Ep #424: The HUMANITY of Education

Hello, empowered principals. Welcome to episode 424.

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. Hope you are well. And I am going to dive right in. Now, you’re listening to this the second week of February, and I’m recording this in January, shortly after the incidents that have occurred in Minneapolis, Minnesota. So for those of you who are on any kind of social media or watch any kind of news, you have most likely heard of the incidents that have occurred in Minneapolis and not just Minneapolis but around our nation. The events that are happening in our world, in our nation, in our country. And I am going to speak to them today in terms of the humanity of education.

So, I have been coaching school leaders on this topic. And I have several one-on-one clients and I have a group program called EPC, the Empowered Principal Collaborative. And then I also teach kind of a la carte courses and programs, masterminds, masterclasses for an individualized topic experience. And in my group conversations and in my one-on-one conversations, this topic of the humanity of education, the humanity of teaching and learning and leading continues to come up.

And these conversations are in response to, in reaction to the events that are occurring in our communities across the nation. And for many of us, our approach, and I’ll speak for myself, like my approach has been to compartmentalize them, to feel my own feelings personally, cleanse that out and then be available for coaching, which is what I highly recommend because I don’t want to have my thoughts and feelings and opinions bubble up and impact any of my clients.

So I also have made it kind of a philosophy or a value within my company to not address current events per se, because my goal is not to politicize the empowerment of school leaders. My goal is to be open and give all school leaders access to this culture, this lifestyle, this mindset of personal empowerment, regardless of political affiliation or political thoughts and beliefs. We’re not on this podcast to debate the politics of education. We’re talking about your personal power and your ability to lead from that empowerment.

However, in my conversations with clients, it became apparent that if this many people who are already in my programs and in my one-on-one coaching programs are struggling, who have been coaching on the tools, who have been sharing their thoughts and feelings and getting in alignment and in integrity with who they are and what they value and their identity as a leader, if these clients who are well-versed are struggling, I can’t fathom what it might feel like to not have access to these strategies, these tools, and to these mindset opportunities and the invitation into how do I handle the feelings that come up in relation to external events that are happening all around me, okay?

So what we know to be true is that for many people, not everybody, but for people who are tuned in and people who are paying attention or who are not compartmentalizing, that the events that are happening around us are having an impact. They’re impacting us, they’re impacting our staff members, our students, our families that we serve, the community at large, the people who are, at district level, school boards. It’s pretty hard to not be impacted when the humanity of humankind is being questioned, is being scrutinized, is being under attack.

So I’ve decided that it is up to me as a leader, leaders go first and leaders are tested and we have to step one foot in courage and the other foot in faith when we are presenting how do we address this? How do we address the humanity in education?

So in our conversations in EPC, we were talking about how we personally feel. So, step one in leadership is it always starts with us. We go from internal to external. Who we are on the inside, how we feel on the inside, our identity, all of that are what drive the external. So we look inward first.

If you are personally struggling emotionally, mentally, psychologically, or even having these intense visceral reactions inside your body to the events that are occurring, what I invite you into is to validate your emotional experience. To first validate how you feel, that your feelings matter. Because you’re a leader does not mean you don’t have emotions. Because you’re a leader does not mean that you have to set aside your emotions. Because you’re a leader does not mean that you have to numb or avoid or suppress your emotions.

In order to have the bandwidth to have the ability to hold the pressure and the tension of other people’s intense visceral reactions to current events, we have to have space for that. If our emotional needs are not met, when we go to school and our emotional bucket has been ignored and it’s overflowing, the minute that somebody else has a reaction, the energy between you and them or the energy in the room, something will release. There will be a trigger point, there will be an overflow, there will be an explosion, there will be some kind of emotional energy release. So, for example, if somebody comes in and they’re very distressed and you are also distressed and they share their distress with you, you may jump right in the pool with them and now you’re both distressed because you were at your limit and they were at their limit and together that creates overflow of emotional energy.

It’s like when your toddler has a meltdown and you’re super tired and you feel like you just want to get on the floor and tantrum with them. That’s what this is. When we are emotionally fragile because we haven’t allowed ourselves the permission and time and space to care for our self emotionally and to acknowledge and validate and process our emotions, then we don’t have bandwidth. We don’t have the capacity to hold space, to hold the pressure, to hold that tension for when other people come in.

So when we’re rested and as a teacher, when you’re well-rested, you’re prepared, if a student has a meltdown, you’ve got the capacity. You’ve got the bandwidth, the patience, the space in your physical body, your emotional space, your mental space to navigate that situation and to stay fairly regulated. Even if it’s bothersome, you can still manage, okay?

Now, when we’re exhausted, we’re tired, we’re not as prepared, maybe we have distractions going on and we come in and a student gets dysregulated, it might put us into dysregulation and put us over the edge. That is what’s happening with the current events. People are so emotionally impacted that it is next to impossible for them, it feels like it is impossible for them to not be impacted in their external world, how they navigate external situations at school.

So in order for us to be able to hold space and allow for people to feel how they’re feeling and give them permission as fellow humans on the planet to feel however they want to feel and to actually feel, acknowledge their emotions, name it. This is how I’m feeling. This is why I’m feeling it. This is what it feels like in my body. Process it, whether it’s rage, frustration, anger, fatigue, exhaustion, exasperation, grief, sadness, pain, rage, anger, the whole spectrum of emotions may be happening all at once. You may be just spinning in emotion. Those feelings, they need to be acknowledged and validated. They need a voice. They need to be heard, they need to be expressed.

And there’s a difference between like seeing something and then having that trigger, that initial kind of feel like, oh my gosh, like that’s shocking or that’s terrible or, you know, that was the right thing to do, the bad, whatever, whatever your brain offers you, we’re not trying to pick sides here. What we’re saying is the human experience is to have an initial emotional reaction, kind of like that shock value. And then what we do is, ooh, that doesn’t feel good. I don’t like that feeling. I don’t like the anger or I don’t like the sadness or the grief or the pain or the shock or the horror. So I am going to avoid it or I’m going to suppress it or I’m going to numb it, distract myself, you know, to like have a glass of wine versus feeling it or gets on the phone and talk about it with somebody or talk about something else or watch Netflix or just go into another room and fold laundry, something to avoid the feeling, the discomfort of the negative feeling, okay?

And what we’ve been doing, I think since as long as I’ve been on the planet as a student and a teacher and a principal and a district leader is that we tend to avoid talking about emotions because just the conversation around emotions makes people uncomfortable, which is a negative emotion. Just bringing them up, everyone’s like, oh, I don’t want to talk about feelings. Like, why don’t we want to talk about feelings? Why do we call it fluff? That’s a distraction from having to feel them. It makes us uncomfortable to simply talk about the feelings. And talking about emotions can bring up negative emotions and we don’t want to bring up negative emotions. We don’t want discomfort, we don’t want the pain, we don’t want the fears. So we avoid it, but in doing so, we perpetuate it.

It’s like, you know, an itch that you don’t scratch, it will continue to itch. And you’re like, well, if I just, you know, it’ll just go away, it’ll just go away. Maybe you can wait it out, maybe the emotion will go away, but it’s not really going away. You’re just suppressing it. It’s kind of like going dormant for a while because you’re distracting. But then if you were to see the incident again or talk about the incident again, the feelings come right back up to the surface. And now they’re even stronger because they haven’t been expressed.

And I will be the first to admit here, I haven’t wanted to talk about anything political on the podcast because I don’t want to isolate people. My goal is to empower people, right? I have had my own fears. I’ve had my fears of cancel culture coming to shut me down, to shut this podcast down, to shut down my business, fears of people tracking me, tracking my business, tracking my services, and then, you know, like somehow speaking negatively of them to the point to shut everything down or retaliating at a professional level or a personal level. Like, I have my own fears of, you know, something personally happening to me or something professionally happening to me.

And I relate to you because it’s scary to speak up when you are afraid of losing your job, losing your title, your status, losing your positional authority, losing what you have right now. When you fear losing what you have, you will play small, you will speak small, you will, you know, this is when we hide, mask, avoid, numb, distract, we will do anything but hit the nail on the head because we’re afraid if we do so, the ripple effect will be so negative. And there are times when that’s true.

And also being the brand of empowerment. So the brand of this service that I provide, which is, you know, coaching and mentorship for school leaders, for district leaders, for state leaders, the coaching and mentorship that I do, the brand of it is empowerment. But it’s not empowering if we aren’t being honest, if we’re not being direct, if we’re not having conversations about the authenticity of the experience, the humanity of our experience. And being in our empowerment requires us as leaders, one, to go first, two, to take the small steps in the emotional energy of courage to forge forward as leaders. We go first because we’re leaders, right?

So I want to directly say that this is not a conversation about politics. It’s a conversation about the humanity of education, the human experience that we’re having on the planet collectively together and the impact of the events that we are witnessing before our very eyes. The impact it’s having on children, on staff members, on families, on communities, on our district, on ourselves. I don’t know how we can continue as educational leaders in good faith without acknowledging the impact of the energy and the actions that are occurring towards fellow humans.

I don’t understand how education can continue to progress forward, to move forward, to empower students, which is the goal. How can we empower ourselves, staff, students, families? How can we educate them and empower them if we’re not courageous enough to have conversations around the humanity of it all, the reason why we’re doing this in the first place?

And I know what you might be thinking because this is what I was thinking and this is where the conversation in EPC went this week, which was, where do we begin? What happens is we see what’s happening and we want to fix it, we want to change it, we want it to stop. We want, you know, better for everyone. And when we think that way at this like national level or global level, and we want it all to stop, you have an all or none thinking, it’s like, I can’t fix all of that. I’m just little ol’ me. How is my personal power as a school leader going to make any difference?

So, where do we begin? In bringing back the humanity into our leadership approach and leadership experience. So these are my recommendations and these are the steps that we embody in the empowered principal program and in the, I consider this a movement, a philosophy, like a new paradigm or a an addition to like a an enhancement into the educational experience. So as leaders, the simplest way to approach and to invite humanity back into education is to number one, feel our own emotions first, all the way through. Not just the surface emotion, like, ooh, I don’t like that. I don’t think I’m going to go there. But to create a space, a sense of privacy wherever you are.

I like to just be in my bedroom. It feels like a safe haven for me to go in and let myself feel my emotions all the way through. To invite them in, how am I feeling? What am I feeling? Naming it, labeling it. Like, I feel this, I’m so this, I’m so upset, I’m so hurt, I’m so angry. I feel so whatever. I say it, I name it out loud, and I let it kind of ravage my body. I let it vibrate throughout my body because feelings, emotions are feelings. We feel them in our bodies.

But what we don’t want to do is we don’t want to feel that vibration. We don’t like the intensity of it. We don’t like where it’s landing. We don’t want our head to pound or our throat to feel closed off or our heart to pound or our chest to feel tight or for our stomach to feel nauseous or have butterflies. We don’t enjoy that vibration in our body, so we try to avoid it versus letting it run its course and fully all the way through expressing that.

How am I feeling? I’m angry. Why am I angry? Because of this. How does it feel in my body? This is how it feels. This is the intensity. This is the color, the shape. This is where it’s located in my body. Oh, I’m so mad. It comes in waves. It’s just like a good cry, you know, where you can feel it coming on and you can hold back tears and you can pull it together for a while. But if you think about it again, it brings it right back up. It’s like when, you know, I’ve lost my mom, my dad, and my grandmother, and I can still literally feel the grief again when I think about them and I feel them, and I feel their absence, and I think about the memories. Now, the tears might be happy tears, but they sometimes they might be very sad tears.

But like a good cry, it will come to the surface and if you allow it and just let it all out, you cry, you wail, you do whatever you do, have the ugly cry. It kind of starts and then it comes in waves and it gets more intense and less intense. And then the waves kind of come in again and then a little bit slower, a little bit slower. And eventually, the body feels complete. And you’re just kind of done. When you let yourself cry all the way through. Because one of the worst things that happens is that we cry, right?

So you allow yourself and you give yourself permission to have your own humanity experience, to have your own feeling experience. And eventually, when you get to the other side of that, you’re like, now what? I’ve had the good cry or I’ve felt the feels, I’ve been angry, I screamed in the pillow, I did what I needed to do. I took that walk and like, whatever it is you need to express yourself, whether that’s through physical motion, whether it’s through crying, whether it’s through, you know, screaming, whether it’s through punching a pillow, something that’s safe, but also like gets the physical energy out of you.

Let that emotion process all the way through, and then you’ll kind of hit a, now what? What is it that I need? What do I need for me to feel better personally? What control or power do I have? A lot of what we feel is disempowerment. We’re angry, we’re frustrated because we don’t feel we have power. But in believing we have no power, we give the power we do have away.

So after the feels come through all the way, then we’re like, what control do I have in this situation? What power do I have? I have the power to manage my thinking. I have the power to think what I want, feel what I want, act the way I want. I have a lot of control over me, okay? Sometimes just having allowed yourself to process the feeling all the way through is completely enough. It’s like, it’s all you needed. It’s just, that’s what I needed. I feel better. There’s nothing more that I need to move forward. And then I’m good.

Other times, you might feel compelled to make a decision or take an action or try a different approach or, you know, perhaps try a new set of behaviors, new habits, new patterns, either ways of thinking or ways of behaving, or perhaps you’re looking for a way to articulate and communicate and express yourself in a way that feels fulfilling and feels complete for you, or it feels like progress, like empowerment.

So after the feelings comes what next? And then ask yourself because in different scenarios, it’s going to be different things. For some people, it’s getting out and protesting. For other people, it’s, you know, sitting back and supporting family, friends, neighbors, school community. Empowerment can look an endless amount of ways. What feels empowering for you? No one can tell you that. Only you can tell you that. But you’ve got to let the feelings pass through first to have the clarity to even know what’s going to make you feel better, okay?

And then as a school leader, moving beyond our personal, now that we’ve done the work internally, we can take it to the external. What baby steps can I take that will support my school community to do the same? And look, you don’t have to take on the problems of the globe or the entire nation. Just thinking you need to do that feels very intimidating, very scary, it’s frightening. It’s very discouraging. So what are the baby steps? What’s one thing I can do? One person I can support, one student, one staff member, one family. What’s one conversation that I’m courageous enough to have with maybe a district level leader?

Because friends, honestly, I don’t see how education can continue to avoid conversations around the humanity of being human. The experience of being human, which includes the emotional experiences we are having. Our emotions are what make us human. It is a unique feature of our humanity. Our emotions are the fuel that drives our decisions. How we feel impacts the decisions we make and the actions we take. Our emotions determine what we believe about ourselves, our identity, other people, what we believe about others, what we believe they’re capable of, you know, their identity, and what we think and feel and believe about the world. Emotions are the fuel. Emotions are the actual energetics of being human. It’s the energy of being human. It’s the energy behind everything.

So avoiding our humanity and narrowing our purpose as educators down to having blinders on basically of just like, I’m here to teach reading, writing, math, sciences, you know, focus on test scores, focus on improving, you know, student achievement, you know, yes, they have a little bit of arts and, you know, PE, but really, we’re here to like curriculum and test and move them forward, get them reading, writing, you know, doing some math, doing some science, a little bit of art in there, and along they move. When we keep that narrow lens and measuring our successes via test scores, we are missing the whole point.

Our purpose as educators is to empower people. To educate them is to empower them, to give them the identity of a person who has power over their lives, the ability to make decisions for themselves, the ability to decide who they are and what they want to do, the capacity to expand their capacity. We empower children, we empower adults, we empower one another. It doesn’t end when we turn 18 or 21 or 25 or 30. Our expansiveness, our humanity continues to evolve throughout the entire existence we are here on the planet as an individual and as a collective. Our power comes in the form of emotion. Emotions are a topic we just can’t avoid because it’s the very thing that defines us and drives us as human beings. That’s what humanity is. It’s the collective experience as humans on the planet. It’s benevolence. This is the very definition if you look it up.

I feel I have been called to create spaces like this on this podcast and in my empowered principal programs where we openly discuss the humanity of education, the deeper purpose, the value of it, bringing these conversations around the emotional experience of educators and students into the mainstream, to prioritize it. We need to prioritize the emotional experience of our teachers, our leaders, our students, our families, to expand the experience and to improve the experience of learning, the experience of teaching, the experience of leading. How it feels. Because if it feels terrible to learn, and it feels terrible to teach, and it feels terrible to lead, what’s the point? It’s not based on empowerment at all.

We’re seeing what happens when we dehumanize humanity, when we dehumanize experiences, when we turn off the emotions and we turn off the capacity to discuss how something feels and to have compassion and empathy for one another’s experience, to look through other people’s lenses, not to completely understand them, but to kind of look through the lens for a minute, to seek to understand. And I do believe that we have the ability, the capacity, and the empowerment to do this as leaders, to create this impact, to bring back the humanity and the purpose of education, which is empowerment for all humans collectively. We can do it gently, we can do it slowly, we can do it with intention by having one conversation at a time, one discussion at a time, one emotional processing experience at a time.

We don’t need curriculum for this. We need to have conversation. We need to have connection. We need to have the courage and the confidence to hold these conversations. I hope you’re coming with us. I know you are if you’re listening to this podcast. I invite you to join EPC. I’m letting people join at any time. I usually only enroll people in the summer and then at Mid-Year Reboot. But because I wasn’t able to hold the midyear reboot because I’ve had multiple family emergencies, I have decided to open the doors to let anyone in who needs relief from the lack of humanity. We’re here to support you. We love you. We want to empower you. We want to work and collaborate with you shoulder to shoulder.

There is change coming to education whether we want it to change or not. It’s coming, it’s happening, and we can stand in our personal power as we navigate the change or we can feel victim to it and stand in our disempowerment. Come along with us. I want you to choose empowerment and enjoy the experience of school leadership, not just for you and for your family, but for your students, your staff, your families at school and the community at large. Have an empowered week. Take good care of yourselves and I will talk with you next week.

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.