Ep #275: How to Manage Staff Emotions

Hello empowered principals. Welcome to episode 275. 

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. Welcome to the Empowered Principal™ podcast. So glad you’re here. Hey, I just wanted to say it’s the beginning of April, and I just wanted to acknowledge how challenging the end of the year feels. I’ve been coaching clients February, March, and now it’s April, and it’s been hard. 

The weather has been crazy this year, all across the U.S. whether you’re here in California where it doesn’t stop raining. We’ve had at least 12 atmospheric rivers come through. It’s just unbelievable. Whether you’re in the west and you’re over here freezing, or you’re over in the south and you’re getting all the thunderstorms. I’m not sure what’s happening on the east coast, but lots of crazy weather. 

People have been getting coached on the weather, believe it or not, because you’ve had to cancel field trips and kids have been inside. They’re getting crazy. Spring fever’s hitting. Teachers are going nuts. Everybody is ready for spring.

When spring hits, as you know, spring fever hits. So then you’re dealing with discipline issues of all kinds, and I just want to acknowledge you. I want to say you’re in it. This is the last trimester of the year, and I want to give you some comfort and support to say I hear you. I see you. I feel you. I’m coaching people who are wrapping up the end of their school years, or brand new leaders who are just signing in, and they are excited and planning for the upcoming year.

Which I’m going to be talking about more in the upcoming weeks. I have an exciting announcement I’m going to be making here over in the Empowered Principal™ land. But for those of you who are brand new, you just got hired, and you want to start off on the right foot. You don’t want to be overwhelmed and confused and feeling chaotic and doubtful and uncertain and lacking confidence. I know how that feels when you jump into the position. Let me just say, I’m here for you. Hire a coach. Start off on the right foot. Let’s go.

I have a few positions open for my one on one program. It’s pretty full, but I will accommodate as many leaders as I can. Okay. With that said, as my demand’s growing higher, I do have a special announcement coming up in the following weeks. So stay tuned for that. 

All right. Let’s dive in. Today I’m going to talk about how to manage your staff emotions. I did this workshop at a conference back in November, and it had such high demand I was actually asked to write a book for ASCD about this topic. I’m working with them on that, but I want to give you the highlights of this workshop. 

Because especially at the end of the year, you are tasked with everyone else’s emotions. Managing not only your own fatigue at the end of the year and all of the chaos and craziness and fun that comes with wrapping up the end of a school year. You’ve got all the testing energy. You’ve got spring fever energy. You’ve got everybody on fatigue energy because it’s close enough to the end of year. They’re tired, but it’s not close enough that they feel that surge of excitement that comes with summer break. Okay?

So you are holding space for not only your emotions but your staff’s emotions, student emotions, parent emotions, superintendent emotions, school board emotions, all of it, okay? I hear you. Let’s talk about it. So I’m going to get through this workshop just to give you a sense of what I shared at the ASCD Leadership Summit Conference back in November. I think this information applies very clearly to the situation you’re in here this spring.

Okay. So when I was talking with the people at the conference, I was asking them why they chose this workshop. Why this workshop? Well, the title intrigued them, and here’s why. They want to be able to hold conversations, especially with teachers and staff and parents, without being triggered by those people’s emotional reactions.

So as a school leader, one of the things you need to do is you need to be able to hold a conversation and maintain your emotional stability and your emotional neutrality and being able to communicate and deliver information, deliver a message, and allow somebody else to have an emotional reaction to that information or to the conversation without you getting pulled in and then triggered by their emotional state. Okay? That was one thing we talked about.

Another people took the workshop is they wanted to be able to anticipate ahead of time how other people might respond in advance and have a plan for that. So if you knew a parent was going to go off the rails because you had to have a conversation about something their student did, you want to plan ahead of time for that, right? Then also we want to be able to balance courage with compassion when we’re approaching a delicate topic that we need to discuss.

I was talking with one of my clients this week, and she was having to call parents to let them know what their child had done or said. She was feeling highly uncomfortable because sometimes kids will say things sexual in nature, which actually triggers a lot of adult feelings much more than the children, right? Especially when young children say it. We feel very shocked when young children are saying sexual in nature before we kind of talk ourself off the ledge.

So this client was having to call these parents and have these conversations with young students and their parents. Being able to have the courage to say what was going on and the compassion to understand that people will be triggered by the nature of those kinds of conversations. So we want to be able to balance the truth and honesty with some compassion and understanding for the person who’s receiving the information, but the courage to be honest, okay?

So here’s some of the things that I wanted to cover in this workshop. I wanted people to understand what emotions are. We’re going to talk about that here today and how they impact your goals. Then the purpose of emotions and how you can leverage them as a leadership tool. Then I’m going to teach you a tool for understanding and managing emotions, okay. If you’ve been listening to this podcast for a while, you know the tool I’m speaking of, and I’m going to use it in the context of how to manage staff emotions. Okay.

So in the workshop, I took them through an exercise about their emotions and being able to tap into their body to feel the vibration of an emotion. So I’m just going to cut to the chase with you here on the podcast and tell you that emotions are vibrations in your body. You can generate them on demand. You can think about being on vacation. You can think about summer break. You can think about being done with some project that just has been hanging over your head. The feeling that comes with spring break. The feeling that comes with the last day of school. 

All of that. You can generate that excitement and enthusiasm, pride in your work, excitement that you’re done, accomplishment. You can really generate those just by thinking about them. You can also generate dread. You can generate frustration, anger, fatigue. 

You can generate a lot of negative emotions in your body by thinking about things that bother you, things that frustrate you, things that discourage you, things that you failed at and you feel terrible about or you’re embarrassed about. Or you feel defeated. You got some feedback that wasn’t positive, and it made you feel defeated. You can generate emotion on demand. 

When you tune into what emotions are, they’re actually just vibrations in your body. That’s why you call them feelings. We feel them. We actually physically feel them vibrate in our body, which is why we do our best to avoid the feelings that feel uncomfortable. 

When you think of restlessness or boredom or you think of stagnation, those feel really restless in my body. I have a hard time with them. When I have to sit still and do nothing when you want to be feeling productive but you’re feeling unproductive. You know the feeling I’m talking about? That’s a very uncomfortable vibration in the body. 

It’s very bouncy for me. It feels very intense. I feel an incredible urge to either physically move or take mental action, to solve problems, to like spring into action, right? Because I’m trying to get out of the feeling of discomfort. I have a negative opinion of that emotion, and I don’t want to feel it in my body. I want to escape it. So we have emotions in the body.

Different emotions trigger different emotional and vibrational experiences in the body. As humans, we have the gift and the pain point of having a full spectrum of emotions to experience throughout the course of life. This is the human experience. We have incredibly positive emotions, incredibly negative emotions. But I want to offer this. Emotions are actually neutral. 

We label them as positive and negative, plus, minus, good, bad, desired, undesired, but the truth is that they’re neutral. They don’t have any innate meaning other than they are a physical vibration in our body that we experience when we have thoughts. 

We can either embrace them as a gift, as the beauty of being a human on the planet versus being born a chair or a table and not having the experience and gift of being a human on the planet. We can embrace them, or we can resist them and spend our time and energy attempting to avoid and circumvent the ones that we decide are uncomfortable or that we don’t like.

Here’s the other truth about emotions. They’re incredibly powerful. They influence every decision we make and actions we take. Emotions are responsible for the outcomes and the results that we create in our careers as principals and in our lives as humans.

Think about this for a second. The way that you feel generates a vibration in your body, and that vibration impacts the decisions you make. Think about it. When you’re feeling happy and light and successful and productive, think about the lens through which you make decisions versus how you make decisions when you’re grumpy and tired or you’re frustrated or you’re sad or you’re discouraged or you feel hopeless or helpless. Like you don’t have any agency or power over a decision. 

Think about what decision you make, or the lack of decision. You procrastinate or you just sit in indecision. You stall out. You make decisions differently based on how you feel. Okay? Notice that.

We can learn how to navigate our emotions through the coaching process, and we can leverage them to create more desired results for ourselves. Not just for ourselves, but we can learn how to lead using the leverage of understanding emotions and their power and how they impact our decisions and our actions. The approach that we choose to take.

Which means if we are doing this, if we are influenced by our thoughts and our emotions and our decisions and actions are influenced, that means everybody you’re leading, your students, your staff, your community. They are being driven by their thoughts and emotions, and their emotions are impacting their decisions and their actions. The results that they’re creating in their classrooms as teachers, as students, the way that parents approach interacting with the school, all based on emotion.

So understanding that emotions are very powerful, we want to identify the value of them. We want to acknowledge the value of understanding our emotions. I know if you’re my age, around my age, even in a decade or in my generation, we were taught. I would say generations before this. I’m in my 50s, right? 

So 50s or older I’m going to say, probably even 40s or older, you were taught emotions are soft skills. Those are fluffy. We don’t really have time for those. It’s a drag. We need to get to academics. We need to be professional. We need to be polished. We don’t have time for emotion, right?

The opposite is true. If we don’t acknowledge emotion and we don’t see its power and we don’t leverage it and utilize it in a way that benefits our leadership position and our leadership skills, we aren’t going to be as effective and as empowered as we could be. Here’s why.

The only reason we ever want something in our school. Any goal that you have. Anything that you ever want professionally or personally, the reason you want it is based on the way you think it will make you feel when you have it. Let me test this.

What is it you want in your life right now that you don’t have? Do you want a certain position in your career that you don’t have? Why do you want it? Your brain’s going to say well, I want to contribute in this way. Yes, of course you do, but why do you want to contribute in that way? It will make you feel amazing. You’ll have more impact, more power, more leverage if you’re in a higher position. Okay?

Let’s say you want to make more income. You want to make more money. Maybe in your current district, you’re the lowest paid district in the county, and you want to move to a different county where you’re the highest paid person. Why do you want to do that? Well, you want to be able to provide for your family. Why do you want to do that? You want to make sure they’re taken care of. If your family’s taken care of, how will you feel? Do you see it? 

You want to feel that you’re loving and protecting and nurturing and giving to your family. Why do we want the house we have, the clothes we wear, the car we drive, the degrees that we work so hard for? I have an amazing client who I’m going to have on the podcast to celebrate her. She is such a success. 

She is just completing her PhD dissertation, and we were talking about why she went for that. It comes down to how she feels about herself and being the example of what is possible for Latina women. She’s amazing. I’m going to have her come on this podcast and inspire you, but I use all of these examples to show you the power of emotion. 

So think about it. Why did you go into school leadership? It goes beyond the impact you wanted to make and the legacy you want to leave and the contribution. All of that is amazing and wonderful, and we are in service of our students and staff, absolutely. When you think about it personally, it makes you feel amazing to contribute to the world, to the community, to your students, to your staff in this capacity. Okay?

So most adults haven’t been taught the skill of how to acknowledge, process, and allow emotions to be present in their body without trying to avoid them, resist them, or react to them. Most people flare up. Their emotion flares up, and they react to that emotion to get it out, right, especially when we’re in the angry stage, right? 

We flare up and we blow up, or we flare up and we go inward depending on how your fight or flight response kicks in, and we’re not thinking about why we’re feeling what we’re feeling. All we’re thinking about is getting that energy out of us, okay. 

This is why working with adults feels very challenging at times because they’re not sure how to process their emotions. They don’t know what to do with them so they react because they haven’t been taught. We’re not sure what to do with our emotions sometimes because we haven’t been taught. So it makes for a very uncomfortable situation adult to adult. Here’s an adult we think we should know, we think they should know. We think everybody in the room should know how to handle themselves and handle emotion. But yet, nobody’s really taught us how to feel our emotions until now.

I believe that the tool that I offer to school leaders called the STEAR cycle, which was created by Brooke Castillo of the Life Coach School. She calls it the Model. I call it the STEAR cycle. It’s the same tool. This tool helps you see and explore your thoughts and emotions so that you can pause when you’re having an emotional reaction. You can acknowledge it, you can allow it, you can process it before you make a decision and take action.

So very quickly. For those of you who are brand new to the podcast, welcome. I love you so much for coming. I’m so happy you’re here. Most amazing podcast for educators on the planet. Here’s the STEAR cycle. The STEAR cycle goes like this.

There are situations that you face every single day. Situations are anything that are external to you. They are everything outside of you as a person. For every situation that you face, your brain offers thoughts and opinions. Opinions are just thoughts. You have thoughts about that situation. You have opinions about it. Those thoughts that are in your brain that are running like a ticker tape. You have about 60,000 thoughts a day. Half are conscious, half are not conscious. They’re just in there running on play all the time in the background.

But the thoughts that do come to your awareness and consciousness trigger your emotion. Sometimes it’s an intense emotion. When you hear somebody’s had a baby, there’s intense joy. When you hear somebody’s passed away, there’s intense grief. When you hear there’s been an accident, there’s intense panic.

When you hear that your school made some award, whatever your state awards, like top school in the state, in the county. Maybe you won the distinguished school award like we did here in California. When you feel that, you rejoice. You’re happy. You have intense pride and gratitude and excitement and accomplishment, right? Thoughts about the situation.  

The certificate itself is just a piece of paper. Or that phone call from your superintendent is simply two humans on the phone having a conversation, but it’s your thoughts about what happened that generate the emotion. When you’re in a state of emotion that you identify as desirable and positive or undesirable and negative or whether you’re feeling kind of neutral, like meh.

However you’re feeling impacts the way you act, your decisions, your actions, your behaviors. It also impacts inaction, procrastination. Inaction is a form of action, okay. Just keep that in mind. But your approach depends on your emotional state. That approach, those decisions and actions, are what generate outcomes and results for you. 

So S, situation; T, thought; E, emotion; A, approach; R, results. STEAR. What I love about the STEAR cycle is the reason I changed the acronym is because you can steer your leadership skills and steer your life in the direction you want it to go. Because something profound that I have learned about this tool is that you can put any desired result you want in the R line, in the result line.

Whatever you want to achieve or create or experience you can put in that R line and you can work the STEAR cycle backwards to be able to create the emotional energy required for you to create that result. That’s why I say to you the power of emotion is so significant it’s not the actions you take as much as it is the energy behind those actions. This is the power of emotion.

So we have our STEAR cycle into play and then we have other people’s STEAR cycle into play. There’s our thoughts and emotions going on, and then other people have their thoughts and emotions going on. Then there’s this emotional Venn diagram that happens. Our thoughts and emotions interact with other people’s thoughts and emotions, and there’s that gray area where we have thoughts and feelings about their thoughts and feelings. 

That’s what’s happening to school leaders right now. You’re out there doing your thing. Teachers are out there doing their thing, and you’re having thoughts and feelings about their thoughts and feelings. So teachers are coming to you complaining, blaming. They’re fatigued. They are making decisions that they want to stay. They want to go. They want to transfer. They want a different grade level. They don’t want to work with this person. They love it. They’re happy. Please keep me here.

You’re having lots of interactions with people right now. You’re also having to let people go out of love. There’s a podcast on that. How to let people go and hold space for them. Now you’re in the middle of holding space. You let them know, sometime in March most likely, but in April, May, and June, you have to hold space for those people to be unhappy or disgruntled or talking behind your back or making waves and trying to create drama. A lot of people choose to behave in that way.

Think about it. This is a perfect example exactly. Your decision to let them go out of love was this is not a great fit for them or for me. It’s not a want match. I’m going to let them go. They might not agree with you, and then they have an opinion about the situation where they were let go. They might be angry. They might be frustrated or confused. So now you’re overlapped. There’s what you’re thinking and feeling, there’s what they’re thinking and feeling, and now you have to manage your thoughts about their emotions. 

Can you see it? That’s what this is about. Managing your staff emotion is about managing your thoughts and feelings about their emotions. You cannot control another person’s emotions. If somebody’s angry with you or they’re upset, frustrated. If they’re having any emotion because of a thought they’re having about you, you can’t change their thought. You can’t change their emotion. You can’t go in their brain and rewire it.

But you can manage yourself around their actions. Because they’re going to react to those emotions. They’re going to have reactions. It’s not to say you’re going to just allow them to be crazy and you’re going to condone them being disruptive or disrupting your school culture. You’re going to set some boundaries out of love, but you’re also going to allow. 

Like if they’re not out of the bounds and they’re just being unhappy or they’re giving you the eyeroll or the side eye. You know what people do when they’re pouting. If they’re pouting, but they’re not generating a ton of drama and crossing boundaries, you can just hold space for them, okay? So there are two separate STEAR cycles going on. Keep that in mind. There’s yours and there’s theirs. You want to separate those back out.

Here is the truth bomb of this podcast today. You do not make other people feel a certain way. You never, ever make someone feel bad, make someone angry, make someone happy. You are not some higher power as a marionette doing the dance of their emotions. You’re not in control of their emotions. Their brain is. They are in control of their emotions. Their brain is what generates emotional vibration based on what it makes the situation mean.

You have a conversation with a teacher, and you let him or her go, they have thoughts and opinions about that conversation. Those thoughts are what generate their feelings. You didn’t come in and push a button. You didn’t come in and push the sad button or the panic button or the frustration button. They triggered those emotions.

So in conclusion, here’s what I want to say about managing your staff’s emotions. You want to keep your STEAR cycle, your thoughts and feelings and actions, separate from your teachers, separate from the other people you’re working with. You don’t make them feel a certain way. They don’t make you feel a certain way. So you’ve got to keep that in check. Separate those STEAR cycles. Notice yours separately from the teacher’s. 

Then lastly there’s something that I call holding space. Holding space is simply allowing other people to process emotion without you jumping into their emotion. Without you getting triggered by their emotional reaction. Holding space does not mean that you’re allowing or condoning the conditions of their situation. It means you’re allowing them to feel. You’re validating the feelings.

People can feel however they want. It’s not our job to tell them how to feel or not feel. We want to allow people to feel whatever emotion comes up for them without judging them or trying to change them or trying to manipulate them into feeling better or to take their feelings elsewhere, right? 

It’s easier to hold space as a school leader when we understand why they’re feeling the way they do. The way you understand how they’re feeling is to understand their perspective. You might not agree with it, but you can understand why somebody might be upset when they’re let go from their position. You can understand it. Do you see that?

Then the goal as a school leader is for us to stay as neutral as possible so that we can be the source of strength and encouragement for that person. Let them process their emotion. They’re going to have that emotion for as long as they need to take to process it and let it work through their system. Sometimes they never get over it. Sometimes they leave on the last day and they’re just as angry at you as they were the day you told them. It’s okay because you’re grounded in your STEAR cycle, you’re not getting pulled into their STEAR cycle, and you’re staying neutral. That’s what holding space is. Okay.

So emotionally resilient leadership has three components. Curiosity, compassion, and composure. Curiosity is examining their STEAR cycle from their perspective. Compassion is about developing an approach out of compassion for them. Then composure is being able to hold space for other people’s emotions. Okay? 

There you have it. That is in double time what I offered at the conference. I tried to do this in about 30 minutes. Hopefully we made it. This presentation was 90 minutes. So I had a lot more time to dig in and work with people. But here’s the truth. 

If you want to dive into this, and you want to be the most empowered version of yourself. If you want to be the leader who knows how to manage emotions, yourself and others, you want to be able to handle difficult conversations and not feel triggered by having to hold those conversations. 

If you want to be really skilled at emotional maturity and resiliency for yourself and how to teach other people, you want to be able to manage your time, you want to be able to manage your energy, you want to be able to manage your life without overworking, overexerting, being super busy, running around crazy. 

When you want to maximize your resources and leverage them in a way that evolves your potential and your school’s potential to its maximum capacity, you want coaching. Coaching is simply the process of examining our current thoughts and feelings, and tapping into the highest version of ourself. The highest, most empowered thoughts you can think, learning how to leverage that into real emotion, tapping into who you are becoming and the legacy you want to create, the person you want to become, the spouse, the parent, the friend, the colleague, the networker. 

Anything you want to be. You want to be an author? You want to be a guest speaker? Do you want to be a podcaster? Do you want to be the best school leader? Do you want to become a superintendent? Do you want to become a PhD student? I have students who are just achieving at ridiculous heights and ridiculous speeds. Their capacity is just to be a human on the planet. It’s incredible. 

Again, I’m going to have Eric on the podcast, but if this sounds engaging and delightful and wonderful and right up your alley, please sign up for a free consultation with me. I’m going to walk you through the process. I want you to be the one that gets these last final spots that are available for this coming school year. I invite you into the Empowered Principal™ program to be able to manage your emotions and the emotions of others. It’s the most powerful thing you can do. Have an amazing week. I love you guys so much, and I’ll talk with you real soon. Take good care. Bye-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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