPC, the Empowered Principal Collaborative, you will get access to both of these master courses for free. It’s a part of your membership when you are in the Empowered Principal Collaborative. Otherwise, you can just purchase them a la carte and enjoy them individually. But if you want the full experience and you want access to everything, join in EPC.

When you join EPC, you get full access to all of my programs that I have previously offered and any new programs that I develop within the 2026 calendar year. So if you join now, you have access to EPC for a full year, and you’ll have access to everything in the world of the Empowered Principal included in your membership. So, keep that in mind.

All right. I would like to have a conversation with you. If you are listening to this, I am speaking to you individually. It’s time to have a conversation. It’s time to talk. Not because you’ve done something wrong, not because somebody’s upset at you, but I want to connect with you one-on-one here right now. I’m just going to share with you very openly, very vulnerably, and very candidly about my understanding of, my observation of the schools, particularly here in the US.

Now, I know a lot of you are from out of the country and you are observing what’s going on here in the United States, and that’s a beautiful thing for you. And I appreciate your heartfelt wishes and concern as we navigate the political energy in our country right now.

I’m here for school leaders. I’m here to support you. I’m here to mentor, to coach, to be a sounding board. I’m here to appreciate you and celebrate you. And I’m here to be honest and open and vulnerable and real. And I want to invite you into a conversation that’s talking about the truth of what is happening in our schools.

There is a very distinct duality going on, a very distinct contrast going on, and I feel so much dissonance right now. Yes, I’m sitting here talking about how to have a more luxurious experience as a school leader, and I believe that with all my heart that it is possible. I also believe it is possible for teachers to have a more luxurious teaching experience as a teacher. And I think it’s possible for students to have a more luxurious experience as students, as they are learning, as we are learning as adults, as they are learning as students, as we are learning as leaders.

I do believe it is possible to tap into a frequency that is a more luxurious experience in our schools. And I also am very aware of how nothing feels luxurious right now, how it feels very all or none, that everything is falling apart, that nothing seems to be working, that everybody is stressed out. There is an extreme amount of pressure and tension. There is discord. There is conflict. We are in conflict with ourselves, with other people, with other people’s values, with the very essence of why we get up and come to school and why we are educators. We are grappling with our purpose, with our value system, with our intentions, with the purpose of school.

We’re wondering, why do students need to come to school other than compliance? Why do we have such strict laws on compliance? There’s the history of that compliance and there’s the current moment. We’re struggling with articulating the value of what we offer. We’re struggling to articulate the value to ourselves, the purpose of school for us. We’re wondering, what is the purpose of school? What is the value of school? What’s the value for us? What’s the value for teachers? What’s the value for students? And what we have been identifying and labeling and communicating as the value, people aren’t buying. They’re not feeling the value of that offer.

And I’ve been mentioning this over and over throughout the last few months on the podcast. But I think it’s time for us to look inward and sit down and have a talk with ourselves, especially if you feel that you are struggling. If you feel stressed, if you feel tension, if you feel a lot of pressure, if you feel like you’re at your max capacity, if you feel like you cannot handle all of the discord that is happening, all of the dysfunction, all of the dysregulation, it’s time to have a conversation and talk with yourself about why.

Not because you’re going to sit there and beat yourself up and say, I can’t handle this. I’m at capacity. And maybe you are. That’s okay. If you are, be honest with yourself. If you feel you can expand your capacity, if you want to be able to handle more pressure, if you want to be able to navigate, if you want to hold space for the duality of finding ways to be more luxurious in your experience as a school leader while also navigating what feels like the impossible and holding space for the truth of both of those, then we’re in. That’s what EPC is doing.

We’re grappling with the discomfort of school leadership, the struggle of school leadership, but also the beauty of it, the luxury of it, the privilege of being a school leader. We have a platform. It’s time for us to start sitting up at that table, taking ownership and responsibility. We are leaders. It is time that we lead. We lead conversations. We open the door up, not just to talk about, hi, how are you feeling today? You know, have a good teaching day. But to talk about, what are we doing? Why are we doing it? And look, it’s not to say that we sit down and we have all of the answers. It’s to cultivate the conversations, to kind of, you know, I think about, I’ve been really into building fires. I have this beautiful fireplace in the home in which I’m staying right now.

And in this fireplace, it will look like the fire is dying out and the embers are going gray or black out. And if I just take the little poker and I stoke those embers, a flame will reignite or the embers will glow. And I feel like we’re going into education, we’re looking at the surface and we’re like, well, it may be smoldering a bit, but, you know, there’s nothing below. It’s about dead. But if you were to stoke that fire and have a conversation, so much will come to the surface. A lot of energy, a lot of opinions, a lot of anger, a lot of pain, a lot of frustration, a lot of confusion and overwhelm.

I believe there is so much confusion right now. And the reason that we are suffering in the, you know, sense of mental and emotional suffering when it comes to being frustrated, feeling exhausted, being overwhelmed, actually is coming down to confusion. We haven’t had the talk. We’re not sitting down saying, what is the actual purpose? What is the actual function of school? What is the value? And can we increase the value?

We’re not going to go in and change the entire structure of education. I understand. There are schools who are out there trying to make systemic changes, like structural, physical changes in their schedules, in the way they grade. I’ve had several people on the podcast who are out there, boots on the ground, actually changing what school looks like, feels like. So I know it’s possible. And I’m here with all of you to talk about the mainstream, public education and private education too. Charters, all of you are invited to this table. But it is time to have this talk. It’s time for us to talk about how we can be of value, how we can create purpose, how we can reconnect with kids, reconnect with families, reconnect with ourselves, and reconnect with teaching. It’s not going to look and feel the same as it did 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 50 years ago.

We’re afraid to have the conversation because we are afraid that education is no longer what we want it to be or what we expected it to be. It’s like when you’re in a relationship and you know that something’s wrong, you know that it’s maybe taking a turn where it might not last forever, but you’re so afraid to have the conversation because you don’t want it to end. That’s what feels like is happening in education. We want it to go back to we’re the bosses, you know, we’re the authority figures, do as we say. You know, you have to come to school. You come to school engaged, understanding the value, understanding the purpose. Your parents value it. The adults in your life value it. They support you. It’s just what you do. No questions asked. We’re not there anymore. But we’re afraid to bring that up because we’re afraid that if we do, there might be a breakup with the old paradigm. We’re afraid that things are not going to look the same, feel the same. We’re not trained for what is coming because we went to school 10 years ago, 20 years ago and times are different.

We can put our heads in the sand and try to pretend that education needs to go back to the way it was pre-pandemic, pre-technology, pre-social media, or we can come to the table and have a conversation, explore for ourselves, what is scary about this? What feels off? What am I afraid of? And talking with fellow educators. What do we want it to look like and feel like? What outcomes do we want to create? What do we think would be of service to students in this day and age?

I really believe it’s time we open up and have the brave conversation, the courageous conversation, to be the Brené Browns of education. Can you imagine Brené Brown coming into the Empowered Principal Collaborative? Ooh. She’s my idol. I want to emulate her work and implement it into who we are as an educational society, as an institution, to show up not just for academics, for the humanness of our experience on the planet, to teach children how to navigate the hardest thing on the planet, our emotions, our physical response, that visceral response, the psychological response, the mental, the emotional, all of it.

When we know how to navigate internally, then we can couple that with how to navigate the world externally with the academic skills. We need to couple them together. We’re afraid to do that. Why? Nobody taught us, so we don’t know how. How do we fix that? We get in a program like EPC and we learn. We talk about it. We open up. We listen. We learn. We try it out. We grow. We stumble through it. We are wobbly as we’re learning. We let ourselves try and fail.

I feel so compelled about this. I want to be the voice that speaks up for you, for students, for teachers. But I cannot do it alone. This is a group effort, a mission, a vision that’s bigger than just me. The Empowered Principal world, it’s so much more than just life and leadership coaching. It has a life of its own. It’s expanding into this movement. And I want you to feel like you have a safe place to come and have courageous conversations, not because we’re trying to fix or change ourselves or somebody else. We’re expanding the concept of education through conversation, one conversation at a time, one coaching session at a time, one aha at a time.

So I invite you in. You can join EPC. I don’t usually leave the doors open at this time of year, but with all of the energy going on with the luxury leadership experience that’s happening next week and with the launch of the Mid-Year Reboot 2026 for school leaders, those two things coupled together, I think are going to really take your mindset, your skill set, and your energy to a different level, a different playing field, an entirely different frequency. It’s really time to have this talk. The time is now. I hope you’ll join us.

Join us for Leadership Luxury, join us for the Mid-Year Reboot, and definitely join EPC. I want you to be there having this conversation. Be courageous, be brave. And you know what’s on the other side of that? Empowerment, freedom, and the feeling of complete fulfillment and satisfaction, knowing you are one of the leading forces. You’re the one who’s courageous enough to start these conversations and hold with them, hold space for them, expand your capacity to sit in the discomfort of we don’t know what to do right now. But what can we do? Let’s talk about it. What might we do? We’re exploring. Come on into EPC and gain access to luxury leadership and mid-year reboot.

I will see you all next week. Have a beautiful first week of December, and I will see you next week here at the podcast on social media, which by the way, if you’re on Facebook, I’m doing a Facebook Live 365 challenge in my Empowered Principal free Facebook group. Join us there. If you’re on Facebook, join us for the podcast. Of course, always accessible, always free. And when you’re ready, step into the world of EPC. I’ll see 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.