Ep #259: Success is Not a Multiple Choice Problem

Hello empowered principals. Welcome to episode 259.

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 school leaders. Happy Tuesday and welcome to the Empowered Principal™ Podcast. For those of you who are new, we’re so happy you’re here. I just believe with all my heart that this is the most impactful podcast you can listen to each week. I know there’s a bazillion wonderful podcasts out there, but I truly love my podcast. I truly believe in its capacity to help you without ever paying a dime. I give you all the greatest content. Today is one of those days. Short and sweet, but highly impactful.

So I want you to know something. Are you ready for it? Listen up. You are here to change the world. It is why you signed up to be an educator. You want to make the world a better place. You want children to have better opportunities in their lives. You want teachers to be successful in their desire to impact student lives. Do not shy away from this calling, your calling. Do not be afraid that it’s too big or too difficult for you. Do not ever believe you’re boxed in to how you currently believe you need to approach school leadership.

Anytime our brain offers us I’ve tried everything or I don’t know what else to do, that’s its way of telling you I need a little break from trying and thinking and failing. Give it a break and come right on back. Invite it to keep going. Invite it to push a little harder. Invite it to believe you do know how to be exceptional in your position.

For those of you who are new to this podcast, this podcast is different than any other educational podcast in the world, as I said a minute ago. But do you know why? Because I am a life coach. I don’t just coach you on how to lead your school. I coach you on how to lead your life, how to be a human as a school leader, how to have work life balance, how to organize your time and your resources, how to interact with people, how to put fun on your calendar, how to enjoy your nights, weekends, and your breaks, how to love what you do, how to accept adversity and failure.

I coach you on how to make a bigger impact at your school, in your district, in the world, but most importantly, in your own life. The work that I offer to school leaders isn’t only so that you can get more done and feel better about how you handled a situation at work, which is all wonderful and lovely. I definitely do that.

Although these are some of the benefits and outcomes of coaching, the work that I offer you is to show you that your career in school leadership and the life you’re living right now has way more possibility than you can currently imagine. And dot, dot, dot, it’s perfectly acceptable and abundant as it is.

Your life is not a set of multiple choice options. Leadership isn’t about doing it the one right way. Our lives are not multiple choice. It’s not okay. You get to be A, a doctor; B, a teacher; C, a mechanic; D, a lawyer; E, an engineer; F, none of the above. That’s not what life has to offer, but it’s what we teach kids in schools. Currently, I’m hoping to change that.

But right now what we’re doing is we’re teaching them that there is a right answer. There’s one right answer and to look for that right answer. We teach them to avoid the wrong answer at all cost. We teach them that they have a limited number of options that are right or correct or good. We teach them that there’s only so many choices in life. That you can only make money if you’re in the certain professions. That you can’t make money if you’re in these other professions.

We teach them that emotions should not be felt or expressed. That they’re bad, that they take time, that they’re uncomfortable, that we don’t like them. We don’t want them. That they’re unnecessary. That they’re a sign of weakness. We teach them that other people have the answers. Teachers have the answers, adults have the answers.

We don’t teach them that they have answers. That they have wisdom, even in their little youthful bodies and brains. We tell them you’re too young, you’re too inexperienced, you’re too unregulated. Let us show you the right way. Just notice what we’ve been taught and what we’re teaching.

I want to say this to you. If you’re listening to this podcast, whether it’s in real time or years from now, I am so happy that you found your way here. There’s no mistake that you found this podcast, and you have been introduced to life coaching for school leaders. There is a reason that this content resonates with you.

Maybe you aspire to become a school leader, and you’re eager to improve the way you teach and lead your school. Maybe you’re new to school leadership, and you’re feeling really overwhelmed with the new set of responsibilities and challenges you face. Or perhaps you’ve been at this job for years, and you want to find the joy in it again and avoid becoming discouraged and burned out.

Or maybe it could be that you know there’s a better way to approach school leadership. You feel a desire to do things differently. One that feels maybe more productive or successful without overworking you and your team. An approach that makes teaching and learning fun and delightfully engaging. Can you imagine coming to work and being delighted that it’s fun and engaging? People are happy. People aren’t bitching and moaning and crying and being you? Can you imagine a school where there is a better way?

I want to welcome you to this podcast because you are in the right place. This is what we talked about on this podcast. You aren’t limited in your options and in your approach to school leadership. You don’t have to do it the way everybody else does it. You don’t have to believe the things that other school leaders believe. You don’t have to buy into what other districts, other superintendents, other bosses, anybody. You don’t have to have a limited number of options.

This podcast is about empowering you to tap into your wisdom, your brilliance, your desires, your school vision, and to follow your heart. I followed my heart, and I invite you to do the same. I knew there had to be a way to lead my school without feeling chronically stressed and pressured all of the time. Trust me, it took me a few years to figure this out. I did not figure it out on my own. I want you to hear this.

You’re not a warrior. You’re not more successful if you suffer in silence and you suffer alone, and you pretend that you’re okay when you’re not. That does not make you a better leader. It doesn’t make you smarter or savvier or more successful. In whatever way you think that doing it on your own and figuring it out on your own.

So many of us believe like we should be able to get this figured out. We should have the answers. We should have the solutions. Yes, you are brilliant. Yes, you have wisdom within you, and it’s not easier to do it alone. I knew there had to be a better way. I believed that there was an approach that I could take that allowed me to be the empowered leader I wanted to be and still have time for a beautiful life outside of my career. I found the solution through coaching.

That’s why I created these services to help you as a school leader do the same. You can love your job, feel confident, be successful, and achieve goals that were once impossible without overworking and hustling 24/7, exerting yourself to exhaustion, overscheduling, running back to back meetings, all of that. I want you to know that you belong here. This podcast is your new home. You are welcome here. You’re in the right place.

I want you to invite your colleagues, any and all school leaders are welcomed here. No matter who you are, how long you’ve been leading, aspiring to lead, where you live, what kind of school you lead, private, public charter, elementary, middle, high school. Maybe you’re at the district level. I’ve got a lot of clients who are district level leaders. They still need coaching. Surprise. Just because you get promoted doesn’t mean your brain all of a sudden has more knowledge on how to be a great leader.

I want you to know that this program, the Empowered Principal™ program, is my one on one coaching program for all school leaders who are just like you. People who want to make a difference in education. People who value connection, contribution, compassion, from inspiring leaders to veteran district leaders. The Empowered Principal™ one on one coaching program was designed for you by someone who’s been in your shoes, who’s walked the walk, who’s done the work.

I’ve been a school leader at a brand new school. I opened a brand new school my first two years in school leadership. It was a charter program within my district. I’ve also worked at the neighborhood community. I went back, and I was the leader for four years at my home school where I taught for 15 years so I had to become the boss of my peers. That was interesting.

Then I went to district level. I worked with principals on a district level. That’s when I saw it. That’s when I saw how much pain and suffering was happening in silence and in private, and that there were principals out there who on the surface looked happy and perky. They were running around looking very busy and professional and productive. But on the inside, they were miserable. Okay. I created this program to have an impact for you in the following ways.

Number one, step into your leadership self-concept. Building your confidence in yourself and those you lead and in your leadership approach. Number two, managing your top resources, your mind, your energy, your time, and your resources. Your financial resources, your human resources, your physical resources. Managing all of those in a way so you can leverage these resources in a way that maximizes your outcomes that you want to achieve.

Number three, working with others and navigating their emotional reaction. Education is the ultimate business of people. Our sole purpose is to educate and evolve the human experience. A significant component of school leadership is working with others and understanding how to lead them. We do this by understanding what drives people’s decisions and action and what inspires them into action, and how to hold space during times that people are expressing emotion without us being pulled into that emotional experience. That’s a huge component of the Empowered Principal™ program.

Then finally number four, building your life and your leadership legacy. Grounding yourself in your leadership values, developing a school vision, and learning how to sell that vision to your team and your school community in a compelling way, how to map out your career and your life that ensures you leave the legacy of your dreams, professionally and personally.

You want your life to have purpose. You want to have spent your time and energy on the things that matter most to you. You want to have fun along the way. We have been conditioned to limit what we believe is possible for ourselves and other people. That changes here. To my knowledge, these skills aren’t currently taught in our school system.

We’re not taught how to expand our self-concept, how to leverage the resources we have available to us, how to understand emotion and how to process it, and how to be productive with emotion, how to leverage it, and how to use our desires as a roadmap to achieve the impossible. In fact, our current instructional approach is to tell children what is and what isn’t possible, and provide them a limited number of choices for what they can expect to experience in their lives. We are limiting their possibility.

In this current system, we teach kids that there’s a right way and a wrong way to avoid failure at all costs. We teach them that other people have the answers and to trust other people more than they trust themselves. Look, as an adult we know the only path to success is failure. Failure, failure, failure, all the failures. We pile up the failures, we get a win.

It happens in sports. We don’t expect 100% wins. We expect losses. We don’t like them, but we learn how to deal with the disappointment of a loss and to learn. Why did we lose? What do we think happened? What do we want to do differently next time in our approach? What do we have to believe? Where did our belief fail us? Did we get 10 points behind in the basketball game, and we were like well, I guess we’re gonna lose. Where did we give up? Right?

The Empowered Principal™ life and leadership coaching program will teach you how to coach yourself and coach other people that you work with. How to hold space for emotions, how to inspire your teachers, and build trust in themselves as you build trust in yourself. Your goal as a school leader is to offer the best experience possible for yourself, your teachers, your staff, your students, the families, everyone. When they have the best experience possible at your school, they go off into the world and create a better experience for themselves and others in the future.

So I want to announce the Empowered Principal™ mid-year reboot series that I’m going to be offering in January. I’m going to share with you all that you need to know about life and leadership coaching, how to apply coaching to your work as a school leader, why having a coach is the best decision for you personally and professionally, and how to implement the mid-year reboot in a way that not only gets you through the second half of the year, but compels you to lead in a way that serves you and any school that you lead in the future for life.

So this is your invitation to sign up for the Empowered Principal™ mid-year reboot series coming this January. This is a four part training series throughout the month of January. I’m sharing my work in a way I’ve never done before. My latest innovations and making the process as easy and as simple as possible for you.

For those of you who sign up immediately, you will receive some bonus content via email that will allow you to get started between now and January, which is the perfect time to dive in while you have time over the winter break. Have an extraordinary week. I’ll talk with you next week. Take good care. I’ll see you at the reboot. Bye.

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.