Ep #152: Accelerate Your Accomplishments

Hello, empowered principals. Welcome to episode 152.

Welcome to The Empowered Principal Podcast. A not-so-typical educational resource that will teach you how to gain control of your career and get emotionally fit to lead your school and your life with joy by refining your most powerful tool, your mind. Here’s your host, certified life coach, Angela Kelly Robeck.

Well hello my empowered principals. Welcome to Tuesday. Welcome to the end of November. And happy US Thanksgiving week. I want to start this podcast by giving a shout-out to my mom, who passed away one year ago yesterday.

My mom was my biggest fan, especially in the beginning of this journey. And she always has been my biggest fan of course. But my mom was so good at cheering me on when I announced to the world that I was starting this business. She knew how scared I was to leave the district and to venture out on my own, and to create a business when I had no business creating a business. I had no idea what I was doing.

And so I got through the fear of posting on social media, what I was going to do, and then I had to learn how to do Facebook Lives, and my mom jumped on to every Facebook Live, no matter how nervous or bad I was. She commented on all of my posts, and she believed in me more than I believed in myself at first.

And I miss her so much. I miss seeing her and I miss seeing all of her enthusiasm and support for me. And I would love for her to see how much I’ve grown and how the business is helping change education one thought at a time, and one leader at a time.

And I know she’s rooting for you and for me. She wants to see education evolve into a system that better serves its students and its teachers and its school leaders. My mom had such a soft spot for kids. She was so adoring of children and loved volunteering in my classroom whenever she came to visit.

And I also have to share with you guys quickly that yesterday is the anniversary of her passing, and tomorrow is my parents’ 51st wedding anniversary. So yes, sadly my mom passed away just two days shy of their 50th wedding anniversary, but we were able to celebrate their anniversary the weekend before she passed.

So it’s a special time of year for me. It always has been a special time of year for me, and it’s exceptionally tender for me this year. So I’m sending so much love out to my dad because here he has been experiencing his first year without my mom, and now I can’t go home to be with him because of the pandemic.

And I’m just sending so much love to my family right now, and I want to send my love to all of you who can’t be with those you loved or you couldn’t be with those who you’ve lost that you loved. I understand what that feels like and I wish nothing but love and support and comfort for you during this time.

So happy Thanksgiving, if you can’t be with those you love, like I can’t be with my family right now, just be extra caring and loving towards yourself this week and spend time doing things that you can do that feel good, and just comfort yourself in a lot of love.

I think we could spend an entire podcast coaching on all of our Thanksgiving thoughts during the pandemic. But that’s just for another time. So this week, for many principals, shifting gears here, is the first week you come up to the surface to be able to catch a breath of air.

For most of you, you have been pushing really hard since August, with only maybe a three-day weekend. I know that Labor Day is in there and perhaps for some of you, you had maybe Patriots Day off, or Indigenous Peoples’ Day off, but no real break until now.

So I really encourage you, today, right now, this Tuesday before the holiday, make a plan ahead of time for your break. Decide right now how you want to spend your time, including extra time for sleeping, downtime, time with family. Decide how much time you want to dedicate to cooking and cleaning, versus resting and reading and just being engaged in conversation with whoever you do get to spend the holiday with.

Get the most out of your time off by doing what you want to do, versus what your brain is telling you that you should get done. When you don’t consciously decide ahead of time what you want to do and plan out, you already know what happens. You passively enter into the holiday weekend and it fills up with activities that you don’t necessarily want to do, or even worse, you fill in the downtime by checking in or catching up on work.

No, no. Do not let work steal this time from you. Things will be fine for the week. And quite honestly, nobody else wants to be thinking about work and getting emails from you. Leave them alone. Decide right now and schedule in lots of abundance, lots of fun, lots of restful activities. Promise? Okay.

Hold on to your seats, ladies and gentlemen. I am going to coach you hard today. I’m going to level up the way you forever think over the next 30 minutes. My thought work and coaching is improving at such a rapid rate, and I have to share it with you as soon as possible.

So my goal today is to accelerate your transformation into your empowerment as quickly as possible. For some of you, this is going to feel like too much too fast. You’re going to feel resistance and maybe even some anger and frustration and resentment.

Others of you might feel confused and overwhelmed, but for those of you who are opened and ready, this will be what clicks inside of your head and sets you up for faster success. I am speaking to my best clients today, my most dedicated listeners, those who want 100% results. Are you guys ready? Alright, here we go.

So I teach the leadership triad concept to my one-to-one clients. It’s a simple concept that is easy to understand and implement, and it goes like this. There is belief, influence, and impact. The equation goes like this. The level of leadership belief that you have equates to the level of leadership influence you have, which equates to the level of leadership impact you have.

For those of you who want to be a highly-impactful school leader and create tangible results for your school and your work-life balance, you need to have a high level of leadership influence. Leadership influence is the degree to which you inspire others into actions that support your goals and their goals, the school’s goals, all the goals.

And the more inspirational your influence is, the easier it will be for people to follow your lead and want to work for themselves and their students and their families and for you. The way you become more influential is through building up your leadership beliefs.

You can’t be inspirational to others when you don’t have a strong sense and empowering beliefs about yourself as a leader. So the work on building up your leadership legacy comes back to working on your leadership beliefs.

This brings me to the belief triad. There are three things that you must believe in order to grow your capacity to be influential and impactful. You have to believe in yourself, you have to believe in solutions, and you have to believe in possibility.

Number one, belief in yourself. When you are new at something, your belief in your ability to do that task is very low. Your brain doesn’t have evidence to prove that you’re capable, because you’ve never done it before. So your self-concept of who you are as a school leader doesn’t match your expectations of who you want to be as the school leader.

Your self-concept hasn’t caught up with the role you have stepped into. Now, what we typically want to do is wait to believe that we’re a good leader, once we have years of experience and collected lots of evidence over the years to prove to ourselves that we are in fact a good leader.

But until then, we lean on other people’s opinions of us and look for evidence outside of ourselves and outside of our own experience to tell us that we’re doing a good job. First year leaders will often say, “I just want people to think I’m doing a good job.”

And so when people do, when people say to them, wow, you’re doing an amazing job, or I appreciate what you’re doing, you’re doing good work, and you get that feedback, that positive feedback, new principals tend to go really high on that. They feel really good when people tell them they’re doing a great job, and they feel really low when people criticize them or don’t give them such positive feedback, or maybe just no feedback at all. Their brains will assume no feedback is bad feedback. So they feel really high or really low.

It’s a very all or none experience. And that’s just because they don’t yet hold the belief in themselves that they’re good enough to be able to neutralize other people’s opinion of them. So when you as a school leader believe that you’re a good administrator and that you lead out of alignment to your values, you care so much less about what other people think about you.

You don’t need their approval to believe you’re doing a good job because you already believe you’re doing a good job. And you can handle it when somebody complains or criticizes you. Just the other day, I had a new client whom by the way, I am so in love with her, and I promise you, she’s going to be on the podcast one day.

But she’s brand new, I’m giving her some time and space. She’s actually really afraid of public speaking so I told her she was going to be on the podcast, and she was like – I’m giving her some time. But mark my word, I’m coaching her to be on the podcast.

But I want to tell you her story. She, the other day, had two parents who were disgruntled with different issues and she wanted to coach on these two topics. So both parents were complaining and wanting her to take actions that they believed would make them feel better.

So one of the parents had their child report to them who was wearing masks and who wasn’t, what the teacher was doing to keep people safe, what she wasn’t doing, basically scouting for any behaviors that weren’t in alignment with what the parent believed should be the protocol for in-person learning.

And my client was feeling kind of irritated and worried about how to address this parent. Her default thinking was that she needed to appease him and to fix something. So when we dug in a little bit more, and I asked her, wait a minute, what do you believe is true? What do you think is true about the protocols you have in place? Do you trust and believe that your teachers are following them?

Versus focusing on what he was believing, what he thought she should do, she was finally able to see that wait a minute, she did feel like she had appropriate protocols in place. She felt like her teachers were following the protocols, she trusted that they were doing the appropriate things and taking appropriate precautions for themselves and for the students.

And she knew that she had more than adequate resources. The PPE and all of the resources that she needed, the materials. And she also knows that she’s in the business of working with children and humans. And that no protocol is going to be perfectly followed. Can you relate?

Yes, of course. We are in the business of children and human beings. Humans and children, we’re all humans, just young humans, do not always follow protocol. We knew that before COVID, and we know it now.

So her belief system, when she just took out what the other person was thinking and looked at what she was believing, she realized, wait a minute, my offer here, what I’m offering as a school leader basically goes like this. In-person learning with its imperfections, or you can choose remote learning with its imperfections.

There is no perfect offer right now. There never is. There never is a perfect offer, but she does believe that in-person learning is appropriate, has protocols in place, and that she trusts teachers and students to for the most part be following the protocols.

And she has the option for people to choose remote learning. But that comes with its imperfections as well. We all know the beauty and the beast of this whole scenario.

So there is no perfect offer, and buying into that parent’s belief that there should be a perfect offer, versus her stepping into her own belief that what you do have to offer families is solid, that will spin you out of control, right? When you believe that the family needs to have their way met, versus you standing grounded in what you believe is true.

When you do this, you spend your time and energy focusing on what the parent’s believing you should do, versus spending your time aligning your actions with your beliefs. So you as a new leader will not believe in yourself initially. The work is to find evidence that helps you ground yourself in self-belief.

Because I’ll tell you what, there are lots of parents out there with different opinions about how you should be running business and running school. You have to stand grounded in what you think is right, what you believe you’re doing a good job at, and that the offer you’re providing to the parents, they’re both acceptable.

Whatever offer you’re giving them, you can work from home or work from school, there are imperfections but they’re solid offers. You have to believe that for yourself.

Step two, belief in solutions. In order to have influence and impact, you have to work to believe that there are solutions to the problems that you’re facing. There are many challenges you face as a school leader, to which your mind will say, well, that’s always been a problem, there’s just no good solution to that problem.

And when you think those thoughts and you believe that that’s true, what you won’t do is spend time looking for a solution. Your brain does not want to spend time thinking about problems that don’t have solutions. Of course it doesn’t want to do that. It’s a no win, right?

It’s certainly not going to spend time thinking about problems, let alone trying to come up with solutions that problems that don’t have solutions. Do you see how that works?

And then on top of it, if you’re a new leader or an inexperienced leader, you’re going to tell yourself on top of there not being solutions to all of these problems, I have no idea how to solve this. I don’t know where to start, it’s too big to solve. And your brain will again resist and avoid thinking about the problem and trying to develop solutions.

In order to feel effective as a leader, you lean into believing that solutions are possible. And what’s so fun about this process is that the more deeply you believe this thought, the easier creating solutions becomes. When you believe there is a solution, then you ask yourself, what is the easiest solution? What’s simple here? Lean into the belief that solutions are available.

Step three, belief in possibility. Belief in possibility coincides with believing in solutions because both involve expanding your capacity to believe in new ideas, new concepts. Believing in possibility means that you work to believe that what you currently believe is impossible can become possible.

This feels hard to your brain. Your brain doesn’t like to be challenged with new possibilities. At first, it will say no. For example, if I asked you to believe right now that it’s possible to get a 10K raise in the middle of the school year, your brain is most likely going to say no way. That is not possible.

And then what it wants to do is justify all the reasons and give evidence that proves why it’s not possible. It will say things like your salary is on a stepping column, it’s pre-determined at the beginning of the year. The district doesn’t give out raises, the district doesn’t have the budget for it. Well, it’s never been done before. Your school board is stingy, or whatever your brain thinks about the possibility of getting a 10K raise in the middle of the year.

Whatever your brain believes to be true about getting a 10K raise, that list of evidence to you will feel very compelling and reasonable. And hey, your brain loves to be right. It loves to have all the evidence and tell the other people why it’s right and they’re wrong.

Now, I want to tell you another story. Another true story from a client of mine. This client hired me back in September, a year ago September. So September 2019. That was her first year.

She was distraught at the time and reached out to me because she was the lowest paid principal in her county. She was working her buns off and was beginning to feel some resentment. She didn’t feel valued and she felt severely underpaid.

So we worked on building up her belief that it was possible for her to get a raise. Now, did her brain argue right away in the beginning? Yes, of course. She did not fully believe that it was possible. But each week, we kept focusing on that it could happen. Like 10% could happen, 20% it could happen.

And even though we didn’t know when it was going to happen or how much she would get, we did keep choosing to believe that it could happen. So I helped her look for evidence to help her brain start to believe and lean into that possibility.

For example, other industries give people raises mid-year. So it was possible that it could happen in education. Even if it had never happened before, it was possible. We just kept choosing to believe that it was possible and guess what, in December of that year, she was offered a 10K raise.

It was actually possible. I love this story. It’s such a true manifestation of how thoughts and belief systems create new results. So I want to ask you this. Now that you know someone who’s received a mid-year raise in education, do you believe it’s more possible for you than you just did before?

What’s going to happen in your mind is one of two things. You’re either going to think yes, I do actually think it’s possible because if she did it, then it’s possible for me to do it. Or your brain’s going to say that’s nice for her, but it could never happen in my district, and it’s going to go back to all the reasons why it can’t happen.

I just want you to notice which way your brain tends to lean. Here’s one more thing I want to address about possibility. The thought, “Well, it’s never been done before,” is the death of possibility. And it’s the worst thought ever.

Every single thing that humans have ever accomplished was at one time never been done before. There weren’t computers until there were. Women couldn’t vote until they could. Everything that we believe is currently possible at one point in time was not possible. Hadn’t happened yet.

So please, please, do not ever list it’s never been done before as an excuse to not believe that something is possible. If I had chosen to believe that I would never be the CEO of a coaching company for school leaders because I’ve never done it before, I would have never taken the steps to get started.

My clients would not be achieving the results they are because I would not be here to coach them. So what are you not believing is possible right now? And how is that negatively impacting your career, your school, or your life?

Coaching accelerates your accomplishments and transforms your ability to step into your empowerment. It teaches you how to embrace the power of your mind and level up the types of questions and the types of solutions that you focus on.

Look, you’re either going to invest time in figuring out this on your own, or you will invest money to accelerate your results. The most expensive way to learn and grow is by experience. Your time is your most valuable asset, and if you want to spend years figuring out how to create results on your own, that’s a very expensive way to get those results.

The least expensive way to grow yourself and accelerate your goal accomplishment is to hire a coach. Working with a coach eliminates years of unnecessary trial and error. And for my client, investing in coaching actually resulted in her making more than her investment within four months. Now that is accelerated transformation.

So what do you want to achieve? What do you want to believe? And how fast do you want to get there? How easy do you want it to be? Come, come join us. Step into your empowerment this year. I’ve got you. I know this works.

My clients know it work, I know it works, and I know that you want to believe that it works. I’m going to show you how to step into that belief. I’ve got you. Believe in all that’s possible for you. Now go have an empowered week. Happy Thanksgiving and I’ll talk to you next week. Take care. Bye.

If this podcast resonates with you, you have to sign up for the Empowered Principal coaching program. It’s my exclusive one-to-one coaching and mentorship program for school leaders who believe in possibility. This program is designed for principals who are hungry for the fastest transformation in the industry.

If you want to create the best connections, impact, and legacy for yourself and your school, the Empowered Principal program was designed for you. Join me at angelakellycoaching.com/work-with-me to learn more. I’d love to support you in becoming an empowered school leader.

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.