Ep #243: Asking Your District for PD Funding

Hello empowered principals. Welcome to episode 243.

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 and Happy Tuesday. So glad to be here with you today. I want to welcome all of our new listeners. We’ve had an explosion of new listeners. I’m so excited that you’re here. I’m so excited to offer this content. I really love the work I do with you and the work that you put out into the world. I’m just so honored to work with all of you and to see the accomplishments and the contributions that you all are making in each and every one of your schools. It really is mind blowing the work that you do.

I know when you’re in it, you probably don’t see how valuable you are, how amazing you are, how impressive you are. I really just want to take this moment to thank all of you, to welcome you all to this podcast. Please share this podcast with your friends and colleagues who you feel might benefit from it.

These conversations we’re having here over at the Empowered Principal™ podcast, they are different. They are talking about kind of the problems behind the problems. The challenges we face beyond the surface level challenges. That’s what we’re here. We’re here to solve problems. We’re here to help you feel better while you’re leading your school. We’re here to stop overworking, stop over exerting, and really enjoying your life. That’s what this coaching program is about. It’s not just about your professional skills. It’s about personally enjoying this journey.

So today, we’re going to talk about your professional growth, your professional development. We’re going to talk about how to get the support you personally need to advance your skills, to improve your ability to lead, to achieve your professional goals without overworking, and how to enjoy your professional experience.

If there’s anything I could offer to school leaders, it’s that there is a possibility out there to accomplish everything you set out to accomplish without hustle and without overworking and without being exhausted and overwhelmed and confused and miserable, and all of the things that we sometimes associate with school leadership.

So let’s start by talking about our current thoughts around professional development. I just want to joke here with you for a second because we all know what people are thinking out there. We know what teachers are thinking. We’ve seen it. We’ve seen a million different memes on social media around professional development. This is the time of year they start popping up. Right?

It seems like teachers and administrators alike have somewhat of a bad taste in their mouth when PD is mentioned. Why is that? Let’s start with the teachers. I love this because the memes out there are so funny. If you ever watch Bored Teachers on Instagram, they’re pretty funny. You have to take it with a grain of salt. But right now they’re talking about oh PD is coming. Another round of days just sitting there. So teachers are rolling their eyes every year when they think about having to participate in PD, professional development. I’m gonna call it PD here.

But if you think about it, what do they typically experience year after year? What they typically experience is sitting in a room over the course of several hours or several days listening to people talk at them while glazing over staring at a PowerPoint slide or maybe watching an occasional video now and then when they would rather be doing anything but that. They would rather be in their classrooms, right?

For them professional development is something that they must endure as part of coming back to school. They feel that PD is something that they have to just get through in order to get into those classrooms, right. They have to endure professional development trainings so that they can then go do the work that they want to get done. Okay.

The reason this is happening is that they are having thoughts. So teachers are having thoughts about their past professional development experiences, and how that PD has impacted the way they’ve taught or not. It impacts the way they think about future PD offerings. Okay.

So if we admit this to ourselves, if we really take a look at teachers and we’re like teachers are always complaining about PD. They never want to take PD. They say they want PD, but then they don’t want it. They don’t really implement it. It’s just a waste of time for us. It’s a waste of time for them.

But if you think about it, and if you remember back to when you were a teacher, they’re actually right on this. Most of the time. The content that’s offered for teachers is pretty similar year after year, right? It’s not always super valuable, and not much really changes as a result of the time that teachers are expected to invest in professional development.

When I think back to my years as a teacher it was basically like here’s our new curriculum. There was somebody from the curriculum company who came in and walked us through the teacher’s guide, who talked about how its laid out, who talked about the student materials, who talked about the consumables. It was something I could have done in an hour or two worth of my time, and it took days. Like if not one day two days or three days even. It was just so dragged out, so drawn out okay.

So when you think about it, teachers aren’t wrong on this. A lot of PD that we offer is either boring or not highly valuable or not very engaging, or it’s not solving a problem that your teachers perceive that they have. So a lot of times PD is offered to teachers based on problems the district wants to solve or that admin believe teachers are having.

But we haven’t really dug in and asked ourselves what is the challenge they are facing in their perspective? What’s the challenge behind that challenge? Why is that a problem? Digging in deeper to figure out the core of what teachers really believe that they need in order to improve a practice or be more successful or achieve higher scores or higher attendance rates, better classroom management, whatever it is they perceive as the problem. Okay.

So what’s also sad about professional development as it currently stands is that it’s not just a waste of time and energy and resources on the teacher’s behalf, it’s also a waste of our top resources. The time we put into it, the money and the energy the district or the site administrator puts into professional development. Right? It’s sad that we keep offering the same style of professional development hoping for a different improved result.

Hey, I’m not saying that all PD is not valuable or important or impactful. There are PD sessions that are brilliant, and they achieve high impact, high leverage. There are also PD sessions that are necessary in order to relay information, to train people on things that might be considered tedious, but also very necessary.

I think about every year as an administrator we had to go through HR trainings. We did this online demand training. We had to do blood borne pathogens. We had lots of campus safety stuff.

Like all of this kind of HR safety operations, things that we needed to know to be in compliance as a school leader but that weren’t necessarily super stimulating or super interesting or highly valuable in terms of being able to be a highly skilled leader. Unless something along those lines actually comes up in your everyday experience as a school leader, then perhaps you’re like so glad I took that blood borne pathogen training right.

But for the most part, we do tend to participate in professional development, trainings, workshops, seminars, webinars, online courses, in person courses, live events where there is a great deal of money invested, time invested, energy, attention, focus, all of our top assets, and we don’t really feel that we got the return on investment that we were looking for. Which means we didn’t get the exchange of value that we were anticipating to get. Okay.

So there are PD sessions that are highly valuable. But sometimes they consist of high quality content, but they’re either very dense and intense with information overload. Like they’ve just crammed so much information. It’s all really good, but it’s really dense, and it’s really intense. It feels like too much information at once.

Or what happens is sometimes we skim and trim down to try and keep things short and sweet. We will skim it and trim it to the point where it has no real depth. I’m sure all of us listening, myself included, have experienced a variety of professional development experiences in our years as teachers and even as admin.

So I want you to consider your thoughts on teacher PD, on admin PD, and see where your opinion lies as it relates to professional development. When we’re talking about professional development we want to understand what do I currently think about PD? What are my opinions? What are my thoughts? How do I feel about it? Just to get an understanding of where you currently stand in your thoughts and opinions on professional development. Okay.

Now when we switch over to admin and we become administrators, whether you’re a principal, a site leader, or a district level administrator. When we think about professional development on this side of the fence, we stress about PD because we know it’s something that we have to provide or need to provide or that we should provide. But we also know that the typical, and what I mean by that is the traditional easy to implement, practical, or cost effective means of approaching PD, they generally do not provide the outcomes that we are hoping for.

So we’re investing time, money, energy into professional development. Planning it, preparing it, or hiring other people to do it, and we’re not getting the results we want out of it. So we’re investing our top resources, but we’re not getting a return on investment. Okay.

This is what stresses administrators out about professional development right? When you become an administrator, professional development tends to feel like more of a burden. You want to offer meaningful and impactful professional development, but you feel confined to a limited experience for your teachers. Either way, whether you try to go dense and intense or skim and trim, when most teachers and administrators think of PD, they think of investing in it and offering it for teachers.

So at the district level, and I’m talking about how to get funding for you as a site administrator. for your own professional development. When you think about professional development, what is your district’s cultural perspective and opinion on professional development? Most of the time all of the energy and resources go to providing support for teachers.

But I want to ask what about principals? What type of PD do you need for yourself to continue your professional journey? Do the people in administrative positions require professional development? Do people in admin positions still need PD? Of course they do.

It’s so funny to me. I felt I had so much support as a teacher. But when I got into administration it was like congratulations you got the job. Here your keys, and dusted off their hands and said now go do your job. No support, no training. no guidance, nobody to talk with.

On top of that, it felt like I shouldn’t need the support. I felt almost a little level of shame of like I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m new at this, but I don’t feel like I should ask. I feel like I should know. I’m embarrassed to ask. I don’t want to ask the same question more than once, or people will think I don’t get it or I’m not competent or I’m not retaining information. We spin out in being new as a school leader, and we don’t want to ask. You know the less we ask, the less we know, the more incompetent we actually prove to ourselves that we are okay.

So is your district a district that values professional development for site administrators? Yes or no? Why or why not? What is your opinion? What do you believe their opinion is? We’re gonna talk about why we need to define what professional development is. We need to talk about its purpose, and we need to talk about the value of it. Because what district level administrators want is to receive value for whatever it is they invest in.

So your superintendent has a budget for the district, and that person wants to invest wisely. They want to spend their money and their resources and their time and energy on things they are going to get a result from, to get a return on that investment from.

So, for example, they don’t just pay teachers for fun. They pay teachers to provide a service that creates a result okay? They pay you to create a result that they want. They’re paying you in exchange for the work that you are offering to them. What I mean by that is you get paid to sit in that position and solve the problems of a site administrator, right? To deal with the things that a site administrator deals with, to solve problems, to work with the people, to hire the people, to take care of the little ones, all of it, right? You get paid for that service that you’re providing as a school leader.

So when we’re talking about growing ourselves professionally, evolving ourselves professionally, how do we define that? So what is professional development? I define it as a process for learning skills and strategies that enhance and further one’s professional abilities. PD is meant to provide the knowledge and skills and awareness and resources and tools and strategies that improve, enhance, facilitate, and expedite one’s accomplishments.

The purpose of professional development is to evolve a person’s capacity to achieve professional goals. In order for a person to expand their capacity to achieve professionally, a person must be open to learning new ideas and concepts, be open to awareness and growing their own awareness. They must be open to questioning past beliefs and past practices. They must be open to changing their approach.

So the skill of being open, open to learning, open to being more aware, open to questioning and adjusting and changing. That’s not taught in traditional professional development sessions. Which is why what I offer as a coach for school leaders is unlike any other professional development opportunity for school leaders on the planet. I help you develop the personal skills you need to learn the professional skills you want.

People will come to me wanting to be a more influential leader. They’ll call me on a console, and I’ll say what do you want. I want to have more impact. I want to have more influence. I want to be the leader who accomplishes goals, who inspires my staff, who inspire students, who helps people. I want to be a leader who helps people. They want to move their school forward. That’s all of you. You all want that.

What I do is I help them with their professional goals of moving their school forward and inspiring people to be more successful by coaching them on how to become the principal who knows how to move their school forward. So what I do as a coach is I teach you the skills you need personally in order to become the person professionally who accomplishes what you set out to achieve in your career.

To my knowledge, nobody else is teaching you this. They’re teaching you the skills or the strategies or some concepts and ideas. This is different because this teaches you who you have to be in order to become the professional who achieves the professional goals you’ve set for yourself. That’s what this kind of professional development is.

A person’s ability to evolve professionally requires them to evolve personally. You can’t offer one without the other. This is why traditional PD isn’t always highly effective. You can teach people the best content, the best curriculum, great ideas, awesome strategies. But unless their brain is open to creating new levels of awareness, learning new content, questioning current belief systems, and adjusting their approach to problem solving, they will not expand their professional skill set.

If this is true, if you have to evolve personally in order to evolve professionally, then the question becomes what separates people who evolve professionally and those who resist growth and change? It really comes down to one thing. There is one thing that people who evolve themselves are willing to do that people who stagnate are not willing to do. That is this. They are willing to feel uncomfortable.

They are willing to feel the discomfort of leaning into something new, questioning what they once thought was true and what they thought that were facts. Just like they were just absolute facts of nature, or facts of education. This is just true. We question that. Is it absolutely true? Is there any wiggle room, right?

People who are willing to evolve themselves and grow professionally are willing to feel that discomfort of cognitive dissonance. What they once believed was true maybe isn’t, or what they once thought was not true, maybe is. They are willing to experience the discomfort of adjusting their thoughts, beliefs, and opinions.

I help school leaders understand how to manage that discomfort of professional growing. Principals who work with me excel. Not because I solely teach them the actions required to be successful at school, but because they’ve expanded their belief of what is possible for themselves and their school.

Clients start coaching with me with the belief that it’s not possible to be successful without overworking or being super exhausted. They start with the belief that they can’t prioritize, or they don’t know how, and there’s too many priorities. They can’t truly prioritize. They feel like they can’t say no to other people. They feel like they can’t have a life outside of school and be a good school leader.

They come to me thinking they don’t know how to make decisions with confidence, or they can’t be happy, or they can’t stay in shape, or they can’t be a good mom, or they can’t be a good wife and a school leader. They come in with thoughts that feel like absolute truths.

Leaders come in with so many parameters around what they think is possible for themselves for their school, for their staff, for their students, and for their experience in this career. But week by week, day by day, we uncover these parameters and expose their brains to bigger possibilities.

Any professional development worth your time, energy, and attention should be offering you value at the highest level. I’m going to say this again because it’s so important. Listen up. Any professional development that’s worth your time, your energy, your attention, your money, it should be offering you value at the highest level.

Investing time, energy, money, attention, and financial resources, all of it, into professional development should guarantee you a return on your investment. How you spend every hour of your day should always be an exchange of value. Either you are receiving value, or you are giving value to yourself and to other people. Your professional development should always be of the highest value.

Every investment of your time, energy, and hard earned money should provide you with something that enhances your ability to lead your school, to help you better manage your top resources and protect them, and to improve the quality of your life and your experience as a school leader. When you receive high quality and high value professional development as a principal, you, in exchange for what you’ve received, then offer more value back to your district.

So for those of you who are eager to have me as your coach, and you’re considering asking your district for funding to cover a portion or all of the cost of next year’s coaching sessions with me, I’m going to share with you how to ask your district for professional development funds.

Number one, you have to believe that they have them and that they’re available. Districts do have money. They might not tell you that, but they do. So you can go in with the belief that they do have some amount of funding. Now they might tell you no. You might get a no.

They might actually not have the money, but nine times out of 10, there are two things happening. They either mathematically do not have any funds. They literally have no money. Or two, they have it, but they’re afraid or resistant to spend it on your professional development.

So we want to go into bucket number two. Assume they have some level of funding, but they’re unsure that it’s a good idea to invest in this way. We’re going to explore that. I’m going to teach you how to show them how this is the most valuable thing that they can invest in you, for you, for them. Okay?

Why should districts invest time, money, and energy into offering professional development to principals? Let’s think about this. Districts want to spend their top resources in exchange for the results they are trying to create. That’s what money does for us. We have money, like the government gives school districts money to spend, and we use that money to create results.

We use it to invest in things that we believe will help us create the results we’re trying to create, which is to educate our children. Which is to have highly successful and effective teachers, school leaders, and districts performing at the highest levels, right? Districts want to buy solutions to the problems they face. So let’s show them how coaching with me will help you become more valuable as a principal, and how that value will increase their value. Okay. Here we go.

So what is the value of coaching for your superintendents or your district level administrators who are making the decisions around whether or not to fund your professional development? Okay. Let’s think about this. Let’s dig into the problems that superintendents and district admin face. Number one, especially right now, hiring and retaining staff, whether it be site leaders, district leaders, teachers, paras, anybody on the team, they want to hire excellent people, to attract excellent people, and to retain excellent people. That is a problem they’re facing right now.

Another problem they’re facing is unskilled leaders or unskilled teachers. People who are applying to the position but who aren’t, at least on paper, qualified, okay. Other problems they have parent management, staff management, program management, student services, resource management, student management when it comes to behavior, test scores, professional development that’s nonexistent or ineffective.

These are just some of the problems that your school district level superintendents, assistant superintendents, coordinators, directors, all of those people are facing. So when they’re looking at their budgets, they want to invest their money that’s in their budget to help them solve problems.

Here’s what they want. They want resourceful skilled principals. They want principals who can solve problems before they escalate up to the district level. They want principals who are good with people, who are good with resource management, and who can create results for themselves. They want principals who are fun and easy to work with. They want principals who are eager to learn and are go getters and will find the resourcefulness that they need within themselves to figure out solutions to problems. Okay.

They also want a principal who’s going to fully implement whatever professional development they receive. So if they are going to consider investing in your professional development, they want to see the impact of that. They want to benefit from the results that it will create. They want you to have PD. They want you to want your professional development. This means they want you to have the type of PD that works for you.

A lot of times the district makes a decision about what type of PD is best for teachers or site leaders versus letting the site leaders and the teachers deciding what’s best for them and what they need and saying,
“Hey, this is the PD I want. I’d like funding for this please.” They’ll say okay, we can give you that. Tell us what’s in it for us. Why should we invest in this PD? You want them to see the value in it for them.

Because look, they would much rather pay for something that you want and will definitely utilize than pay for something that’s not effective, that you’re not interested, that you’re not going to listen to or pay attention to. They’re tired of that. They want to pay for your PD that you want to have, right?

If having a one on one coach that supports you privately and confidentially and weekly throughout the school year to help you solve any problem you are facing. If that sounds too good to be true or it sounds like a dream come true, then you are definitely in the right place because that is what I do. I designed this program exactly how I would have wanted my own professional development to look and feel for me. That is why this is so successful.

So when you think about the top resources that your district has and that they are trying to protect, just like you’re trying to protect your time, your energy, your effort, your money, so are they. They’re trying to protect their money, their effort, their energy, the human resources that they have, the people, retaining high quality people, and time.

They want to invest in PD that saves them money in the long run, that reduces the amount of effort on their part required. That reduces the energy output for them and increases the energy input that they receive. They want to retain high quality principals who create results and have balanced lives. They want the same for their teachers. They want to protect their time. They want to invest in something that helps them save time in many, many ways.

When they find something worth investing that helps them save time, retain humans, save energy, increase their money and their bank accounts and their budgets, and decrease the amount of effort required to achieve goals, that’s a no brainer investment. That is a grand slam investment for them.

So how is coaching a grand slam professional development offer to them? What happens is when you get coached, you’re less likely to quit because you have somebody to talk through problems with every single week. You don’t burn out, and you don’t overwork. If you get off track, you get right back on track the next week. That means less turnover for them.

When you are balanced, when you are settled, when you have somebody to troubleshoot with and solve problems with and who’s an expert in coaching, who’s trained, who’s an expert, who’s done the job you’ve done for many years, who’s now coached people in your position for many years, you are going to be highly effective. You’re going to want to stay. You’re going to value a district who invests in you. That means less turnover.

Higher retention rates means more experienced and skilled leaders. For every year they continue to invest in you, you become more valuable to them. They want you to stay. They want you to have a coach. They want you to be skilled. Because that means for every dollar they invest in you, they’re gonna get 10 times the return based on your value that you’re providing back to the district.

The focus for them is on advancing schools and the district rather than simply getting somebody to fill the position. So now we’re talking about the quality of leadership, the quality of teaching, the quality of services they are providing to their community.

They’re not just spinning out, spending all their time and energy on staffing and retention and attracting people and then onboarding them and then letting them go and having to go through this every single year. They’re now spending their resources, their time, energy, and effort on enhancing the quality of teaching and learning and school leadership.

It also allows the district to get in full alignment. What it does, when they say yes to you having a coach, it shows them that you value your position, and you value them as an employer. It also shows you that they value principals. That they value you. This is an exchange of value. You are going to honor them and value them, and they are going to honor you and value you. When they invest in you, you are going to give that return on investment back to them.

When a principal feels like the district cares about them, they’re much more inspired to improve and to stay. This is about sustainability. We are in the business of lifelong learning. We are educators. Let’s be that example. We want to value all levels of our organization from the top to the bottom. We want everyone to feel supported. Everyone has a learning curve no matter what position they’re in. Everyone deserves to have the coaching, the mentoring, the professional development that they deserve and need in order to evolve themselves to the next level.

We understand being a principal is a huge learning curve. We want districts to value that and to see that and to acknowledge that. We understand that principals, like any other human, they benefit from coaching and mentorship. Your learning doesn’t stop just because you accepted an administrative role.

It seems like the level of support drops right off, at least it did for me. My district was so kind they even gave me a coach. I think I met with her once a month. Something like that. Maybe every couple of weeks. But it was so much paperwork because of the program involved. It was very scripted. It was a lot of paperwork. Fortunately, my coach was so talented she could go off script, and she could do the paperwork on the side and truly, truly coach me. But most people do not have anybody. That’s unacceptable, and it’s not sustainable.

The long term benefits to your district is that they receive emotionally mature and resilient school leaders and teachers. You will have better communication skills which enhance how they look and how they are perceived in the community as a school district. When you are able to manage yourself and your school, much less issues filter their way up to the top. Because you’re able to handle them and manage them.

You know how and you’ve learned, and you have somebody to talk through. When something new comes up, you will just talk to me, and I will coach you through it. If we don’t know the solution, we’ll figure it out. We’ll go find the answers. I don’t claim to know everything, but I do know how to coach, and I’ve been through a lot of stuff as a school leader. So I’m going to be able to coach you through pretty much anything. If not, I’ll make sure we get the resources that we do need. Okay.

When you are a stronger leader and you have more value to offer, you are a stronger representation for your school and your district. People become more attracted to your district when they see you’re happy, teachers are happy, the longevity of your positions. When people want to stay in that, it will become a coveted place to work. That’s what a district wants.

It’s just like a baseball team or a basketball team. They want to attract the biggest talent, the best talent. The way they do that is by ensuring that you’ve got happy players on the team, sustained players. Players who feel balanced. Players who feel loved and appreciated. Players who receive investment.

I’m a Golden State Warriors fan, and I think about how amazing Steve Kerr is as a coach, and how he’s cultivated Stephen Curry and all of the players on that team. They stay because they feel loved. They feel respected. They feel supported. They aren’t expected to be above human. Of course, some of them, I think, are above human, but they’re extraordinary because he values them as a coach. He values them. You want your district to value you, and you value your district.

The other thing that superintendents love is that they don’t have to do all of the mentoring. Look, your district admins, they are so busy trying to run the show from their perspective. Whatever seat they sit on at the top. They want to have you mentored, but they don’t necessarily have the time and the resources and the energy to mentor you.

They want you to have a mentor. They don’t want to have to do it. It’s something off of their plate. When they can see that value, that it adds time to their plate by not having to mentor you and not having to hold your hand every step of the way, that will be highly valuable to them.

Here’s what you have to believe to ground yourself prior to going in and asking for PD funding. Number one, you have to believe that coaching is the solution to the problems that you face. You have to be all in. You have to be it’s so excited and so eager that what I offer is going to help you solve problems, address issues, overcome challenges and increase your value as a school leader.

If the problem you are facing right now is how you’re feeling about school leadership, and you want to tackle that then what you have to believe is that coaching is going to help you feel better. That feeling better is actually possible. It is an option to be happy as a school leader and fulfilled without overworking and without all the overwhelm and the confusion and the doubt and the fear and the panic and the stress. Okay.

There is an option. It isn’t an all or none. You’re not a happy principal or a miserable principal. There is a middle ground where sometimes it’s hard and sometimes it’s great, and you love the balance. You have balance in your life physically, mentally, emotionally, personally, interpersonally. It is possible. You want to believe that it’s possible in order to pursue this.

I always think of teenagers who want a cell phone for the first time. So maybe it’s a preteen at this point. But your own kids, when they really want something, and they believe that it’s going to make their life feel better with all their heart, like getting that first phone, they’re so committed to that belief that they will pester you for as long as it takes until you say yes to buying them a phone or to allowing them to buy a phone. They believe in it so deeply.

You’ve got to believe in coaching and mentorship, and that you are worth it. That this level of support is exactly what you need. You’re so excited about it. When you’re excited, they’re excited. When you’re sold, they will be sold. You’ve got to be 100%. That’s step one.

Two, you have to believe that your district wants to invest in you. They want you to be happy. They want you to thrive. They want you to be able to solve problems. They want you to be sustainable. They want you to stay because the more they invest in you, the more you’re worth to them. They want you to have the support you need to create the results you want. They benefit every single time you benefit. This is a win-win situation for them and for you.

Number three, you have to believe that you are going to get what you came for. That you’re going to show up and apply what you’re learning through the coaching process. You cannot be a passive learner in any form of PD. If you just sit there and passively listen or zone out, and you don’t participate, and you’re not actively engaged, and you don’t really try because you don’t really think it’s working, and you don’t think it’s worth the value, you’re never going to get what you came for.

Wanting the district to pay so that you don’t have to have skin in the game will not work. You have to invest yourself, your time, or your energy, or your money, or your attention or all of the above if you expect the district to do the same. If you want to become exceptional and empowered as a school leader, then you have to be willing to trust that you have what it takes, that you can learn new things, and that you can experience the discomfort of change. That it’s temporary. All the hardness.

Whenever somebody says this is really hard I tell them, but it’s temporary. It’s like learning to ride a bike or learning to drive a car. All of those things felt really hard until one day they just weren’t hard. Now you get in your car, and you drive almost automatically without thought. It’s not hard anymore. Riding a bike isn’t hard anymore because you’ve learned it. You went through the hard part, but on the other side is freedom. It’s the freedom to come and go as you please. Right.

I want you to think about this. Think about when you learned to drive. Were you the kid who resisted learning how to drive and put it off for as long as possible because you were afraid to fail, or you were afraid it was going to be too hard, or you were afraid you wouldn’t be good, or you were afraid you would get in accident? Or you were afraid you weren’t going to understand something?

Or were you the kid that couldn’t wait to be taught? Even though driving is very new. It’s very scary. There’s all these buttons, all these lights, all these things going on. You’re like what is happening right now? But you want the freedom. You want the wheels. You want to be able to go, right?

Learning new skills as a school leader is so much more fun when we understand that the hard and scary part is only temporary. When we can look down the road and see that the long term payoff for our short term discomfort is highly valuable. It’s highly worth it for us in the end.

Your district wants you to be successful. It’s why they hired you. They don’t pay you a salary for you to feel defeated, exhausted, overwhelmed, confused, overwhelmed, and discouraged by failure. They want you to have what you need to be a success. They just don’t know that there is this level of professional development available to you so that principals can help address the challenges that the district faces.

There is PD available for you that can help you solve problems that help them solve problems that you face in your position, and that they face in their position. Trust me. The principals that I work with have superintendents who ask them questions like how are you this successful this first year? How was it possible? What’s your secret sauce? How are you so accomplished? Your district wants to understand what’s happening.

If you’ve been listening to this podcast or consuming it and applying this material and getting results just from listening to the podcast, imagine what weekly coaching will do in addition to that. You are going to blow your mind. You’re going to blow your superintendents mine. They want that. They want to know that this is out there and available.

They are not aware. They’re not listening to my podcast because I target school leaders. If they knew the power of coaching for you and for them, they’d be all in. They want you to have what you need. They want what you have. They also want to feel better in their jobs. They want to work less. They want to achieve more. They want to enjoy their work in their lives. I want to share with you this outcome is available to every single human out there in school leadership.

So again, here are the steps. Sell yourself on the value of coaching first. Why do you want this specific professional development for yourself? What goals do you want to accomplish, and why? What obstacles are you facing? How is coaching the solution? Answer those questions for yourself before you ever go and ask for money. You’ve got to be 100% sold in order for them to be 100% sold.

Then when you’re ready, you approach them with what’s in it for them. You don’t go in and say me, me, me. This is all about me and how I’m going to feel better, and I’m going to have work life balance. They don’t want to hear oh I’m going to learn how to do more and work less.

They want to hear here’s the results I’m creating for you. This is how I’m going to improve the quality of our school, the quality of the district, the quality of people we attract into our schools. They want to see what’s in it for them. Because people say yes to things where they see the value. You are asking your district to invest money into you.

So they need to understand what do they get in return? What are you going to offer them as a result of coaching? Make a list of all the problems you’re going to solve as a school leader and how it benefits your district. Once that’s clear, they will be much more likely to say yes.

Then you have to be open to ask for funding and be open to hearing no, at least initially. If you get a no, you plan to invest anyway. Here’s why. Sometimes for the district to trust you or trust me or trust the process of coaching because it’s new to them, and they don’t know who I am. They’ve never listened to the podcast, or they don’t know what coaching is. They’ve never heard of a life coach for school leaders. So they’re not really sure what it is. They don’t trust that. Or maybe you’re brand new to them. They’re not really sure if you’re going to give them the results that you promise.

So for them to believe that coaching is a solution as much as you believe it’s a solution, you might need to invest in yourself upfront for the first year, or for a portion of that first year. Many districts are eventually open to providing you with funding right away. Some are, and others need to see the results for themselves first. So be willing to go all in on yourself either way.

If the district says no, how will you be resourceful to get the support that you need to be successful, to feel good about yourself, to accomplish, to inspire other people, to achieve goals that you feel are currently impossible for you? Be willing to go all in on yourself. Because if you can’t believe in yourself enough to back up that belief with investing in yourself then how can you expect your district to do the same? How can you expect them to believe in the value?

Consider that you might invest in yourself initially, and then upon seeing the changes in you, they might offer to chip in at some point. This has happened to several of my clients. The clients, they went in on themselves for the personal growth, the personal development, and because they changed so dramatically, the district asked what are you doing? How is this happening? Who’s your coach? And they offer to pay for a portion or all of it. This has happened so many times.

So be patient. You might get a no at first, that’s okay. Invest anyway, get the results. They will see the benefit in you and for them, and they will be much more likely to continue investing in your professional and personal growth.

Bottom line, you should not be afraid to ask your district to invest in you, especially when we are able to guarantee them a more confident, savvy, skilled version of you who’s happy and who wants to stay in the district. This creates a win, win, win, win, win. You win. Your staff wins. Your students win. Your school community wins, and your district wins. This makes investing in you a sure bet every single year.

I love you all. Can’t wait to work with you. Let’s get busy getting funding for your professional development. Let’s go. Have a great week. I will talk with 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.