Ep #234: Wrapping Up the Year

Hey there empowered principles. I want to invite you to my upcoming workshop, the Three Month Plan, on Wednesday, June 22^nd at 4:00 p.m. Central/7:00 p.m. Eastern time. I created the Three Month Plan process in response to school leaders who felt that mapping out the full year was daunting and honestly not very useful.

The truth is you can’t possibly know everything that will happen between now and next June, but you can more accurately anticipate what to expect over the next three months of your school leadership journey. Breaking the school year into three month segments makes school leadership feel much more manageable and less overwhelming. You don’t have to take everything into account all at once. Just the things that are coming up in the next 90 days.

This workshop will include time for you to begin mapping out your plan and have your questions clarified. When you register for the workshop, I’ll send you the Three Month Plan template. I’ll teach you the process and walk you through the plan step by step. The registration link is in the show notes. Sign up today for the workshop, and you will receive an email with the template.

The Three Month Plan workshop is on Wednesday, June 22^nd at 4:00 p.m. Pacific/7:00 p.m. Eastern. You must attend live to receive live coaching and support on the three month process. Join us today. Register now and you will receive the three month template in your email box. I’ll see you there.

Hello empowered principals. Welcome to episode 234.

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. Happy Tuesday. Happy summer. Welcome to the end of the school year. Today we’re going to talk about wrapping up the year. So whether you are technically done or you’re almost to the finish line, you want to bring closure to the end of your school year. So as you’re listening to this perhaps the school year is already over, or maybe you’ve got a little bit of time to go. Either way, you want to implement a process for closing out the end of the year.

So the last eight to 12 weeks of your year have probably felt very busy and chaotic because there’s extra things that need to get done within a certain time period. You’ve got teacher observations, the evaluations, hiring, staffing conversations, testing, testing technology, all of the end of year events. There’s a lot to wrap up and put a bow on, right.

So for those of you who attended the webinar on how to enjoy the last eight weeks of school, you learned a process to help you plan and prepare for the end of the year. If you didn’t make that, that’s okay because I shared a summary of that training on the podcast back in May. So definitely check out those two episodes. There’s a part one and part two.

For those of you who are current clients or who are planning to sign up for coaching this coming year, you’re going to have access to all of the EP trainings and the webinars and the replays. You’re going to have access to the three month plan that I’m creating and the templates that go with that. You have access to all of my tools, my work sheets, my workbooks, all of it. Okay.

What’s so awesome about the three month plan, and I’m going to be talking more about this throughout the month of June because I want you planning now for the beginning of the year because I want you to feel like you’re ahead of the game and then always be planning three months ahead. I’m going to teach my clients how to do that. So if you’re a current client or you’re planning on signing up, let’s go, right.

What’s so awesome about the three month plan is that you can apply it to the beginning of the school year as well. So I taught it as though you were preparing for the end of the year, but you’re going to apply it throughout the course of the school year. We’re going to break the school year up into seasons, up into three months segments. We’re going to plan them out so that you can include breaks, rejuvenation, self-care, days off, downtime space on your calendar during the work week to actually get projects done so that you can maximize your time and your resources as a principal.

Doing this, learning how to do this makes life so much easier. It makes your job so much easier. When your job feels easier, you enjoy yourself. You calm down. Your mind is clear to make decisions quickly and to solve problems faster. This creates momentum for you as a leader, which allows you to implement your vision so you can increase your impact on your students and your staff.

It feels like magic when you follow the Empowered Principal™ steps and you figure out what they are for, why you’re doing it. It’s magic. It has helped every single client I’ve ever worked with, has always achieved 100% of the results that they came for. Sign up for coaching now in June even when you have a break.

Look, I’m going to give you plenty of coaching breaks. If you sign up, now you’re still going to have a summer. You’re still going to go out and have fun. Hey look, I’m taking a week off per month in the summer. You have the ability to take off as much time as you want. When you sign up for coaching, when you are on break or you are on vacation, you don’t lose that session. We just postpone a week and then we pick back up when you’re back in town.

So you can’t lose. You do not lose a session over the summer. It behooves you to start sooner so that you can get your plan underway and feel prepared and ready for the year. Okay. So sign up for coaching now so that you can plan ahead for the fall and create time this summer for a real mental break.

Okay. Let’s talk about wrapping up the year. So there are actions you need to take to wrap up the end of the year and questions you want to ponder for the remainder of the year and moving forward. So the actions look like cleaning up loose ends, putting that task list onto paper, writing out every single to-do, prioritizing those to-dos, delegating and constraining what you absolutely have to do and what you don’t have to get done.

So you want to make sure all the way through the end of the year that you have written out your tasks, you’ve prioritized them, you’ve decided who’s going to do them, either you or somebody else, you’ve delegated them when appropriate, and you follow through. And you’ve created and given yourself enough time to get everything done.

Now, once the kiddos are away and the teachers pack up their rooms and clean and they’re off and you’ve got a little quiet time, you might spend some time taking actions that you don’t feel like are the priority during the year. Things like cleaning out your files or cleaning out your office or maybe even redecorating your office, making it more inviting for you. Don’t forget to plan summer activities. You have to intentionally plan your fun, your rest, the experiences you want to have, your pleasure, your play, all of it, okay?

So those actions that tend to get put off the plate because you’re too busy and you don’t think you have time, this is a great time to add them back in. To organize yourself, organize your files, organize your email and your computer, to toss things out that are done, to really cleanse your physical space so that you can cleanse your mental space. Okay. Those are the actions that you want to take, but I want to talk about some of the thinking that needs to happen to wrap up the end of the year.

Most of us want to—this is what I wanted to do—check off all the to-dos, slam my computer shut, close my door, lock it, throw away the key, and run away for summer. I didn’t want to think any more about the end of the year. I want it to be done.

I encourage you to take this step before you say goodbye to the school year. Take time to reflect on the year. Don’t just walk away from it. Don’t just say thank goodness that’s over. TGIF. TGIS. Thank goodness it’s summer. I want you to really like spend a half of a day. Take a full morning and think about the year. Go through your calendar and look at the year.

Look at the fall, the winter, look at the spring. Look at the seasons of your school year. Break it down by season, and then ask what worked? What about this part of the year worked? What do I remember? How was I feeling during the fall? How was I feeling when school started? Is that how I want to feel this year? What worked? What did I learn? What do I want to do differently? Not just from an action standpoint, but from a feeling standpoint.

How do you want to feel next year in the fall, in the winter, in the spring, during testing, at the end of the year, the last eight weeks? What do you want your experience to be? What did you learn? Don’t forget there are things this year that went really well. There were successes. You want to bring those with you. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel or to make adjustments if something is working smoothly. So look at the processes. What processes, routines and procedures, protocols. What do you have in place at your school that is working beautifully?

Celebrate that. Wow, lunch worked great. Or wow, we’ve got yard duty down to a tee. Or our fire drills are perfect. They look like the kids know what to do exactly. Or maybe bus duty? I don’t know. Like look at all of those areas. Think about how you spent your time. Did you spend your time dealing with substitutes? Did you spend your time dealing with yard duty issues or lunch duty issues? Or people like not knowing how to walk down the hall? How did you spend your time? What were the problems?

What weren’t the problems? Think about that. What was not a problem for you? The way you can think about that is what are your colleagues complaining about that you’re thinking to yourself, “Oh, that’s not a problem for me.” You have solutions to things that other people don’t have. So acknowledge that. What worked?

Then go through the seasons and ask what did I learn? What did I learn? What did not go well? What did I learn from that experience? Then what do I want to experience moving forward? What needs to shift? Where do I need to problem solve? Where do I need to put my energy? Where can I delegate? Where can I constrain this year? You want to reflect on this year to learn from it so that next year is not just a rinse and repeat of last year. Okay?

Once you’ve done that, I want you to think about creating closure for yourself. There are going to be memories that you have from last year that will trigger you or created trauma for you, very intense reactions from other people. I want you to think back and let yourself go to that space where that horrible thing has happened. Just write about it, journal about it, think about it. Decide how to get support if you need. If you were really traumatized, and there have been principals severely traumatized in their work. Teachers, same thing.

If you need support, as I discussed last week, please get the level of support you need. Whether it’s through coaching or through therapy or through your doctor, find ways to address the trauma or address the triggers and see if there’s a way you can bring closure to that experience. With that experience, you can ask yourself what did I do right? What did I learn? How am I going to approach a similar situation in the future? How did this happen for you?

I know it might be hard to ask this question because when we’ve been through something very painful, it’s hard to understand how it happened for our benefit. But if you can be courageous enough to ask that question and to answer it, what you’ll find is, at least for me, what I found was I grew so much stronger.

I became more resolved in who I was as a leader. I started looking for the ways I was doing it right, where I had self-confidence, where what people were saying about me was not true. I found ways to create safety and security and self-confidence from myself. I didn’t need that parent to tell me good things about me in order for me to feel good about myself. I could feel good about myself even when they were screaming at me or yelling at me or accusing me of something I’d done wrong that I hadn’t done.

So if you have any specific triggers and interactions or traumatic situations that occurred, I invite you to consider exploring them versus trying to avoid them, trying to suppress them. They will come back into your life when you go back next year if you don’t address them or acknowledge them.

So whatever level of support you need to address those, please I invite you to bring closure to last year, to this year, and into the following year. Because you can either bring the experience and the learnings and an idea of how you’re going to approach a similar situation in your future. Or you can bring along with you the trauma and the pain and the sting, which is going to have you in fight or flight and have you avoiding. You are going to avoid at all cost having that experience again in the future. Okay? Try to make some sense of it and to show yourself how you’ve grown as a result of that triggering event. Okay.

Now, once you’ve done that, what I like to do is I like just to create a closing ceremony for myself to honor myself, to congratulate myself, to be proud of myself, to really focus on what I did right and how I’ve grown and who I’m becoming. I celebrate that with my family. I celebrate that just within myself. I take myself out for lunch or I buy myself flowers. I really, really acknowledge myself in the physical form so that I can kind of solidify that I’m doing it right, that I am capable of this job, and this is who I was meant to be. This is who I’m becoming as a leader. Okay.

Now, after that then you can get into the next steps. What are the next steps? This is where you go from those last minute actions of kind of cleaning up and organizing and clearing out to going into reflecting about what worked, what’d you learn, and what are you going to do differently? Putting full closure on the end of the year. Then you can go into next steps.

So the next steps go into visionary planning. They go into projecting your thoughts into the future. This is where the three month plan comes into play. When you’re creating the three month plan, you’re going to start asking yourself powerful questions that create solutions. I’m going to give you some questions and then I’m going to send you off into the summer. I want you to ponder these questions throughout the next four weeks.

Question number one, how can I save time? Look at the way you spent your time last year. Don’t just speculate. Actually go into your calendar. Look at what you put on the calendar. Then you’ll remember like if you did that thing or not, or if you spent your whole entire year with interruptions and student behavior or parent meetings or emergency this and emergency that.

Just be honest with yourself. How did you spend your time? How do you want to be able to spend your time? Then how can you create that time? How can you create time? How can you save time? What are the tasks that somebody else can do? What are the tasks you can say no to?

You want to make these decisions now ahead of time, so that you’re not caught in a situation where you feel compelled to people please, say yes when you mean no, to take on extra tasks because you’re organized or you’re the good person. You’re the A plus student. Make decisions now about your time so that you know what the answer is when it’s presented to you. You’ve already decided ahead of time. Think about how you use your time and how effective can you make your time.

So the solutions to saving time. There’s two ways to save your time or to create time: delegation and constraint. Delegating things that you don’t have to personally be doing or constraining by saying no and keeping the focus on the one priority.

Question number two, how can I increase the effectiveness of my resources? The solution to this question is called what I call power problem solving. You’re going to increase the effectiveness of your resources by scheduling time to power problem solve. What is a more effective way I can use this resource and this resource and this resource?

You have time as a resource. You have humans as resources. You have physical materials as resources. You have money as resources. You have your brain as a resource. Put that brain to work. Make it work for you in coming up with solutions. Schedule into your work week on a regular basis, power problem solving. Give yourself an hour a week to problem solve powerfully. Okay.

Then question number three. How can I increase my influence, my impact, and my effectiveness in our ability to achieve our goals faster? Basically, how can I increase the influence and impact that I have on myself and other people to increase my school’s effectiveness? The solution to that is to implement the Empowered Principal™ Process. It’s to implement what I teach you on this podcast every week. To take one component of it and implement it. To test it, to try it out, to see what works. I invite you to implement this at a deeper level through coaching.

Answer these three questions throughout the course of your summer. Be sure to close out all of your action items. Close out your thoughts and feelings through the reflection process and the closure process. Get the support you need for any triggers or traumas that you have experienced this past year. Then allow yourself time to plan and ask yourself powerful questions and answer those questions. If you had to know the answers, what would they be? I love you. Have a great rest of your week. Happy Summer. I’ll talk to you next week. Take good care.

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.