Ep #371: Blamed the Villain

Hello empowered principals. Welcome to episode 371. 

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. Happy Tuesday. Welcome to February. Here we are, trucking along, getting through that winter. I know for me, I am freezing here in Nashville. We have had extreme cold, as you’ve probably seen on the news if you don’t live in the South. It’s been colder here than my home state of Iowa. We’ve had more snow. It’s pretty wild. So I am adjusting and I am doing my best to embrace sweaters and sweatpants and warm socks and my Uggs and lots of layers and hot tea. So may you be warm wherever you are in the world.

All right. Today I’m going to talk about a topic that is very, it’s raw, it’s personal, it’s near and dear to my heart. And what I love about the work that I do is I create from a place of experience. The topics that I bring up, the work that I offer, the services I offer, the coaching that I provide, the content, the coursework, the programming, everything that I have created in my business and in the services through the Empowered Principal, they’re all founded in my own personal experience.

That is the only way that I can know that they work because I’m the one who experiences it. I’m the one who tests it. I’m the one who tries it. I find out what works. I find out what doesn’t. I do the workbooks and the workshops myself. I’m integrated into the work that I do with my clients. And I am always studying myself. I’m studying my brain, I’m studying how I feel, I’m noticing the resistance, the limitations that I have in my mind, and I work on them actively so that I can provide you with very real authentic perspectives and things to consider and alternate thoughts to think and using your emotions as your compass and leading your school in a way that feels very authentic and aligned to who you are.

Because you can take these tools and you can apply this coaching and you can customize it in a way that no matter what your values are, or what you want to prioritize, or how you feel, or how you want to feel, or the accomplishments you want to achieve, or the goals you’ve set for yourself, or the experiences you want to have in this lifetime, it works no matter what. Because you plug in your experiences, your thoughts, your feelings, your desires, your dreams, and you implement them in a way in your life that will translate into the same outcomes. Meaning, feeling more fulfilled, feeling more balanced, feeling more relaxed, feeling more empowered, feeling more fulfilled, more joy, and really loving and appreciating the opportunity to be a school leader and to have the balance and a full life outside of school leadership. To be one human who loves what they do while they’re at work and loves their life outside of work.

That’s what this is all about. We are in the business of human development, as I say. That’s what education is. It is the business of human development. And we don’t stop developing when we graduate from college and obtain that teaching credential. We will continue to develop until our last human days on the planet.

And this topic is near and dear to my heart because it’s happened to me in my own life personally and I have deeply contemplated this because it was such a profound impact on my life, on my identity, on my psyche, on my mental and emotional wellness, state of wellness, and I’m offering it to you here.

Now, of course, this is going to be like the outline version of it for the podcast. I’m actually diving deeper into this into a new program that I am offering coming in March. I’ll tell you more about it. It’s the Spring Training Series for School Leaders through the Empowered Principal Program. It’s a separate standalone program. So if you are not ready to jump in and join EPC, which is the full school year program, you can give this a try. It’s an eight session program that I’m going to be teaching live through the first two weeks of March. And I’m covering all things related to spring. So all of your HR, all of testing mindset and empowerment and creating a relaxed and confident environment for your testing, talking about hiring, firing, letting people go from love. We’re going to talk about setting things up for testing, and then we’re going to get into how to enjoy the last eight weeks of school. There’s a lot of celebrations, a lot of events, how to not get overwhelmed and overworked and overexhausted, how to learn how to delegate like a boss and enjoy and actually celebrate the end of the year, how to reflect and contemplate on what you’ve learned, how you’ve grown, the accomplishments you’ve created, really acknowledging and validating yourself.

And then we’re going to get into what I call vision forecasting, which is future planning, looking ahead, designing the experience you want to have. And finally, we’re going to talk about leadership identity. So it is a full program. There is a lot of content in these eight sessions that we’re going to do.

And I will have our producers put the link to register for that program in the show notes. And if you have any questions at all, feel free to just reach out to me on Facebook or Instagram or email, angelakellycoaching@gmail.com. You know where to find me and I will be happy to set up a phone chat with you and answer any questions that you have. Or you can ask them your questions to me directly on social media. So happy to connect with you in any way that’s most comfortable for you.

So let’s dive in to being blamed as the villain. As a school leader, there are going to be people who consider you to be the villain in their story. You’re the bad guy or gal. They’re going to blame you as the reason for their unhappiness, their discontent, their dissatisfaction.

They are thinking that you are the reason, whether it’s your decisions or your actions or your energy or just because you’re on the planet, because you’re in the position of authority, you must be the reason why they are not happy. Or that you’re the reason why life is hard for them, or they’re not feeling the way they want to, they’re not accomplishing what they want to. 

People get upset about master schedules, they get upset about the class list, they get upset about test scores, they get upset about the copy machines, they get upset about the number of copies, they get upset about the timing of meetings, they get upset about the content, the topics of the meetings, professional development, they might be upset about how long the maintenance waitlist takes or the technology people take, they might feel that you’re pressuring them to perform. People will have all kinds of thoughts and they like to focus their discontent towards the leader.

Now, this especially applies to the spring season because in spring, you know what happens. There is a lot of staffing conversation going on. This is the HR season for you. You are wrapping up observations, you’re having those evaluation conversations and post-observation conversations. You’re giving people administrative feedback and evaluative feedback. You’re making decisions about if somebody’s going to go on an improvement plan, if somebody’s going to be satisfactory or not, if somebody is going to be returning or not, or if somebody is going to be reassigned, you’re making a lot of staffing decisions and those do impact people. And when you make decisions that impact people, it is very easy for them to believe that you are the reason they are unhappy with your decisions.

Okay, so they’re going to be upset about performance reviews or tenure, getting tenure, not getting tenure, being invited back, not being invited back. Being reassigned, as I said, if there’s staffing changes, maybe somebody’s coming off of leave or somebody’s going on to leave or there’s, you know, just the numbers aren’t going to hold, you know, you’re not going to be able to have four third grades next year or you’re not going to be able to have five people in your English department and you need to downsize or you need to shift somebody around, right? They’ll get upset about that. Sometimes they get upset because somebody else is being moved around. Their best buddy got moved or reassigned or isn’t being asked back. And they’re just as upset about that as they are if it were happening to them.

Now, especially if you are a brand new principal, if this is your first year at your site, even if you’re not a brand new, but if it’s your first year at a site, this is their first go around with you in the spring season so they’re not sure what to anticipate and they can be very nervous. And they also see that there’s usually a lot of staffing changes happening at the site administrative level. APs, principals coming and going, getting reassigned, people at the district level, central office level, coming, going, getting reassigned, that kind of thing. So there’s a lot of nervousness around employment, around staffing.

So be aware of that if you’re brand new, it’s coming. And if you’re, this isn’t your first rodeo, you already know what’s coming. And you’ll want to be able to navigate that. This is one of the major things I’m going to be covering in the spring training series for school leaders.

So if this is an area you are interested in learning more about and feeling more confident and feeling more assured of yourself and your decisions and working on how to navigate and hold conversations without you freaking out and going into fight or flight, remaining calm, remaining assured of yourself so that you can hold space for those conversations. We’re gonna be talking about that when it comes to all things HR, staffing, firing people, hiring people, holding space that awkward time between when the day you tell somebody they’re not coming back and then they weirdly have to work and try to perform at their best for the next two or three months.

It’s crazy. You tell them in March they’ve got to work March, April, May, sometimes into June before it’s their last day of employment. So we’re going to talk about that. But there is a lot of spring fever anxiety that comes up.

One, they’re really nervous about their evaluations. Two, they’re nervous about staffing and employment, understandably so. And three, for the people who are in testing grades, usually grades three and up in elementary and then obviously middle and high school, kids are all testing. State testing, you know, season is coming and people get very anxious about what they’ve covered. They’re trying to cram it in. They’re trying to really hammer it in for the kids and test prep starts and people start getting a little irritable and school feels a little less fun for everybody during this season. So there’s a lot of tension in the air when people are nervous, when people are unsure, when they don’t understand what’s happening or why it’s happening or just the unknown of how the kids are going to perform and what that’s going to reflect on them as teachers.

Okay. So all of this energy is going around in the spring. There’s excitement because it is spring. You got spring fever, you have spring fever behaviors, both in students and adults. And then you have this nervous energy around HR stuff and around, you know, the testing window.

So I just have to say, this kind of energy, this really high buzz, but also anxiety driven, very anxious, worried, doubts, fears, all of it’s coming to the surface, it’s intensifying. This is why I have the dream of making the type of coaching that I offer, this empowerment coaching, a mainstream practice for everyone in our schools.

Because I’m starting with school leaders because you’re such a pivotal position within the district, right? You’re the ultimate middle manager and you have the capacity to create impact and a ripple effect up and out to your staff, students and community and also up towards your district.

So can you imagine if this type of coaching is available to everyone on campus, it’s part of professional development, personal development integrating into professional development, which becomes a mainstream practice for everyone. So once a person becomes aware of how to step into their personal power, and be able to maturely regulate and manage their emotions, their emotional state, and their reactions to their feelings, and they’re able to access empowerment through awareness and alignment, your teachers are going to feel so much more control over their professional experience in their career.

Paired professionals, support staff, if they had access to this knowledge, they would be able to regulate, they’d be able to make decisions from a more empowered place. Is this the right job for me? Is this the right school for me? How do I want to show up? I want to be the best version of me as an employee. What does that look like? What training do I need? Let me take responsibility for my career and ask for the things I need, get into alignment with what feels good and collaborate, get on board and coach myself when I am in resistance or when I do feel like I’ve hit an upper limiting belief.

Right. I can just imagine the difference in schools when adults have access to this type of coaching and this type of conversation and this type of content and information. It’s going to be so incredible when you as the leader are able to integrate this work into who you are and to model it for your teachers and eventually, I promise you, it will come in the Empowered Principal programming to extend this out to staff and students.

For now, we’re starting with site and district leaders because those are the people who make decisions about the vision, the future, the approach that we take, the mindset that we embody, the vision of who we’re becoming. So this work starts with us, always, internally first, in order to have it work its way into reality, into the existence of the program and of the vision that you have for your school.

So this is why people think that you are the villain. Number one, they don’t have this pocket. But number two, you are the villain because you are the leader. First and foremost, when you stepped into the leadership position, people immediately perceived you as having control and power over their career and over their situation, over their assignment, over their teaching experience, their grade level experience, the culture and climate of the school, all of it.

They see you as having this some kind of otherworldly power once you step into a leadership position and you’re kind of the Wizard of Oz behind the curtain making everything happen. And it’s determining how they feel. It’s determining how they experience things. They think you have this power over them to make them feel good or feel bad because they believe that you have the control to change things for the better or for the worse for them.

I know when I went into school leadership, my peers were like, “Bo, you’ve gone to the dark side” and teachers get really into this. There is teacher solidarity, and then there is administrative. Two teams. That’s how people view it. Some people. I like to bring this back together as one. But people told me, “Oh you’re going to the dark side.” I’m like, “The dark side?” That’s interesting that you think that.

And it does feel like that sometimes because you feel really isolated and alone. And it feels a little dark because you’re navigating in the fog sometimes. But I promise you, you’ve not gone to the dark side. You haven’t become an evil person or a bad person, and you’re not a master puppeteer who is now taking over control of people’s lives and careers and experiences.

Honestly, our teachers, they give us way too much power. They think we have way more power than we actually do. But because we have the positional authority, villains tend to be labeled as leaders and leaders are labeled as villains because in that scenario, they’re believing you possess the power and they are the opposite of that, which is a victim, which they have no power.

So unfortunately there are people who think you were the bad person, you’re the one who created an undesirable situation for them, they’re unhappy with you but they don’t want to tell you because they don’t want you to make life worse for them, so they talk behind your back, and the story they tell is through the lens of how you’ve hurt them, how you’ve made them suffer, how you’re negatively impacting them.

You’re the reason behind, get this, you become the reason behind their decisions and actions. And I find this fascinating where someone labels you as the villain, that because you did this or said this or decided this, now that’s the reason why they have to respond or react in this way. They had to make this decision. They had to say the thing or this is why they behaved the way they did.

And they justify their own behaviors, their own actions, their own words based on you, which is completely the opposite of empowerment. It’s saying you’re the puppeteer behind my decisions and actions and words and behaviors. That can’t be true.

But when people don’t want to take ownership or they don’t know how, they don’t have the tools or access to understanding their emotional experience and how to regulate those emotions, how to allow themselves to feel a certain way and validate that, and then take ownership of it and shift it into more positive energy when they don’t know how to do that. And of course they don’t because we’re not teaching it to adults and we’re not really teaching it to kids.

When they believe that they don’t have agency over their emotional experience, you do become the reason.

They can’t think of any other reason why they would feel the way they do. It’s got to be somebody else, right? And then they justify their less than beautiful behaviors because they think, it’s you. Well, that person made me feel this way, that leader made me feel this way, the principal did this, and I felt this, so I had to react this way. It’s just the way it is.

They don’t understand that they’re not experiencing life in school the way they want to, not because of you, but because of their own mindset. And look, I’m going to say something heart to heart. It hurts to be labeled as the villain. No one wants to be the bad person. We’re taught, do not be the bad person. Be the good person. It’s bad to be the bad guy, right? Bad things happen to bad people.

When we get labeled as a villain, the first thing we do is want to get back out of it as fast as possible and justify and explain ourselves or defend ourselves. We want to try and protect ourselves from the label of villain. And when somebody’s in like a villain victim mindset, it’s a very all-or-none approach, right? It’s either good or bad. It’s that person’s fault or it’s this person’s fault. And because it can’t be my fault because I’m the victim, then it has to be the villain.

So know this. Number one, it stings to be labeled as the bad person. And the first thing you’re gonna do is wanna defend yourself and protect yourself and try to explain yourself and back yourself out of it.

Number two, the next thing that you might do is, am I? And you might believe it and you might, instead of like trying to deny it, you might actually go down a rabbit hole and look for all the ways in which you messed up and did it wrong. And you can really go into a dark space yourself when you’re thinking, what did I do? When did I do that? And then you start to question yourself and doubt yourself. And you actually can convince yourself and talk yourself into believing that yes, in fact, you did do this horrible bad thing, or you made these decisions that hurt people, and it’s your fault they’re suffering, and now you want to grovel and repair and fix and apologize and try to mend and placate them because you feel like you’ve done something wrong.

But here’s the truth, here’s the middle, the land of Anne. We know that there is no such thing as all good or all bad. There is duality in every aspect of our world, in every aspect of our experience. And people are both. People have amazing attributes, positive attributes, and there are moments when we feel so good about ourselves and we’re so proud of ourselves and we feel in alignment with who we are. And then there’s moments where we’re like, oh, I can’t believe I just said that. Or, oh, I overreacted or, oh, I really let my emotions get to me or, oh, I did make that decision from a not very clean place.

Sometimes we win and sometimes we lose. Sometimes we succeed. Sometimes we fail. Sometimes we get it right. Sometimes we get it wrong. There is duality in the experience. Whether you’re a leader, a teacher, a student, a parent, a district administrator, doesn’t matter what seat on the bus, we all have the duality experience in our careers. So we’re both.

So just know. Know you aren’t perfect, and they didn’t make a mistake every single time. And know you aren’t perfect and you get it right about half the time. And as leaders, what we want to do in our highest, most aligned self is we want to expand our capacity to hold space for when we get it right and have grace when people are wrong about us and be able to hold that and allow them to be wrong about us?

And we have to have the capacity to hold space when we get it wrong and know how to discern for ourselves what is our responsibility to take on and oops, we got that wrong, we need to repair, apologize, and get it right. Or when we look and say, hey, you know, my opinion of this matter is I feel like I handled it pretty well. I can see why they might misinterpret or maybe I miscommunicated, maybe I need to clarify something, but I do feel in alignment with that decision or that action or that choice of words or how I handled something. So oftentimes we allow people to tell us, you got it right or you got it wrong and just take that for face value.

Now, I’ve recently gone through some personal experiences where I was blamed for somebody else’s feelings, for their decisions, for their actions, for the outcomes that they’ve created in their own life. And I will tell you, it felt incredibly helpless. And the more that the person believed this story that they were creating for themselves, that they were a victim, and that I was their villain, the more that they would tell me, this is how you did it wrong. And this is who you were. And this is this and this and this.

My initial reaction was defensiveness. And then I sat with them. I thought, just stop, drop the defense. Just listen. Don’t get defensive and listen and listen for the truth. And when I listened, it was like, oh, there’s the other 50%.

And I’ll tell you something in those months, in the beginning, my younger self, that more immature version of me where I did not have these tools, the emotional regulation tools and allowing emotions and processing them before I speak and differentiating between reacting to my emotions and responding to them, my younger self would have gone into fight so hard. I would have gone into fight or flight, and I’m a fighter, and I would have been very defensive, protective, and argumentative.

The only time I’m not a fighter is if I’m very intimidated or afraid of somebody, or really afraid of an outcome that actually might not be safe for me physically, psychologically, financially, you know, career-wise, or professionally, anything like that. So before this work, internal work that I’ve done, like I definitely would have defended myself, I would have attacked right back, I would have thrown the blame right back at them, And I would have felt very justified in doing that.

So if that’s you, I feel you. And if you are a fighter, the hardest thing to do and the work that we do when we’re gaining emotional resiliency and regulation and maturity is that we drop the defensiveness. We don’t fight, we sit and listen, we don’t defend, we don’t explain, we don’t justify, we don’t argue, we simply listen, take it in. I have to typically, thank you for sharing, I have to go away and I have to process it in privacy. Because I’m gonna be emotional about it and I have to sit with it until I can come to terms with what I believe is true and decipher for myself what part of their feedback lands true for me and what part of their feedback does not feel like it’s my responsibility.

Now sometimes if you’re typically a fighter you might feel you don’t have the bandwidth. So when I was a principal and people were attacking me, oftentimes I just didn’t feel like I had the emotional bandwidth or desire to deal with all the blaming and the accusations. And in those moments, I would just shut down. I would let them do their thing, but I wasn’t really listening. I wasn’t receiving the feedback. I was just blanket. I kind of put it like a shield over me and I let them say what they were going to say, but I didn’t really engage in conversation at all.

And sometimes you need this approach, especially if it’s happening in real time and you can’t escape and get away, or you don’t feel like you can defend yourself, or you don’t feel like it’s safe to do that, you’re going to be in triage mode, so you might have to back down in that moment. But if you’re a person who tends to be flight risk, if you tend to freeze or flight, when you go, if you go into fight or flight and you’re a more conflict avoidant, I want you to realize that stepping away, but doing nothing with it is just the same as fighting and being defensive without listening.

It doesn’t create a long-term solution unless you’ve made an intentional decision to reflect, review, and then decide if that relationship is going to be cut off for good. You know, sometimes you step out, you freeze, you step away from a relationship, you analyze it and decide, this is the best course of action for me. I need to resign, or I need to move to another school, or I need to move to another school or I need to move to another district or personally you need to end a friendship or a relationship or something like that.

So my invitation whether you go into fight or flight is that there is a moment of pause. So for my fighters, when you want to defend yourself, you take a moment, you drop the defenses and you actually listen. You pause enough to listen and receive the feedback and then you take it with you and reflect.

My fighter flighters, if you are going into flight or freeze, like you just super conflict avoidant, you’re not going to engage in the fight, but you do have to engage in listening and receiving, just like the person who wants to defend themselves. You want to receive it and say, thank you for the feedback and then go into privacy, process how it felt, because it’s gonna feel really horrible, but then trust that you can decipher for yourself what’s true and not true about that feedback.

Because what most people do is they stay in fight or flight when somebody attacks or when somebody blames or accuses them and you’re the villain and they’re the victim. And you’re like, what the heck is going on here? You’re going to go into fight or flight and you’re going to react before you’ve had an opportunity to even contemplate whether the situation that you’re being blamed for is actually because of you or is half your fault or is even within your control.

There are things that people blame leaders for that leaders had nothing to do with. And there is something about creating a tolerance as a leader that requires you to let people be wrong about you or to misunderstand you or to think they know you but they don’t.

Think about it in terms of celebrities. There are people trolling celebrities on the internet 24-7, 365, and they say incredibly mean, hurtful, really shocking things. And those celebrities have to have the bandwidth, and I’m sure they have coaches and they have therapists and they have people to help them regulate emotionally, but they have to separate those person’s horrible, awful, ugly words from the truth of who they are. And they have to let that person hate them, let that person be wrong about them, let that person troll them.

Now, they can put boundaries in place and block the person, or if it gets really ugly, they probably could press charges. But I want you to think about that. Every level you go up, there is going to be more exposure to the possibility of being considered a villain.

And deconstructing the truth of what’s going on is really challenging because it means that you have to hold space for the duality of both the truths. You could be wrongly blamed and then you have to let people be wrong about you, or you could be accurately blamed for part of it and then you have to take ownership for that. That doesn’t feel good. Both are gut-wrenching.

So it’s hard to let people be wrong about us and continue to be confident in ourselves when people are out there falsely accusing us of something that we didn’t do or didn’t say or didn’t have power over, but they believe we do. And the flip side is super hard. It’s really hard to stand in our empowerment, in our role as leader, and say, you know what, as the leader, I got this one wrong. I did something or said something or I miscommunicated or there was an oversight or I did not take into consideration this impact, and it feels terrible.

Or perhaps you reacted to something emotionally and it impacted somebody. Or you were in your own state of fight or flight and said something hurtful, unintentionally or intentionally. And owning that and feeling the remorse of that is equally painful as to have somebody say negative things about you that aren’t true.

But here’s what I want you to know. This is the hard stuff of leadership. This is what we talk about in EPC. In EPC we hold space for you to be able to feel how you feel, to be that wrongly accused, or to have to feel the remorse, or the guilt, or the shame, or the regret of how you’ve handled something and coming up with a plan.

And let me tell you this, in either scenario, you cannot address the situation and respond with intention if you haven’t processed the emotions that come with it. You cannot regulate an emotion that you haven’t yet acknowledged and validated and processed. You just can’t. It’s still in there.

So if you avoid the feeling part and then try to go out and reconcile a wrong accusation, but you haven’t processed how you felt, it will come through energetically in your approach, and people will feel it. It won’t be a clean conversation in either way.

So, what I want to leave you with is, both are true, we have good days and hard days. We make mistakes, and we get it right.

But even when you have done something less than stellar, or something you’re not proud of, or something in hindsight you didn’t realize had an impact on someone and it was hurtful, it doesn’t mean you are a villain. There is the label, and then there’s you. Your identity is not an evil villain with the intention of waking up each morning and looking to go to school and cause all the harm that you can cause. That’s not your heart. That’s not your soul. That’s not why you’re in school leadership. So you’re not the identity of a villain. You simply are a human who made a human error or a misstep.

What they did was label you. They cast you as a character in their story. So you’re cast as a villain in their story. And when you think about it, oftentimes when you are blamed as the villain, as the bad person, it’s because they don’t feel that they have the power to be the hero in their own story. Because there’s the villain, and there’s the victim, and there’s the hero. And they’re not making themselves the hero and saying, look, I’m gonna create the experience I want regardless of this person, because I’m the star of the show. I’m the hero. No, they’re like the side character that doesn’t have a speaking part, and they’re just one of the nameless victims. They’re not even a main character in their own movie.

Because you’re the villain, you’re going around and hurting all the people, and then somebody else is going to come in and save the day and who that is in their story, I don’t know because it can’t be anybody else but them. And until they realize that and they label you, you have to see it’s just a label, it’s just a story. And it’s really a reflection of their lack of personal power and their lack of empowerment in their lives.

So you are good regardless of how other people perceive you. And your identity, your perception of you, it has to matter more than the opinions of other people. You need to learn how to discern for yourself what’s true and not true. And I will tell you this from personal experience, it’s very hard to do it in the moment. I actually don’t know how I would have done it on my own. I had a coach. I had a therapist.

I had a mentor. I had sponsors helping me. I had an army of people to help me unravel the accusations and to also take ownership of my part. And because of this intense work that I’ve done personally, I’ve developed a course on this work because I believe it’s such a profound experience of leadership. The course is going to be included in EPC, in the Empowered Principal Collaborative, so as a member of EPC you’re going to have access to this program.

But as I mentioned earlier, the spring training series for school leaders of 2025 is coming up in March. I’m giving you guys a month notice to get it on your calendars. This is a paid program. There are 8 sessions. It’s going to be held live so you will have the ability to ask questions and engage with me personally. The recordings are going to be all available and for those of you who purchase this program it will be accessible for life.

So I’m going to create a Facebook group just for people who register and I’ll upload all of the resources and all of the replays into that Facebook group and then I can engage with you in the Facebook group as you’re working through the modules. You can ask me questions, you can get coaching, but you’ll have access to that for life. So it’s a one-time fee of $555. You get access to all 8 sessions. You get access to the Facebook group and you’ll get access to me on the live training, or if you watch the replay, you can ask me questions in the Facebook group.

Okay. So for those of you who have been following the Empowered Principal podcast for quite a while, you know that I throw down my best content here, I don’t hold anything back, but I can tell you this, there is a difference between the podcast and coaching. The podcast shares overarching ideas, concepts, content, information, and it’s free because I want every principal, every district leader, every educational person on the planet to have access to these ideas. I think they’re going to change the entire experience of education. I really, really do.

So It’ll be free forever on the podcast, I give you my best here. And it’s content that you can consume, and then interpret on your own, and self-apply.

But coaching, being in EPC, or for those of you who are interested in one-on-one, it takes you deeper. It takes these concepts deeper. It helps you actively integrate them and apply them into your life daily, on the daily, and you have the support of somebody else who kind of helps you see around those blind spots.

I’m telling you, when I was going through this myself, there is no way that I could have self-coached during the intensity of the emotions I was experiencing. I couldn’t see through the fog of all of the confusion in my mind. And having a coach, having a mentor, having people to support me, having therapy, and they all serve different purposes. But the purpose of coaching, it takes the work down to a transformative level.

I believe that coaching is the processing of an expansion of your awareness, of your insights, and of your development as a human and as a leader. It’s a different experience than most people have ever experienced before. And because I believe in coaching so deeply and I believe in school leadership so profoundly, I’ve decided to start offering some of my courses in a more a la carte fashion.

So the Spring Training Series is an a la carte fashion. You don’t have to be an EPC to sign up for it. You can purchase it separately. And then if you decide, this is the most fun part. If you decide that you loved it so much, you want to join EPC, you can apply the $555 towards the cost of EPC. So you can take the Spring Training Program, see if you love it. If you love it and you want more, you can take the $555 and apply it to the cost of EPC. And then once you’re in EPC, you get access to everything.

So the link for the Spring Training Series will be in the show notes. If you have any questions, reach out. We can schedule a quick chat and I can answer any questions you have or you can just simply email me at angelakellycoaching@gmail.com. Find me on Facebook, find me on Instagram. I will be happy to message you and answer any questions that you have.

Have a beautiful week. I love you all and I appreciate the work that you’re doing. Take good care of yourselves and I’ll talk to you next week. Bye!

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.