Ep #418: The Best of The Empowered Principal® Podcast

Hello, empowered principals. Welcome to episode 418.

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, and welcome to this very special holiday episode of the podcast. As we wrap up the 2025 calendar year and settle into the rhythm of the holiday season, I wanted to give you something a little different.

Today’s episode is a best-of collection featuring some of the most powerful moments, insights, and conversations from past episodes of The Empowered Principal Podcast. Think of this as a gift from me to you, a beautifully wrapped bundle of the reminders and the tools and the conversations that have helped so many principals and district leaders throughout the past year. Have a beautiful holiday season. May you be well, may you enjoy, may you rest, may you play and celebrate. I will see you in the new year. Wishing you all the best. Enjoy the show.

—

I didn’t know what life coaching was, but I knew I needed one because my life was a big mess. I was not feeling like I was doing anything well, being a parent, running my household, being a good principal, being an instructional leader. So I found this person, Dr. Martha Beck, and I signed up for her program, not to become a life coach, but to learn what it meant to coach my own life. I wanted some empowerment back. I wanted some agency. I wanted a sense of control somewhere along the way.

And from her, I learned just some techniques to just regulate myself emotionally when I was overwhelmed or to stop and take time for myself to just literally make sure that I’m drinking water, make sure that I am eating lunch, making sure that I put time limits on the amount of work that I did. So I started playing around with this idea of I’m a human in a school leadership role versus I’m a school leader and that’s my only identity because that job’s never done. We all know that.

The same goes for students. If there are students listening to this, you might just think like the studying’s never done, the learning’s never done. And on one hand you’re right because we are lifelong learners, but on the other hand, there needs to be something more than studying, learning, test scores, achievement, and that there needs to be living. So there’s all the doing, but then there’s also the living.

—

Being a leader, stepping into a leadership identity and a leadership role, that role requires you to develop yourself. It invites you to the expansion and the evolution of you personally. Professional development at its core actually is personal development. Because you can go and you can learn information and knowledge and skills and concepts and platforms and ideas to build you up professionally, but what really happens is you expand your capacity as a leader, or you expand your capacity as a teacher. And that happens only when you expand yourself personally, when you are open to learning, when you are willing to get it wrong until you get it right, when you’re willing to implement something and have it be messy and a little awkward and a little clumsy and a little bumpy and a little crunchy.

That requires personal development. It requires you to develop yourself and maturely approach your professionalism. It requires maturity and personal growth to be vulnerable and to allow people to give you feedback and to observe you and to try new things you haven’t tried before in front of somebody. That’s very vulnerable, but that is a personal development skill.

—

Imagine the analogy of a game of tug of war. In the game of tug of war, it takes two people to pull at the rope. For there to be tension between two people, if the rope is energy and it’s connecting you to that other person, both people on both ends must be pulling at the rope for there to be tension in the rope. If one person or the other drops the end of the rope, the tension drops. The tension in the rope lags and it goes falls to the ground. There is a disconnect. When one person disconnects, detaches from that attachment, there is no longer energy being transferred back and forth.

So, when you’re in a game of tug and war, for example, when we feel we are right, we feel very justified, very self-righteous that we are right. We have facts, we have data, we have information. We have proof. We pull at the rope to prove we are accurate. We’re tugging to prove we are accurate. When we feel we’ve been wrongly accused, when we’ve been blamed, when we feel that blame is inaccurate, we will tug with defensiveness. We will do anything to try and prove ourselves not wrong. We will tug, we will engage, we will attach to defensiveness, we will pull with defensiveness, and we will engage in a tug of war. When we feel that somebody’s lying to us or we feel they are withholding information or there’s something we feel energetically that they’re doing that’s an omission or they’re lying to us or they’re hiding something from us, we get engaged, we pick up the rope and we pull. We tug to try and corner them. We try to catch them in their lie. Instead of picking up the rope and pulling and engaging in a tug of war, drop the rope.

—

You are always only doing one thing at a time. Even when you think you’re multitasking, you’re really doing one thing. Even when you’re driving and listening to the podcast, you are physically engaged in the act of driving. The outcome you’re going to create when you drive is that you’re going to go from A to B. Now, you can autopilot your actions while your brain is thinking about the podcast, the content of this podcast. So you’re thinking about what I’m saying as you’re doing the action of driving.

And this podcast, you can check off the box and say you’ve listened to the podcast, but you haven’t taken action on the podcast, unless the action is an internal mindset shift that’s occurring. But even so, that mindset hasn’t created a different result yet in the external version of your life. So even when you think you’re multitasking, and I’ve really explored this because I used to preach multitasking. I used to be the poster woman of multitasking. I thought it was the right thing to do. I thought it was the efficient, effective thing to do, most productive thing to do.

But I noticed, when I’m actually in a meeting, but I’m also checking my phone for emails, I’m either engaged in answering an email or I’m engaged in the meeting. I’m not actually both. I might physically be present at the meeting, but if I’m engaged on my computer or on my phone, I’m not engaged in the meeting. There’s one thing that I’m doing at a time. So it feels like you’re multitasking because your body’s in one space and your mind is in another space, but you’re really only doing one or the other. You’re physically creating a result or you’re mentally preparing to create a result, but you’re not doing both. You can never be physically producing more than one result at a time.

Your body is always in one space. Have you noticed in your house, you might have a 5,000 square foot house, but your body is only enjoying one space at a time. You’re either in your bathroom getting ready for the day or you’re in your bed or you’re relaxing reading a book or you’re sitting by your fireplace or you’re out in your garage tinkering or you’re in your kitchen creating some delicious delectable to eat. But you’re only in one space. You’re in your office or you’re in your bedroom, or you’re in your living room, or you’re in your kitchen. You’re either inside or you’re outside. You’re in one space.

—

The most impactful thing that you can do as a leader in your building is empower others to lead. And so, because that’s where you see that magnification of the things that you can do, the capacity grows so much further when you don’t feel like it has to go through yourself. And that’s not, you don’t have to feel like you’re making yourself redundant in that. It takes courage as a leader and people will see you as a stronger leader when you let go of power and actually say, no, I trust you. Let’s do this. But you need to build your team towards that so that they understand that they have capacity to make decisions, that you trust them and they’re empowered. You know, this is The Empowered Principal. The whole idea is that the empowered principal empowers their team to lead so that they can lead effectively.

—

Leadership isn’t ego driven. It’s not me fixing problems. It’s not me having to know the knowledge and the wisdom and then imparting it on people and then marching people down the street and do as I say and do as I do and that’s not leadership. Leadership’s actually the opposite of that where when you’re leading people, they are choosing to follow. They are inspired, they’re listening, and we create that climate when our mindset shifts from it is my job to be the leader and look like a leader and be perceived as a leader versus let me show people what leadership looks like internal leadership from an internal space.

—

When parents give us attention, appreciation, love, gratitude, that is the cherry on top. I want external validation, external acknowledgement, external kudos, all of that to be your cherry on top. Let it be the whipped cream, let it be the cherry, let it be the sprinkles. But underneath that big old ice cream sundae is the foundation that’s you. The best part of the sundae isn’t just the sprinkles and the cherry and the whipped cream. The foundation it’s built upon is the beautiful ice cream of your flavor of your choice. You can be vanilla, you can be chocolate, you can be mint chip, you can be praline. It doesn’t matter what flavor you are. The foundation of you is you. You’re unique. You have your own flavor, but that is what matters.

A bowl of cherries, whipped cream and sprinkles does not fulfill you for very long. We want the Sunday because of the ice cream flavors we chose. Are you following me here? So, when teachers are dismayed, it is because they have slipped out of empowerment. And you can invite them back into empowerment, invite them back into internal validation. Of course, as humans, we’re wired for connection. We are wired to belong. We want external validation. It’s a lovely thing to have, but we can’t rely on it and we know that it’s fleeting.

Somebody gives us a compliment today, it feels good today, but tomorrow we don’t get one and now we don’t feel good. We are relying on external intermittent validation. That’s not going to carry us very far. Versus waking up every day and personally aligning to who you are, who you’re becoming as an educator, loving it, going in, doing the work. And when it’s hard, whoo, take a little break, get some rest, recover, and come back at it because we chose this because we love this, because we are feeling validated in who we are and what we’re doing.

—

We’ve all had classrooms we walk into. We walk in and we know that there’s good things going on. And then we can walk into another classroom and we can know that there are some hiccups going on. There is some, it’s not so smooth in that room, okay? There might be a detour happening or there might be some bumps in the road. We’ve got a smooth sailing, this road trip’s going great, we’re on track, it’s aligned. And then we’ve got this one that’s, you know, maybe stopped and they’re at the carnival for the day. It’s kind of chaotic, okay?

So, more than just how it looks is the energy of a classroom. It’s how the classroom feels. And without saying too much more about that, I want you to contemplate for the week, when you’re walking through classrooms, when you’re doing observations, there is the actions and the words that you’re observing behaviors, right? There are words, there are actions, and then there is an energy in that classroom. Because kids can be sitting on the carpet, crisscross applesauce, hands in their lap and totally silent. They could look engaged and not be engaged.

Teaching and learning is not what it looks like. It’s what it actually is. And empowered principals, exceptional school leaders, go beyond what it looks like and go through to what it is. They think about the energy of the classroom, how it feels, how it feels for students, how it feels for the teacher, how it feels as the leader to be in that room. There’s something more that is expressed on our campuses than just what people are doing, the actions they are taking.

—

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. 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, you know, at the staff meeting or a staff, you know, 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.

—

We’re grappling with the discomfort of school leadership, the struggle of school leadership, but also the beauty of it, the luxury of it, the privilege of being a school leader. We have a platform. It’s time for us to start sitting up at that table, taking ownership and responsibility. We are leaders. It is time that we lead. We lead conversations. We open the door up, not just to talk about, hi, how are you feeling today? You know, have a good teaching day. But to talk about, what are we doing? Why are we doing it? And look, it’s not to say that we sit down and we have all of the answers. It’s to cultivate the conversations, to kind of, you know, I think about, I’ve been really into building fires. I have this beautiful fireplace in the home in which I’m staying right now and in this fireplace, it will look like the fire is dying out and the embers are going gray or black out. And if I just take the little poker and I stoke those embers, a flame will reignite or the embers will glow.

And I feel like we’re going into education, we’re looking at the surface and we’re like, well, it may be smoldering a bit, but, you know, there’s nothing below. It’s about dead. But if you were to stoke that fire and have a conversation, so much will come to the surface, a lot of energy, a lot of opinions, a lot of anger, a lot of pain, a lot of frustration, a lot of confusion and overwhelm. I believe there is so much confusion right now and the reason that we are suffering in the, you know, sense of mental and emotional suffering when it comes to being frustrated, feeling exhausted, being overwhelmed, actually is coming down to confusion. We haven’t had the talk. We’re not sitting down saying, what is the actual purpose? What is the actual function of school? What is the value? And can we increase the value?

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.