Ep #232: Lighter Leadership

Hello empowered principals. Welcome to episode 232.

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 leaders. Welcome to the end of May. Happy Memorial Day weekend. Happy summer. Happy end of school year. Let’s celebrate. It’s so much fun. I just want to remind you very quickly. Please join the Facebook group, The Empowered Principal™ Facebook group, because we’re starting our summer of fun challenge in June and July. It’s going to be a blast. Lots of prizes, lots of fun, lots of celebrating. Let’s go. Okay.

Last week I talked about a heavy topic short and sweet. This week I’m going to talk about a lighter topic. This is called lighter leadership. We are so hard on ourselves as humans. I feel like especially as women and as women educators and as women leaders in education, we are incredibly critical of ourselves. We think that when we’re not successful something is wrong with us. We’re missing something. We’re not doing it right. We messed up. We’re not cut out for this. We’re so hard on ourselves.

I had a realization this afternoon with my own journey as a business owner, as a CEO of this company, as an entrepreneur, and as a coach. This experience, this journey that we’re on, becomes tarnished with our relentless self-criticism. We are not letting ourselves enjoy life, enjoying the ride, enjoying the experience of being a school leader, or for me being a coach for school leaders.

When I think about all of the things I’m doing wrong, like there must be something wrong with me. Why don’t people want to coach with me? Is my content not good enough? Why didn’t people like the podcast? How come this? How come that? I’m very focused on my steer cycle, and I’m not focused on other people’s steer cycle. When I get caught up in my own overwhelmed cycle, my life experience and my career experience is very stressful and heavy and exhausting and painful.

I decided today I don’t want this to be my experience. I’m offering this to you. I don’t want this to be your experience. We have one journey. We get to create it. We get to design our life in any way we want. We get to decide how to feel and experience our empowerment in this lifetime as a woman, as a leader in education. I think the answer is simply to lighten up.

I’m going to invite you to lighten up on yourself. To let yourself experience school leadership and the journey of school leadership as a delight. Let’s have fun. Let’s be messy. Let it be a process. Let there be no end game. It’s about a journey. It’s about the joy. It’s a game. It’s playful. It’s curious. It’s interesting. We don’t need to be so serious all of the time. There’s a time and a place for serious, but you know what? We’re too serious.

We’re so serious at home. We’re serious at work. It feels like the weight of the world is on our shoulders because we think it’s our job to solve problems all of the time and to always be up leveling and always be performing and to always be producing and to always be productive and to always be getting it right. I want us to reimagine the experience of school leadership as a much lighter version of ourselves.

What would it be like and what would it feel like to be loving and forgiving to yourself? What would your best friend say to you? What would your mom say to you? Can you say that to you? To believe and trust that you’re doing it right and you’re on the right path, always. You’re always doing it right. There is no wrong way. That even the bad days and the difficult moments, they’re preparing you for your future. That today whatever you experienced, good, bad, or ugly, it’s on purpose to give you the tools that you need to perform at your best tomorrow and in the future.

In this moment this afternoon, I was feeling so weighed down thinking about the conflict and the dissonance that’s happening in education. I was feeling so sad about teachers and principals being stressed and overwhelmed. I was agonizing over students and families, and how I, as just one person in the world, how can I help more school leaders, more educators suffer less?

It felt so serious. Oh, I’m crying right now. It felt so serious and so complex and so heavy. Then I saw it. I can never be available for people when I’m taking this work so seriously, when my journey is weighed down, and that my experience as a coach is so negatively impacted because I’m taking this work so seriously. I’m taking on all the problems. I’m trying to fix everything for everyone.

I saw oh, if I don’t change the way I’m thinking about this, this journey is not going to be fun. It’s going to be hard. It’s going to be sad. It’s going to be heavy. I was so focused on what wasn’t working and what more I needed to do instead of seeing the miracle of this work and the possibility for you and what’s in this for you, for all educators, and for education itself. I realized in this moment I’m making this journey much more difficult than it needs to be.

I thought of all of you. How are you making your journey so much more difficult than it needs to be? What if? What if it weren’t? What if it weren’t this hard or this challenging? What if we were doing it right? What if we didn’t have to get it right? Or we didn’t have to fix it all? Or we didn’t have to be better? Or we didn’t have to do more? What if we did less? What if we prioritized lightheartedness and joy, and we laughed at ourselves, and we forgave our mistakes? And we didn’t make it mean something so heavy about ourselves and other people. What would the journey be like? What would it look like?

I want us to feel like children skipping through this journey, smiling and laughing and singing and whistling and dancing and soaking in the joy. We’ve lost our joy, and that’s not okay. I’m here to offer you that lighter leadership is the solution because if we can’t lighten up, we can’t expect our teachers and our students to lighten up. The approach we’ve been taking, that it’s more serious and more work and more stress and more time and more academics and more instructional minutes. We see that crushing our students and our teachers and ourselves.

Let’s band together and agree from this day forward we are going to lighten up. We’re going to be delighted in the miracle of having the honor of leading a public school or a private school or a charter school or whatever school you’re at. We’re going to relish in the miracle of the privilege of being a school leader. We’re going to have fun. We’re going to seek out the joy, and we’re going to change the trajectory of our experience as educators.

I love you all so very much. I don’t want you to suffer. I want you to be on the lighter leadership journey with me. Have a great rest of your day and your week, and I will see you in June. Congratulation to those who are wrapping up the end of the year. I look forward to celebrating you and enjoying the summer together. Let’s go have some fun. Take care. Talk to you next week. 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.

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