Ep #352: Overcoming Insufficiency

Hello empowered principals. Welcome to episode 352. 

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. Happy Tuesday. Welcome to the podcast. So happy to be here with you today.

I have hopefully a very empowering episode for you because I think it is a universal emotion that people feel at some point, whether you are a school leader, a teacher, a student, a parent, any job in the world, any position in the world. And that is the emotion of insufficiency. So I want to talk about today how to overcome the fear of insufficiency. There is a difference between feeling insufficient and the fear of being insufficient.

So let us first talk about what insufficiency means, the definition of insufficient. When we think about the definition of insufficient, the word means not sufficient, not enough, inadequate. When we think about the word inadequate, it feels like it is a personal flaw. When we think that we are insufficient or not enough, we are inadequate, we feel flawed, and we think it is a personal character defect in something that we either should be able to control or that we inherently do not have control over.

So what is interesting about insufficiency is that we think that we are insufficient and we should control that insufficiency, or we think it is just something within us that we are not capable of changing, okay? It feels like it is very all or none. I should be doing it, but I am not, or I am trying to control it, but I cannot. It is just who I am.

So let us talk about this. When you think about feeling inadequate or feeling insufficient, the reason you are feeling that way is because of the way you are thinking about yourself, the identity that you currently have about yourself in whatever capacity you feel insufficient.

So for example, if you are a school leader and your thought is, I am feeling insufficient, I am feeling inadequate, I am not doing enough. Do you see how it goes into the thoughts about yourself? There is something about you as a leader in the identity of a school leader that you feel that you are not meeting the standard. You are not being sufficient.

You are not doing enough. You do not know enough. You are not capable enough. You are not skilled enough, knowledgeable enough, influential enough, empowered enough, there is something about insufficiency that feels very personal.

So I walked a client through this and I am going to walk you through this because if there is anything, any aspect of school leadership or furthermore, any aspect of your life where you are feeling inadequate, insufficient in your relationship as a parent, as a daughter, a son, a brother, a sister, anything, a friend. If you are feeling insufficient or inadequate in some way, I want to walk you through this.

So what I want you to do is I want you to think about what specific area do you feel insufficient in? And even within school leadership, I will use that of course, because that is what this podcast is about. If you are feeling insufficient in some way as a school leader, can you identify and nail it down? What actually are you feeling insufficient in?

Is it time management, planning? Is it having work-life balance?

Is it your relationships at work? Is it your leadership skill set? Is it communication? Is it mastering your calendar and honoring it and being able to be in control of your schedule and your calendar?

Is it energetics, like do you feel like your energy is depleted all the time and you are just insufficient, like you are just tired all the time or you cannot seem to keep up or go fast enough? What specific area? Is it emotional regulation? Do you feel like you cannot manage your emotions and you want to be more mature as a leader in terms of not reacting to your emotions but intentionally responding as the version of you that you want to be?

Think about the area where you feel insufficient. Be specific with yourself and then notice when you are thinking about that part of you that is insufficient, it is going to show up somewhere in your body, somewhere in your stomach or maybe your chest, maybe your heart races, maybe you feel a tightness in your chest, maybe you feel tightness in your neck or your jaw or your shoulders kind of come up and clench in, maybe you feel an overall tightness. Maybe your mind goes kind of cloudy, notice how your body reacts when you are believing the thoughts that you are insufficient in some way. And then look, I know what is going to happen.

Your brain is going to say, but it is true. Here is all the evidence I have been collecting to prove myself true. You are insufficient here and here and hereYou messed this up. You forgot that email. You were late to this meeting. You went home late three times last week.

You cannot manage your time. See, I told you so. Your brain is going to be very convincing because it wants you to believe you are insufficient. Why do we do this to ourselves? Why does your brain want you to be insufficient? Because you think that if you are insufficient and you are telling yourself that, then you are going to continue to seek the solution to become sufficient.

So I want you to think about what are the triggers, what thoughts trigger you into believing you are insufficient in some capacity. Usually it is along the lines of I am not doing enough, there is too much to do and not enough time, it is overall not working, like whatever I am doing, whatever approach I am taking, it is not working. It is not working fast enough, it is not working big enough, I am not enough to get to all of the things, the people are not happy enough, my teachers are stressed, they are not happy enough, there must be something I am doing wrong. I want you to redirect your thoughts and reframe them. There are two kinds of insufficiency. You are either new at something and you are learning the skill set, or you actually are skilled at it, but you are telling yourself you are not.

So you are either brand new and you are like, I have some skills I have to learn. I am a brand new first-year leader. Or this is my first year at this school. I have some things to learn about this school and these people and this community. There is an insufficiency that is unknown. You are like, I am new, I need this skill, or I need to hone this about myself, or I am working on my emotional regulation.

I know that I tend to get angry quickly. I am working on learning a skill.

But you do not make it mean that there is something wrong with you for not having yet learned that skill. You just simply have not learned it yet. So there is being new and being technically insufficient because you are learning a new skill, but you are not framing it as insufficient. You are like, of course I do not know, I am new.

This is new for me. I have never done this experience before.

You can be a 20 year veteran and have a situation at school come up that you have never had to deal with before and it feels new. And you might feel insufficient at the knowledge or the skill or the understanding of how to approach that new thing. But it does not mean you are incompetent or insufficient as a school leader. It just means you are learning something new today.

And then there is what most of us are doing. We are not looking at our strengths and our talent and the skills we do have and the experience we have gained and our past practice and knowledge and wisdom. We are not looking at all of that and giving it any credit. We are only focusing on what is not done, what we did not do well, the people who are not happy versus the people who are, we are just looking at all the nots versus the what is, the things that are working, what is going well, the skillsets I do have, the talents I do have. We want to redirect back to okay. When I am feeling insufficient and I am feeling all this tightness in my body, the truth is I am either learning a new skill and I am new at something but I am learning it and that is okay because of course I am new at lots of things all of the time.

That is the goal, to be continuous, lifelong learners, to expand ourselves and continually develop ourselves personally and professionally. Of course, I am learning something new and that is good. That is a good thing. I am proud of that. I am proud that I am actively learning new things.

You are either in that camp or you forgot that you have tons of amazing skills that you can apply to this new situation or you can apply to your thoughts and your mental management and your emotional management so that you can lead yourself, self-leadership through this new situation based on what is working. The people who are happy, the things you did get done today, the things that are going right, the amount of students who are proficient, the amount of kids who are in attendance, the amount of teachers who love working at this school.

We want to redirect our brain because it just wants to give us all this BS, basically. I do not know why it does that. Maybe because it wants to keep us on alert, but the truth is that you are safe. You are sufficient. You are adequate.

You are more than adequate. You got hired for the job. If you were not adequate, you would not be in the job. So the fact that you are in the position means you are adequate. You are doing it. You are sufficient.

So what about the thoughts around when I think that I am insufficient, I feel compelled to do better and do more. I expect more of myself. I see so many more things that can be improved. It motivates me. How does it feel in your body? I am insufficient.

The thought, the belief, I am insufficient. How is that motivating? That is demotivating. I am learning. I am growing, I am expanding, I am widening my skill set. Those are empowering thoughts.

Those are motivating thoughts. This is working. What else is working? Can you imagine if we were able to get this done? Oh my goodness, would not that feel so good? Good thoughts feel good.

Empowering thoughts feel empowering. Insufficiency falls flat. It does not feel good. So do not motivate yourself with a demotivating thought. It is like whipping yourself into like, oh, I am so fat, I better go work out. Oh, that feels good.

Or I am so lazy, I should get up and be more productive. What identity is that? That it is a self-scathing identity. You are self-deprecating, you are self-loathing. It does not feel good, that is not motivating.

We would not ever say that to another human.

We would not say that to a teacher, you are so lazy. Pick it up, pick up the pace, or to a student. You are so this, you are so that, you are so incompetent, you are so insufficient. When are you going to get it together and learn your ABCs? Right, we would never speak to others, to students, to staff, to our loved ones in the way that we speak to ourself.

So this is actually an act of self-love and self-acceptance to remind yourself how adequate you are. Not only that, you are amazing, you are empowered, you are brilliant. You have talents and genius within you. You are wise. So when the feelings of insufficiency come up, remind yourself, I am in one of two camps. I am either brand new, learning something new, and that is a good thing, or I just forgot that I am not new, and I know what I am doing, and I forgot to focus on what is working and all the accomplishments I have made.

You cannot be insufficient if you are learning something new and trying and going for it, or if you are looking for the ways in which you do have the skillset. You cannot land in insufficiency when you are either excited to learn something new or applying your current wisdom, the knowledge you already have, and applying it to a new situation. Those are your options. So let us eliminate insufficient the best we can from our vocabulary, from our emotional state. And anytime it comes up for you, remind yourself, I am either learning something new or I forgot that I already know what I am doing. I hope this landed for you. Have an amazing week.

You guys are doing so well. I am so proud of you. I am cheering you on. I hope you are coming to EPC. The next time the doors open in November, we look forward to having you get on in here. There is no insufficiency up in here.

All right, my friends, have a great week. I will talk to you next week. Take good care of yourselves, 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.