Ep #314: Mid-Year Reboot: Deepening Awareness

Hello, Empowered Principals, welcome to episode 314.

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.

Happy New Year, Empowered Principals. It’s 2024, oh, my goodness, what is happening, how is it 2024? This is insane. Happy New year. I hope you had an amazing holiday season. I hope you had a beautiful New Year’s with lots of kissing and love and hugging and celebrating and setting your most delicious intentions for 2024.

I’m going to make today’s podcast short and sweet. This is your invitation to my upcoming training series. I’m doing a popup because I did this training series in December and I wanted to offer it again in January for those of you who were so busy with the holidays and enjoying yourself and taking a break from school leadership conversations. So I’m going to offer you a second round of the mid-year reboot for school leaders.

The dates for the second round are coming up this weekend, starting on Saturday January 6^th, 2024, at 9:00am, Sunday the 7^th at 9:00am, Monday the 8^th of January at 4:00pm and Tuesday January 9^th at 4:00pm. So Saturday and Sunday will be 9:00am Pacific Time, that’s noon on the East Coast. And then Monday and Tuesday, I’m hosting them after school hours, so. 4:00pm Pacific, 7:00pm Eastern. This is your opportunity, if you missed the mid-year reboot in December, I’m going to host them one more time.

And let me tell you a little bit about what the mid-year reboot is. For me as a coach, this is your opportunity to refuel and renew yourself because for educators, yes, Happy New Year’s. January 1^st, the calendar year, it is the beginning and fresh start for people who work on a calendar year and that’s lovely and amazing. But for us as educators, the beginning of this new calendar year actually represents the midpoint of our school year approximately.

It’s the perfect time for us to check in with ourselves, not to just pump ourselves up, to push ourselves to the finish line of the school year. But to truly reinvigorate ourselves with awareness and acknowledgement, validation, alignment, momentum. But the purpose of all of that, all of that energy is to create fulfillment. That’s my word for 2024, fulfillment.

I want this mid-year reboot which is totally free to school leaders. I want this to be about fulfillment for you in the sense of feeling fulfilled, to feel satisfied as a school leader, to feel accomplished and pleased, delighted, proud of yourself, grounded, trusting. All of those emotions that come when you feel that you’re doing what you were meant to do.

You’re contributing in the way you were meant to contribute and that you feel satisfied with your career, satisfied with the productivity, satisfied with the progress, satisfied with the people you work with and the students you’re serving and the families and communities you’re working with. Just completely delighted and fulfilled with your life versus the type of fulfillment, which is that sense of completing a duty out of obligation, fulfilling your job. We’re not going in to fulfill a position or fulfill a task or a project.

We’re not just here to put our buns in a seat in an office at a school and be the principal, that’s not the highlight of why we do this job. You’re not a person who’s just a widget, who gets assigned a task or to get an assignment done or to finish this order, complete this order, fulfill this task, fulfill this assignment, fulfill this order. I’m not talking about fulfillment in that way. You are not on the planet to robotically fill a position or a role or a task or an assignment, or quite frankly, the needs of other people. That’s not what you’re here for.

This reboot is an invitation for you to step into a new identity coming into the midpoint of the school year. You don’t have to wait all the way until next year or until you have time over the summer or until you change positions or you go to a different school, or you up-level to the district office. You can reboot and reinvigorate right now. You can learn the skills and the mindset and the strategies to feel fulfilled in your job right here, right now. This is why the mid-year reboot is so magical.

And it feels even more empowering when you’re not waiting for some made-up point in time to create a starting line. This can be it, January can be your starting line. It’s your moment right here today. You get to decide that January is your reboot starting line in the middle of the school year, I get it, it seems weird, but this is your moment. This is your chance to claim the identity and the lifestyle and the leadership self-concept that you want to experience. So what are we going to cover in the mid-year reboot?

Number one, we’re going to talk about acknowledgement of where we’re at right now in creating awareness. Creating fulfillment with where we’re at right now, where you’re at, where your school’s at, where your staff is at. Whatever progress you’ve made between August and now is sufficient. You have fulfilled what you need to fulfill in order to feel accomplished and fulfilled. So there’s embracing where you’re at right now and feeling the sufficiency of that.

Then we’re going to talk about alignment. It’s that school vision, it’s your lifestyle vision, it’s your career vision, where you want to go, where you want to take yourself professionally, where you want your lifestyle to be and where you want your school to go. There’s not just your school vision or your career vision. We’ve got to encompass your lifestyle vision. I don’t want you working to the point where you’re getting your school on-board and you’re getting your career advances, but that your lifestyle is suffering because of it.

We don’t want you overworking to the point you have no life outside of school. Or that your friends and family are making snide comments because, yeah, you’re going to miss this event or, yeah, you don’t come home on time or, yeah, you’re spending more time at work than you are here. What do you care about more? Those kinds of things, that’s not the point of empowered leadership.

Alright, third, we’re going to cover generating momentum. I love the idea of generating momentum. I’m going to talk about what momentum is, where it comes from, how to create it, what to do if the candle burns out, how to get the rest recovery you need to regenerate momentum and to inspire others into momentum.

And then finally on day four, we’re going to talk about how to overcome obstacles. When we have momentum there will be obstacles that get in the way or people will have objections to creating momentum like why bother, it doesn’t matter anyway. Why should we do this? I’m not on board. I don’t understand. This seems too difficult. I’ve already got so much on my plate. All of those obstacles, we’re going to talk about ways that we can overcome obstacles.

Our own internal obstacles, I call them thought obstacles because most of the obstacles in our way are actually thoughts. We’re going to talk about how to remove or reduce those obstacles and objections and overcome those objections and those obstacles so that we can keep the momentum going forward. What we’re going to offer you is how to simplify your work, clarify your personal vision and your professional vision and your school vision, how to generate that momentum.

And how to uncomplicate obstacles, conversations, leadership strategies, time management, balance management, emotional regulation, management. All of those things that I talk about in the school leadership mastery series, I want to show you how to uncomplicate them. So what I’m going to offer is free access to the mid-year reboot. It’s coming up this Saturday, Sunday, Monday and Tuesday. Put the dates on your calendar.

That is Saturday the 6^th through Tuesday the 9^th, four days in a row, 9:00am on Saturday and Sunday, 4:00pm on Monday and Tuesday so that you can join after work hours. You need to be there live. I’m not going to give you guys, replays because nobody watches replays or very few people watch the replays, so no replays. But what I can offer you is come live, you need to be in the energy and excitement of the mid-year reboot.

And this is also your last invitation to join EPC for this calendar year. The doors will close at the end of January. We are starting EPC on January 10^th. You want to get into this program. We keep the energy and the high vibes, the momentum. We overcome obstacles every single week from now until the end of this school year. We take a pause through the summer so that you can be on break and then we resume your registration from September all the way through December.

So if you register for EPC, you will gain access for one entire school year. So for those who do the mid-year reboot and you join the cohort, you get January all the way through May. And then we pick up again in September and you go all the way till December. So you’re not going to miss a beat. I want you guys there, mid-year reboot Empowered Principal Collaborative. This is where the innovation is happening, the energy, the excitement, the enthusiasm.

But my favorite part about all of this is you work less and accomplish more. Don’t think that’s possible? Come on into EPC, watch the magic happen. I see it happen client after client after client. It’s been amazing. Their results are amazing. And you get to connect with like-minded principals in an environment and in a container that was designed just for you, the site leader. Come on in. Can’t wait to see you, talk to you guys soon.

The more impact I make, the more value I provide to the district, the more money I will make. And then I can start to see how my career could develop into something way bigger than I ever imagined it. What if I could actually go into district leadership? That would be insane. I didn’t think that was possible but I was tasting what it felt like to consider, to dip my toe in the pool of school leadership. So being ready for a change, I was ready to feel challenged, ready to be engaged, invigorated.

When I thought about career status, it up-leveled how I felt about myself, my self-identity, my self-concept of who I could be in the field of education. When I thought about making more income as a single mom, it blew my mind thinking about how independent and empowered I would be. The fact that I could provide at a higher level for my son and I. To feel free and independent, to be able to put him in Boy Scouts and let him go on all the school field trips and the trips and to go experience things that I never even considered being able to experience as a child myself.

To be able to gift him that type of childhood, I was all in. But ultimately, what really blew my mind was the impact that I could have, the significance that I would feel if I were courageous enough to step into being a school leader. So all of that to say, it all comes down to the emotion you feel. When you were considering being a school leader you had this idea of how you thought it would feel. It wasn’t just about the tangible, the income or the status or the impact, and yes, all of those things.

But the reason you want all of those things is based on how you think you’re going to feel about yourself and feel about your contribution and the work that you do in the world. So this reboot is an invitation for you to step into a new identity right now, mid-year, coming into this midpoint of the school year. You don’t need to wait until you’re in a new job or a new district, or a new school. Anything.

You don’t need to wait for a circumstance outside of you to change for you to decide, I want to up-level, I want to reboot, I want to change. You don’t have to wait until the summer when you have time. You have time coming up in the break right now. So you can change how you feel right now. You can do this mid-year. That’s why I’m calling this the mid-year reboot. It’s so magical.

And it feels even more empowering when you’re not having to wait for somebody else or something outside of you or something to change circumstantially. You’re not waiting for something else to tell you, it’s time or to give you a starting line. This is the starting line. You decide this is time, today, right here in the middle of the school year. This is going to be your moment. So I want you to claim it. I want you to feel the empowerment of having the leadership legacy and the lifestyle that you want to experience.

So for those of you who are brand new to me, if this is the first time you’re ever engaging in one of my trainings or webinars or you’re not familiar with the Empowered Principal world, hello. It’s so nice to meet you. I want to just quickly introduce myself. I’m Angela Kelly. I am a former teacher as you know. I’ve told you the story, instructional coach, reading specialist, principal, site principal at two different sites, district level administrator.

I’m now the CEO and founder of my company, Angela Kelly Coaching. And I created a life and leadership coaching program for school leaders, specifically for site leaders but I do also coach district level leaders, state level leaders. And I offer support like nobody else in the Empowered Principal Collaborative and the Empowered Principal program.

I offer the tools and skills to navigate this job from a mental and emotional standpoint, to build up your mental capacity, your emotional capacity. To build emotional maturity in yourself and in your staff and in your students so that you can work with the general public and all that they bring to the party. So here’s what we’re going to gain together in the next four days. We are going to reset our outlook and jump in fresh, reinvigorate ourselves and reinvent.

We’re going to teach you how not to fall behind and fall into a behind mindset. I want you to feel sufficient in the work you’re doing right now. We’re going to establish a feeling of accomplishment, a sense of accomplishment on how to create and how to achieve goals. I’m going to teach you how to feel balance. Balance is actually an emotion that you feel and it’s this balance of desire and sufficiency. I desire to take my school and my career to the next level. I desire balance in my life, but I’m also sufficient right here where I am right now.

I’m going to teach you to feel mastery, to be a master at your craft of school leadership. To be able to deal with the hardest part, the emotions that come with the job and the emotions of all the people you’re working with. But ultimately what I want you to feel is fulfillment, accomplished, capable and empowered.

So four components to this next four days. Acknowledge an awareness of where you’re at right now. We have to create awareness of where we’re at right now. If we don’t know where we’re at on the map, how do we know where we’re going? We have to ground ourselves and say, “Here’s where I’m at.” Since August or July I’ve been running ragged trying to figure life out, going 100 miles an hour and I need to ground myself. You need to take a deep breath, slow down that nervous system.

Give myself time in my brain and in my body to relax and reflect on where we’re at right now. Let’s just take a pause and notice where we’re at right now and create awareness that wherever we’re at right now, all of the accomplishments you’ve created and all the accomplishments that you have yet to come right here, right now. You’re in the right place at the right time on the right track. You’re doing it right.

Day two, we’re going to talk about alignment, aligning from where you’re at right now to where you want to be. This is about the vision, the vision you have for yourself, the experience, the vision that you want to create for yourself personally and professionally, making that into one vision because you’re one human. But also including the vision you have for your school and your staff and your students and your community, your school vision.

So you have this personal and professional vision for yourself and your school vision. That all has to be aligned. It all has to make sense. And we can create energetic alignment when we learn the mastery of emotional alignment, mental alignment, and we put those two together. And then you have external alignment once you’re internally aligned.

Day three, we’re going to talk about generating momentum, the energy required to do that reboot, to put it actually into motion and then to maintain momentum.

And day four, we’re going to talk about how do we overcome the obstacles that get in the way of our momentum. So are you ready to go? I’m ready to dive in. This is going to be so much fun.

I first want to say this explicitly to start everything off. When we’re talking about goals, whenever I say achievement, accomplishment, goals, all of those words, they are very charged in education. They have definite meanings. They bring up a vibe. I’m going to say something very explicitly. Those words in this world, in the Empowered Principal world, are not just about student data, test scores and academic achievement.

I’m talking about goals like extraordinary wins. I’m talking about mature staff conversations, mature staff interactions, mature staff collaboration, productive, healthy, vibrant, honest, direct and loving, compassionate conversations. There’s a difference between being nice and being kind. Honesty is kindness. Placating is being nice. When we’re dancing around, being honest because we’re afraid of not being nice, we forget that we’re being unkind and unfair.

We want to talk about what mature conversations look like. We want the extraordinary win of irresistible school cultures where people are drawn into your school. They feel this attraction, this magnetism to come to your school because of its energy, its excitement, its enthusiasm. Where the staff want to work there, where students want to be there, where families want to be at this school with you as their leader and beyond you. You want to create a legacy where that school’s got a vibe where people are knocking at the door and pounding down the door to get in.

How do we create that? Emotions. How people think and feel about your school creates energy and irresistibility. That’s a school culture that you want to cultivate. Work life balance, think it’s not a thing? Think again. I’ve created and I’ve helped others create work life balance in a way that you didn’t think was possible.

It’s kind of like back when I was a kindergarten teacher and I never considered that being a leader was even a thing for me. It just was way too far out of reach. Balance probably feels that way to you right now, but it is possible for you and for your team. It does require some prioritization, some constraint and essentialism. But those two levers are what creates the actual balance.

And what you’ll find is when you implement balance and you implement constraint and prioritization and you make those decisions and you honor them and you say no to the things that are not the priority. You’ll find that everything gets done that was meant to get done in less time. The priorities get done and all the fluff gets to sit on the sidelines. Imagine the extraordinary win of fluid routines, procedures and protocols.

How do things become fluid? When we value them, when we value fluidity. When something’s not working on your campus, let’s say the cafeteria is a mess and every day you’re just dreading lunchtime because there are not fluid routines and procedures. How do we create fluidity? We go in and we value the fluidity. We’re like, “I need fluidity because of the value of it.” It’s so valuable to me because when I figure out how to create a fluid routine.

When I go in, and I take the time and energy to observe and figure out what’s working and what’s not and what we need to adjust. When I do that, the value of that work of creating fluidity means I can rest assured I can be free of having to deal with the chaos every day. We want to create fluidity at our school. Imagine the extraordinary win of consistent and explicit communication, over-communicating to the point that everybody’s like, “Yeah, I got it. You’re clear. We got it. We’re on it.”

Or so clear that they’re ahead of the game on you. You’ve been so clear, so consistent, teachers know exactly what to expect, when to expect it, what to do, easy to access, easy to understand. They know where to go for information if they need it. New people have been trained to know where to go, who to ask. So that you are not the funnel through which they have to go through to create fluidity.

Extraordinary wins like coaching teachers up, coaching teachers out. Some teachers were meant to teach. Some teachers were meant to teach at other schools or not teach at all. Having the empowerment and the discernment of when to coach up and when you’ve coached up as far as you can and when it’s their responsibility and now it’s time to coach out. And knowing the difference between the two.

When you are a problem solver, appropriate problem solver at your school, you’re going to add value. One of the things in the Empowered Principal program is, we increase the value that we provide as a school leader. You don’t get paid as a school leader to walk onto campus, to sit down at your desk, to check emails for eight hours, to walk around your campus a few laps and then go home. You get paid for the value that you provide to the district.

Your teachers get paid to provide a service, to create value in those classrooms. What is the value they’re creating? They’re creating, one, student supervision and safety. Two, they’re creating students that make progress. They’re instilling lessons and concepts and ideas in a variety of instructional content, instructional methods, instructional approaches so that kids are being modeled for and learning how to be learners. That’s a very valuable thing.

We are increasing the value of the world when we educate our children. Imagine, shifting outdated thoughts and outdated approaches. But I want to talk about the most extraordinary win of them all, most delicious of them all, having some fun. Because I know when I was a school leader I forgot that it could be fun. My thought was, I’ve got to get serious now. I’m in the big leagues. There’s no time to be messing around. I’ve got to be professional and polished. I’ve got to look the part, pretend the part. I’ve got to dress up. I have to be very serious, stern-faced.

I forgot that I could have fun for a while until I remembered. We’re going to talk about enjoying the journey, increasing your wins in all of the ways. So set an intention for today’s training. What is it you want to receive today and then how will you receive it and then implement it into your work week next week?

We’re going to dive into the most foundational part of school leadership. It’s probably not what you think. You want to know what it is? It’s creating self-awareness, creating awareness about ourselves. No one thinks that that’s a part of the equation, but it is a part of the equation. Creating awareness begins with building a relationship with ourselves. As school leaders, we think so much about what everybody else is thinking that we forget to check in with ourselves and what we are thinking.

The only time we do it is when we hit the wall of exhaustion or overwhelm or frustration or failure or burnout. In order to be the leader you want to be and to create the school leadership experience you want for yourself and your school, you have to acknowledge how you feel right now. That’s why step one today is all about awareness. It’s all about acknowledgement of where you’re at right now. We’re not trying to hurry out of where we are in this moment.

Who we are right now, where we are right now, what we want right now, how we feel right now, that’s all sufficient, it’s acceptable, it’s enough.

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.