Ep #213: Deciding Ahead of Time

Hello empowered principals. Welcome to episode 213.

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.

Hello my empowered leaders. Happy Tuesday. For those of you who are new, you know what? Welcome to the podcast. What is up? I hope you’re having a beautiful week. It’s amazing here in California. I love where I live, and I love to go visit other places too. I love it all.

All right I’m going to dive in, make this short and sweet. This is week four of the midyear reboot for school leaders. Today we’re going to talk about deciding ahead of time. What does that mean to decide ahead of time? Here’s what I think it means.

It means that you’re going to predetermine your outcomes, the results you want to create in your life, the goals you want to achieve. You’re going to decide them in advance. So many times even in our resolutions, I want to talk about new year’s resolutions here for a second. We get to the end of the calendar year and we celebrate the new year. It’s super exciting. We’re like okay, it’s full of possibility.

I love the new year because it gives us that opportunity to really look back, reflect, think about what worked, what didn’t, what we want to accomplish in the new year. We’re full of possibilities. So I love the new year energy because it gives us that moment of looking into the future.

That’s what I spoke about on last week’s podcast is using this energy to look into our future and to imagine what could be possible. To push ourselves, what else could be possible? How good can things get? So how do we do that? I’m going to talk about the how on today’s podcast.

The how is you’re going to decide ahead of time. You’re going to predetermine that outcome in advance. You’re going to visualize the outcome that you want. So I want you to pick something, professionally, personally. Something you want to accomplish this coming weekend or this second half of the school year or over summer break. Just pick an outcome that you want to create for yourself.

Once you have that outcome, this is what I really want. Take some time to explore it. Don’t just be flippant about it. You want to really think what is it I most want? What would blow my mind? That’s what I ask myself. What would drop my jaw? What’s a wow goal? If I could achieve that, what would happen then? I think about the possibility. I get into that future, and I’m going to talk a little bit more about this in a second. You get into that future and you feel it, you imagine it, okay.

So decide for yourself right now. You pick the one thing that you’re going to achieve and you commit to that outcome 100%. You’re not going to stop trying until you’ve accomplished it. Remember the conversation about learning to walk. You don’t stop trying just because you fall, just because you fail. Just because it didn’t work the first, second, third, fourth, 10^th, 20^th time. You keep going.

When you commit to a decision that you’ve made and you just say, “I’m committing no matter what. I’m going to do the mental and emotional work required to adjust my approach until my approach works.” When you do that, the solution or the result or the outcome that you’re looking for, it’s inevitable. You can’t not achieve it if you don’t stop trying.

Look, we are always going to be trying to achieve something in our life. There’s always goals that we have achieved and accomplished and we’ve checked the box. There’s always something in our future we’re going for, probably until the day you die.

If you work your whole life to achieve something and you don’t achieve it. Let’s say you’re trying to make a million dollars a year. You’re like, “I’m committed. I’m dedicated. I’m going to figure this out. I’m going to do the mental work and the emotional work and the physical actual work required to try and figure out how to make a million dollars.” You get to the end of your life and maybe you’ve made $850,000 or $900,000. Are you going to be sad that you tried to hit a million and missed? Or are you going to celebrate and appreciate the $900K that you have? Think of it that way.

The word decide, I love this word. Because the word decide, decide, means to cut off all other options. So when you decide ahead of time it means you don’t have to re-decide in the future. You’re not going to change the goal. You’re not going to alter it because you’re afraid you’re not going to achieve it and make it easier. You’re going to decide, which means you’re going to cut off all other options. The option to give up, the option to change, the option to wiggle out is no longer an option. Because those other options have been cut off.

Here’s the deal. As you’re listening to me say this, you’re going to think that what I’m saying to you is you’re going to have to expend a lot of time and a lot of energy. You’re going to have to overwork and hustle and exhaust yourself and burnout and rush and be urgent all the time. No. Your brain thinks that the goal that you want, it’s going to be super hard. The work’s going to be hard. You’re going to have to overwork.

Your brain’s going to think that deciding and committing is too hard. Let it think that. Tell it that’s okay. We’re going to go for it anyways. Because look, not achieving it is hard. If you’re a person who struggles with your income and you want to make more money, it’s hard to not make the money that you want to have. It’s equally hard to figure out how to make it. You might as well go for the goal that helps you figure it out and how to make it, right?

So this is how I do it. Give you a little hack here. Imagine the person who already has the outcome you desire. You can do this with something very specific. I was just working on this with a client today. This client wants to have all of her observations done by the end of January. I’m recording this on January 6^th. She wants to have them done by the end of the month.

So you can do this with something very specific, a task or a project that you’re working on, you can decide I want this done by X date or I want it done in this fashion. Or you can go for something larger, like the principal whose contribution is valued by the district at $120,000. So I have another principal that I’m working with whose financial goal, she wants to make $120K as a school leader. So we are working on raising her value, creating the demand where she is the principal who creates $120K.

So who is the principal who has an organized calendar and plans out her tasks in advance without feeling the panic of always being behind because she has things laid out for the month? She knows what she’s working on and when she’s working on them. Or that principal who is in high demand and makes top dollar because of the value that he or she is providing to the district. The principal who knows and understands what is required to overdeliver and provide a level of service to the district that results in the district offering you a raise or a midyear bonus.

That just happened to one of my clients. I’m going to have her on the podcast in the future to share with you how she created so much value as a first year principal that she received a midyear bonus. This isn’t the first client that’s achieved a midyear bonus ladies and gentlemen. So it’s possible. It’s possible for you. In order for you to create the results for yourself and your school that feel impossible to you now, you have to start by imagining what it would be like if it were possible. You have to entertain the thought in the first place.

Most of us refuse to entertain the thought of what we really want to experience in our career and in our lives because we don’t really think it’s possible. So we shut it down in the beginning because we don’t want to have to long for it. We don’t want to feel the yearn and the angst of deprivation that comes from the belief that I can never have that. It’s not for me. It’s not attainable. Other people can have it but not me. Those kind of feelings or thoughts.

If you want to make more money or you want to have a well-managed calendar that doesn’t feel super rushed and super overbooked and overwhelming but you never think that it’s available to you or possible for you to have it. What I do is I just imagine a person out there somewhere who already has it.

For me, it’s easier to imagine another person. Sometimes I imagine like my future self. I can picture myself being the person who has it, but other times I can’t. So I have to imagine somebody just nebulous out in the world. Somebody has to have this goal already figured out. I think about that person. Who is she? What does she? I just envision her. I try to embody her. Who is this human who has what I want? I try on their thoughts and emotions like a new outfit or a new pair of shoes.

I try to let it vibrate in my body by thinking about what is she thinking? What is she feeling? How dose she show up? How does she dress? How does she act? How does she interact with people? What does she think about all day? How does she show up in the world? I practice thinking about what it would feel like if I already were that person, and then I embody that feeling right now.

So you can do the same. You have to be willing to let yourself be honest with yourself. What do you really want? Is it money? Is it time? Is it balance? Is it sleep? Is it more time with your own kids? Is it more time in classrooms? Is it superintendency? Is it working at a conference? What is the thing, the real thing that you want? Do you want to become an author? What is it that you really want to contribute and experience in the world?

Be honest with yourself. Nobody’s looking. Just tell yourself the truth and then practice this daily. Embody the thoughts and feelings that come along with what you want. I ask myself this like what do I think is going to be different when I have that future? What will be different? What will be the same? How will I feel? What’s my life going to look like? I try to put as much detail as possible into my future.

When you notice your brain going back to the past, you can just redirect it. It’s normal to go back to the past. It wants to think about that’s not possible and I’ve never done that before. I don’t know how. You have to practice thinking about your future over and over and over. The more you entertain the past, the slower your progress. The more you entertain the possibility of future, the faster you’re going to become the person who has the accomplishments.

By the way, the little secret is this. You have to let go of who you are now in order to become that person. That feels very scary. You have to up level your self-concept of who you are. It might require you to let go of old habits or old patterns of thinking, feeling, and acting. That is what feels scary. You have to be willing to shed the old version of you and embrace a new version of you.

When you feel yourself slipping out of belief and moving away from that decision that you’ve made, feeling less committed to it, bring yourself back into the emotion that you’re aiming to feel. Because the reason that you want to accomplish the goal in the first place is because of the way you think it’s going to make you feel when you have it.

So we get to feel that now. We get to jump into that space where we’re imagining it and we’re embodying it. We can just roleplay it. I just pretend I’m the person who has a million dollar business. I roleplay that. What do I wear? What do I look like? Who am I talking with? Who am I spending my time with? What are my clients? How amazing are my clients?

What am I doing with my money? How am I planning out my life? How am I saving money? I don’t need to spend it. I just want to have it. I want to be comfortable with having it. I want you to be comfortable with having money in your life, with having an abundance of time in your life. With having a lot of success as a school leader in your life. You have to be comfortable. You have to become comfortable being the version of you that has more money, has more time, has more freedom, has more success.

So when you feel yourself slipping out, ask yourself why did you make this decision in the first place? What’s the significance of deciding ahead of time? What’s the impact of this decision? Why are you willing to recommit to the mental work to achieve it?

The question I love is what’s the cost of not doing this work? What’s the cost of not trying to make more money or not trying to create more time or more freedom in your life or more flexibility? What’s the cost of not trying to achieve a higher attendance rate or better test scores or happier teachers, right? When teachers aren’t happy, they leave. Then you’re spending your time hiring and firing and letting go and rehiring and courting teachers and training them than you are in classrooms building up teams, right?

I want you to commit to that decision and recommit to it every single day. It’s a matter of waking up and deciding every day that you’re committed to that decision that you made ahead of time. My husband and I do this with our marriage. I wake up each day and I tell him, “I choose you. I want you in my life. I choose to live my life with you every single day.”

I want you to do the same with your dreams and your goals, and to choose the life you have and the life you’re creating every single day. Choose to commit to your decision ahead of time, and then recommit to it every single day. Even if you have to sell yourself on why it matters to you. When things get hard and you fail and it feels terrible to fail, remind yourself why you’re doing it in the first place and recommit.

People are going to tell you you’re crazy, you’re delusional. All the evidence outside of you is going to tell you that this isn’t working. You have to have the resolve to look for the evidence that tells you it is possible. You know what? You decide what’s possible. You get to create the evidence. You get to decide to believe in yourself regardless of your past, of what other people say about you, or what’s been done before. Decide ahead of time that you are successful, you are capable, and that you are able to achieve the impossible.

I’ll talk to you in February. Take care. Love you all. 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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