Ep #212: Future Possibility

Hello empowered principals. Welcome to episode 212.

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 Robeck.

Well hello my empowered leaders and happy Tuesday. Happy 2022. I really hope this year is going the way that you want it to. I have been reconnecting with my clients after the holiday break and listening to all the joys and all the challenges that are coming with the return to school. Let me tell you, some of you are having an amazing time and others of you are really challenged with the COVID crisis, again.

We have another bout of COVID hitting our schools, hitting our staff. A lot of you have teachers out. A lot of you, yourself, have been sick. We’re all contracting this virus at some point. I just want you to know I’m thinking about you and wishing you well. I hope you are healthy. I hope your staff is healthy. If you want support and you want a coach, call me. We’ve got a whole half a year. That’s what this January reboot 2022 is all about.

So today, I love this topic so much. I’m passionate about it. I have been emerging myself in these concepts and in these thoughts. Today I’m going to share with you what I’m thinking about for myself, what I’m introducing to my one-on-one clients, and what I’m offering through the Facebook group and through my email lists.

So if you aren’t on the Empowered Principal email list, what the heck? Let’s go. Get on the list. I offer tons of great input and advice and strategies and tips and concepts and tools to help you overcome the challenges you’re facing as school leaders. So let’s do this.

Okay. As you know this month we are going through the midyear reboot by exploring what we think is possible and looking at what we think is impossible, and why we think it’s impossible. I think that’s so fun.

So here’s the deal. You have things that you want to experience in your life. You want to accomplish in your career. You have personal aspirations. You have professional aspirations. You want to experience certain things in your career, certain things in your life. Perhaps you want to be a superintendent or you want to become a presenter or you want to become an author or you want to become a podcaster professionally. You want to do something that expands who you are as a school leader.

Or maybe you just want to get really good and hone your skills as a school leader. Perhaps you’re ready to move to a bigger district. You still want to stay a principal, but you want to be a district. Maybe you’re a person who is listening and you’re aspiring to become a school leader, okay? You all have professional aspirations.

You also have personal aspirations. You have thoughts about what you want to achieve in terms of balancing your time. You think about how you want to spend your time. You think about how much money you want to make or would like to have. You think about the relationships you want in your life. Whether you want to be married or you want to stay single or you want to have a partner or you want to have children or not have children. You want to travel or not travel. You want to have many different experiences or you want a very quiet stable life.

There’s no right or wrong way to live everyone, but I want you to know that deep inside of you is a compass. Martha Beck calls it your north star. It’s the part of you, your essential self, that knows exactly who you are and what you want. What happens is we get disconnected from that person. We get disconnected from who we truly are.

That’s called the social self. I call it our mind and our heart. Like our mind has been trained to think of who we should be and how we should act based on what we’ve been told, what we’ve been taught, what we observe out in the world. We disconnect from that knowingness, from that compass in us that tells us this is what I really want to experience. This is who I want to become. This is how I want to show up in the world.

This is the part of us that knows who we want to become, knows what we want to experience. Maybe it’s so deep inside of us because we’ve stuffed it down and we haven’t allowed it. We say to ourselves, “I don’t really know what I want. I can’t articulate what I want to achieve. I don’t need that in my life.” Even though deep down we kind of want it, right?

Future possibility is looking into the future to decide, to determine how and what it is that we want professionally and personally.  I want to start out by saying that everything from your past, everything you’ve achieved in your past, it was impossible for you personally to have accomplished it until you accomplished it. I love that.

So when you were a baby, you did not know how to walk. It was impossible for you when you were born to walk. You had no business walking around when you were two or three months old. But when you developed and you became one, your brain and your body had a little conversation and decided, “I have an urge, I have a yearning, I have a desire to move faster than crawling. I want to learn to walk.” You evolved physically, mentally, emotionally until you were able to walk.

When you were an infant and couldn’t walk, you didn’t have the thought, “I want to walk.” You didn’t know it was possible until your body developed such that this internal compass in you gave your brain the wherewithal that walking was a good idea. Even though your body didn’t know how and wasn’t quite sure, it was determined and committed no matter what to figuring it out. Your brain had to fail and fail and fail. Your body had to fail and fail and fail, but you never gave up. You kept standing up and falling. Holding onto the couch and falling. Taking a couple steps and wobbling and falling. You failed your way to successful walking.

So any human and every human on the planet that has achieved something for the first time. I think about things like the first four minute mile run. The first person who ever broke the four minute mile barrier. The first person to ever climb up Mount Everest. Anything and everything that’s ever been created or accomplished by humans for the first time. The first time to the moon, the first car, the first airplane, the first TV, the first iPhone, all of it, the first computer. It all started off as impossible, and it only became possible because of one thing. That’s a thought.

Thoughts are what move humans from impossibility to a possibility. From something not being achieved, a goal, a desired outcome or result you are trying to create in your life. The way you move forward is by thinking about that impossible goal and finding all the ways in which it might be possible. Failing, failing, failing along the way.

So everything you want number one, you can’t achieve it if you can’t conceive it. Number two, you have to be in thought about it for it to even be a possibility. Achieving the impossible is absolutely inevitable when you decide to let failure be that path to possibility.

Just like when you were learning to walk or learning to ride your bike or learning to drive a car, all of those modes of transportation. You wanted them so badly that you were willing to fail. You were willing to fail. You were willing to fall on your bike or crash on your  bike or have an accident in the car.

I can remember being 16 and one of the very first times my parents let me drive alone by myself in the car. I went maybe one mile down the road to I think I went to Walmart or Target or something. As I was pulling out of the parking space, there was a big van next to me. Someone was coming down and I didn’t see them, and they hit the back of my parent’s car. I was so scared. I failed. I ruined the car. I had my first accident. I called my parents. They came running. Of course everything was fine. I felt bad. My parents comforted me and said it was okay.

The point is that we have to fail over and over and over again to get to the goal, to get to our successes, to get to the accomplishment that we want. So failure is the path of our future. It is the how.

When I talk to clients and they’re new at school leadership or they’re wanting to transition into another position in the district, they always say to me, “But I don’t know how. I don’t know how to make more money. I don’t know how to get that job. I don’t know how to lead my school.” The how is decide, commit, and then fail your way to the success.

This is where the problem lies. We think that failure is the worst outcome possible. We think that we shouldn’t fail. We avoid failure at all costs. We think it’s the stop sign that says, “Nope, you’re on the wrong path. Don’t do this. It’s not working. Stop what you’re doing.” We think the failure is the stop sign on the path to success. If you look at anything that’s been created in the world, crossing that finish line was accomplished by embracing failure after failure after failure.

I think about the movie Apollo 13. That whole movie is all about trial and error, fail, fail, fail, fail. Even when they sent the astronauts up into space, they failed. They used that failure to create more success. NASA’s successes, all of their successes, their trip to the moon. All of the successful attempts they have achieved are only possible because of all the failures. We want to embrace failure as the path of our successes, of our teacher’s successes, of the student’s success.

We teach in our schools that failure is to be avoided at all costs. This is a huge mistake. We label failure as bad, as wrong. We feel bad when we fail. Teachers feel bad when they fail. Students feel terrible when they fail. No wonder kids drop out. No wonder they don’t want to be in school. No wonder they give up on learning and they don’t want to read and write because it’s hard, and they fail at it.

If we create cultures where failure is embraced and we celebrate the failure and we say, “Yeah, we do hard things because we fail at them. It’s okay to fail and it’s good to fail. We want you failing.” If we can shift that mindset that failure is the problem instead of failure is the solution, we can give kids some much power over their learning and their accomplishments and their achievements. We do the same things to teachers.

This isn’t to say we don’t give feedback and we don’t offer them suggestion for improvement or tell them when something isn’t going in a direction we want it to go as a school leader. It’s to say that it’s not all or none. We have to let teachers fail in order to become highly successful teachers. Students need to fail a lot. They’re children. They are learning. We have to allow that. We have to hold space for failure. We have to embrace it.

Which means we as adults have to allow it in ourselves. That’s what kids see. We don’t allow failure ourselves. They see that. Then they don’t allow themselves to fail. When we tell them, “Oh it’s okay,” they don’t believe us because we don’t allow ourselves to do it. We don’t model that behavior.

We give critical feedback when students or teachers fail to meet a standard or pass an exam or pass a test or pass our observation criteria, whatever it is, right. Sometimes we use unintentional and sometimes intentional forms of what I call shaming for failing. You remember the red pen when you were a kid? If your paper was all marked up with lots of red pen, that was a very bad thing. You didn’t want your friends to see it. You hid that paper. Your parents would freak out. It was a big deal to get a lot of red marks.

Some of us had the days of the color behavior chart with the clips and up and down where we’re socially commentating on a student’s behavior. Perhaps we do the whole stay in at recess to finish your homework. I know I had upper grade teachers thinking that that was a solution for kids.

Just the other day I had a client who shared with me that one of her teachers had given a student a zero score on a homework assignment because the student didn’t put their name on the paper. The teacher did this twice in a row to teacher a lesson, to teacher responsibility. Obviously, you can imagine the parents called and didn’t feel like that was appropriate.

So we do these intentional and unintentional, like subconscious and conscious ways of trying to correct behavior. We’re trying to give feedback, but we’re doing it in a way that says failure’s not an option. It’s a very bad thing. Avoid it at all costs. What’s sad is in school it’s the worst thing you can do, but in life it’s the best thing you can do because it’s the path to success.

Now the other piece of future possibility is that there’s a difference between looking to our future, deciding today what our future’s going to look like, and then figuring out how to make that happen by trial and error and failing. Trying again and committing and never giving up. Versus looking to the past. I call this past probability.

What we do is we look back to the past to determine what we think we are capable of achieving in the future based on the trajectory of what we have accomplished in our past. So we look back and we say hm, okay. Here’s what I know I’m capable of. Here’s what I know how to do. Here’s what I’ve accomplished so far. Therefore that must mean the probability of my success is going to be based on my past.

No. That’s not the case. What makes you successful, what gives you future possibility, what helps you create a possibility beyond imagination, what helps you create the possible from the impossible is looking forward not backward.

We do this in education constantly. We use past data to measure what we think we can accomplish, and we use it to guide what we think will be a reasonable goal. When we’re establishing site plan goals, we look at the past. We say, “Well, we’ve averaged about 2% or 4% gains. So let’s shoot for 5%.” Do you see that? We’re using our past to determine the future. The future has no business looking at the past. The past has no business telling us what the future holds.

In education, we’ve gotten into this habit of looking at trends and patterns to determine ahead of time what we think is possible, what we think students can do, what we think teachers are capable of teaching. We use this past to talk us out of believing that our future has the possibility to tackle the impossible.

We fail ahead of time. We decide today that tomorrow is going to be the same or just about the same by telling ourselves well, it hasn’t been done before. It doesn’t work like that. This is the way we’ve always done things. The system’s not designed for that. We don’t really have control over that. We’ve never achieved that level of success before. Or this is going to take too long.

A lot of times our brain is like, “Well, I want that goal, but that’s going to take forever. To get people on board, to get people thinking that way, to get the culture just right, to get students all motivated and ready to learn.” We think that other people just don’t care enough. We have all these thoughts that hold us back. That’s because we’re using our past to determine our future. I invite you to consider using your future to determine your future.

Finally, this is my favorite part. Future possibility begins with brand new thoughts. Thoughts you’ve never considered before in your life. Thoughts that have never even occurred to you. You cannot achieve what I call with my clients a WOW goal. It’s a wildly outstanding win goal. If you can’t conceive the thought, you can never begin to achieve it. Because all goals that have ever been achieved always start with a thought.

So I’m going to ask you a question that might make your squirm. Believe me, I’m going to be talking a lot about this topic in the spring in future podcasts. So buckle up and get ready because we’re going to dispel some myths here people. Here we go.

Have you ever conceived the thought that you are capable of making $200K a year? $200,000 a year as a school leader? How about $500K? How about one million dollars? Have you ever even entertained the idea that you could be making double what you’re making now? Triple what you’re making now? Have you even considered that thought?

I’ll tell you this, and I was this way too. Most educators have never conceived that they can make more money because we have been taught and we have been conditioned to believe that educator’s don’t make money and they don’t make a lot of it. They have to live paycheck to paycheck. So it never occurs to our brain to put this thought into motion in the first place. We just sign up for education. We resign to the fact that we’re not in it for the pay. How many times have you heard a teacher say that? “Well, I’m not in it for the money. I’m in it for the kids.”

No, we go through the motions in education thinking that all we can make is what the pay scale offers us or what the school board has to say or what the school board offers us. So much of what holds us back are outcomes that we’ve never considered in our brain before.

So let me ask you this. Do you think that there is one person on the planet out of what seven/eight billion people that happens to be an educator that also makes a million dollars a year? Do you think there’s one person out there that has achieved that goal?

Let me fill you in. I just googled it before I jumped on the podcast. I googled something like millionaire educators. Listen to what I found. Ramsey Solutions conducted the largest survey of millionaires ever with 10,000 participants. Eight out of 10 millionaires invested in their company’s 401K plan. For educators, it might be a 503B, right. The top five careers for millionaires. Are you ready for it? I’m blowing my own mind just reading this out loud.

Number one, engineer. Not hard to believe. Number two, accountant. Crunching numbers. Number three, teacher. Not superintendent, not the county superintendent, not the State Superintendent of Education. Teacher. Number four, management. It’s just general management. Number five, attorneys. Doctors aren’t even on the list people. Teacher is number three in the millionaires. Are you hearing me? The myth of the poor educator is busted.

My friend Susan who I love dearly, she’s been retired many, many years. I called her my west coast Mama. She’s like family to me. She has well over a million dollars. She was a teacher. Her husband worked in like air conditioning contracting or something like that.

They weren’t founders of Apple. They weren’t high end executives. She was a teacher. She never was an administrator. She was a kindergarten teacher her whole life. I think she taught like 40 years. Her husband was a contractor in like air conditioning. Building air conditioners for buildings or something like that. They are millionaires. I want you to hear this.

Look, I’m not saying that all teachers and all principals are millionaires or that they make even close to that. What I’m simply trying to illustrate is the concept that we have to be open to  thoughts we’ve never considered before in order to create a new outcome for ourselves.

They are uncomfortable to consider because our brain’s like, “That doesn’t feel true. That can’t be possible. I’ve never heard of that before.” Your brain’s going to kind of resist you being open to possibility. I use money intentionally because I want you to know it’s possible for you to make more money.

I’m going to be talking about how you create more money in your life. How you create more value. How you create high demand for yourself. I’m going to be talking about that in March. I use money because it’s so visceral. The reaction we have, and we’re so deeply held in the belief that it’s not possible for us to achieve making more money. I’m determined to dispel this idea that we aren’t able to become as wealthy as we want.

Look, hey, you don’t have to have money or a higher income as your goal. You can have any goal you want. Maybe you’re content with your income. Maybe you want to focus on working less hours. Maybe you want to implement an SEL program that’s actually effective, that teachers kids how to understand and process emotion and leverage it to their academic and social benefit.

Maybe your future possibility includes starting a podcast or presenting at a national conference or starting your own consulting firm one day or selling your lessons online. I know that lots of teachers do that. There’s endless ways for you to enhance your income. There’s endless ways to create balance in your life. There’s endless ways to achieve the experiences that you want.

Next week we’re going to talk about how to get started with this. We’re going to talk about how to make that decision. Because whatever you want, it starts with a thought and it ends with committing and deciding to what you want. We’re going to talk about how you decide ahead of time, how you create your future from possibility, and you take the impossible and you make it possible. Are you ready? I am. Let’s go. Have an amazing week. I love you guys. Talk to you next week. Take care. Bye.

If this podcast resonates with you, you have to sign up for the Empowered Principal coaching program. It’s my exclusive one to one coaching and mentorship program for school leaders who believe in possibility. This program is designed for principals who are hungry for the fastest transformation in the industry. If you want to create the best connections, impact, and legacy for yourself and your school, the Empowered Principal program was designed for you. Join me at angelakellycoaching.com/work-with-me to learn more. I’d love to support you in becoming an empowered school leader.

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