Ep #279: Let Ease Come to You

Hello empowered principals. Welcome to episode 279. 

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 and happy Tuesday. Welcome to May. I hope in your neck of the woods it is finally warming up. I know in California we have had all the cold, all the rain, all the wind. It’s been a crazy winter and spring, and it’s finally warming up. I’m actually recording this podcast, and then I’m heading down to Santa Cruz, which is a very famous and popular beach town here in northern California near San Jose, near the Silicon Valley, and this is where we go to play. 

So I have friends who have a beach house down there, and they arrived last night. I’m recording this podcast, and then I’m popping out of here and heading over the hill to Santa Cruz. I’m so excited.

So let’s talk about ease. This is going to be a short and sweet podcast because this is just something that came to me over the weekend, and it was so profound and so simple. I could feel it change me. It was like the very fibers of my being changed with this experience. So I’m going to share it with you, and I’m going to show you how you can implement this one sentence into your life, and it will change the way you feel completely. I’m telling you. I have had a different experience of my life this week than I had before this sentence appeared in my mind. It kind of floated through.

So let me tell you how this happened. I was thinking about my clients. I’m almost maxed out. I have 23 clients. My max is 24. I’m thinking about them all the time. How do I help them? How do I get better, faster results? How do I make things easier for them? How do I make school leadership easier for them? How do I help them balance their life? How do I make it easier to have conversations, manage their time, leverage their resources? 

This is what my brain spins on all the time. I just love this work. I love coaching. I love school leadership. I love my clients. My brain just loves to frolic in the land of how do I make life better for them? I was noticing a theme that was coming up, particularly at the end of the school year. 

It’s very fascinating to me because I do this too. I study myself a lot. I study my brain. I study my actions. I study my thoughts and feelings. I was noticing that I was doing the same thing as my clients. I was like oh, this is so interesting. The thought that we like to believe because it feels really good and we think it’s the “right thought”. Things like this is the right thing to do, this is the responsible thing to do, this is the proactive thing to do. We should be proactive. This is the leader thing to do. I’m a leader. This is the leader thing I need to do.

I find myself in that energy a lot. I want to do the responsible thing, the proactive thing. I want to be a leader. I want to model leadership and what it is. I try to make what I think is the best decision in the moment, the right decision, right? We all do this. 

So I want to talk about this briefly because what I found and what I saw in myself was that I was getting spun up in wanting to be very proactive both in my business and in my personal life. I felt myself saying like I want to get ahead of the game. I want to be responsible. I need to be proactive and take care of this now so that dot, dot, dot doesn’t happen, right? 

When I’m in this energy, it can feel empowering, but there’s a slightly different flavor to it. It’s a little on the urgent, panicky, controlly, graspy side of empowerment. Yes, I am feeling empowered. I am being productive. I’m being proactive. I’m doing the things. I’m trying to make decisions and take actions and get this done and get this information and get my ducks in a row.

But what I notice is there’s the slight variation. It feels empowering to get the things done, but the energy behind the actions feels a little bit forced and a little bit like controlling or trying to coerce or manipulate, whether that’s myself or somebody else. 

So you know that feeling when you’re trying to force a decision? You’re trying to make this decision happen. We need to make this decision. I write out the pros list and the cons list. I’m researching, and I’m looking around. A decision needs to be made. That feeling, or maybe it’s an action. I need to get this done. I need to do this. Why am I procrastinating? Let’s just do it. Let’s force it. 

Or perhaps you’re trying to force a result that you want to create. We need to hit this goal. We need to get this done by this date. We need to rush. We need to generate this outcome. We feel like we’re doing the right thing by taking lots of actions and being very swift and decisive and getting the information to ourselves. 

Maybe we’re trying to help somebody else get to a decision or take certain actions. So we’re forcing upon our energy onto them. We’re like here’s some information. Here, look at this. Here, I researched this for you. Hey, you should think about this. Have you ever done that? Yes, that would be me. Guilty as charged.

But I noticed that I felt like I was being proactive. My brain was telling me this is the best thing to do. You’re being responsible. You’re being a thought leader. You’re taking action. You’re helping yourself make this decision. You’re helping other people make a decision and move forward. I noticed it, and I was like wait a minute. I saw myself being super productive and feeling really good about it and kind of thriving off of that dopamine hit, all of that proactiveness.

Underneath there was this layer of anxiety. There was this layer of uncertainty. There was this drive behind the productivity. It didn’t feel clean. It didn’t feel as though the actions and the decisions that I was making and taking were coming from a really clean space in my mind. I just noticed that, and I stopped. I was like whoa. I noticed that I was wanting to force decisions so that I could feel in control. That I could feel grounded. That taking those actions, I made it mean something about me, and I made it mean something about other people.

I was like oh my gosh. I’m chasing a feeling here. I’m telling myself to be proactive and to be the leader and to do all the things because I wanted to feel certain. I wanted to feel safe. I wanted to feel productive. I wanted to feel that I was being responsible, and that I was committed to getting the results I wanted to get. 

But when I slowed down just enough to tune in, what I noticed was that actually I was very panicky, very buzzy with energy. My body was vibrating with a lot of buzzy energy. My head was spinning. It wasn’t clear. As I was observing my energy in my body, a thought floated right through my mind. I had never seen this thought in my life. I don’t even know where it came from. That’s why I think the universe has got to have our back because this thought floated through my mind.

Here’s the thought. Let the ease come to me. I was like what? Let the ease come to me. I started to say it out loud. I’m standing in my bedroom, and I thought what am I doing right now? But it couldn’t stop. The thought could not stop repeating itself. Let the ease come to me.

I’m like okay, there’s something going on here. I slowed down, and I asked myself what is the meaning of this sentence? What does it mean for me? Let the ease come to me. Then I saw it. Let the ease come to me. Let things be easy. Look for how they can be easy. Believe that they can be easy. Focus on how things might be easier, how they can be easier. Allow yourself to feel the emotion of ease. Practice from a place of ease. Practice decisions and actions from a place of ease. Make your plans. Plan your life and your career from a place of ease. Let the ease be present. 

I was like oh. I was so busy forcing and trying so hard. I was making things hard because I was thinking they had to be hard in order to be productive. So I was like oh, wow. That’s interesting. Let the ease come to me. Then I was like what else does this mean? This is what I came up with.

Let the ease come to me. Stop trying to chase the ease. Stop trying to find it or control it or manipulate it. Stop trying to rush things. Rush decisions, rush my actions, rush my results. Let the ease come to me instead of frantically chasing it and searching it and trying to figure out how to put ease into my life. In that quest to chase the ease, what I’m actually doing is creating a more panicked and frantic life. 

I’m creating the stress, the overwhelm, the uncertainty, the unsafety, the panic, the rush. You know that energy? Yes. It’s coming from my brain, not the external circumstances that I’m dealing with. When I am frantic, my life feels frantic, my actions get frantic, my decisions get frantic, and then I have frantic results. So thank you. Let the ease come to me. Invite it in. Come on in. It knows where to find you. So I invite you, let that ease come to you. 

Then finally I asked myself one more time. Is there anything else this sentence means? It said let the ease come to me. I deserve ease. I’m worthy of letting things feel easy and having ease in my life. I’m capable of letting things be easy. It’s safe for things to be easy. They don’t have to be hard. They don’t have to be difficult. They don’t have to be a struggle. In that moment, I just felt myself drop into ease. Ease is an emotion, and we generate that emotion with our thoughts.

So as you’re entering into May and into the last weeks of school and as it’s wrapping up, I want you to see if you can practice this and allow ease to come to you. Allow yourself to invite ease in, in your thoughts, in your decisions, in your actions, in your results. 

What if obtaining the results that you want in your life or in your career, you can apply it to all aspects here. What would it look like if it could happen with ease? If it didn’t always have to be a struggle? How would you feel? How would you be thinking?

Not everything is easy, and not everything will feel easy. There are reasons why things feel challenging, and we want them to be challenging because we love to feel accomplished. I’m talking about letting things be as easy as possible so that you can get more done without spending time and energy thinking that they have to be hard, and letting your brain search for why this is difficult and how this is difficult and how it’s a struggle. So invite ease into the rest of your school year. Have an amazing week. I’ll 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.

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.