Ep #95: Why Learning New Things Is Hard, But Worth It

Hello, Empowered Principals, welcome to episode 95.

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 there, my empowered leaders. How are you guys doing this week? Welcome to the middle of October. It’s actually getting towards the end of October. Halloween is probably in full swing and you guys are in the thick of the end of your first trimester. So congratulation, you are doing the work. I am so proud of you. Congratulations.

We have been focusing this month on the concept of workload and I feel like the first trimester is really testing our stamina and our energy and our grit, basically, in getting that school year up and running, getting teachers in place, getting them hired, getting them supported, getting kids on schedules and routines and getting parents calmed down and into the routines of the year.

The first trimester is a really, really big push energetically. So we’re talking about workload because our brain, probably at this point in the year, is at a low. And I know there are studies out there from The New Teacher Center who have studied the emotional and mental wellbeing of teachers throughout the course of the year and this right here, in this moment, this season of October, you’ve been working at it hard, you’ve got the school year going, it’s a big struggle. There’s a dip in October that happens.

So I understand where you’re at right now and you might be feeling some fatigue. That is why we’re going to talk about workload today and we’re going to talk about how our thoughts about our workload impact the way that we approach the work.

And as I’ve been thinking about this and thinking about what workload is in schools, I had a huge a-ha moment. I was listening to another podcast that was discussing people’s capacity for learning new things and I realized why learning new things is so uncomfortable, especially for adults, and how it’s all related to the STEAR Cycle and why learning new things feels like work overload.

If you think of the act of learning something new as the situation line in the STEAR Cycle, you can then run the cycle and see how your thoughts, emotions, actions, and results are impacted based on what you’re thinking about the process of learning new things. When we are in the process of learning something, it feels very cumbersome and difficult and challenging and it stresses us out and it’s almost like a physical itchiness in the body because we’ve fatigued those muscles in one of four ways, what I call our learning muscles.

So when you think of the STEAR Cycle and you think about learning something new is the situation that you’re in, you have one of four learning muscles that gets fatigued. It’s either your belief, your emotion, your approach, or your actions, what I, instead of the result, I call failure. So I call it belief fatigue, emotion fatigue, action fatigue, or failure fatigue. And we have one or more of these that happen to us when we’re learning something new and we feel like we just can’t go on anymore.

So the first one is belief fatigue. Learning requires us to question what we’re currently believing is true, or it requires us to think about something that we’ve never even thought of before, like a brand-new concept, a brand-new thought. And the effort that it takes to think about something new to us is really significant because it requires more focus and time to process what we’re making that new information mean.

It’s like the brain has to go into low gear and slow down and climb that hill. Our brain has to take that time and energy to process the new information slowly because it’s trying to see how the new information connects to what we already know.

Since our brains love ease and consistency and patterns of how things are connected and related, it will get really fussy when an idea is presented that it hasn’t yet figured out the connections to or how it makes sense. So when something, like new information, for example I’m learning how to create website pages and landing pages and it’s all new to me, every word of these trainings is new for me. I’m writing it down, I’m writing definitions, I feel like I’m back in school.

And so because our brain likes it when it’s automated and easy and consistent and flow, when we have to halt and slow down, we have to stop and, like, what? We’re questioning that brand-new concept, that brand new idea, that brand new belief. We’re not yet believing; we don’t yet understand it. It doesn’t make sense so we’re not believing it to be true or we’re not seeing how it all connects, and we can fatigue from that.

And our ability to spend effort into thinking about a thought that isn’t comfortable yet is really challenged, and eventually we’re going to hit that capacity for thinking about that new thought, and fatigue will set in and we’ll have to take a break.

The same holds true for learning something that is in opposition to what we currently believe. The brain does not like to have its beliefs questioned. Have you noticed that? It wants to go on the defense and it wants to explain and justify why what you believe is true is true. It’s going to defend itself.

And the reason it’s so uncomfortable to have our beliefs questioned is because we might decide, we might hear something that questions and challenges and tells us that maybe our current beliefs aren’t exactly true, which we then make mean that we are wrong, and nobody loves to be wrong. Everyone feels uncomfortable with having to admit that they are wrong. And most people hate being wrong so much that they would rather have their beliefs go unquestioned and just sit in their justification of being right and being true than to be open with themselves and open to questioning their beliefs and having to admit that possibly they might be wrong.

Wrong is just an opinion by the way. So you can say, I used to think that this was true and I was right about it then, and now I’m choosing to think this and I’m right about it now. I don’t have to be wrong. Wrong is just a label. It’s just nebulous. It’s just an opinion.

So you don’t have to label changing your belief systems as being wrong, as you were wrong and now you’re right, like it’s all or none, or there’s one correct way of thinking or not. You can just say, I now believe this. Today, I learned something new and now I believe this, end of story.

Isn’t it fascinating to wonder why we’ve kind of agreed as a society that being wrong is something so terrible? What if being wrong was actually the best thing we could feel? It really is possible, when you think about it, to be happy about being wrong. And I’m sure you have experienced this.

Let me tell you a story. Just the other day, I was looking for some of my things at my in-laws’ house and I couldn’t find them. We stay at their house a lot. They’re in the process of moving and packing and the house had been staged for the sale of their home.

I had items over at the house that I hadn’t yet picked up and I just thought I’d swing by and pick them up, and I couldn’t find them. So my brain automatically made the assumption that the stagers either moved my stuff out of sight where I couldn’t find it, or worse yet, I was like, I wonder if somebody took it. I wonder if it was just there and they took it.

And I was witnessing my brain coming up with all of these thoughts and I said to myself, gosh, I hope I’m wrong. I don’t want to be thinking that people I don’t even know are stealing my things out of my in-laws’ home. The best-case scenario is they got moved to somewhere out of sight.

So I wanted to be wrong. I really did believe that they got moved or that somebody had taken them because I couldn’t think of any other possibility to it. And I wanted to be wrong about these assumptions.

So, fast forward to a week later, I’m back at the beach condo and I’m digging through a closet, and boom, there are all the items I was searching for. I have no idea how they got there. I don’t remember putting them there. But I was so happy, one, that I found them, and I was super confused. I was sure that I’d left them at my in-laws’ and I was super baffled that they were here at the condo.

But I was also so happy that I was wrong because it meant, number one, I still had my stuff, and two, nobody had stolen it, nothing had gone wrong. And I had to let myself and I was feeling a little embarrassed, just at myself. I never said anything about it, but I felt really bad that my brain decided to make the missing items mean that somebody put them out of my sight or that they took them.

I was like, wow, I shouldn’t be accusing people of stealing, even people I haven’t met. That’s crazy. But it was just my mind. I told myself it was just a thought, I’m so glad that I’m wrong. And I’m sure that you’ve had cases where it feels good to be wrong, like your brain comes up with all these crazy scenarios, like it will forecast out and anticipate problems up in the future and you’re like, whoa I hope I’m wrong about that.

So allow yourself to enjoy being wrong. Like, practice and have fun with being wrong because belief fatigue will occur when you’ve reached your upper limit for thinking brand new thoughts or having to question your belief system. It’s totally normal. We all have that limit and we all hit that fatigue moment. And in order to learn new thoughts, you have to grow your capacity to be able to question what we believe is true.

Number two, emotional fatigue – although emotions are just a vibration in the body – and I say just lightly because really, emotions are why we do every single thing that we do, every decision we make, everything that we want, every goal that we want to achieve, every action we take is all driven by emotion.

So I understand, like, technically they’re just a vibration in the body, but they are also very, very uncomfortable to allow and to be present and to let them be in the body and experience them for the entire duration. When we do allow ourselves to experience negative emotions from beginning to end, we have a threshold for what we believe we can tolerate.

So when something bad happens and you’re having a negative emotional reaction to it, your brain is going to say, oh we’re getting to the limit of what we can handle, what we can tolerate. And the hardest thing that you will ever do in your life is experience extreme emotion, intense emotion like grief, regret, heartbreak, those things that just feel unbearable in the moment, that’s the hardest thing that you will ever, ever do in your life.

Your brain is going to want to distract and deflect and procrastinate and buffer with other activities when it reaches that threshold, and you’re going to experience this emotional fatigue as a result of hitting that plateau. So, for example, the easiest thing I can think of that comes to mind is like going through a breakup.

When you go through either a friendship breakup or a romantic breakup or a divorce and it’s extremely painful and you just feel like you’re never, like, you just can’t even get up in the morning, you can’t breathe, you can’t think about anything else, you can’t eat, you’re just consumed with grief and sadness and loss, all of the bad feelings, they just feel awful, you will hit, just your brain and your body can’t take it anymore, you’ll hit that plateau.

So sometimes, you fatigue from having to think so hard about new things-, other times you fatigue because you are emotionally drained and you need a relief from that emotional experience. And one of the things that I teach as a concept is helping people build the stamina for allowing their emotions to be present in the body, to allow urges to happen, to allow negative emotion to vibrate and just let it be present. And really being able to acquire this skill, it’s the number one step to really being able to embrace your full empowerment and accomplish any goal, and I mean any goal that you want.

So when you’re at school and there’s something that’s going down that’s really awful – a lot of times, for principals, it tends to be like people are talking behind your back or somebody posts something horrible about you on social media or a parent attacks you publically in a meeting and that whirlwind of societal death that consumes you and you feel like, oh my god I’m going to die, this is awful people are saying this about me, they’re thinking this about me.

When that’s going on, I help clients navigate that difficult situation by teaching them how to allow those emotions to be present, how to show up when they’re feeling that way, and how to start feeling better. You feel better by allowing the feeling to actually be present. When you resist the feeling and you push it away and you try avoiding it and you try basically placating it by sugaring it up or doctoring it up, by doing something else that feels good in the moment but it’s not really addressing the issue, taking that emotion in and allowing it is how you get rid of it.

And it doesn’t logically make sense, but that’s the only way. Basically, you can’t go around it, you have to go through it. We call it the ring of fire. You’ve got to go through the ring of fire. So, there’s the emotional fatigue.

Number three is action fatigue. When we’re learning something new, when you’re a new principal and you’re learning the job and it’s brand new and there’s so much to learn and do, you have to take tons of action. You have to take lots of action that you have never taken before.

Let’s use teaching as an example.  So when you’re learning how to teach and you’re a brand-new teacher, you have to, like, think really hard to plan through every step of your lesson. You spend hours doing that, then you’ve got to go and you’ve got to prep all the materials and you check the boxes to make sure, did I prep everything, is everything in the right order for this lesson, do I have all the components of the lesson?

And then you have to spend your energy and time thinking about okay, now I’ve got to get up in front of the kids and I’ve got to – what if I mess up or what if I say the wrong thing or what if I totally screw this up? So then you’ve got to navigate your own emotional and mental wellbeing through the process of planning how you’re going to present the lesson.

Then you actually have to get up and do the lesson. And then after the lesson you’ve got to figure out how you’re going to assess their learning, and then adjust your instruction based on how the kids performed on the assessment. So when you’re new to teaching, it’s exhausting. I’m tired just saying that.

Remember how exhausting school leadership is? I mean, how teaching is? Well yes, school leadership is the same. When you’re brand new, you go home tired because you are taking so many new actions that you have never had to take before. It’s exhausting and you have to build your capacity to take more action, and you will have a ceiling for capacity of how much action you feel like you can bear to take.

And in the beginning, as a teacher, your threshold might be one lesson. You might have spent hours or days or even weeks planning one single lesson. But once you’ve taught for four or five years, going all day teaching lesson after lesson nonstop, it’s not a big deal, you just know the drill. The same thing is true when you’re a principal.

So when you first start training – and I like to use the example of running for people. So I used to be a runner and I like to use the example, if you’re not a runner and you decide you want to run a race, you get really excited and motivated, but your body, when you start taking that action of running, is going to be like, hey, wait a minute, maybe a few blocks in you’re like, I’m already tired, I’ve hit my plateau.

You have to train. You have to start by running one block and then two blocks and then one mile and then two miles, and as you train, you’re building your muscle strength, your muscle memory, you’re strengthening your cardio vascular system and then you’re able to go farther and farther and eventually you’re going to be able to go faster as well.

So first, you have to build the foundation, and then you can go faster, this is how school leadership works when you’re brand new. You have to take so much action that’s brand new. You physically exhaust yourself from taking action and you just like, I can’t do any more. But the further along you go, the more you practice, the more you train, the longer and faster and more efficient you’re going to be.

So the answer to action fatigue is this; you want to take very slow methodical baby steps. You want to be consistent over being perfect or concise. You want to be able just to be clumsy, take slow action, like, only run a few blocks, only get a few things done. And as you build your capacity and your knowledge, you’re all building this at once. You’re building your belief capacity, your emotional capacity, your action capacity and slowly, over time, and taking those little tiny baby action steps will get you to the bigger goals.

And finally, there’s failure fatigue. So, in the STEAR Cycle, we don’t have a failure. Well, failure is in the STEAR Cycle. It’s called a result, and then a situation, and what we think about that failure. So failure is actually a potential result.

But I call it failure fatigue because when we’re doing new things, learning new things, trying new things, we’re taking lots of new actions, we’re going to fail. It’s just a part of the process. We will not be successful the first time we try anything new, the first time we think anything new or feel anything new or take action towards anything that’s new. We will never be 100% successful and a lot of times, people will try, try, try and fail so many times they just fatigue of the failure. They’re like, oh my gosh, I keep failing, I’m giving up, I’m not doing this.

So, failure fatigue is the most dangerous because if we believe that we’ve failed too many times, what ends up happening as a result of that is we want to quit. And that is the ultimate failure, like, little mini failures along the way like something didn’t work out or you didn’t get the results you wanted in the time frame that you said you wanted them, those things happen.

But if you get up each day and you’re like, I’m going to try again, I’m going to practice my mental and my emotional capacity to, like, take some more action. I’m going to keep trying. I’m going to adjust my approach, you will expand your ability to allow failure to happen, and really that’s the key because if you have the mental and emotional capacity and stamina to allow yourself to fail over and over again, that is how you get to the results.

So, a lot of times, in schools, we plan smart goals and one of the things is that it’s time-sensitive. And I have a problem with that in the sense that yes, you want to try and achieve a goal by a certain time and that can motivate you to get into that action planning and to tolerate those mental and emotional aspects of really hitting a hard goal.

But I would also say that when you look at the big picture of who you want to be as a school leader and the legacy you want to leave behind and the influence and impact you want to have on students and staff, giving that, like, so what if it takes you two years to learn how to be awesome at your job? Who cares if it takes you three years or five years?

What we’re looking at is the big picture result and you’re going to fail a lot of times when you are leading your school. But your ability to allow failure to happen and growing that capacity for failure fatigue is really the key to how you learn to succeed, because you only succeed by lots of mini failures. You learn what to do, what not to do, what to do, what not to do.

So, I want you to practice building up your capacity to think new thoughts, to challenge your current beliefs, to experience and allow emotions to happen in your body and build that capacity for emotions and know that you will hit plateaus in emotional fatigue. I want you to practice expanding your ability to take actions and new actions and know that action fatigue is going to come up as a new leader. That’s totally fine. And then finally, you will hit a plateau of failures.

You’ll feel like you can’t take another failure, you just can’t do it anymore and really, the answer to that is to keep trying anyway, to keep doing it anyway because success can happen in an instant. One day it’s not working, and boom, the next day, something works, and you’re like holy cow how did that happen.

Here’s how – all of the failures, the emotional aspect, having to think new thoughts, having to feel new emotions, having to take new actions, all of those things that didn’t feel like they were working, that was actually the way to get to how it works. That is the path. That is the solution. That is how you do it.

You have to be willing to allow yourself to feel failure, to have things not go well, and that is how you get the goal accomplished. And next week, we’re going to talk about when you hit that goal, how you celebrate it. That is going to be a fun episode. I can’t wait to share it with you. I hope you guys are having an amazing week. Focus on your capacity to feel emotions, to think new thoughts, to take new actions, and to allow failures and to know failures, it’s just data. It’s just learning. It’s just this is what I learned, this is what I’ll do differently next time, and this is how I’m going to adjust.

So, go out there, grow your capacity, and have an amazing empowered beautiful week. I’ll talk to you next week. Take care, bye.

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