Ep #441: Experiential Neuroscience in Education with Thayne Martin

Angela Kelly: Hey there, empowered principals. A quick heads up before we begin this podcast episode: This particular episode mentions some sensitive topics, including childhood trauma and a suicide attempt. I invite you to please listen with care.

Hello, empowered principals. Welcome to episode 441.

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.

Hello empowered principals. Happy Tuesday and welcome to the podcast. We want to congratulate you for all of you who have finished out the school year. What a wonderful year it is, and summer break is coming along. And I hope that you are able to complete all your staffing and finalize those last little minute tasks that you need to get done so you can go off and enjoy a beautiful, beautiful summer break.

I have a special guest here with me today. His name is Thayne Martin. He is the founder and owner of It’s Pure Love. We met online and we had a meet and greet, and we just hit it off. He has some amazing stories, amazing content, and amazing resources for educators. So, Thayne, welcome to the podcast.

Thayne Martin: Thank you so much for having me. It’s a pleasure. I admire your work and the goodness that you put into the world. So thank you for being you.

Angela Kelly: I really appreciate that. For us having just met, I felt like I found a kindred spirit out there. Like we are trying to bring the humanity back into education: love, compassion, kindness, patience, understanding. And Thayne’s energy and the work that he’s doing, really, I felt very compelled to bring this to your attention as the listeners, especially this time of year because as that year is ending, we’re softening a little bit. Like we’re taking a deeper breath, we are relaxing a little bit, and Thayne’s going to tell you, he has a wife who is in education. He’s going to tell you some stories.

But this is the time of year where we’re reflecting, we’re taking a break, and this is the perfect opportunity to just really embrace what Thayne has to offer and to start practicing it when you have the time and space over the summer months and you have a little more flexibility in your day to embody this and bring this into your practice as you’re planning and preparing for next fall, which is unfortunately right around the corner, right? It happens sooner than we realize. So, Thayne, tell us a little bit about your background, your history, the work your wife is doing in the world, and then how you developed It’s Pure Love.

Thayne Martin: Yes, okay. So before I get into that, I just want to thank every teacher that’s listening. I’ve been fortunate, married to my best friend, and I’ve supported her through her teaching career. And Friday is her last day, 23 years of teaching with this particular district. I think it’s around 28, 29 total years teaching. So thank you to all you teachers for making a difference in the world and for putting the love into the children that someday will be the children that take care of each one of us. 

So I want to just first off thank each of you because I know it’s a sacrifice. I know how difficult it is to be a teacher in today’s classroom and even more so today because we live in a world where the support for education is under attack.

It’s under attack because our society is under attack and the things that matter to us, the things that matter to families, to teachers, like kindness, love, gratitude, all those prosocial emotions, that’s where I found happiness for me. And in learning how to be happy myself, I learned a particular way to find that happiness and then communicate it in a way that everybody can learn from.

So I’ll back up a little bit and tell you a little bit about my story. So I grew up here in Phoenix, Arizona, born into a beautiful family, great mother, great father, and life was normal for me as a little kid. Lower middle income, we didn’t have a lot, but we had what we needed. But my life changed for me as a child because sadly, there was a man that moved into our neighborhood that was a ugly individual that decided that his needs were more important than mine. 

And so sadly enough, he ended up robbing me of what I would say is a normal childhood development because I found myself at the hands of ugliness. So I did like most people try to do, especially men. I tried to outrun that trauma and that led to a lot of poor choices and ultimately late in life for me, being blunt, it was a suicide attempt.

And that suicide attempt was that wake-up call for everybody in my life that something had happened to this man. And not once in my life, I was in my late 30s for the first time I told one single person what ever happened to me. So my life has been about learning how to stand back up because I lived my life as a victim. I ended up going into your traditional therapy and I’m grateful for that. But in the end, it was experiential neuroscience that actually healed me because I realized that all the therapy in the world wasn’t making it stick.

Why was I spending literally decades in therapy, working with therapists and psychologists, talking about my past, talking about things that I needed to do, talking about being better when my emotional dysregulation would enter the picture. But no matter what I did, every time you get into that situation where the body responds, if you don’t have practice from that body response, ultimately, you’re not going to make the right decision. And that’s what I realized. 

So for me, it was my life experience that led me to this work of neuroscience. And interesting enough, not that enough crazy things haven’t happened to me, but it was an accidental drowning. I literally was in an accidental drowning and I lost consciousness and I died. And when I came back, I came back with knowledge and I came back with an understanding of what really matters in this life.

And so I started pouring myself into neuroscience because I realized that if I wanted to heal my brain, I also needed to heal my body because my body was operating different from what my brain was operating. And that’s when I started discovering experiential neuroscience. So that’s a little bit about my background and how I came into it. 

I started my company, It’s Pure Love, a little over a year and a half ago, and we are pioneering experiential neuroscience and actually going to be having some of our protocols studied at a university level because we’ve uncovered some pretty uncanny ways that we can help the brain learn in the classroom. So super excited about that. And anyway.

Angela Kelly: Yes.

Thayne Martin: That’s my story.

Angela Kelly: Yes. And I didn’t even know any of this story. So we always do a meet and greet, as you guys know. And Thayne and I were talking about love and, you know, just the humanity bringing it back to education. And he’s like, “Yeah, I used to have an anger management problem.” And I was like, “What? You?” I cannot even fathom that in this, you know, the version of you that I’ve met.

Thayne Martin: Because I was angry. I had never gotten help. I had never, you know, especially for men that are abused as kids, there’s not a lot of resources for us. And there’s also not a lot of people that specialize in men that were abused as children. And that’s also one of the reasons why I stand up because I’m not ashamed of what happened to me. I was ashamed most of my life and I showed up as a victim. And that’s also why I was angry. I was full of piss and vinegar. I was kind to my family and friends, but outside of that, I was full of toxic. I wasn’t kind. I would say I was a Karen.

I was a Karen, and I showed up that way. I was privileged. I was making a lot of money and I showed up that way. And I also did not like who I had become. I didn’t like being angry, but I didn’t know how to process that anger. 

I did not know how to not respond when my body escalated. I mean, it could have been road rage for me. I could have been driving down the road and the body serves up the response because somebody cut you off. Well, that response from the body is automatic and it is fast. And so immediately, somebody would cut me off and where do I go? I would go into road rage. Well, that’s not healthy either.

So I was looking at my life and I was looking at everything going on in my life, and frankly, it was a train wreck. It was a train wreck. On the outside, everything in my life was perfect. On the inside, I was completely broken and I was hiding because I’d never shared what happened to me. So for me, it was that wake-up call that made me realize that my body’s response is separate from my mind’s response. 

And until I can learn to train this body to understand what this mind is thinking and make them work together, I’m going to continue showing up in the world in a negative way. So how do I train that negative response that immediately comes out of my body when I experience anger? That’s literally what led me down the path of neuroscience. 

And then honestly, I’m a very religious person. I didn’t used to be. Before I drowned in the pool, I was an atheist, but I’m not an atheist anymore. I understand things. I understand what’s important, okay?

Angela Kelly: Yes. Can you tell us a little bit like what was the awakening? What was the clarity, the aha moment for you? Like what were the thoughts and the shifts?

Thayne Martin: Yeah, okay, great question. So when I drowned, I was very fortunate to get out of the pool alive. I know that. When I came out of the pool, my body wasn’t working. When you lose oxygen and the body goes down, when your soul comes back into your body, it doesn’t immediately engage. It’s like I wanted to swim. I wanted to swim, but I couldn’t. So I literally managed to meander my way by just moving my limbs. I was wiggling to find safety. And I found a step in my pool that I could rest on.

And the aha moment for me was laying on the side of that pool, realizing that I had escaped death and looking up into that massive beautiful sky and seeing the moon and all these stars. And what came to me was that everything up there was perfectly balanced and everything down here was not. And that included myself. So how do I, how is this maintained balance?

So ultimately, it led to this discovery. And the discovery is essentially a scientific principle. And if you understand that everything in the universe stays perfectly balanced, then you also understand that the language of the universe is actually math. So all those math teachers out there, I want to thank you because that is the language of the universe. 

And it is that understanding of math that when you apply the principles of math to physical matter, it always applies, okay? So when I started thinking about that, I started realizing that the anger that I had inside was a human emotion. And human emotion is physical energy when it leaves my body. So therefore, the principles of math that describe the universe can also support me in my life and in my emotion.

So that’s what led to this idea. And it starts with basic math. And every person that I teach, I teach and I take them back to first grade. I take them back when they learned their initial math skills: first grade, second grade. And I always ask them because the beautiful thing about the equation of life and abundant happiness is you already know the operators. Every human being knows them, and I thank every teacher for teaching them. Now I’m going to teach you a different way to apply them. All right? So it goes like this.

The first thing you learned in elementary school was addition. You learned 1+1. Well, in the equation of life and abundant happiness, addition means adding those things in life that bring forth goodness and joy. That’s addition. The next thing we learned was 1-1. That was subtraction. And subtraction in the equation of life and abundant happiness is about letting go of those things that don’t serve us, that don’t help us. 

And the one thing that I learned when I died in that pool is the importance of the present moment. That was a space that I never lived in. I was always like consumed with my past that I couldn’t fix and a future that scared the heck out of me. But what I never did was stay present in the moment.

So I learned with the equation of life and abundant happiness, the power of emotional regulation is staying aware and being in the moment. So the thing upstairs that everybody gets to define, okay? The expectation is that we as humans, we balance. So I add what I need, subtract what I don’t, and I achieve what I call neutral balance, where I’m not encumbered one way or the other. I’m perfectly balanced in this moment right where I’m at. So we have addition, subtraction. 

Then the next thing that they learned in elementary school was multiplication. And multiplication is about growth. It’s about aligning your friends, your family, your teachers, your co-workers, your fellow students, the thing upstairs, and letting the world help you grow. It’s about expansion. So you embody action and intention and you move out into the world and you create, and it grows and it gets bigger.

So now I’ve learned multiplication and I can see how I could actually apply that in my life. What did we learn next? We learned division. After we memorized those multiplication tables, we learned division. And division is about taking the expanded growth, that amazing goodness that we created, and then dividing it and putting it back into the world from where it came. So we’re supposed to work on what we call the principle of abundance. 

And that means the principle of abundance is a cost from your heart. So in the example, if I had a hundred dollars, I balance, I put action and intention, I engage my family, friends, teachers, co-workers, and I grow this to a thousand dollars. How much of that thousand do I actually need, number one, and then secondly, we understand that human beings have a desire for safety. So how much more do I need in order to feel safe? So maybe I need 600 out of that thousand and then another 200 to feel safe.

That’s my heartfelt abundance. That is the cost of that growth. So what that means is there’s two hundred dollars of extra abundance that I don’t need. Well, we’re supposed to put it back into the system. Unfortunately, mankind hasn’t figured that out and we’re holding on to money and that’s resulted in greed and excessive wealth. It bothers me that we’re going to have our world’s first trillionaire, and then we have people in third world countries that go to bed hungry every night. And yet they all sleep under the same sun. 

And that’s why me and my work is about changing that and bringing happiness and goodness back into, to life. So we add, subtract, we multiply, divide, and then we find the equal sign. The equal sign in the equation of life and abundant happiness means gratitude. It is gratitude, gratitude, gratitude.

And I would tell you that I did not know gratitude. I did not embody gratitude. And if you said gratitude to me before I drowned, I would have rolled my eyes at you because that is the same thing my grandmother used to use with me, right? When I wanted that extra thing of ice cream, my grandma would be the first one to go, “You need to be more grateful for the two scoops of ice cream that you already have before asking for the third.” And then I’d roll my eyes. So that was my relationship with gratitude.

And then I drowned, okay? And so I realized that gratitude was something that wasn’t the center in my life, not like it should. And so I decided one morning, I took a picture of a sunrise, and it was the most beautiful sunrise. And I posted on social media and I asked people, “What are you grateful for?” And you know what the most common thing that people talked about? Gratitude. Gratitude. They were thankful for gratitude and living with gratitude. And I’m like, “I don’t live gratitude. I don’t even really understand it. And it’s a word that ticks me off.”

So I decided to learn gratitude. I made a decision to get up that next morning and celebrate every sunrise for 365 days. And then somewhere along the way, I started podcasting on Instagram, sharing my journey with my family and friends. And this is where the equation of life and abundant happiness came from. And I tried learning gratitude by writing lists. That didn’t work. I tried an app to learn gratitude. That didn’t work. 

And then one day, I met a stranger. I met a stranger that completely blew me away. They did something for me in public that they didn’t have to do, and I was struggling. It was an emergency situation. And this person stepped forward and in a moment that could have gone horribly wrong, she lent an ear and kindness from her heart, and she turned what could have been a very ugly situation into a beautiful situation.

And then I did something I’ve never done before. I thanked them authentically and genuinely from my heart. And when I did that, in this one particular instance, I got something that I now call a gratitude cocktail. And it starts at the top of the head and it goes all the way down to the feet. It comes all the way back up through the body, and then you feel your vagus nerve begin to wave and oscillate. And I got tears. I started crying because it was joy that I was experiencing with this other human who is a perfect stranger. And the interesting thing, she had happy tears too.

So I left that moment and I said to myself, this is gratitude. How do I learn this? I want this feeling of an abundant happiness and joy that literally overwhelmed me. So I stepped into the world of neuroscience because I wanted to find out why did that happen that first time? So I went on along my day and I tried to create that experience with other people. And then ultimately, I couldn’t do it. And then I started studying. Why did I have this physiological experience with a stranger, but I didn’t have the same experience when I practiced gratitude with people I know?

And that led me to one of literally the most vast discoveries in neuroscience, which we’re actually now studying. And I have an amazing, she’s my vice president of neuroscience and research. She’s got 23 years clinical experience studying this. And I taught her the equation of life and abundant happiness. It changed her life, and then she said, “I want to join you. I want to study this. This is amazing what you’ve learned.”

So from that one exercise, I learned that the human being learns by experiencing, not by reading, not by doing. That’s why all those years of me sitting in seminars, right? That’s something my wife talks about all the time at the district. They bring in these people to come in and talk about teaching emotional regulation, social skills, and it’s a seminar. 

And the teachers sit through the seminar, they pay attention, and then at the end of the seminar, they roll their eyes and they say, there’s no way this is ever going to stick in the classroom because they’ve never really, at least in her district, got the kind of training in order to teach children to be emotionally intelligent in the classroom. And so that’s when I realized that I needed to create something specifically, not only for business and people, but also in education because I learned that we retain 90% when we do something. And we only retain 10% when we read about it or do traditional learning.

So experiential neuroscience is using experiences that are designed to open the heart, open the mind, and create goodness, love, connection, empathy, happiness. It’s all about training the body from a physical response to a new prosocial emotion, and they’re done through experiences. So the experiences are done with family, friends, and even with strangers. 

And you’re going to learn from your family and friends and strangers, each of these exercises, you’re going to see how you show up in life. You’re going to learn some amazing things about yourself. And you may learn some things about yourself that you want to change because you realize that that’s an old belief that came from my childhood. And I just realized in doing this experience in this deck of cards that that’s been with me since third grade. I’ll share that. Yeah.

I recently was working with a client that really struggled to be seen in public. She didn’t like to engage with people. She was afraid to talk to people. She was afraid to speak up and have a voice. And ultimately, I have an experience that I had her do where she had to be a little bit vulnerable with people in public. And ultimately, she struggled through the exercise and then she completed it. And then she recorded a video of her completing the exercise. 

And what changed in her was the abundant happiness because she realized that she could talk to people in public, have an amazing experience with them, and get out of that thought process where she was humiliated when she was a little girl at the lunch table in third grade. That one memory from third grade is what this woman has carried her whole life. And now because she experienced it in real time that she could actually work with a stranger and have love, kindness, and connection, she’s no longer afraid of that anymore. So she overcame that barrier through experiential learning. 

And that’s what experiential neuroscience is. It’s about exercises that are rooted in safety that make the person a little bit uncomfortable so that we can learn. And then while we’re in that exercise and the brain is paying attention, all of the exercises are designed to deliver a prosocial emotion experience at the end. So what it does is it’s updating the physiological response from the body real time to a new memory. And we’re literally rewriting that old story that the body continually plays. And when you rewrite that story from the body and tie it to a new memory in the mind, it remembers. That’s that 90%. So that’s in a nutshell what I do and working with people.

Angela Kelly: Yes. I can see where principals would be following along and even though like neuro, neuroscience sounds like very complicated and very complex, you have a way of breaking it down. So what leaders want to know, I think they can believe. They can feel this, they can believe it, they can see the truth in it. And then they, their brain goes, but how? 

So you and I were sharing, you were sharing some really like concrete simple examples of things that people could listen to this very podcast and turn it off and walk away and experiment with this and try it out and start to feel some changes. Do you want to share some of those?

Thayne Martin: Absolutely. Yeah. So when we work with schools, we work with principals, we work with teachers, and we work with students. So we’re going to be teaching emotional intelligence and social intelligence and metacognition, okay? We teach that as well to every layer in education because it has to be full boat. You can’t have leadership that’s emotionally intelligent, teachers that are not emotionally intelligent. Everybody’s got to be trained in the same system. All right. So let’s take a principal.

So this is a card and I’ve shared it with your team and you can edit it in. And anybody that wants copies of these cards, that information will be available on my website as well as you. So this one is called Let’s Do Lunch. And this is a card specifically from the deck of cards that’s designed to teach principals emotional intelligence and social intelligence skills, okay? So this is what Let’s Do Lunch is. 

Pick an associate you don’t know very much about and make a personal attempt to know them better by inviting them unexpectedly to your office or room for lunch. Okay. Don’t talk anything about school. This conversation is about getting to know each other as principal and teacher. Talk about your life, their life, family life, favorite movies. Be human, okay? 

So what’s the first thing that comes up to you when I ask you to play that card? Because the first thing that pops into your mind is what we call first awareness. And first awareness is usually the most accurate response because it’s coming from the subconscious and it’s not filtered by prefrontal cortex and organized thought. So I always ask people what’s the first thing that I ask when I just asked you to randomly, as a principal, go find a teacher and have lunch with them unexpectedly last minute, okay? Like that should be your first awareness.

The second thing is, what fears stop me from connecting with my co-workers and others? As a principal, what keeps me from knowing my teachers better on a personal level? Because at the end of the day, we’re all human. And when we struggle to balance our emotional energy at home, when we have fights with our spouses and we bring it to work, does that affect the classroom? Of course it does. That’s why as a principal, you know what? You’re also a counselor to your teachers. We’re all in this together. 

So part of this is about building empathy and leadership and remembering the importance of putting love even at work, right? That’s the fun thing. Itspurelove.com. My company teaches love. We teach it to businesses, we teach it to schools, we teach it to people because love is the most powerful teacher of all. It really is.

So imagine in this example how that teacher is going to feel when you the principal, pull that person in and you pour your life and you pour your thanks and your gratitude. Hey, you know, Mrs. Smith, you’ve been working for me. I noticed you’ve been here for over 10 years and I can’t think of one time when you and I sat down and had lunch together. So I brought you in today because I want you to know how much I appreciate you and how much you matter, not only to me as the principal of the school, but to the students and the parents. I am constantly reminded of the amazing work that you do. 

And time after time, I hear other teachers always telling me about you picking up the extra slack. You know, there’s always that teacher that sometimes struggles to get out there and get duty done. And yet sometimes you substitute and you work to help that person. Not everybody does that, but you do. So Mrs. Smith, as your principal, I just brought you in here today to let you know how much I appreciate you, how much I care about you, and I just want to get to know you a little bit better. So let’s have lunch today. Tell me about your life. Where are you from? What’s going on in your home life? 

Just have a conversation as two humans and watch what happens because you’re going to build an amazing relationship with that teacher and she will not forget this lunch meeting. And then she’s going to go into that lunch room and she’s going to tell everybody there that she just had the most amazing meeting with the principal and that that principal thanked her and made her feel special. She was seen. And that’s something that every employee wants. They just want to be seen. 

And I would tell you that in my wife’s career, I can’t think of that many times where she actually felt seen. And that’s a reflection on leadership. So that’s an exercise that any principal can do. That’s just one example of 101 exercises I’ve designed for a principal to learn about themselves and how they’re showing up in leadership. So that’s an example of a principal. Does that make sense?

Angela Kelly: Yep. That totally makes sense. No, that’s great. Let’s talk about what it would look like in the classroom. So with teachers, students, how can we start to, we don’t need to understand maybe all of the depths of the neuroscience behind it, but we want to understand enough so that we see the value in it and we see the benefit of it because once we understand it and we feel it, then we’re inclined to want to engage with it and embody it. So what would that look like in a classroom with teachers and students?

Thayne Martin: Yes. So the first thing we’re going to do is we’re going to come in and we’re going to train all the teachers. All the leaders are going to get trained in emotional intelligence. So you would actually go through our course and we would teach you emotional intelligence skills through experiential learning. So an example for a teacher learning to embody goodness and all the things that teachers, I’m going to say automatically do. Most teachers really do. But the cards are designed to, you know, also open up the teacher’s heart and see how they’re showing up. And it’s about creating community inside of the school, right? And it’s, it’s every layer. It’s leadership, it’s the staff, and it’s the students.

So at the staff level, we’re going to be teaching you about emotional regulation. We’re going to teach you how to add, subtract, multiply, divide, equals. You will learn the equation of life and abundant happiness, and you’ll use it in a way to teach children how to ultimately manage their own emotions because the biggest problem my wife has had is she’s never been trained in emotional intelligence in order to teach those children. 

And it used to be that parents were the people that taught emotional intelligence. But today, those parents are running two jobs, working three jobs to make ends meet, which means that the emotional intelligence skills and the social intelligence skills aren’t being taught at home. That has put extra demands on the teachers. That’s something that my wife has faced because she has found more and more being piled on to her as the educator that used to be done at home.

So my wife’s biggest complaint being a teacher of almost 30 years was that there was never any education to teach her to teach emotional intelligence to children. There wasn’t a program that was easily identified that the kids could learn prosocial emotion. Okay. 

So let’s use one as an example. So I created one. This is one that’s also available. And this exercise is called Magic Lunchbox. And with Magic Lunchbox, the teacher is going to have not only a deck that they’re going to teach emotional regulation using mathematical skills. So there will be some teaching curriculum available to teach in the classroom, but the real teacher is actually the experiences themselves.

So here’s a perfect example. This is called Magic Lunchbox. So the teacher allows students to draw numbers from a magic lunchbox. The students then have 10 minutes to find their match and spend their lunchtime today with a new lunch buddy. For added fun, the students are not allowed to speak to find their match. They must communicate through gestures and non-verbal clues. Odd number, teacher is the match. So you as the teacher might be a match for that one kid if you have an odd number of kids in your classroom. Okay. 

So now imagine those children and the excitement they have going in and pulling that number and their magic lunchbox and imagine the prosocial skills and the fun that they’re going to have trying to find their match in the classroom to be their lunch buddy that day. But the fun is that they’re not able to speak. They have to use different forms of communication. So that means the kids get to get creative. Maybe they get a piece of paper and they write a story and they walk around with their story until they find the person that has their number. You want to promote creativity and you want to make it fun.

So then once those kids have found their match, then that day they are to have lunch in the lunchroom with that new buddy. So that’s a great exercise that you could do say at the beginning of the year to start promoting prosocial emotion and emotional intelligence when the children and creating connection. So that’s just an example of one exercise that you could do with children in the classroom. The deck itself has 100 cards and every one of them is designed specifically to meet the needs of the students, right? 

There’s also a deck of 101 cards to design to teach the teachers emotional intelligence. So as your students are going through the course, so are you the teacher. What’s great about that is as you learn, you will embody the emotional intelligence and the social intelligence skills from completing the exercises, and then you’re going to be an even better teacher to teach those kids emotional intelligence and social intelligence as they work similar exercises, but they’re designed for kids, right?

So like an example for a teacher, this is one my wife loves. And by the way, my wife is actively engaged in creating them. When she retires, she’s going to be onboarding and taking ELAHcation, that’s the name of our program, and running it into the districts and helping us create more exercises because nobody knows the classroom like a teacher. I’m a neuroscientist, I’m a business guy. I don’t know the classroom like my wife does. So she’s actually helped me tremendously bring content that teachers care about and principals and students.

So when I was designing an exercise to share with your audience today, we created one called Duty Break, okay? And I know when I say duty my wife just kind of goes, she rolls her eyes, right? Like every teacher does, okay? So this card, Duty Break is a fun card that you as a teacher would experience in school, okay? 

So this is the mission for Duty Break. We all know duty isn’t always bliss. Today, take a look at the playground, letting your heart direct you, find a teacher currently assigned to duty, and relieve them of command. No questions asked. Let them know how much you appreciate them and how they show up at school. Smile and take over their duty responsibilities. 

Now, imagine the goodness that you just created with that co-worker by not only seeing them and recognizing them for their contributions to the school, but to give them that kindness and love randomly, unexpected. Trust me, that teacher will remember that, right? And so will you. And you’re going to have this amazing experience that I just experienced from that other teacher. 

And now that teacher is somebody that I didn’t know before because they’re in the fifth grade and I’m in first grade and we don’t always, we’re in different lunchrooms and different lunch hours, but now I have a relationship with this teacher because I relieved her of duty. And someday, maybe she relieves me of my duty when she sees I’m at the end of my rope. Okay. That’s the beauty of this. So everything is about creating prosocial emotions: love, kindness, gratitude, empathy, forgiveness, all the things that children need and adults need and leaders need to be effective in the world today. So that’s kind of in a nutshell what we do and how we teach in the classroom. Does that, hopefully, does that make sense?

Angela Kelly: Yeah, that’s wonderful. No, thank you so much for that. Yeah, it makes total sense. Thank you so much for sharing your beauty, your presence, your gratitude, and the work that you’re doing with this company. I see the value in it. I see the benefit, and I, what I really appreciate most is like your science and math brain coming together with the artistry and, you know, skill set of your wife’s number of years in the classroom and her skill set there. Like that combination is so beautiful. And I look forward to seeing your work throughout schools that I work with as well. So it’s a nice little compliment. Yes, absolutely.

Thayne Martin: Yes. Thank you so much.

Angela Kelly: Yeah. Well, thank you for your time today. Thank you for your presence. Thank you for, you know, reaching out and wanting to share this with the listeners of The Empowered Principal® Podcast. It’s, it’s a gift and we need as much as we can.

Thayne Martin: I am grateful for you teachers. I really am. You know, I have three daughters that are very powerful, loving, kind women today. And I know that they have many teachers along the way. I don’t want to get emotional, but there’s certain teachers that stepped up for my girls at certain parts of their life when I wasn’t always being the gentleman that I am today. There were teachers that stepped in and helped my kids. 

So thank you to all you teachers because I know it’s a sacrifice and I know oftentimes you’re not seen, but I want you to know that this man sees you. I see the issues that we’re dealing with and we’re going to fix all of that. We’re going to fix the world, we’re going to fix the classroom, and we’re going to do it with love.

Angela Kelly: Yes. Thank you so much once again. That is it, empowered principals. May you use this as an opportunity to explore gratitude, authentic gratitude, authentic appreciation for all of the gifts and blessings in your life, in your professional life, your personal life. And may this bring you so much joy. 

And for more information, all of the information we talked about today and resources will be in the show notes. So you can access all of that there. Thayne has provided some free resources for you to check out and there’ll be links for more information for you to explore and access that. So again, thank you all. Have a beautiful week. Take good care and we will 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.