Ep #415: The Creator Mindset: A Reframe for Leadership and Life

Hello, empowered principals. Welcome to episode 415.

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 empowered principals. Happy Tuesday. Welcome to the magic of December and the holiday season. I hope you are finding this time of the year such a delightful, enjoyable, peaceful time with your family, your friends, the students at your school, your staff members. I believe that this month creates so much magic and it is filled with so much joy and hope and playfulness, possibilities. It’s a beautiful time of year. And I feel encapsulated by it. I’m ravished with gratitude and peace and appreciation and love, looking back at the last year and celebrating all I have overcome, all I have accomplished, the friendships, the connections, the clients, the wins of my clients.

Oh my goodness, it brings me to tears when I think about the impact these people are having on their schools. I think about the places I’ve traveled, the friendships I’ve cultivated, the programs I’ve created, and, you know, the loss in my life, saying goodbye to my dad this year, the day after his 75th birthday, losing my grandmother at the age of 89 just two weeks before her 90th birthday where we had a celebration already planned for her. Lots of loss, lots of sadness and heaviness in my heart, but also so much joy.

Spending time with my son, spending time with my sister and my family, visiting friends, putting some relationships to rest and cultivating brand new relationships. It’s just been a year full of life for me, life and death, actually. And while I am here on this planet, I want to live. I want to breathe life into each and every one of my listeners. I want you to feel alive, to feel the energy of the human experience, to experience all that life has to offer, not just the hard things, but the luxuries of life, the luxury of being alive, the luxury of having the things we have, the people we have in our lives, the experiences that we’ve created for ourselves. There’s so much luxury in our lives and taking a moment at this time of year to just honor that, acknowledge it, celebrate it, it really makes a difference when you take a moment to embrace and celebrate the things in your life that you love about your life, that you love having in your life, and without them, life would not feel the same.

Because we are all creators. We are all born to create. You were born a creator. That is the intention of your life. You were born to create. I was just talking with my niece’s daughter. She came over the other night and we were baking brownies. She had a new creation that she wanted to bake. I asked her, “Did you find this recipe online? Did you see it on social media?” And she said, “No, I just created it. I made it up and I want to try it.” And because I’m the baker in the family, my sister’s like, you can have this one. I do the art with her. You can do the baking. And she came over and we baked her brownies. I let her create this vision that she had. She created it in her mind, and it went from being in her imagination to asking me to come pick her up. I picked her up. We went to the store. We got everything we needed. We came here and we did the work of creating her brownie with the, you know, middle surprise, she called it, where she just put sprinkles in the middle of these cute little brownies. It was the cutest thing.

But I share that with you because I’m speaking with a 10-year-old who is profoundly tuned in to the fact that she was born a creator. She creates the most amazing online characters. She is studying films and animation. She wants to be in that industry when she gets older. And the conversation I had with her really opened my mind, expanded me in ways that some adult conversations have not. But we had this conversation on everything in life is a form of art because we are born creators. And we’re creating whether we’re being intentional about that creation or not, whether we are aware of this ability that we have or not.

And everything we do is an art form. Cooking is an art form, cleaning can be an art form, leading is an art form, teaching is an art form, learning is an art form. Anything we do in life, relationships are art. There’s a dance and rhythm to friendships. We dance together, we play together, we travel together, we go on journeys and experiences together.

Everything in our life is a creation that was created by us. Now, just stick with me on this for a moment because you’re probably wondering, what does this have to do with school leadership? And I’m going to bring this home, but go on this ride with me, okay?

Think back to the experience of teaching. Most of you were teachers of some kind before you became leaders of teachers. You created the experience in your life of being a teacher. You created that. How did you create that? You desired it, whether you were young like me, where I wanted to be a teacher probably by the time I was in third, fourth, fifth grade, somewhere in there. I loved school. I loved my teachers. I wanted to be a teacher. I saw them as being so loving and caring and kind and professional and polished and I really valued my teachers. I valued the experience of learning. I valued being a student. I understood its worth and its value in my life. And I really loved learning because it was engaging and it was fun.

I felt it in my bones when I was a little girl. I actually told my dad, “Dad, when I grow up, I’m going to become a teacher and I’m going to move to California.” My dad was like, what are you talking about? Now, the reason he was so stunned by my statement at this very young age was that I am the first person to ever go to a four-year university in my family. Teachers require that four-year degree. No one in my family had proclaimed or attended a four-year university. I at the elementary age decided and proclaimed I am going to become a teacher and I’m going to move to California.

I grew up in Iowa. We did not travel. We did not have the funds to travel, the means to travel because my parents were working all of the time and we were making ends meet. So we weren’t saving for family vacations or having the luxury of time off to go take vacations and experience the world outside of my hometown in Iowa. I created that in my mind. I don’t even, I didn’t even know the state of California, but something in me created this vision, this experience. I felt called to it. Maybe you didn’t feel called to it until you were in high school or maybe even your first year of college, but you felt called to it and you imagined it prior to being a teacher.

And then from there, from that drive, from that imagination, from that desire within you, you intentionally decided to take the actions that led you to creating the experience of being a teacher. You created this career in education. You chose it. You focused on it. You focused your thoughts, you focused your decisions, you focused your actions. You lasered in on the experience of teaching. Prior to teaching, you desired it, you imagined it, you envisioned it. Those thoughts, those images in your mind, the experiences in your body that you felt before you became a teacher, how you imagined it would feel, what you imagined you would do, the impact you imagined you would make was the energy, the fuel behind you becoming a teacher.

So you believed that you could be a teacher before you did the legwork of becoming labeled as a teacher. You had to declare your major, you had to sign up for all that course work. You had to read all the theories, the pedagogy, you studied, you wrote papers, you passed exams, and you student taught. You embodied the belief in yourself as a teacher while you were becoming a teacher, but you were always creating that becoming. You were always a teacher, but you were going through the steps required to get the label, the credential as a teacher, but you were always on your path to becoming a teacher.

And the same is true right here, right now in school leadership. The same is true in your personal life. As a leader, before you were a leader, you intentionally decided to become a leader. It didn’t just fall into your lap without any thought, any imagery, any imagination, any future forward thinking. Your actions led you to create the experience of leadership. You created this as a vocation, as a passion, as a career. You chose it, you focused on it. And you believed that you would achieve the accomplishment of becoming a school leader before you completed all of that work to become labeled, to be titled as a school leader, to be hired as a school leader in a position of school leadership.

You had to declare it internally first. You created it from your mind, your heart, your body, your soul. You claimed that you were going to be an administrator. You signed up for all that course work and leadership preparatory classes, whatever your path was to getting your administrative credential. You read, you studied, you wrote papers, you passed exams. You embodied the belief in yourself as a school leader while you were in the process of becoming a school leader. But that was always going to be the case. You were always creating your becoming of a school administrator.

That’s very concrete proof in your own life that you have the power and the potential to create any experience you want. And here’s what I’ve noticed, I’m creating whether I’m being intentional about it or not. I can create the outcomes I want or I can focus on the outcomes I don’t want and I can create that too. And good gracious knows, I have done both. I have created experiences that I very much desired to experience and I’ve created experiences that I very much did not wish to experience. I did not desire them and they happened.

You are always creating with your mind, your beliefs, with the energy of emotion that builds up in you as you are imagining what you desire, and that fuels your decisions and actions. Now, the gift of being a creator can lead you in both directions. And it’s something that is very fair to ask. It’s something we want to be aware of and intentional with because you can create confidence and you can create self-doubt. You can create peace or you can create war with yourself, with others. You can create calmness or you can create chaos, internal calmness, internal chaos, external calmness, external chaos. You can create solutions or you can create problems. Sometimes we do both. But you can focus on solutions and create solutions with curiosity and experimentation and exploration, and you can also create problems with excuses and abdication of responsibility, blaming, giving reasons as to why you can’t create solutions. You can create connection with yourself and others, or you can create a disconnect.

I really want you to hear this. If I could instill this understanding in every school leader, I would give you a vitamin gummy full of this and pass it out for free for the holidays. We have been gifted as humans with the luxury of being creators. We create the experience we experience. And this is where people will say, “I didn’t create this experience. This happened to me or this experience happened outside of me.” And my answer to that is yes. There are circumstances out of your control. But what we try to do is we try to spend our effort enforcing control on a circumstance that is out of our control. And that is very frustrating and it’s very exhausting and it’s very exasperating.

We don’t control the circumstances outside of us. We don’t control people’s behaviors, people’s decisions, people’s actions, people’s words, the weather, the traffic, who hires us, who doesn’t hire us. We don’t have full control over other people or the planet, but we do have control and we do create our own interpretation of that circumstance, our perspective of the situation, our beliefs about what is true, people’s intentions, what they made it mean about us, what we’re making it mean about us, and how we respond to these external circumstances.

That is what we control. That is what we create. We create responses to external circumstances. When you don’t get hired at the job you thought was the end all be all for you and they get you to the third round and you thought you had it and then they call you and say, “Thank you very much. We really respect you and appreciate you. However, we’ve decided to go with another candidate.” And you are crushed. It’s not that you could control their decision. You might have had influence on their decision in the way that you showed up, but ultimately, they made a decision outside of your control. What you make it mean about you, what you make it mean about them, and what you do in response to that rejection, to that no, that you can be creative with. That you can be responsive to versus reactive to.

Because the world isn’t fair. It’s not balanced, it’s not even. It’s very imperfect, it’s very messy, it’s complicated. There are things that happen in the world that crush us just to think about, let alone seeing it or having it happen to us. Sex trafficking, child abuse, racism, sexism, misogyny, there’s so many things, war, horrible, horrible events that happen outside of our control. And what’s really interesting if we go meta on this for a second is that the imperfections of the human experience actually are created by the humans. War, humans. Now, nature, right? There is a balance of, you know, prey and predator, and that feels horrible to us to think, “Oh, that cute little bunny is actually the prey for an animal that eats bunnies to stay alive for their existence and that bunnies were put on the earth as consumers of our grass and our gardens, but also as prey.” But the universal balance is there.

Humans, there is, I would venture to say a universal balance, and I believe we create a lot of the unfairness, of the imbalance, of the imperfections, of the messiness. When you think about problems, when you think about chaos, when you think about war, when you think about things that make us highly uncomfortable, much of that is created by humans. But we don’t control the other humans. So when other humans choose to create war instead of creating peace, and they choose to create chaos instead of choosing to create calm, we still have the option to create the experience that we personally want because we are an artist, we are the creator. We can create peace and calm within. We can create solutions and evolutions in our school because it’s ever evolving when we choose to be aligned with our creative energies.

And if this feels like I’m talking way out in left field and it doesn’t apply to school leadership and it doesn’t apply to teaching and learning, and it doesn’t apply to the problems that you have right now that you’re facing at your school right now. Maybe you’re thinking, well, my scores just dropped six points and my superintendent’s down my throat. How can I just be peaceful when my superintendent’s, you know, pressuring me to get the test scores up? I want you to think about how this actually impacts the quality of education on your campus. It’s fair to question it and it’s understandable to doubt it.

And yet, if you were to go on your computer right now and Google leadership efficacy, teacher efficacy, student efficacy, there is endless research on the positive impact of teacher efficacy, student efficacy, and leadership efficacy. And there is an impact of collective efficacy, what teachers believe they can do as a team, what the staff believes they can do collectively as a whole. It has a positive impact on learning, performance, and achievement. Research after research after research article, and then there’s research on the research. How you feel impacts how you perform in sports, it’s true, in business, it is true, in school, it is true, and in life it is true.

You don’t have to believe this. You don’t have to create calm. If things around you are chaotic and you want to feel chaotic, you have the luxury of choosing to feel chaotic. When you see injustice in the world, you may choose to be enraged and let that fuel your actions towards getting justice, creating justice. For there to be justice, there has to be injustice to make justice, right? That’s the balance. And when it comes to school leadership and teaching and learning, how we feel about ourselves, our identity as a leader, as a teacher, as a student, impacts either way, positively or negatively, our results, our outcomes. We create them.

So how you feel impacts how you perform, and how you feel is created by what you believe to be true about yourself, about others, about circumstances, about your creativity, about the truth that you are a creator, and what you spend your time thinking about. Are you focused on the calm or the chaos? On the problems or the solutions? On progress and growth or stagnancy and excuses and reasons why you can’t? This awareness is not intended for you to now go out and try to control every thought. “Oh my gosh, I am the creator. I have to control my thoughts.” It’s not about bypassing the learning curve or skipping over the discomfort of not knowing something or feeling new and awkward and clumsy about something. We’re not trying to bypass the discomfort of learning or the discomfort of being new or the discomfort of being completely out of our element and not knowing something.

It’s to know that when you are faced with something new, when you don’t know what to do, when you’re in a brand new position, when you lack information, when you don’t know how to do something, when you don’t have the skill set, when that does happen to you and your faced with something new or different or something out of your sphere of knowledge, that you do have control of how you treat yourself. You have control over how you identify yourself. You create the experience of being new. Is your experience of being new one of curiosity and lightheartedness and playfulness and delight? I call it kindergarten energy. When the kids first come in, they don’t care that they’re new to school. They don’t label that as a problem. They think it’s great. New is great, different is good. Show me everything. I want to touch it all. Tell me what it is. Teach me. I want to learn. I want to soak it in.

And then the older we get, we get self-conscious that we don’t know and that we should know and that how embarrassed we’ll be if somebody knows we don’t know. And then we act like we know when we really don’t, then we really feel foolish when somebody sees that we don’t know and we tried to cover up that we didn’t know and we do this silly game with ourselves because we’re afraid to just stand up and say, “Look, I don’t know. I’m new here. Tell me all the things. I want to learn. I want to learn to know.” We create the experience of what it feels like to not know, of what it feels like to not understand to be new at something. And we lean into that experience with the mindset of being able to handle being new.

I can handle the discomfort of being new. I’ve done it a bunch of times. I was new at everything one time. I can handle not knowing a skill. I didn’t know how to tie my shoes. I didn’t know how to drive a car. I didn’t know how to ride my bike. I didn’t know how to go on dates. I didn’t know how to pass ninth grade until I did. You didn’t know how to do anything you did until you did it. So of course you know how to handle it. But yet our brains like, “Oh, I don’t want to feel the discomfort that comes with not knowing. I don’t want to be the one who doesn’t know. I don’t want to, you know, have to be new at this.”

It’s being able to handle the discomfort of what you don’t know up until the moment that you do know. I call this holding space. It’s having the tolerance and patience to not know something all the way through until you actually do know, right? It’s, you know, if you go to the gym, it’s like you have to try lifting the next heavier weight until you can lift it. And you can’t lift it 100% of the time until the moment that you can. Or you can only do 10 reps and your goal is 15. And you do 10 reps and then you do 11 reps and then you do 12 reps and you’re still failing until, you’re failing all the way up until 15 reps. And then you get to 15 reps and you’re like, okay, now what? Well, now I want to do either heavier weights or I want to do more reps. It’s just a moment in time that we know.

So we need to implement perseverance for ourselves, grace, patience, compassion while you’re learning, while you’re growing, while you’re expanding your capacity to lead, your expanding your mind, you’re expanding your skills. Empowered leadership is all about the art of tapping into this creative energy, this creative flow. It’s your personal creative genius that can only come from you. No one else can lead the way you do. No one else can teach the way you do. No one else can live your life the way you do. It is striving towards what is possible for you and turning that impossible thing into the possible, riding right on that edge of your potential.

And the empowered principal coaching programs, the one-on-one coaching programs, EPC, which is the group coaching program, my live events that I offer, and all of the different EP leadership series courses that I provide kind of all of carte, all of them were created as both an essential and a luxury. These programs to me are essential in that the mindset and the skill set that I teach, they’re relevant and a part of the school leadership experience, no matter where you are on the globe.

We focus on those little daily interactions that we all have, those commonalities, working with teachers, working with students, working with parents, getting our schedule under control, managing priorities, managing demands, shifting priorities, how to present ourselves, how to communicate, how to build relationships, how to manage our time and planning, how to, you know, all the HR stuff. There’s universal things that we face as school leaders. This program covers all the essentials, and I believe it’s essential for all of us to have access to these conversations around the tangible, practical things that school leaders must learn to do and ways in which leaders must learn to think.

But this program is also a complete luxury because this experience is not a one-size-fits-all. I did not create The Empowered Principal Program from a commodity mindset. I recognize there are major organizations, national level organizations, everybody’s offering leadership support, leadership coaching, leadership mentoring. It’s not The Empowered Principal Program. This is like custom-crafted, boutique, high-end experience. It’s not like going to a conference, here’s the information, now you go apply it. It’s not like hearing a keynote speaker and being inspired but not getting anything tangible. It’s not even having presenters come to your school and present a professional development day with your staff and then going off. It’s not a group of consultants who are going to walk through and check a checklist and then tell you what’s working, what’s not, and what you need to do differently, and then leaving you to do it all. The EP experience, it’s very personalized. It’s custom-designed based on what you need in that exact moment and what serves you and your school best.

It is having a mentor in your pocket right by your side week after week and daily should you need it. So it is a premium tailored experience that caters to you, to your success, to your satisfaction. Because I care more about how you feel than what you do. It’s not what you’re doing. As a creator, it’s who you’re being while you’re doing it. It’s being in the energy of I create this, I am capable, I have the capacity to, I can handle this. It’s how you feel when you’re leading that impacts your ability to lead, how you feel about yourself, how you feel about your ability to lead, how you feel about those you are leading, how you interact with them, the value of your leadership, the meaning of your leadership.

I think about it in terms of other artists, right? A painter who hates to paint, who’s just like, “Oh, takes so much long.” You know, think about like, is it Michelangelo who did the Sistine Chapel? It took him years. Can you imagine working on one project for year after year after year, not having it finished and the space he had to hold for himself to create this masterpiece? And I think the story goes that he even tried to avoid it. He didn’t want to do the project. But can you imagine being a painter who hates to paint and being sentenced to life to paint? Or being a painter who loves certain kinds of painting, but you’re asked to paint like a landscape, they’re not going to go to the painstaking effort of attention to quality when you hate doing something and the detail that’s required versus somebody who loves to paint.

And I think about that with luxury brands, which I believe The Empowered Principal is considered. We don’t have a lot of luxury offers in education, but I want this to be the first. It’s a luxury to have a coach. It’s a luxury to have leadership mentorship in the way that I offer it. And I want people who want this. I don’t want people who need it. I do want people who need it in the sense, if you need it and you want it, you’re here. I think about luxury brands. The same is true with clothing lines, the attention to detail, the type of fabric, the style, the design, the fabric they use, handbags, shoes, cars, hotels, restaurants. You can go to fast food restaurants and get consistent food. It’s consistent whether you’re in Iowa, California, New York, you’re going to get the same cheeseburger. But if you go to Nobu and you want a Wagyu burger with the most premium cheese deliciously cooked to perfection as you like it with all of your accompaniments just as you like it, with the sides just as you like it, and if they’re not, they take it back because you expect perfect french fries, not cold ones, not burnt ones, just right ones.

We deserve as school leaders to have the option of tapping into our creative potential and having a service that offers a more luxurious experience that hasn’t been on the table. It wasn’t on the table, at least to my knowledge when I was a principal and I wanted to create it. I want to call in school leaders who want to tap in to this creativity, who want to take ownership of the experience they’re having and the experience they’re creating for themselves, for teachers, for students. I don’t want to be an educator who believes what other people say is or is not possible. I don’t want to buy into that. I don’t want to buy into the criticism of the educational system, the judgment of everybody else, and to take on those judgments and criticisms as my identity. I don’t want that for my experience. And I don’t want that for your experience.

The Empowered Principal calls in leaders who want to take back that ownership of your ability to create, to create positive experiences, positive interactions, positive connections, positive advancements, not only in academics, which I know we’re all focused on, but also in the human development, in the social and the emotional and the mental and the psychological development and physical development of our students and our staff, by the way, we’re forever evolving.

And so in this way, yes, The Empowered Principal brand is a luxury brand. It’s exclusive in its mindset, in its approach, in its potential, in its craftsmanship, in its study of human development and the human experience as leaders, teachers, and learners, as students. It is cutting edge in that we aren’t trying to solve problems with external products. We’re solving problems through internal alignment with our own creativity and our own potential. So these are the concepts that I am including in the new masterclass series, Luxury Leadership that I am hosting starting today at 4 p.m. Central time.

If you’re listening to this morning, you can come on in to Luxury Leadership. It starts today. It’s a three-day series. Every day, 4 p.m. Central Time. So if you’re listening to this podcast in real time, it’s going to be December 9th through 11th at 4 p.m. Central Time. And I believe that December right now with the magic of the holidays, it is the perfect time to get into the frequency of luxury as it is such a magical time of year. The holiday season feels to me so luxurious in love and friendship and connection and family and time and rest and hope. It’s not even about the luxury of all the gift giving and receiving. That is an added layer. It’s just a bonus, cherry on top to the holidays. But not all families, not all people are able to have that level of luxury in their experience of the holidays, but you can create a luxurious experience no matter what the circumstances. Anyone can experience the emotions that come with luxury. And this is what I’m sharing in leadership luxury this week.

And don’t forget, in January, the mid-year reboot is taking place starting January 6th. And that course will be free for those who sign up for EPC between now and January 6th. So the link to join EPC, which is full year of support, it’s listed in the show notes. And when you join, you get access to all of my past programs. I have them in a library where you can access the replays and the trainings and all of the resources and, you know, worksheets, handouts, booklets that come with those programs. You get access to all the past ones. So if you’ve missed something because you weren’t in EPC before, you still can access it.

And any future programs that I create while you are a member of EPC, you also get access into those. So if this is your first time, join EPC and then you get access to everything. And I’ve been doing this stuff for a decade. There’s a lot of content in there. This is my signature program, and it’s the best value because you get access to everything, you get weekly coaching, and you get a bonus one-on-one call per month. First come, first serve, you sign up as needed.

Join EPC, join this luxurious experience of coaching and mentorship. Join us for Luxury Leadership starting today, 4 p.m. I’ll see you there. Take great care of yourselves. Happy holidays. I love you all. We’ll talk to you next week. 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.