Ep #446: The Empowered Principal Academy: Mastering Coaching & Leadership

Hello, empowered principals. Welcome to episode 446.

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 July. Happy summer of fun. I hope you are having the most delightful summer. And hey, if you are on Facebook, you need to come into the Empowered Principal Facebook group. I want you winning for having fun. I want you to be rewarded for having fun. There are a few weeks left in the Empowered Principal Facebook group Summer of Fun challenge. The more you have fun, the more chances you get to win Empowered Principal credits. So, I hope, I know you’re out there having a blast. Keep it rolling. Okay.

Today I am announcing something very big, very near and dear to my heart. Something I have been working on. It feels like a birth. It feels like something I have birthed into the world that has been a labor of love, a work of art, a masterpiece in the making, and it’s just the beginning. It’s just evolving. It’s never complete, as you know. Our work is always a masterpiece in progress. 

And I am so deeply honored, excited, and delighted to share with you the newest upcoming program for the 26-27 school year. I feel like it is a part of me. It is the work I have been cultivating for the last decade of my life and my career, and it is culminating into the most powerful and beautiful program. It has transformed me personally, professionally, as a coach, as a mentor, and I cannot wait to tell you all about it.

So if you think about your job, your role in leadership, leading people is getting them to act, to take action. Leading your team, your staff, even your students, and leading up, leading your administrative team at the top, if you’re at a site, is leading people to set ideas and plans into motion.

Leadership is about generating momentum. It’s about taking action in spite of fear. It’s about trying and being willing to fail and then getting up, dusting yourself off, licking your wounds, and trying again. It’s not about, and I really want to emphasize this, leadership is not about getting people to do what you want them to do or what you believe or have been told that the district wants them to do. That’s not leadership. We get that confused.

True leadership is about inviting people into their own inertia, their own empowerment. And with this concept of leadership being motion, I want to invite you into this brand new Empowered Principal program that was personally designed with you, the listener. Yes, you. With you personally in mind as an empowered principal. If you’re listening to this podcast, this new program was created for you. Because if you’re listening to this podcast, if you are referring this podcast, if you are consuming this podcast like Netflix and you’re binging on it, great.

You understand that your leadership job is to inspire people into motion, into taking action yourself that evolves them and invites them to take action, both personally and professionally. Your role as an instructional leader is to ignite the motion of learning. Learning by doing, learning by trying, learning by failing, by trying again, by exploring, by expanding, by evolving. Your role as an instructional leader is to lead others towards their own advancement academically, socially, emotionally, personally, professionally. We lead ourselves into motion to help others do the same.

Your role as an instructional leader is to coach, to mentor, to guide. And you know what? No one taught us how to coach as school leaders. We were expected to know how when we got the job. To simply transfer our skills of teaching children into teaching adults, but it doesn’t exactly translate the same, does it? At least for me it didn’t and those that I have coached over the last decade. Our role as instructional leaders is such a significant part of our job, yet it often becomes the role that gets lost in the shuffle of managing the people, the places, the things.

So let’s reconnect with our desire to impact as instructional leaders through the Empowered Principal Academy. EPA, the Empowered Principal Academy, is my newest and most in-depth program that teaches school leaders the art of instructional leadership. 

EPA was developed to help you bring out the best in those you lead because coaching is the practice of embracing empowerment for us as the leader and coach, for them as the educator, the paraprofessional, the staff member, the office member, the entire support team. For the greater impact on our students, our school community, our greater community, and eventually the world. Because each and every student whose lives you touch, your community touches, your staff touches, touches the world.

We can never know the reach and impact that one student will have in the world. And you take that times 500 students per year, times 10, 20, 30 years of education, your impact knows no limits. Imagine each member of your staff and student community fully embodying their own empowerment. I want you to sit here with me and feel that, the magnitude of our potential.

Coaching is the beauty of evolution and creation. It is the gift of development and expansion. The art of living a life that is a legacy to you and to those whose lives you touch. Where you as the leader have the opportunity to provide others the opportunity to create the life experiences and the career of their dreams, both in your students and your staff, because coaching is opportunity.

It is about our identity, ever evolving as leaders, as teachers, as support staff, as students, as parents, as community members, so that we can all inspire one another into the evolution of our own expanded identity. It doesn’t end. We want the people we work with, the students that we’re teaching, to own their empowerment, because leadership is mentorship. Leadership is teaching. Leadership is coaching.

Mentorship is a form of education because personal growth equals professional development. The more one grows personally, the more they grow professionally. That includes us. Mastering the art of coaching develops you as a master at school leadership. This is about you, them, and the greater good. I personally will be your host and master coach instructor in the Empowered Principal Academy.

I invite you to join me on this journey of mastering the art of coaching, the art of mentoring, the art of school leadership, the art of empowerment. We start this July 2026. I welcome you in.

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.