Ep #419: Leadership Energetics

Hello, empowered principals. Welcome to episode 419.

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, happy, happy New Year, my empowered principals. Welcome to 2026. Happy New Year. This to me is one of the best times of the year because there is so much energy. There’s so much excitement and enthusiasm and hope and just this openness to all possibilities. And it happens to us this time of year every single year.

All of the anticipation of a fresh start, a new year. It’s the time where we renew commitments or we develop new commitments to ourselves. It’s the opportunity of that clean slate, the openness to change, to evolve, to expand ourselves, to develop ourselves, to try something new. It’s that positive anticipation of what you will experience in this upcoming year. Can you feel it? That energy of hope and possibility and expanding your potential this coming year?

It’s at its peak in end of December and into January. There’s just a vibe and an energy to this new year, a new feeling. There’s a vibration inside of you. It’s this feeling of aliveness. And the feeling that you feel right now is energy. It’s passion. It’s mental and emotional engagement. It’s soul feeding and fueling. It’s how you feel when you are so interested and curious about something, when you’re immersed in it.

It’s not just about the outcomes or the goal accomplishment that you’re trying to create, but it’s for the experience of the creation of it. You know when you’re going on vacation and you’re anticipating the vacation and you’re planning it and you’re thinking about it, and you could spend hours researching airlines and hotels and locations and restaurants and museums and shopping, whatever it is you do on vacation, but you’re planning it and you feel the excitement and anticipation of the actual experience of it as you’re creating the planning of it. You’re not actually doing it, but you can feel the energy. That’s what the New Year energy feels like to me. It’s like we’re mapping out the vacation of our lives this year, the dream come true experiences that we want in our lives.

Now, we do this for vacations. We can be very meticulous at planning, or we say, this is where I want to go and I trust that the experiences I’m meant to have I will have. Some people are very laissez faire and very open-ended with their planning. Other people are very meticulous in their creation of the plan. But either way, what you’re doing is you are personally, internally cultivating and anticipating the experience you want to have. We go to great lengths to do this for vacation or maybe for the holiday season, you planned out how you wanted to experience your holidays, your vacations. But we don’t tend to put this much eagerness and curiosity and effort into planning our everyday lives, our personal lives, professional lives, the combination of that experience, the lifestyle that we want to live. And I’m really feeling this year.

It’s not about where you live or who you live with or, the specifics of your life right now. You can generate the feelings, the emotions of an experience. So whether you live in the Midwest like I’m currently living, or you live on the West Coast where I used to live, or you live over on the East Coast where one of my best friends lives and I’ve spent time living with her and spending a great deal of time being in her lifestyle, you can be anywhere on the planet listening to this podcast and being in the energy of life creation, leading creation, leadership energetics, leading your life, leading your career, and cultivating the experience that you want.

This is an internal experience that you have when you are in the energetics of leadership. It’s the experience of creation, the experience of helping other people, the experience of problem solving and figuring something out. It’s the experience of contributing in whatever way feels good for you. The experience of interacting with other people you adore and appreciate and respect and lead. The experience of collaborating with them and working together with them. It’s the experience that you have today while you are working towards an outcome.

The way you handle yourself today when you are working towards something and when something doesn’t go the way you had hoped it would or that you had planned it would go. It’s the way you connect with yourself and with others today as you’re planning to roll out something coming down the line in the future. It’s the way you communicate today, the way you support today.

You know, I have to be honest with you, I was obsessed with Taylor Swift’s new album. I’m not a Swifty, I would not identify as a Swifty, but I highly respect her, one, as a woman on the planet, two, her leadership energetics, and she’s just off the charts amazing in terms of income generation, marketing, connecting with her audience. She’s so authentic in who she is and she stays in alignment, which to me is why she is so successful. She has leadership energetics available to her. She’s aware of them, she’s aligned to them, and she implements them. And I saw a conversation with her, you know, she’s been on endless interviews and shows discussing her new album and discussing all of the nuances of it. And she was talking about how much fun it was to create the album.

She’s not just excited that the album dropped and that she broke the internet with record sales and record sales. She’s excited about that part of it, but she was also equally as eager and excited about the creation of the album and how much fun it was to be in the experience of creating the album, writing the songs, creating the music to go with the songs, working with her, you know, producers and her band members and her dancers and her choreographers. Like she’s got a whole army of, you know, teammates that she works with. But the creative experience itself was just as fun as dropping the album and making however much money she made on this album.

She’s not making albums to make money. She’s making albums because she enjoys who she’s being in the creative process, who she’s working with, who she’s connecting with. She’s loving the day-to-day existence and identity of her life. She’s not trying to reach some kind of number on a screen. And yet, here we are in education. We are so focused on the numbers on the screen, the student data points. We’ve turned students into data points. We have turned our careers into test scores. We’ve turned our identities into what other people score us as or believe us to be or think who we are, versus us being in the leadership energetics of enjoying our lives, our careers, the work, the people, the children, the students, the families, the communities, our bosses, being in it.

So I invite you to consider, even if only for the time you are listening to this podcast, just consider that your leadership energy has the power to transform the educational experience for students, staff, family members, the community, the district. I want you to really imagine for a moment that you were to believe in this truth. Imagine waking up every day and thinking, my leadership energy has the power to transform the educational experience for my staff, my students, and the families of this community. Say that sentence out loud. Say it with me now.

It gives me so much energy and emotion because it’s true and it feels electrifying to lean into and to just try on this belief. Say it with me. My leadership energy has the power to transform the educational experience for my staff, my students, and the families of this community. Imagine how that feels inside of you when you believe it to be true, when you see the truth in it. Visualize the experience that you as the leader will have. You as the principal, you as the assistant principal, you as the instructional coach, you as the, you know, coordinator, assistant superintendent, superintendent, district leader, whatever your title is.

Imagine the experience that you have knowing that you are creating a more positive experience for people on your campus and that you have the power within you to invite others to experience their own powerful energetics. Just sit with this and imagine this as the truth. Every day you make a positive impact. Every day you are making progress. Every day you are helping someone. Every day you are impacting and changing a life. Every day you are learning and expanding your capacity to lead. Sit in the truth of this. Sit in the energy of this reality.

Imagine if tomorrow or if today, if you’re listening to this first thing or you’re driving home tonight, today, tomorrow, imagine that if this became your new identity, this became your new reality. The principal, the district leader, the state leader, the county leader, the leader who believes they are making a positive impact, truly believes it, knows it in their soul. I’m making a positive impact.

The principal, the district leader, the site leader, the county, state, federal leader, the teacher leader who believes and trusts they are making progress, even through all the ups and downs and setbacks. Progress moving forward. There is progress even in setbacks. That’s called learning.

The principal who knows they are helping someone and changing a life each and every day, not that you know, or always know whose life you’re helping or how you are changing it, because it might not be impacted today. The interaction you have today might not impact their life until next week, next month, next year, next decade. You have no idea your impact, but you trust that you are changing a life, impacting somebody with positivity and helping them for their future. You don’t know how it’s changing. You might not know who you’re changing, but you know that you are and you’re showing up in that belief. Today I’m changing a life. Today I’m going to help somebody. Today we’re making progress. Today we’re making a positive impact.

Now, I want to say explicitly, leadership energetics is not about being happy all the time, feeling comfortable all the time, having things feel at ease all of the time, having other people be completely satisfied and happy all of the time. There is not an absence of disagreement, an absence of growth, an absence of struggle, an absence of conflict. In fact, it’s the opposite. It’s the openness to question, to explore, to expand what we believe is true. There is internal conflict, internal disagreements at times, internal dissonance. There’s external disagreements, external conflicts, external exploration of what’s possible.

This is not about tapping into your leadership energetics so that you can control others or convince others or change others. That’s not what leadership energetics is about. Leadership energetics is about a way of being. It’s a way of living. It’s an identity that you embody.

Accessing and applying your leadership energetics is how I believe school leaders create positive impacts. And this requires a level of trust and faith and surrender. It’s less about what you’re doing and more about who you are as you’re doing it. It’s showing up today, being in the energy of leadership, believing your leadership is working, believing that you are making an impact as you’re taking action. You’re believing in the impact as you’re taking the action today. It’s trusting that today’s next best step or next best decision is the next best thing as you’re in the decision-making process, as you’re deciding what steps to take. You’re trusting it.

It’s having faith in your abilities and in other people’s abilities. It’s seeing other people in their highest, most empowered identity and speaking to them at that highest level and speaking to yourself in that highest level. It is surrendering up resistance, confusion, overwhelm, suffering, disempowerment. It’s surrendering those things. We allow the resistance by exploring it or moving forward. We refuse to stay in confusion and overwhelm and let it sink us down and stagnate us and make us feel stuck.

It’s about dropping the stories that you cast yourself in, in the role of victim, of villain, of the person who’s unable to release any suffering, where you replay the pain points in your past, in your history over and over and over, or you cast yourself as the person who has no power, or you’re the person who is always the problem, always the villain, always the bad person, or always the victim, always the one who has a villain in their story. Exploring that, understanding it, exploring your resistance to release those blocks so you can remove them and reopen flow back into your life and trust and belief and keep moving forward.

It’s about getting specific with what you’re confused about, getting clear and not allowing yourself to drown in confusion or drown in overwhelm, to break them down and get specific and figure it out. It’s about releasing these stories that keep you from feeling empowered. These stories of disempowerment, of stagnancy, of being stuck, of not knowing what to do, of too much to do and you don’t have the control, you don’t have the power. Those stories hold you back and they stagnate your leadership energetics.

My perspective is that we have tried and applied external pressures to improve education, to improve student learning and student outcomes. And in my humble opinion, this external pressure that we keep trying, it’s not working for at least half of our students. And I would say it’s not working for any students at some level. It’s not working for teachers. It’s not working for staff members. It’s not working for site and district leaders. It’s not working for members of our community, families, and it’s not working for society at large.

You could just google what people are talking about in the field of education. Education’s broken. Education’s not working. Educational system this, the students that, the teachers this, the leaders that, the test scores this. Plenty of information out there around how it’s broken, how it’s not working, how people aren’t trying hard enough, how students are off the chain, how teachers are exasperated and leaving, how leaders feel their hopeless, they’re throwing their hands up in the air, they’re not sure what to do.

I’ll tell you who it is working for. This current dialogue, this current narrative, this current perspective, it’s working for testing companies. It’s working for curriculum companies, and it’s working for those who want to remain in power using the fear of test scores and accountability and career consequences to intimidate educators. It’s working for those people, but it isn’t working for those who are doing the work, students, staff members, teachers, families, leaders, districts, educational systems, colleges, universities, preschools, all the way down from the babies up to postgraduate doctorate students.

And you might say, yeah, but it’s working for somebody. People are graduating, people are getting degrees. Those people have just learned how to play the game, how to play the system. I believe this is the perfect time. It’s the perfect opportunity to test out the power of leadership energetics and what we can accomplish when we acknowledge and when we leverage our ability to guide ourselves, to harness the power of our own energy without holding ourselves back in fear of its limitlessness.

When we believe that we have the power to feel how we want, to believe what we want, to take action, to serve and help and contribute and empower people, when we get up and lead with that kind of leadership energy, there’s nothing holding us back. When we understand and hold the energetics of personal leadership and personal power, we will beat the odds. This is when we burst past all expectations and all the predictability. We move beyond the current paradigm that we’re living in, while still operating in it, but we excel beyond what’s predictable. We excel beyond what people say is the limit of possibility. We blow past that.

We’ve seen it done. There are schools who are doing it because they refuse to agree and buy into the one story that is this is what school looks like, this is what it feels like, this is what it should be like and continuing to believe that’s the only story and that’s what creates success. Because the truth is that story only creates success for a very finite group of people. And in the world of The Empowered Principal, we’re exploring beyond that. We’re leveraging leadership energetics.

The mentorship within the programs of The Empowered Principal are designed to help you expand your capacity to leverage your leadership energy so that you can empower others to leverage their own personal power, their own leadership energetics. We want to leverage our own energy to model that, to be the example of that, and to empower people to try it on. Let’s test drive this baby.

Let’s leverage the energy of the new calendar year here in 2026. And I invite you to join us in The Empowered Principal Collaborative. And when you are a member of EPC, you also will be able to participate in the midyear reboot series, which is starting this January 6th. If this speaks to you, if this calls to you, if this energy feels like the energy you want to tap into leading your school in the upcoming calendar year, this is the time. Join EPC, join us for the Mid-Year Reboot and let’s see how limitless we actually can be. Have a beautiful 2026. Again, happy New Year. I look forward to seeing you in The Empowered Principal Collaborative. Have a beautiful week everybody. Take good care. Bye.

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