Ep #420: Leadership Luxury Series: The Connection Between Luxury and Education

Hello, empowered principals. Welcome to episode 420.

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.

Over the next three days, just to make it clear, there’s three sessions here. Today is day one. We’re going to go into day two and day three. We’re just going to expand this concept of school leadership and really work on enhancing your experience as a school leader. And when we enhance our experience as the leader, we can enhance the experience for staff and for students.

So I want to be really clear, this is not a course on how to be a school leader. I do a lot of workshops, a lot of trainings. EPC has this. One-on-one coaching provides this. My other programs offer the logistics and the skill sets about leadership. This is not that course. You will be able to walk away with things you can implement, but this is more of an exploration of the energetics of leadership and the empowerment that we want to embody as a school leader, okay? This is more the energy behind. It’s the who we’re being versus what we’re doing, okay? So really an exploration and contemplation, okay?

This to me, this workshop is really about an invitation to all educators to contemplate and look through the lens of how can we improve or enhance or evolve the experience and go beyond surviving. You know what that feels like when you’re just hanging on by a thread as a leader and you’re going in, serving, and then relieved that the day is done or that the week is done or that the holiday is here. And you’re hanging on by a thread to get through next week before school, before the holiday break. I want us to shift from surviving to aliving, being alive, to being satisfied, to feeling fulfillment, to believing that we’re making a difference, that we have an impact, and that we’re not just spinning our wheels in probability and spinning our wheels in kind of stagnancy or repetitiveness.

We want to thrive. As school leaders, we want our school to thrive. We want to walk into those doors and see the aliveness on our campus, not from the lens of who’s complaining and what isn’t working and what are the stats that are dragging our school scores down, but thriving in that we know our purpose. We know our mission. We know the intention behind what we’re here to do today. And it isn’t necessarily about me, you know, having things be easy. That doesn’t necessarily mean a luxurious experience where you come up and put your feet up on the desk and have a cup of coffee all day.

That’s not the kind of luxury we’re talking about. We’re talking about satisfaction, productivity, and being proud of who you are as a leader, being proud of the work you’re seeing in your staff and with your students. Pride in the physical campus, pride in the energy of your classrooms, pride in who you are and in your mission and what you’re doing, living the full expression and experience of yourself as a school leader and outside of leadership. Loving your career, being proud when you when you go out home for the day, being proud that you’re a school leader. Feeling like when you lie your head on the pillow at night, yes, this is what I was born to do.

We want to inspire change. We want to electrify our own experience, kind of plugging ourselves in to that energy of, I know who I am, I know what I’m doing, I know that I’m making a difference, and I love what I’ve created around me. This luxurious experience for yourself, for your staff, your teachers, your students, your support staff, and for your community.

So we’re going to explore luxury, and then we’re going to talk about education, and we’re going to look at the two. This is day one. We’re going to just explore it and how luxury and education and leadership haven’t maybe been connected, but how we can connect them.

So when I was contemplating, what is luxurious leadership? You know, what is the image that I get? What is the feeling that I have when I think about the idea of luxury going together with school leadership? Like, does it even go together? Is it even possible? So I started tuning into really defining what luxury is.

Because on the surface, in my experience, what I what I’ve witnessed is that we often tend to define luxury as being either very exclusive, meaning only certain people have access to it. Like that’s very luxurious. Only the celebrities have access to that. It’s very luxurious. It’s very exclusive. You can only VIP people are welcome to access this, which often then is also tied to expensive. Something’s very exclusive or very expensive.

So we tie our definition of luxury, oftentimes, to financial luxury. So it’s related to wealth. It’s related to your bank account. It’s related to your income. It’s related to what you can purchase. And we think about what it would be like to have this luxurious life, having exclusive access to things, to be able to purchase whatever we want and not having to work because our bank account is so full that we don’t need to put out energy.

Luxury might be like having tasks that you don’t like to do, having the cash, again, it’s cash-related, to pay other people to do it for you. So you can be at ease, right? Perhaps it’s financial luxury in the way of like when I think of luxury, it might be like going to five-star resorts or first-class travel or Michelin star restaurants or going and shopping at exclusive, right? high-end, very expensive shopping boutiques, handbags, shoes, designer clothing, certain kinds of cars, certain kinds of homes, the decor in your homes, you know, the access you have to, you know, send your kids to certain colleges, prestige, luxury, right? You see like our culture, our society has defined luxury around the financial luxury. You know, mansions, cars, all of that, right?

And I started thinking about luxury and this is, I believe this is true. There is a type of luxury that is financial luxury and it is somewhat exclusive and it is expensive. But luxury in its entirety is not defined necessarily by wealth. It’s not simply just wealth. There are many kinds of luxury. There is no one absolute luxury.

So think about this. For example, what one person, let’s say, I don’t know, Kim Kardashian, runs out and she goes shopping. What she defines for herself as a type of luxury, another person would not care for that or value that or want it. It’s what she values and what she deems as a luxury in her life versus what somebody else might deem a valuable or a luxury in their life.

So luxury in the way that we’re going to explore it here, in terms of leadership and school and teaching and learning and education at large is that luxury is really about experiencing things that you value in your life and acknowledging and appreciating the luxuries that you do have access to in your life and that what’s luxurious for school A over here, what they find valuable and what they define as, oh, this is such a luxury to have, may not be the same luxury for another school. You know, what’s luxurious to have at an elementary school might not be a luxury at all in college or in high school.

So just as your personal and professional values are unique to you, your type of luxury, what you value, what matters to you and what you desire to experience is different. But just as your values are unique to you, they’re also not comparable. So you can’t say that, well, because I value this, it’s more important than what you value.

So let’s say your friend, she really values having a brand new car. She really values that. That’s like, it’s one of her top priorities. She’s always leasing a new car. She has a new car every three years. It’s just something that she values. It’s a luxury to her. She loves it. She loves her car. She embraces having her car and that’s a luxury to her and it becomes a priority and that’s what she does. That’s a luxury she values and she claims it. That priority for her is not less important if you as her friend don’t value having that kind of luxury. So if you’re not really into cars or you don’t really feel like you need a brand new car every three years, you’re just like, I’m good. I want the car that I know and love. I want it to be in our lives for a long time. I value it. It’s a part of the family. Like I buy a car and then it’s it’s with us for the long haul. That’s what I value.

What she values in cars is no less better or worse or different. It’s not comparable to yours. There’s no right kind of luxury, just like there’s no right kind of value. What you value is what you value. It’s what you appreciate, it’s what you desire, it’s what you respect and acknowledge and you’re grateful for it in your life.

So often times we in education particularly, we want to get into comparing and contrasting and judging and, you know, critiquing the values of other people. So we might dismiss what like, oh, well, I would never spend that much money on a car every three years. That’s crazy. That’s ridiculous. And she might be, uh, hello, how can you ever drive that car without being totally embarrassed? Right? Different luxuries.

So luxury isn’t just a zero-sum game. It’s not a yes or a no, an all or a none, a have or a have not. It’s not an absolute. It’s an opinion. It’s a value. It’s just simply experiencing things that you value. You appreciate that you enjoy and acknowledging them and celebrating them.

You know, one thing that I highly value is like time and flexibility, being able to be location independent as an entrepreneur, as a business owner. I highly value having empowerment over my time, empowerment over my location. And this really came to the surface for me when my mom got diagnosed with a terminal illness way back when I was, she got diagnosed, gosh, I don’t even remember what year it was, but she lived with this terminal illness for quite a while.

But what really where my value and the luxury really became apparent to me was later in life when I was a principal and then I was a district leader, and my mom’s illness was advancing and time was of the essence. Her time on the planet here was of the essence and it was kind of touch and go for a while. My sister was her primary care provider and I wanted the luxury of coming home to be with her when the call came and when the time was coming near. I wanted to be with her. I wanted to be present with my family. I wanted to support my dad and my sister. I wanted to be physically present with my mom as her body transitioned and I didn’t have that luxury available to me while I was working.

And I could have had that luxury. I could have been given permission to travel, to take a leave or use, I had many, many, many days built up because I had worked in the district for a long time. I could have had that luxury, but I wasn’t granted access to that luxury and it became so important to me that time and flexibility and freedom became my overriding value. And that was one of the reasons literally why I decided to resign and start this business because I value time.

So time can be a luxury and time doesn’t cost money. We associate time and money together, but truly when you wake up, you literally have minutes in your day that you can spend as you wish. But it doesn’t cost you paper dollars, right? So the luxury of time, you can create luxury of time. You can say, I want a luxurious amount of time to complete this site plan. I want to know that I have time blocked off in my work day to get this done. I don’t want to have to do it before school, after school, after hours, nights, weekends. I want to do it during the day.

So I’m going to block off one hour per day for the next five days and I’m going to work on section one, then section two, then section three, and then I’m going to review on section on day four, and I’m going to finalize on day five and then that will give me five hours of working on this site plan, all during my work day. And my secretary is going to be a little bulldog at the front door saying like, if there’s not blood or fire, do not enter into her office, right?

You can have different kinds of luxuries in life that aren’t associated or attached to money. Some are as a school leader and some are not. Like the luxury of being able to take care of your physical needs. It is a luxury as a principal to be able to go to the bathroom. Teachers don’t have that luxury in the same way we do. Now, it sounds simple and silly, but it is a luxury. And when you are a teacher in the classroom and you drank thirty-six ounces of water before school started or more, and you’ve got to go and you have to wait till the bell, it feels like a luxury to be able to go when you need to go, right? Okay.

So your physical needs, like the luxury of being able to go to bed early. If you don’t have children or you live alone or you have, you know, the adults, your children and your family can take care of themselves so that you can go and like take a warm bath, get in your snuggies and your comfies and like go to bed at seven or eight o’clock just to like the luxury of being in bed, reading a book, falling asleep, getting a full eight hours of sleep. That’s a luxury.

Mental, like the luxury of like giving yourself a mental health day or the luxury of taking time off. So when my mom did pass away, she passed away a couple days before Thanksgiving and we took that holiday time that was off to grieve, to be thankful but also to grieve. And then again, another wave of grief came at Christmas and New Year’s. And I loved on myself. I still can remember going to my friend Kathy’s house. I have many Kathys in my life, but one of my friend Kathys, we were there for New Year’s. We stayed for a couple days with her. So we my mom passed away here in Iowa, right like just a couple days before Thanksgiving. I flew back to California, spent Thanksgiving with our friends up in Reno. And then we drove back to the Bay Area, which was our home at the time, and we stayed with our friends. I think we just did Christmas quiet, just our family.

And then for New Year’s, we went over, but I on New Year’s Eve day, before we went out to the New Year’s party, I had the luxury of crawling in bed at three o’clock, crying my eyes out until I fell asleep, and just being in this comfort of love and understanding. Everyone was understanding that I was devastated and they let me have that moment and then I literally woke up so refreshed. I felt so much better and I was able to go celebrate the year and then entering in the New Year with my loved ones, even though my mom had passed from the planet, right?

So there’s luxury in taking care of ourselves. There’s luxury in rest and sleep, luxury and, you know, those little daily things where you get some water, take a walk, get a bathroom break, actually eat lunch. That’s a luxury to have lunch, isn’t it as a school leader?

But it’s also a luxury, spending time with people you enjoy. It’s luxury to have a mentor, to have a coach. I am deeply grateful and I feel like it is one of the luxuries I would spend all of my dollars on is to have mentorship, to have a coach, to help me process emotions that I don’t find easy to process on my own. To discuss things, to navigate things, to contemplate things, to question me and to expand me in ways I couldn’t do on my own. That to me is one of the top luxuries in my life. I will go to great lengths to find the right mentor and to work with them and to implement whatever their coaching is for me in that moment.

It’s the luxury of empowerment in our life, feeling empowered, feeling personal power in your life, that’s a luxury. And we take it for granted. We take the powers that we have for granted. So these little luxuries in our lives, they’re invitations. It’s the luxury of being open to change. The luxury of having the ability to try, the willingness to try, the courage to fail, the resilience to keep trying after you failed. It’s a luxury to have the honor and the privilege to try something new and fail and try again. It is a luxury to seek out what you are grateful for, to be in gratitude, to be in appreciation of all that you have, to live and to see every little thing in your life as a luxury. Your holiday lights, being able to buy presents, being able to have a home, a warm bed, insurance, being able to have internet, being able to have a warm coat, being able to drive through Starbucks, all these little luxuries. And we just take them for granted, but they are luxuries. And when we look through the lens of luxury, we see how amazing luxury is.

We can also choose luxurious experiences. One of the things I have been practicing in my own life and in my business is choosing luxury, choosing peace when situations get tense. That’s a luxury to choose peace when things are tense. To choose calm when other people get upset and disregulated. That’s a luxury to be able to do that. And as school leaders, we have access to that. Choosing centeredness when your values get questioned, when the people are coming at you sideways, choosing that centeredness when your values are in question. And then choosing ease when complaints are flying, you’re like, I am not going to play whack-a-mole. I’m not going to be a firefighter. I’m not going to go put all these out. I’m going to ground. I’m going to stay calm and I’m going to approach this with ease because trying to people please got me nowhere.

Now, we’re going to talk about this tomorrow. It’s the dissonance of luxury. So sometimes we actually block ourselves or limit ourselves, kind of like put up a subconscious barrier around ourselves to protect us from having luxury because we believe that if we were granted some form of luxury that there would be a price to pay. And the truth is there is a duality. There’s a dissonance of luxury because with more comes more, more responsibility, like more staff, more responsibility, more observations, more evaluations, more people to coach and mentor and to lead. So you have the luxury of having more hands on deck, which is a positive thing, but you have also more leadership responsibilities.

And when you receive more money and resources for your school, that’s wonderful. You get all of these resources and multiple supports, but you also have the responsibility and the time and the effort to manage those resources and decisions about those resources and implementation and monitoring of those resources. So what we do is we want the part of luxury that feels good and is enjoyable, but we’re not as willing to accept the duality of that, the polarity, the dissonance of with this comes this. And so we will say, oh, I don’t want because I don’t want that part, I’m going to block this part because we can’t have just the good part. We have to have the whole thing. I’m going to talk more about that. That’s a whole separate topic, but I wanted to bring it up because your mind might be saying, well, you know, like, I’m open to luxury. I want luxury of time, luxury of resources, luxury of empowerment, luxury of, you know, emotional regulation. I want all of those luxuries. But do we want them the whole package?

And we’re going to talk more about that tomorrow. So if that’s on your mind, I wanted just to bring that up a little bit to let you reassure you that we are going to explore all of that because that’s really where the crux comes in, right? Where we feel a desire to have a more luxurious experience, to feel more satisfied, to feel more fulfilled, to feel more connected, to feel more impactful. We want to feel this way, but we are resisting what comes with that form of luxury, right? You buy a higher-end vehicle, you love all the bells and whistles, but it may cost more to maintain it. You might have to use premium gas or you might have to have a certain kind of maintenance. Maybe they only service certain kind of cars or you have to have these specialty wiper blades or headlights or whatever. It comes with both.

So there’s a certain amount of pressure that comes with luxury. Like there’s more luxury to being a lead principal. You have some more freedoms, you have some more empowerment than an AP, but there’s more pressure, right? So we want to look at our luxuries and notice that sometimes we think of a luxury as a burden if we’re not balancing that ownership with gratitude, being grateful for it and being happy we have it and taking ownership and embodying it, embracing it.

So we want to appreciate the luxuries we currently have. So the first way, and it’s the way I would say like, when people ask, but how? But how? When I give them the response, they’re like, but that just seems too easy or it can’t be just that. But it is. It is just that. How do you expand luxury? How do you create a more luxurious experience for your school, your staff, yourself? You expand your perspective. You look through the lens of luxury. You allow that dissonance, you know it’s coming, but you also appreciate it because the benefit of the more, the benefit of the expansion is 10x and you’re also expanding your own capacity. So appreciating luxury is appreciating all of it and it is being grateful for the luxuries you already have.

So homework assignment number one, when you get off of this, you know, session today, think about all of the luxuries you already have in your life, the luxuries you have at home, the luxuries you have in family and friends, the relationship luxuries you have. It’s a luxury to be in relationship with your spouse or your partner or your best friend or your sister, your brother, your kids, your own children, your parents, what relationships are luxurious in your life and without them, you would be devastated. They were a luxury to know them. It was a luxury to have them in your life.

It’s especially, I think about relationships where the person grants you space and grace and they’re very loving and forgiving and kind and gentle. What a luxury to have a friend, a partner, a parent, a sibling who is gentle and kind and supportive and forgiving and holds space for you to be human. That’s such a luxury because there’s so many people out there who are always criticizing, always have that snide comment, always a little jab, always want you to play a little less and be a little small so they can feel good about themselves. Like there’s a lot of that coming at us. So it’s truly a luxury when we have someone who really roots for us, who genuinely wants to see us shine and thrive.

So as you’re contemplating luxury, there are many kinds of luxury. It’s not just about wealth and exclusivity. It’s about what we value. The luxury of time, the luxury of freedom, the luxury of flexibility, the luxury of permission, the luxury of empowerment, the luxury of mentorship. It’s what you value. So you can look at, what are the luxuries I have in my life right now that I’m so grateful to have? Like, I’ve had a dishwasher and not had a dishwasher and I love having the luxury of having a dishwasher. Right now, I do not have the luxury of having a dryer. So the washer and dryer, the washer’s working, but the dryer is no longer working. It has moved transitioned into its next life and it’s going to be replaced in the next week.

So I had the luxury of having a working dryer and now I don’t. So now I’m taking my laundry to my sister’s house, which is also a luxury to have somebody in town who has laundry. But it’s these things, like, wow, we got to do the laundry, we take it. Imagine having to walk a mile down to the river with your washboard and scrubbing all three of your children’s clothes plus your husband’s stinky socks that he wore to the gym. Now the laundry, the washer and the dryer are very luxurious.

So think about things in your life that you have. What if you didn’t have a car? What a luxury to have a car. What a luxury to be able to afford gas for your car. Lighting, electricity, and I know these things are basic, but there’s a difference between, yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. I’ve got internet. It’s great. It’s great. I got an iPhone. I know, I know, I know. I should be grateful. There’s a difference between yeah, yeah, yeah and actually knowing in your body, feeling it like the gratitude of this computer, the gratitude of internet to be able to be having this conversation with you across the globe. The fact that we can have conversations as educators around the world talking about the similarities of our experiences and the challenges and the differences in our experiences and to provide support to one another and to communicate with one another. We couldn’t have done that 20, 30 years ago.

It’s a luxury. Enjoy it. Be in awe of it. There’s so many luxuries. So do that tonight when you get off this call. I really encourage you, the luxury of having your holiday lights on or your candles or presents under the tree, food in your belly, food on the table for your family. And if these are luxuries that you don’t currently have in your life, what is a luxury you do have?

And can you find luxury without it being related to money or exclusivity? That’s part one. And then the second part of this conversation for tonight is around education. So we’re going to set the conversation around luxury just on the side table for a minute and I want to talk about education and why, you know, when we think about how we define education, why luxury and education aren’t tend to be linked together.

So what do we mean when we say education? So as a society, when we talk about education, when we say education this, education’s a problem, what we’re talking about is we’re referring to the institution of a structured, formalized, systemized education program. It’s the institution of education we’re talking about.

But we also can mean like education like receiving education, like a degree, a certain level, grade levels, a certain kind of education, trade school, master’s program, PhD, you know, and the institution itself, the physical campus, the colleges, the universities, you know, the trade centers, the elementary, all of the schools, the physical campuses, we talk about that as like the physical space of education where people come to learn. And we also refer to like the act of teaching and learning, right? Like acquiring knowledge, gathering, you know, skill sets, informations, you know, learning how to reason, you know, gaining wisdom.

And typically we talk about this in a more formal way, like formal education where it’s very measured, it’s standardized. We got bell curves and norms and grades and scores and test data and we’re comparing schools and ranking all of them and standardizing them, all of that jazz, right? And within that institution of education, when we are defining learning versus not, teaching versus not, trying to decipher what’s good teaching, what are we not teaching? Are we teaching? Are we learning? Are we not learning? There’s like layers of opinions and judgments happening, right? And you’ll see like it becomes a very all or none, very binary system where it’s like you passed or you failed. You either understood it or you did not understand it.

So why was the institution of education at large, why was it created? And we’ll all have different thoughts and opinions on that and these are some of mine and you can agree, disagree, add to the conversation. I would love that. It’s to ensure competency. Like when we when we think about why we started education, we wanted to impart knowledge, wisdom, experience, skill sets to our younger generation. We wanted them to be competent. We wanted to ensure their safety and well-being, to ensure reliability, right?

I think about when it comes to competency, safety and reliability, I think about pilots. I think about doctors. I think about driving, people who are on the road driving. Like things that are life or death matters. Like a pilot, if a pilot’s not competent and safe and reliable, they have no business being in the cockpit of a plane with hundreds of people on board. Doctors who aren’t competent, safe, and reliable have no business being in a, you know, ER or in a surgical center, same with the entire medical staff, lawyers and legal staff, teachers and educational staff.

There’s many professions that we go through educate formal education to ensure competency, safety and reliability. I think people who build houses, construction, engineers, all the electrical, the plumbing, like the trade work people, very skilled. It’s a very specific art to their science. And we need them to be competent. We need them to ensure our safety so we don’t get electrocuted or we don’t flood our house out. We need to ensure reliability that we can trust and have faith in their work and that there is some kind of, you know, measurement standard for the quality of work that they’re providing.

So most professions have some kind of formal education requirements. That’s how our society establishes trust, faith and assurance. So there is a an establishment of rigor. And you guys know, we all know this, even though we do our best in education to create that competency, safety, that rigor, that reassurance and trust, not there’s not a 100% guarantee, right? You’ve had doctors who’ve botched things, you’ve had contractors who’ve botched things, there’ve been pilots who’ve crashed planes, there have been, you know, teachers who’ve caused harm, there have been lawyers who are shady. It’s not a 100% guarantee, but we as a society did our best to create formal educational practices to the point where we have we have created a high percentage of reliability. And we know it’s not foolproof, but there is value to rigor and in our formal education system.

So there’s the institution of education, right? And then there’s teaching within that institution, and there’s an art and a science to teaching, right? And there might even be a book out there about the art of teaching, science of teaching, but I think about like the formal aspect of teaching versus the informal, the science versus the art, like formal teaching environments, schools, universities, colleges, there’s public, there’s private, there’s charter, choice programs, right?

So there’s an art and a science to the ways in which we impart information, share information, expand people’s wisdom, give access to knowledge and skills, mentorship, coaching, teaching, modeling for people, training them, guiding them, educating them. There’s a whole world in which we’re learning as infants up until the last day we’re on the planet. From birth to death, we are learning, we are teaching. We are receiving and we are providing.

And think about the informal teaching environments. There’s parents. We have different adults in our life. There’s role models, coaches, religious leaders. We even have our mentors, siblings. My friend Eric and I were talking about life lessons learned on a school bus. Like rural kids who are country kids who ride the bus for upwards to an hour or more a day each way. They’re the first ones to get picked up and the last one’s off. You learn a lot of life lessons on a school bus. So your siblings, your peers, there’s informal teaching going on those buses. There’s informal teaching going on the playground, in bedrooms when there’s sleepovers. like many, many forms of teaching.

And, you know, there’s many professional development sessions that are more informal, right? Like this. So there’s establishing the institution. There is the teaching aspect of it, where there’s formal teaching and then informal teaching, and then there’s learning. So there’s education, there’s teaching, there’s learning. So we’re learning no matter what. We’re learning from the school of hard knocks, from life, from interactions we have with people, from the experiences that we create in the world. We’re learning from the world globally all the time, the people around us. We’re observing, we’re engaging, we’re learning from these experiences.

So life is access to education. And we tell people like, you need to get educated. Well, there’s the school of life, the world as our teacher, and then there’s the formal, right? You get schooled, right? You learn from the school setting where there’s a structure, formal, standards-based, you know, we have standards in each grade level, whether that’s public or private, but we offer this structure to learning, classrooms, grade levels, bell schedules, curriculum, interventions, the academics, the PE, art, music, some have it, some don’t.

So you can see that when we talk about the institution of education and teaching and learning, nowhere is it talking about luxury, other than this. Education is both essential and a luxury. If you think about education, it’s essential that all humans, we are all born to learn from the minute we come into the world, we’re learning, right? We start crying, they clean us up, give us to mama. We’re learning. That’s mom. This is who loves me unconditionally. This is where I’m going to get my nourishment. This is where I’m going to get my love. This is going to be how I’m going to be held. This person responds to me. We are all learning. We’re all receiving an education from our interactions with the world, with the people, with the planet, the experiences that we have, the places we go, the events we participate in.

So it’s essential that we learn in order to stay alive. Every human learns. They learn what’s safe, what’s not safe, who to trust, not to trust, what to say, what not to say, what to do, what not to do. As little kids, we are learning that when our parents are saying, yes, no, do this, don’t do that. We’re learning if we are lovable. We’re always learning. It’s essential to our existence. We learn how to eat and drink and move our bodies and crawl and clap our hands and play and walk, right? We get older and we learn how to, you know, get dressed, go to the bathroom, put on our shoes, buckle our seat belts, ride a bike. We learn how to make a snack and eventually we learn how to drive a car and then we, you know, we learn, we’re always learning. It’s just all around us.

But we’ve also created it as a luxury, but not in an inclusive way. We’ve made some type of information exclusive, some type of information very expensive, right? So it’s also a luxury. Awareness on what you know and don’t know is a luxury. Knowledge, having the knowledge and awareness around you, that is a luxury. Access to information is a luxury. Acquiring certain skills isn’t only essential, it becomes a luxury. You know, physical skills, mental skills, cognitive skills, emotional skills, financial skills, social skills, societal understandings, that’s a luxury. How to navigate the world.

Self-discernment is a luxury, reasoning, being able to reason and ration for yourself. That’s a luxury. Empowerment is a luxury because when you don’t have empowerment, you have oppression that is not a luxury. Empowerment is when you have luxury.

It’s been said that knowledge is power and it’s it’s true. Awareness is power, alignment is power, education is power. Education is agency and freedom over your life. Education is empowering, liberating, freeing. It’s independence at its finest. Education, the art and skill of learning and leading and teaching is about personal power, enhancing it, evolving it, expanding it. Education gives people power over their lives, which is the most luxurious thing you could give to a person, which is accessing their personal power. Access to education is a luxury.

We all know that. It’s a luxury in this world to have access to education. Not everybody on the planet has access to the institution of education, even though they may have access to learning, but they don’t all have access to the institution of education. And education used to be the gatekeeper. It used to be the holder of knowledge. It had a gate around it. Inside the institution with these very high walls with expensive and exclusivity was all of the knowledge, the power, the wisdom, the skill set. And we kept it for those with prestige, title, status, power, money. It was exclusive to access. Now it’s becoming more universal access. And yet still not everyone, particularly on the planet has access. Not everyone has access to formal learning or to be able to learn in mainstream in these more traditional ways.

So when we think about the luxury of education and the luxury of being a school leader, it is quite a luxury to have the privilege of being in the field of education, leading, guiding, mentoring, teaching, coaching, because before you were at the mercy of the institution. The institution was controlled, controlled who, what, where, when, why, how, controlled what is taught, who is taught, when it’s taught, how it’s taught, why it’s taught, what’s not taught. Very controlling. And then the global pandemic hits and it cracked, it fractured the exterior of education.

So education in and of itself is a luxury. It’s a luxury to be an educator. It’s a luxury to be in education. It’s a luxury to have access to education. Education’s not intended to be controlled or withheld. It’s not intended to be for a select percentage of the population. Education is an essential luxury. It’s not intended to be a luxury for just some or a few. Education is essential to the empowerment of all people and yet, it’s still also considered a luxury. So it’s essential and it’s a luxury. That’s why I call it an essential luxury. It’s essential to the empowerment of all people and yet it continues to be exclusive and somewhat, you know, in some ways expensive. It’s a luxury that it is a privilege to experience being educated. That’s a luxury. It’s a luxury to understand the purpose of education and the value of being educated. And we as educators, we’re there. We were born with a mission to empower people, to develop the humans. We are in human development, personal development. That’s what education is, personal development. We’re developing those little beings and those teenagers into our goal functioning adults who are empowered to have access to the life that they want, the lifestyle they want, the career and the way that they want to contribute to the world.

It’s a luxury and it’s a luxury to be a member of society who is granting empowerment to the younger generations. It’s also a luxury as an educator to have the ability to be educated on ourselves. Let me take you deeper, okay? It is a luxury to understand yourself, to understand how you function as a human, how your mind works, why you feel the way you do, how your experiences have shaped you, when you’re using your past to predict your future, how you’re shaping your experience, what lenses you’re looking through and being aware, oh, I’m looking through the lens of victimhood or I’m looking through the lens of disempowerment or I’m looking through the lens of negativity or I’m looking through the lens of critical thinking, critical skills, criticism, right? What critical lens are we using here to empower? We can look through a critical lens to help empower people, to inspire them, or we can look through a critical lens to bring them down.

What’s on our lens, right? Really to deep dive into who we are as humans and the best specimen to study is yourself, to understand your purpose, your vision, your mission, your experiences on the planet, why you engage with people the way you do, why you interact with the world in the way that you do, why you’re drawn to certain disciplines of study, why you think the way you do, why you tend to behave in a certain way. It’s a luxury to really explore this.

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