Ep #323: End of Year Planning

Hello empowered principals. Welcome to episode 323. 

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 principals. Welcome to March 2024. Oh, my goodness. How was it March already? Ah. We’ve got teacher observations should be done by now, for most of you, I hope. We are in testing season. I’m sure you’re all ramping up for that. 

I want to just, first of all, send you some joy. I want you to feel joy. It’s spring. Hopefully winter subsiding in your neck of the woods. Better days, brighter days, longer days, warmer days, they’re coming. Okay, I know. We’ve had the winter dip. 

In February, I coached a lot of principals on fatigue and just kind of dreariness, not feeling very motivated, very energetic. Those things happen. Those dips happen. They’re normal. So if you are feeling kind of under the weather or just energetically low, not a problem, and I want you to intentionally invite some joy back into your step and into your world. Even though it’s busy, you are going quickly towards the end of the year. It’s coming. You have done an amazing job. 

Remind yourself of how far you have come since last August. Really give yourself a pat on the back and feel proud of yourself. Feel proud of your staff and your students. Really take a moment to just allow joy to fill in your heart. Okay, happy spring, happy March. Here we go. 

I’m going to talk about planning for the end of the year. Now, there are two kinds of principals when it comes to planning. Principal number one is the one who loves to plan. They have all the planners and all the journals and all of the calendars. They’re beautiful. They map everything out, and they have it on their whiteboard, and they’re very planned. Those are the planter principals out there. I was one of them. I can relate to you. I loved to plan. 

Okay, principal number two intends to plan. They want to plan, but they’re out doing. They’re out being. They’re out living their job. They’re thinking to themselves I know I should plan. I know I need to plan. But I’m busy doing the job. I’m out there engaging, connecting, supporting, solving problems, mingling with the people, being with kids, being out on the field or the recess, right. You are out living the job.

You feel like you want to plan. You need to plan. But it feels like planning gets a little bit overwhelming, or it feels like it never is the right time or enough time. There’s always a little obstacle in the way of planning, okay. 

For my planning principals what I find is that they like to indulge in planning and spending a lot of time and planning. Then they get to the weeds of it, the how, and then their brain kind of locks up like well, we can plan all of these details out, but then we’ve got to go do the thing. Then the doing is what feels overwhelming. For the principal who’s out doing the planning can feel overwhelming. 

So I’ve got you covered. We’re going to talk about why planning is important, and how to balance planning with doing. So for my principals who are out doing and they intend to plan, they want so badly to plan, but they can’t get themselves to do it or feel like it time just escapes them. They meant to plan, but they are kind of going a little bit more with the flow or taking things as they come on the daily. Then feeling like oh, I should have planned. Let’s talk about that. 

So we have to sell our brain on why it’s important to plan because the brain’s like I know it’s important on an intellectual level. But when it comes down to the action of planning, the sitting down, getting out, mapping out all of the details and taking the time to plan, the brain’s like ugh. This is a little tedious. It’s kind of boring. I’m not really sure how to answer all of this. 

It feels overwhelming because you see everything mapped out in front of you. It feels like I have so much to do. How am I ever going to get this done? That’s one of the reasons we don’t plan, right? We feel overwhelmed by the planning process because we see in front of our eyes all of the things we want to do in the next three months.

Okay? So we have to sell our brain on why it’s important to plan. If you think about planning for three months out, the reason that I break down the school year into four seasons, four three month plans, is because it’s a bite size chew, right? A 90 day plan feels doable. You can kind of project out into the future three months in advance.

From now it’s March. March, April, and May. You know May is coming really quickly. Your brain’s like, oh, I can get on board with planning March, April, and May. Even though there’s a lot going on March, April, and May, it’s a finite amount of time to plan for. You’re not trying to plan for an entire year or a three year plan or a five year plan, something crazy like that. You’re simply planning for the next 90 days, okay. 

That’s why I love the three month plan. I teach the three month plan process in the Empowered Principal® Collaborative, and I’m going to be teaching it in an upcoming spring training series for school leaders. Totally free. Eight weeks of webinar trainings, all free for you.

I’m going to be putting them into a portal where people can have access as a membership for lifetime access as a member of the Empowered Principal® Program. But, for now, you’re going to get them free throughout the month of March and April. So I’m going to teach the three year planning process this week, actually, as this podcast drops. So all of March, all of April, you’re going to get eight weeks of spring training for school leaders. You are so welcome. I love you so much. 

Okay, here’s another reason to plan. Vision. When we are leading a school, as a leader, part of our identity as a leader is to have a vision. We need to know where we’re leading the people. Where are we going? What’s the intention behind the day to day work that we’re doing? People want and need to be grounded in where they’re going. They need to understand the intention, the purpose, the value. 

So when you’re creating your plan, it helps you map out the vision. Mapping out three months in advance helps you maintain momentum towards your vision. It helps you create the vision. Sometimes you need to create a plan to be like oh, this is where we’re going to be by the end of three months. 

I like to teach people how to backward plan. What is the desired outcome you want to create in the next 90 days? What do you think it’ll take to get you there from A to B? Here’s where you’re at, here’s where you want to be. How do we bridge the gap? Okay.

Three, planning creates clarity so that you can be clear in your communication. When you know what’s coming up in advance and you’ve done the tedious work of planning, you can clearly communicate to your staff, to your parents, to the entire school community, to your district office so that everybody knows and is on the same page as to what’s going on for the next 90 days.

You set people up for success when you have planned out, you’ve set the vision, you’ve set the tone, you’ve set the calendar, and you’ve communicated that out clearly. People need and want to know what’s going on? What do you expect of me? What should I know? Where do I need to be? What do I need to bring? 

Telling them all of those things is easier for you when you plan it out. Because you know the staff meetings, you know the events that are going to be on campus, you know what district meetings or special ed meetings or school wide meetings that you need to have. You map all of those events out ahead of time with an end goal in mind. 

You’re not just mapping it out to check the box to say you calendared them. You’re going to plan with the intention of what is the outcome of each event on my campus? Is it purposeful? Is it intentional? Because you’re investing time and energy into each and every event that you plan. So you want to make sure that there is a purpose and an intention for every use of every minute on your campus. Right?

Okay. Then, when you have clarity as to what’s going on, there’s a vision, there’s a plan, you’re communicating that out. That is what creates alignment. So there’s three steps to the Empowered Principal® process. It’s awareness, creating awareness and understanding of what’s going on, where are we going, what’s happening here. We create awareness of where we’re at. Then we align that, step two, to where we want to be. So there’s awareness. Then we create alignment, and then that alignment generates momentum. We’re moving forward. 

When momentum starts to wane, we go back to awareness. Awareness, alignment, momentum. That is the rhythm of every chapter and every season of your school year experience. You create awareness around it, where are we at, where we want to be. Then we create an alignment, communicate, get everybody on board. That generates momentum. Everybody understands what’s going on. Everybody gets on the bus. They get on the right seat on the bus, and then the bus gets moving. Okay.

So it creates alignment. When you have alignment, people feel calmer. When you have the information you need to do a good job, you feel more confident. You feel more at peace. You feel calmer because it helps you understand what is the standard I’m trying to meet? What is the expectation? When you have that information, it makes their job easier, which makes your job easier. Okay. 

So there are a few obstacles to planning. I’m going to cover these in detail in the spring training series. For those of you who sign up for the Empowered Principal® Collaborative, you will get all of the access to all of this information. You’ll get all the workbooks, you’ll get all the resource guides, you’ll get the coaching, you’ll get everything. Okay.

So some of the obstacles that come up for planning, these are my doers. They feel like they don’t have the time, right? My planners feel like they need to plan, plan, plan, and they feel like they get lost in the doing okay. So you have to understand, am I the planner, or am I a doer? Doers don’t feel like they have the time to plan, and planners don’t feel like they have all the time to implement and do. 

But the truth is, we do have the time. We do have the time. We need to learn how to leverage it, prioritize it, make it more efficient, and just maximize our potential when it comes to planning and doing and balancing that. Okay. 

A second obstacle that comes into play when planning is believing that it will be hard, that it will require a lot of our time, a lot of our energy, and a lot of effort. That this will be very hard to plan. So people who are doers, they feel most comfortable when they’re out doing. Planners feel most comfortable when they’re sitting down planning. Then they feel like the hard part is the doing. The doers feel like the hard part is the planning. Okay.

So I’m going to talk more about hard next week. I’m actually going to create a podcast about different kinds of hard and how to navigate those different kinds of hard. But I want you to really look at what planning is. Planning isn’t actually difficult when you think about the physical demands of it. You’re actually just sitting down with calendars on your desk or with all your events mapped out. 

It isn’t physically difficult or challenging to sit down and plan. It might feel uncomfortable, like you get a little squirmy and you want to get up and move around. You might feel that like an urge to move, especially if you’re a doer, but it’s not technically a physical challenge to sit down. 

What feels hard about planning is the mental grind, the thinking and the overseeing and the tediousness of it. Making sure that you didn’t double booked yourself or that we made sure that everybody has coverage or that we have subs lined up for that day or we have everybody on board for that special education meeting. 

What feels hard is those details, like getting into the weeds of the details and making sure that everyone’s on board. What also feels hard is making sure there’s enough time and the right time. It involves the people. It involves the mental grind and the emotional way you feel when one, you’re planning and two, when you’re implementing. Okay. So what’s hard about planning is more about the emotions that come with planning than it is the actual hard to do. 

Okay, the third obstacle to planning, I hear this so often. Every time I sit down to plan, I get interrupted. Now, if you are constantly being bombarded or interrupted, that’s actually not a time management issue. It’s a boundary setting issue. Okay. 

I want you to think about that for a second. It’s not a time management issue. You don’t have a problem with the way you manage your time as much as you have a problem with how you set boundaries around interruptions. When is it viable and important for you to be interrupted, and when is it important for you not to be interrupted? So think about that. I’m going to talk about that a little bit more in EPC if you join us, okay. 

All right. So how do you overcome these obstacles? That’s what spring training is about. We’re going to talk about that in spring training. We talk about it in EPC. I’m going to break down all the obstacles and give you tips, strategies, and keys to be able to overcome them so that you are a planned principal, and you’re balanced in your doing and you’re planning. 

You can feel alignment so that you can create momentum to get you from here we are beginning of March all the way to the end of the school year. Then you can rest and celebrate and look back and reflect on what an amazing year you have had. Have an amazing week, you guys. I’ll talk to you next week. Take good care. Bye.

Hey empowered principal. If you enjoyed the content in this podcast, I invite you to join the Empowered Principal® Collaborative. It’s my latest offer for aspiring and current school leaders who want to experience exceptional impact and enjoy the school leadership experience. 

Look, you don’t have to overwork and overexert to be a successful school leader. You’ll be mentored weekly and surrounded by supportive likeminded colleagues who truly understand what it means to be a school leader. So join us today and become a member of the only certified life and leadership coaching program for school leaders in the country. Just head on over to angelakellycoaching.com/work-with-me to learn more and join. I’ll see you inside of the Empowered Principal® Collaborative. 

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