Ep #410: The 1/3 Perspective

Hello, empowered principals. Welcome to episode 410.

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.

Well, hello, my beautiful empowered principals. Happy Tuesday. And my goodness, welcome to the month of November. How is it November? This year has been lightning speed. It’s funny because at the end of the year, I always feel like the year went fast, but when I think about all that happened in the year, it amazes me how much has happened this year. We’ll be doing some more reflection in December and then for the Empowered Principal Mid-year Reboot, which happens at the beginning of January. You’ll want to sign up for that. More details to follow, but that will be happening the first of the new year. We always do a mid-year reboot in January when our mind is fresh and rested and we have the new year energy to re-decide who we want to be, how we want to develop ourselves, how we want to grow, and what we want to experience.

The mid-year reboot is such a fabulous opportunity to set your intentions for the rest of this school year and to decide what you want 2026 to look like for you and your school and your family. So, I’ll be sharing more about the mid-year reboot in December. But welcome to November, and today’s topic really came from a one-on-one coaching call I had into a conversation I had with my group coaching program, EPC, the Empowered Principal Collaborative, which then became a Facebook Live. For those of you who are on Facebook, I have a free Facebook group, the Empowered Principal Facebook group.

It’s open to anybody who is in education, aspiring to be a school leader or in school leadership and would like to collaborate, connect, and really dive deeper into the daily mindset and skillset of the Empowered Principal movement. So, if you are on Facebook and you’re not in the group, I invite you to join us. I am doing a Facebook Live 365 Facebook challenge where I jump on live every single day for 365 days to just connect with you, to see how you’re doing, to provide insights, value, what’s going on in my life personally, professionally, what’s going on in the world of the Empowered Principal.

And it has been so much fun to just re-engage in a way with school leaders that is so natural and genuine and authentic, and it’s such a beautiful way to connect with each and every one of you. And I am providing what I believe is invaluable insights, wisdom, information that occurs during the course of the day or during the course of the week. It’s something that I want to share with you as school leaders because it’s very isolating to be a school leader, particularly when you are the only administrator on campus.

And even then, even with a staff or you have a team, it still feels very lonely. And I want to create a space where you can come, a place where you can gather, where you can relax, where you can speak freely, where you can express yourself freely, where you can share, where you can ask questions, where you can just sit and listen, or you can comfort somebody else, or you can celebrate yourself. You know, we don’t get to celebrate ourselves as school leaders very often, and I want a place and a space for you to be able to do that. Because what’s required for us to really enjoy ourselves and to really acknowledge any kind of win that we have, we need to do that for ourselves because nobody’s coming to do it.

Our superintendents are not coming to celebrate us. Our teachers are busy. They’re not coming with the goal of celebrating us. It’s our job to acknowledge ourselves, to celebrate ourselves. And I want you to have a space where you feel that is allowed, that you have permission to celebrate, that you have permission to collaborate, you have permission to speak freely. And that’s what this group is. And of course, if you should decide and when you decide to come into the world of the empowered principal, whether that’s through one-on-one coaching or group coaching or one of the programs that I offer, just know that those spaces just take all of this to the next level.

So, I want to share this conversation with you. I call it the one-third perspective. It’s a perspective that my coach taught me many years ago, and I keep it in mind and I apply it regularly because it serves me so well. It serves me professionally in my business. It serves me with my clients and it serves me personally in my life. It also serves all of those that you serve. So this isn’t just for you. When you apply this perspective, my coach called it the one-third rule. I don’t like rules, so I like to call it the perspective because it provides me perspective. So, the one-third perspective is very simple. You’ve probably heard it before, actually. I don’t think that my coach invented this. I don’t know who invented it. Somebody did, but I believe that it’s universal. And I’ve applied it in my life. I’ve watched clients apply it and it works. So I invite you to try it.

One-third of the people, whether that’s your staff, your students, your families, your community, your colleagues, the world. I like to think of it as the world. A third of the people on the planet in your school, in your district, are going to vibe with you. They’re going to be on board with you. They’re going to like you. You call these people your people. They’re the people that you just feel click right in. You click with them, you enjoy them. These people support you, they love you, they care about you, they rally for you. You feel in sync with them. You feel good when you’re around them. You have aligned values, you have aligned visions, and it’s like you’re just in the same lane, floating down the same river, going in the same direction. Easy peasy.

Then, you have a third that in the very big picture, if you’re thinking about a third of the people on the planet, these people aren’t even aware of you. There are so many billions of people on this planet and many, many, many, many, many of them, probably more than a third, will never know our existence. They will never really know us. They’re not even aware of us. But if you bring it into the context of your life and the people you do know and the people that are aware of you, so the people who are at school or the people in your social circles or your family or your community, your district, that kind of thing. These people, this third of the people, and this is all in relation to you, right?

So a third of the people you know are going to like you, a third of the people that you know and are in your sphere, these are people who I define as neutral. They don’t love or hate you. They’re just more focused on themselves, their work, their lives. They’re kind of in their lane doing their thing. They’re not out rallying for you, but they’re not out hating on you. They’re just doing what they need to do regardless of who the principal is at their school. They’re getting up and doing their job and focusing on their kids and teaching. They’re complying. They’re doing what needs to be done and what they’re asked to do as employees. And but they’re not expressing explicit approval or disapproval. So they’re kind of the neutral crowd.

And you can probably think of people on your campus who are like that. They’re pleasant, they’re cordial, they’re professional, but they’re not big ralliers. They’re not people you would want to hang out with 24/7, but you don’t dislike them either. You could visit with them at a cocktail party or at the staff meeting or a staff gathering. You could go to a happy hour with them and they would be lovely to talk with. And you might learn something amazing about them and maybe they become your people. But they’re currently neutral.

And then, you know, the other third. These are the people who do not agree with you, do not approve of you, do not support you, do not like you. You say go, they say stop. You tell them your hair is blonde, they say, no, it actually is strawberry blonde. Right? They just have a little opinion, have a little resistance, have something different to offer in every case. They will agree to disagree. They will blame, complain. They might argue. They might point out your faults and mistakes. It feels like these people are on the planet to cause you pain and suffering and frustration. These are people that really get under your skin. They trigger you, okay? You know who I’m talking about. You know who I’m talking about with your people. You know who I’m talking about, the neutrals, and you know who I’m talking about with those who get your goat.

And here is how we tend to approach this. We first go in when we’re school leaders and we try to find the people who like us because we need them to ground us. We want to know the people who like us. They say go build relationships, but what they mean by that is go out and sniff out the people. Who are the third that like me and then the third that are neutral, feel a little bit aloof, but they’re not. And then the other third are rolling their eyes. Ugh. Here she comes. I can’t believe they hired her. She’s not going to tell me what to do. She’s younger than me. I’ve been teaching for 30 years. What can she possibly teach me? Those people, right?

So we tend to go out and say, okay, who likes me? I need to be grounded. I need external validation. I need to be loved and supported. And hey, look, we are wired for connection. We’re wired to be liked. So this is a real thing that we do because it feels like safety, it feels like survival to know people who like us. You know when you walk into a room, let’s say you go to a conference and you go alone, what do you do? You look for friendly faces who are smiling, who have an open seat next to them and ask, may I sit next to you? Because it builds a connection and it creates a feeling of safety and some trust and you can relax and know that there’s a friendly face next to you and you strike up a conversation. It’s the first thing we do. We want to establish ourselves foundation of safety and trust.

And then we start to notice who’s kind of neutral, who’s kind of aloof. There’s people at your table at the conference who are doing their thing. They’re not like annoyed that you sat down. But we want to try and get them to like us. So we find out who likes us first, and then we notice the people who are a little bit aloof or who are kind of neutral or just kind of busy doing their own thing. They might whiz by us without saying hello or something because they’re so focused on themselves. But then we really will notice and we’ll zoom as fast as we zoom into the people who like us, we equally zoom into the people who we think don’t like us. Even if we don’t know if they don’t like us, we’re like, what if they don’t like me? They looked at me weird, or that girl rolled her eyes, or that girl turned her back to me. Oh my gosh, what did I do? Do I have something on my face? Do I have something in my nose? Do I have something in my teeth? Do I smell? Did I forget to put deodorant on today? What is wrong with me? Did I not smile at her? Oh my gosh, did I make a face? And we are so caught up in what we did to upset them and why they don’t like us and we’re already thinking about what can we do to get them to like us.

So we’re usually we blame ourselves. We’re like, oh my gosh, what did I do? Let me fix what I did. I did something wrong. Do I look funny? Do I smell funny? Is there something unacceptable about me that I need to change immediately? Or we’re like, what the heck is her problem? Why does she get sour face? Why, I didn’t do anything. So depending on where we are with our identity, we either blame people or we blame ourselves. When we feel that someone who doesn’t like us has done something or said something that trigger us, what we will do is go and rally. So like, did you see that face that she made or did you hear they said this about me? We want to bring in the troops that like us, the third that like us. We rally them all around us, gather the wagons and lick our wounds.

And then in that group, we will either blame the other people for not liking us and for what they did and what they said. Meanwhile, we’re not liking them. FYI. We’re in the middle of doing the exact thing that they did to us or similar. So we’re blaming them, or we feel very victim to their behaviors, helplessness, and which is still a form of blame. Or we’re like, oh my gosh, that’s feedback that I’ve done something wrong, that something is wrong with me. We blame ourselves. We try to figure out how to get them back on our team. And the harder we try, the more they resist because they don’t want to be coerced into liking something they don’t like or believing something they don’t believe or standing for something they don’t value or engaging in a practice they don’t find valuable.

And many of us leaders will get lured into the chase. Chasing them for their likes and approvals and their friendship and their thumbs up. I mean, I’ve done it. I’ve observed clients doing it. I’ve seen my colleagues engaging in it. The desire to be liked is so compelling that we almost don’t notice when we’re doing it. It feels like it’s the right thing to do. We don’t even realize how much we value their approval because what we’re really doing when we’re so obsessed with it is we’re trying to escape the emotions that come up when we’re thinking about or we’re believing that somebody doesn’t like us.

I mean, think about that right now. Think of a person that does not like you, that has blamed you, that has accused you, that has wronged you, that has said terrible things about you, whether they’re true or not. Even if they’re true, it’s bad and if they’re not true, it feels worse. But either way, when someone opposes you publicly and doesn’t like you publicly, that feels awful. It’s anguish. It’s an emotion that vibrates so painfully, you’ll do almost anything to make it stop. I think back to how much time I spent thinking about teachers who didn’t like me. I was obsessed. I would stew on what they did or what they said or what they didn’t say. Sometimes it’s the non-verbals that will kill you. Then you spin out thinking about what they did and what they mean and trying to interpret it and what could they have meant and why did they do that? And I don’t understand. And then start spinning on what could I do differently or what should I have said? Or should I apologize, or are they just being jerks?

The amount of time and effort and attention that went into spinning on the third who didn’t like me was astounding, quite frankly. It felt like no matter what I did, what I said, they didn’t like it. I could feel their dislike for me. Just my presence seemed to be a bother. My existence on the planet seemed to be a nuisance. And I really wasted time, energy, attention that I could have been spent leading, loving, growing and expanding. And really, at the end of the day, I ended up doing this because I hired a life coach, but I ended up having to go internal and reflect on why I was doing this to myself, torturing myself, doubling down on their torture, right? There was people not liking me and then there was me not liking me because they didn’t like me.

So here’s how the one-third rule, the one-third perspective, shifted my thoughts, my feelings, my perspective, my approach. I thought about the truth of the perspective, the truth of the one-third rule. There are people who are easy to get along with. If I think about my own life, there are people who are just very easy to get along with. They just click. It feels harmonious. It’s joy, it’s pleasure. It’s a delight to be around them. It feels good to be me when I’m around them. I look forward to them. I admire them. I cherish their relationship. I value it.

In the workplace, it just feels good to have people that you can work with, speak to, talk to, who get you, who like, I’m on it, boss, or I’m ready to do that, or I’d love to take that or I support you and I know this is hard. I see you. And I just want to thank you for your hard work. Like all of that, amazing. And we want to cultivate those friendships deeply, but we can’t only rely on that handful of people. So there is truth. There’s a handful of people that it’s a click. And I would venture to tell you that you can expand that third by getting to know more about the neutral.

So then there are people in my life who are very neutral to me. I may not have awareness of them at all on the planet when you think globally. But in our world, for the people who do exist in my world and I feel neutral about, it’s as though we coexist. They’re doing their thing, I’m doing my thing. I’m not loving or hating on them. I’m not following. I’m not obsessing about them. They’re doing their thing. They’re not obsessing about me. It’s like we coexist and we work in parallel, like two children who engage in parallel play. They’re happily playing. They’re content. They’re living and breathing and doing their thing. And they’re aware of that other child’s existence. That other child is playing, but they’re not seeking out to engage or to seek their approval. They’re not bothered by the other child. They’re just neutral. They’re content and they’re not reliant on that other child’s interaction or that opinion of that child. That child doesn’t have to play their way. They can play in their own way and it’s fine.

And then there are people that we don’t find easy to get along with. They don’t click for us. They have a different energy than we prefer to be around. They have values that we maybe don’t understand or don’t agree with. They have a different approach to things that rubs us wrong or feels, you know, out of alignment with who we are and what we learned and what we believe. These are people we might not feel good when we’re around them. They’re work to be around or we don’t like the way they do things or say things, and we’re triggered by them when they do it. It rubs us wrong, and they’re triggered by us. We don’t want them to not like us, but we are okay with us not liking certain people.

That’s the truth of the one-third rule, the one-third perspective is just leaning into the truth. A third are going to like us, a third are going to be neutral, and a third are not going to like us. And it’s not because we’re doing something wrong and it’s not because we need to be better and it’s not because they need to change and they need to get on board with us. It’s just simply the truth. And you can lean into that and then say, okay, if this is the truth, if there are people we like, people we don’t like, and people who are neutral and in the middle, now what? What do I do with that?

How do I leverage this perspective to enhance my life, my experience, my leadership skills to invite me into connection with as many people as possible and to lead people who don’t love me, who don’t connect with me, who are neutral about me, who don’t follow my guidance or don’t want to? We can appreciate those who do align with us and feel that immense gratitude for them loving on us and being present in our school. So grateful, so appreciative of those folks who give you that smile, who wink at you, who say yes, who step in, who do the extra work, who go the extra mile, who rally the troops, who talk highly of the initiative, who help with the rollout, who come to you in advance and say, hey, think about this or this is brewing. You might want to get a handle on that.

Just be so grateful for those people and take time to acknowledge them and let them know how much you enjoy their presence, their support, their collaboration. Don’t forget about acknowledging them. Sometimes we take them for granted. We don’t want to do that. We don’t want to spend more time chasing the other people and getting them to like us than we take time to appreciate those who already do like us, who are already in alignment with us.

But we can also acknowledge and appreciate those who are independent and focused on their own work. We can be so grateful as leaders that those people are just doing their job. They’re not actively out creating conflict or disruption. We can connect with them, learn more about them. And hey, maybe they’re going to become more of our own people. But even if they stay neutral, we can acknowledge them, appreciate them, validate the work that they’re doing, validate their independence, validate that they’re not out creating conflict and disruption, and just appreciate that.

Because really, that group is also your people. They’re just doing it at an independent level. They’re not needing to cheerlead you on. They’re not needing it for themselves or they’re not needing to do it for you. They’re just out doing, out living, out teaching. They’re doing their thing, okay? And for the people who don’t like us, we can also seek to understand ourselves because of them. And we can seek to understand them. Having that contrast, having people who don’t like us is what helps us to hone in on what we value. It helps us refine our vision. Maybe there’s some holes in our vision that we want to refine, and it also helps us stay true to what we believe in, our values, our philosophy, our principles of leadership and of our lives.

It’s okay to have contrast. It’s okay to have polarity. It’s okay to have difference of opinions in our schools, in our campuses, in our lives. The people that don’t like us or people that we don’t like, they are curriculum. It’s an invitation for us as leaders to expand ourselves, for us to understand why they trigger us below the surface. So we can list out, here’s the ten reasons why I don’t like this person. Here’s all the things they do and all the things they say. And I don’t like the way they smell, and I don’t like the way their face looks, and I don’t like the way they roll their eyes. But why? Why does it bother you? Go below the surface. You can see them as a mirror into the internal work that you can do. And not do this work because you’re not good enough or you’re incompetent or you’re not doing enough. None of the worthiness work, that’s separate. There’s a difference.

This work is about choosing it, choosing to do the internal work because you want to grow. You want to expand your capacity. You want to evolve yourself. You want to learn about these triggers so you can release them so that they’re no longer triggers because you see them for what they are. Oh, when people roll their eyes at me, it bothers me so bad because my older sister used to do that. And I used to think she was such a witch. You know? So rude to roll your eyes. My mother taught me it was rude to roll your eyes. Like, why does I rolling bother you? Why does somebody speaking up bother you?

I can remember, personal example. And this could be a whole separate podcast, which I’ll probably do, but I was so sensitive to feedback. I did not like getting any negative feedback. I used to, oh my gosh, if a parent said something or a colleague or gosh forbid, a superior, I would be so devastated that I wasn’t good enough, did something wrong, needed to fix it right away, or I’d be so resistant to it because I was tired of people telling me what I did wrong and I just wanted to live and breathe and why can’t I just be the way I am?

I had to do a lot of internal work on the purpose of feedback, how I defined feedback, what I made it mean, how I interpreted it. And I would dismiss it if it came from somebody I was like, oh, well, you’re just complaining or you’re just blaming or you’re not taking responsibility. It tended to be people like when I was a principal, it was like the teachers were just complaining versus giving me solid feedback or looking for the truth in their feedback or validating it at the very least. So I had to do the work on how I interpreted feedback, what I was making it mean, how I defined it, the purpose of it, the value of it.

And when I started doing that, then feedback started not being a big deal for me because I released it as a trigger. It was no longer a trigger. It was actually an invitation in. And it’s not that I no longer felt the feels of feedback, but I felt them in the form of the truth of them or the discernment that it wasn’t feedback that I was going to leverage, like somebody says, well, you should cut your hair. Oh, I should. Oh my gosh. Do I run and cut my hair? Maybe. Maybe I’m like, yeah, you’re right. I look in the mirror. Whoa, it’s been a few months. I got so busy with work. I haven’t had a haircut. Yeah, I need to get my highlights done or I need to get a blowout and go out and feel amazing and look great. Or maybe it’s like, no, I don’t want to get my hair cut. I like my hair long or I like my hair this color. I like my this style. So it invites you in to do I want to take this feedback or do I not want to take the feedback? And it’s really when I started working with a life coach. I had no awareness. I was completely reacting. I had no idea of the third, the one-third perspective, the one-third rule that she taught me. It released me from so much from trying to get everybody to like me.

And when I was coaching my one-on-one client, she goes, but isn’t that our goal to try and get more people on board? And I said to her, your goal is to lead them in spite of them not liking you. Even when they don’t approve or agree with you or like you. It’s learning how to sell them on the value of the vision. It’s not about them liking you so that they’ll be on board. It’s about them understanding the purpose of the vision and how the vision does align to their work that they’re doing in the classroom and their way of doing it, or how this way of doing it helps them, makes life easier for them, better for students, more impactful. There has to be value in it.

And all of a sudden, what you start to realize is your goal is not to get a lot of people to like you and then they’re blindly following you. That’s not leadership. Leadership is being able to lead the one-third, one-third, and one-third because you have a clear understanding of the one-third perspective, and you maintain that perspective, and you study your approach to how do you approach the one-third that like you, the one-third that are neutral, and the one-third that you find more challenging.

This is the kind of stuff we dig into in EPC. If you want to get in, now’s the time. We’re going to be doing the mid-year reboot in January. And if you want to gain access to EPC for the rest of the school year and to the mid-year reboot, join EPC. EPC gives you access to everything, to one-on-one coaching, to group coaching, to all the programs that I offer, all the a la carte programs that I offer. You get all access. Plus, you get all the replays in school. You can have me in your ear all of the time, if you would like. Not just the podcast.

I feel like this podcast is so valuable. I give you everything. But what I know to be true is it’s one thing to listen and another thing to implement. It’s so hard to integrate and implement. And that’s where weekly coaching steps in. It invites you to move, to be willing, to stay open to do this work. Not just to consume it, but to become it. So I invite you into EPC. Have a beautiful week and I’ll talk to you next week. Take good care. 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.