Ep #373: Your To-Do List

The Empowered Principal® Podcast Angela Kelly | Your To-Do List

As principals, we often find ourselves drowning in a sea of tasks, appointments, and responsibilities. But what if there was a way to transform your to-do list from a source of stress into a powerful productivity tool?

In this episode, I dive deep into the psychology behind our to-do lists and share my insights on how to create a list that truly serves you. Let’s explore the emotional relationship we have with our lists and how it impacts our ability to prioritize, delegate, and follow through on our commitments.

Get ready to revolutionize your approach to task management and discover how to create a to-do list that empowers you to take control of your time and energy. By the end of this episode, you’ll have the tools and mindset shifts needed to make your to-do list work for you, not against you.

 

Sign up for the Mid-Year Reboot series here!

The Empowered Principal® Collaborative is my latest offer for aspiring and current school leaders who want to create exceptional impact and enjoy the school leadership experience. Join us today to become a member of the only certified life and leadership coaching program for school leaders in the country by clicking here.

Ready to dive deeper into leading with confidence this spring? Join me for the Spring Training Series for School Leaders—an 8-session live program starting in March, designed to empower you through HR, testing, leadership, and more. If you’re not quite ready for the full Empowered Principal Program, this standalone series is perfect for you! Click here to register!

 

What You’ll Learn From this Episode:

  • Why your current to-do list may be holding you back from true productivity.
  • How to identify and manage the emotions that arise when interacting with your list.
  • The key steps to take your to-do list from a brain dump to an actionable plan.
  • Why prioritization, delegation, and calendaring are essential for an effective to-do list.
  • How to build a better relationship with time and honor your commitments to yourself.
  • Strategies for navigating end-of-year challenges like staffing decisions and holding space for emotions.

 

Listen to the Full Episode:

Featured on the Show:

Full Episode Transcript:

Hello empowered principals. Welcome to episode 373. 

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. 

Well, hello, my empowered principals. So happy to be here with you today. Happy Tuesday. Welcome to the podcast.

I want to dive right in. This is going to be fairly short and sweet. I was coaching one of my clients and we got into the topic of her to-do list. And I want to invite you, as you’re listening to my voice, to take a moment and think about your to-do list.

I’m sure that no matter where you are, whether you’re in your office or you’re on a walk or you’re driving or you’re listening to this and you’re far away from work, you can visualize your to-do list. Is it on your calendar? Is it on your desk? Is it on your computer? Is it in a notebook? Is it on a notepad? You know exactly what it looks like. You know exactly where it is. You know the pen you use to write with it. You know the to-do list intimately because you are so connected to it and involved with it every day.

Okay. Now think about that list and I want you to tell yourself what the purpose of that list is. What is the purpose of your to-do list? And if you think about it, for most people, a to-do list is a list that captures all of your thoughts. There are thoughts about things you need to-do, things you need to complete, things you’d like to get done, things you hope to get done, things you feel pressured to get done. And the to-do list captures the thoughts from your brain and puts them onto paper or puts them onto your computer screen.

So a to-do list for most people is simply a brain drain. It goes from the brain onto paper and this action that you’re taking going from brain to paper it’s a task or it’s an action line that I recommend everybody take, particularly if your head is spinning and your head is trying to hold all of that content in your memory, right? So the list is what helps you capture everything in your brain and it puts it down onto paper. And I’ll say paper, whether it’s computer, digital, or actual pen and paper, but it’s a placeholder for those thoughts.

It’s a placeholder for your desires, things you want to-do, actions you want to take, projects you want to complete, conversations you want to have, appointments that you want to make and then meet, people that you want to connect with, all of the things, right? Personal appointments, professional appointments, meetings, observations, conversations, check-ins, picking up your kids, getting over to the dentist, getting your best friend’s birthday present purchase, planning your husband’s birthday party, calling your mother, talking to your sister. I mean it’s on and on. This is why we create to-do lists because our brain wants to explode with all of it swimming up in our mind.

So the to-do list captures all of it and puts it down on the paper. I just call this a brain drain. So most people have a to-do list and it’s a brain drain of all the things that they want to-do, need to-do, would like to-do, feel like they have to-do. Okay? And the beautiful thing about our lovely brain is that as soon as we drain it out, there’s a moment of like, ooh, that feels good. I think I got everything. And then a few minutes or a few hours later, it fills back up. It’s like the cup that never empties. It will fill up the cup again with all new kinds of thoughts and things you need to-do, or it will recycle the water that was in the cup before and fill it back up with the same thoughts.

So you look at the list and you’re still thinking about the same things that are on the to-do list. And so we either add more things to the to-do list. Oh, I forgot this. Oh, what about that? Or we think further into the future. Okay, I’ve got this month covered. Now, what about next month? And then wait, what about six months from now? And all of a sudden, our to-do list is growing longer and longer and longer and longer. Now this to-do list might be helpful. It might give your brain some reprieve from trying to hold and memorize and remember all of the things you want to-do.

So it can give you some relief, but it can also, when you look at it, especially if you’ve been adding on and adding on and adding on, or you have the same things come up on your list over and over and they’re not getting done. So it either feels really good to be getting the things done and to getting it out of your brain, or it feels like crazy stress every time you look at it and it brings up anxiety, stress, worry, doubt, fears, resistance to having to get it all done. But the to-do list in and of itself tends to be simply a placeholder. And it doesn’t do a lot more than that as it stands, than just as a to-do list. Okay?

But what do we love to-do? We love to put things on the to-do list and then go do something that’s on the list and then check it off or cross it off. It’s incredible how addicting that is. Something as simple as checking a box or striking a line through that task. Have you ever done this? I’ve done this so many times. I did something that wasn’t on the list. So I wrote it on the list so I could write strike it off the list. Have you ever done that? It’s so crazy satisfying. I don’t know why, but something as simple as a check mark or a cross out, it feels so good. So good that we keep creating a to-do list.

But I want to go into the to-do list problem so I can help you create a to-do list that actually is productive. Because look, some things are on the to-do list day after day after day after day. Work out, work out, work out, work out, take a walk, take a walk, take a walk, take a walk, call a friend, call a friend, go to bed early, eat healthy, you know, whenever, get your newsletter done. There are things that are on the list that we’re like, we have such good intention, we really want to-do them. And then we don’t, and they’re on that list on repeat over and over, but we don’t really question it, why we’re not doing it or it shouldn’t be on the list. So there’s that. And then there are the things that we just keep adding, hoping that they’ll get done because they’re on the list.

Have you ever done that? Like, so we either get the things done on the list or we don’t, and they tend not to fall off the list. And the ones that we do get done, we feel super good about it, gives us this great big wave of dopamine, and we feel very productive on the days. The thing that we put on the list, it got done. We feel good about it. We get to cross it off the list and then it’s over. And then we look at the other things that were like, oh, and then the list feels bad again. Have you noticed that?

So because we stop at brain draining the to-do list, which is just like blurting everything out onto paper from your brain, here’s everything I need to-do. We blurt it all out and then we just leave it there. And it’s this kind of jumbled mess. It has no rhyme or reason. It has no value assigned to it. It’s just there. But when it’s on the list, everything feels important. Everything feels like a priority because it’s on the list.

I want you to consider the purpose of that list. Why do you create a list? And how do you feel about your to-do list? This really matters. Some people look at their list and they feel great about it. They know the purpose, it serves its purpose, it’s productive, they use it efficiently and to create the outcomes that they want. Some people, the to-do list is all they need to get things done.

So ask yourself, how do I feel about my to-do list? When I’m looking at it, does it feel good or does it not? It’s very clear and it’s very simple. You don’t have to make this complicated. It’s either going to generate feelings of like calmness, clarity, certainty, like productivity, or it’s going to generate feelings of anxiety and stress and doubt and worry.

So if your to-do list doesn’t feel good for you in any way, shape, or form, then it’s time to change the way that you approach your to-do list and leverage it in a way that maximizes your productivity and that feels good for you. So the to-do list is simply the very first step of proactively planning your productivity.

And what happens for a lot of us principals out there is that we don’t want to-do the remaining steps of the planning, which includes prioritization, delegation, and calendaring. We don’t want to-do that part. We don’t like it. We think it’s going to take too much time. We get stuck in indecision. We complicate it by making everything a priority, and we don’t want to delegate. We don’t want to give things up, and we don’t want to have to calendar it because it feels like now it’s set in stone and we get all squirmy if an emergency comes up or something happens and it’s on our calendar and then we didn’t do it.

When we don’t honor our calendar, there’s a feeling of disappointment or a feeling of guilt. We feel kind of guilty if we don’t honor what we ourselves put on our own calendar. Can you see it? Okay. So just notice how much emotion comes into play when you interact with your to-do list. The emotion is the biggest part of it. I know that sounds like insignificant but it’s the most significant.

And I teach an approach in EPC for task management that’s efficient and productive. And the technique itself, the process that I created, it’s not really rocket science but it does take the to-do list to the next level and the next level and the next level. It goes much deeper than just blurting everything out and doing a brain drain on a piece of paper. The technique itself is not rocket science, I promise you.

However, coaching your mind and managing your emotions around your to-do list and all the tasks you need to get done can feel like rocket science when you’re in the moment. Managing your time, managing your energy, managing your interactions, managing how much effort you put into a task or how much time you’re going to give to a task or what you’re willing to delegate, what you’re not willing to delegate.

The amount of time you spend just thinking about your to-do list but not doing the to-do list. Think about the minutes that you spend just thinking about the to-do list or looking at the to-do list or worrying about the to-do list or wondering how you’re gonna get the to-do list done. We spend so many minutes at work contemplating about the to-do list versus prioritizing it, delegating it, calendaring it and let’s go right.

It’s the emotion that’s holding you back or the fear of some anticipated emotion in the future. That’s holding you back. We have a lot of thoughts and feelings around delegation, around prioritization, around calendaring, around honoring. And we also have a lot of thoughts and feelings about the obstacles that come up. Things like interruptions, emergencies.

Now look, if everything is an emergency, if every single day you’re having emergencies and putting up fires, they’re no longer emergencies. We have a management problem. So there are true emergencies and there is a need for interruptions at times. But we tend to use them as an excuse, as the reason why we can’t calendar, we can’t plan, we can’t prioritize and delegate.

We think that school leadership is so full of emergencies and interruptions that it’s impossible to actually plan and honor the calendar. But I’m here to dispel that myth. What makes time management, balance management, planning management, what makes all of that so difficult are the threads of emotions and thoughts that we have and the relationship that we have with time, the relationship we have with ourselves, the relationship we have with others.

Those get intertwined into our ability to take a to-do list from a brain drain and prioritize it. And what can we delegate? And what can we constrain? What can we say no to? What can we put on the back burner? And then what needs to be on the calendar this week, next week, and then three months from now. And then when it comes time to-do the thing that we’re set out to-do, do we honor that? Do we actually do the thing when we said we would do it?

Are we in a relationship with ourselves where we have our own back, where we are honoring the very thing we said we wanted to accomplish. That’s a whole another level. This is why you can get the best time management system in the world. You can get the prettiest journal and planner. You can have multiple calendars on your computer, but if you don’t follow them or honor them or take the time to plan them proactively and really build up that relationship with time and planning, there is no system that will work.

There’s nothing external that you can implement that’s going to help you feel better around your time and to build a better relationship with your time. Okay? So in March, I’m going to be hosting my annual Empowered Principal Spring Training Series. I’m gonna teach how to develop a plan for the last months of school, all the testing, all the celebrations, all the graduations, all the promotions, all the end of year, yada yadas, all the hip hop hoorays. In a way that feels manageable and enjoyable for you.

Enjoy the end of the year, whether you end in May or you end at the end of June. Enjoy the last two months of the year. Don’t run yourself ragged. There’s a way to prep and plan for that now and to delegate more than you ever thought possible and to actually be present and enjoy the celebrations of the end of the year and looking at the accomplishments, focusing on what worked, focusing on all the hard work and the effort and acknowledging it, validating it, celebrating it, versus running on empty, not sleeping, overworking, overexerting, overscheduling yourself back to back, not eating, not getting any rest, feeling like you can’t even comb your hair, you know what I’m saying? Making sure that your shoes match, right?

So I hope you’ll join me in March. I’m going to be covering all things time management, planning management, balance management, but I’m also going to talk about the things that come up in the spring. March and April are heavy hitters with HR stuff. Things like making staffing decisions, how to tell people that you’re letting them go from a place of authenticity and love, and then how to hold space between the time that you tell them and the last day of school.

Because very few professions have this where we tell an employee, “I’m sorry, we’re not going to re-select you for employment next year, but we’d really like you to give it your best for the next three months, even though you know you’re not coming back to our place of employment. Have a nice day.” Yet here we are in education, having to tell people in March that they’re no longer reelected for next year. And then please do your best and get through testing and celebrate the end of the year and don’t be sad. Be happy and please do your best between March, April, May, and into June. Thank you so much for your service. Goodbye. That’s how it feels. We have to hold space for that.

Ourselves, for them, and the embarrassment or the shame or the frustration, whatever they’re feeling. So there’s how you’re feeling about it. There’s how they’re feeling about it. And then the whole staff has an opinion about it. So how to hold space gracefully for all of that. We’re going to talk about that in the Spring Training Series.

I have developed a very authentic, gentle approach to navigate this so it feels more comfortable for you, for them, and for everyone around you. And if you want more, come on in to EPC. You can get started right away at EPC. Doors are open in March. And the link to register for the Spring Training Series.

And by the way, when you join EPC, you get free access to all of my trainings, all of them. And I teach them in EPC. So you don’t have to-double down on your time. I will cover these concepts in EPC, but I also do trainings for people who are not in EPC who just want to a la carte purchase specific trainings.

So you can purchase Spring Training, you can purchase the Mastery Series, you can purchase HR stuff, you can purchase Emotional Regulation. I have the Mastery Series all separated out. You can purchase them a la carte. You can purchase them as a bundle and just join EPC because you get the best value. It’s only $19.97 and you get access to everything.

So for those of you who are new to me and you want to try something out, you can do a la carte or if you are ready to dive in, you get a full year into EPC for one price. Come on in, we can’t wait to meet you. Love you so much, thank you for the work you do. Have an amazing week. Talk to you real soon. Take good care. 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. 

Enjoy The Show?

/0 Comments/by

Ep #372: Acknowledging Pain

The Empowered Principal® Podcast Angela Kelly | Acknowledging Pain

Do you feel like people are actively trying to hurt you or criticize your every move? If so, you’re not alone. The emotional and mental toll of school leadership can be incredibly painful and isolating.

In this deeply personal and vulnerable episode, I share a raw and unfiltered message that I recently posted in my public Facebook group for school leaders. I dive deep into the struggles that so many principals and administrators face, especially when they’re new to the role or dealing with particularly challenging situations.

If you’re suffering emotionally and feeling like you’re not cut out to be a leader, this episode is for you. I offer validation, support, and practical tips for acknowledging your pain and moving through it with grace and resilience. You’ll come away feeling seen, heard, and empowered to keep showing up as the leader your school needs.

 

Sign up for the Mid-Year Reboot series here!

The Empowered Principal® Collaborative is my latest offer for aspiring and current school leaders who want to create exceptional impact and enjoy the school leadership experience. Join us today to become a member of the only certified life and leadership coaching program for school leaders in the country by clicking here.

Ready to dive deeper into leading with confidence this spring? Join me for the Spring Training Series for School Leaders—an 8-session live program starting in March, designed to empower you through HR, testing, leadership, and more. If you’re not quite ready for the full Empowered Principal Program, this standalone series is perfect for you! Click here to register!

 

What You’ll Learn From this Episode:

  • Why it’s crucial to acknowledge and validate your feelings instead of pretending to be okay.
  • How to identify and label your emotions to process them more effectively.
  • The importance of releasing emotions through crying, screaming, or physical movement.
  • How to ask your emotions what wisdom or insight they have to offer you.
  • Why making mistakes is a necessary part of the learning process as a leader.
  • How to prioritize and delegate when you’re feeling overwhelmed by your to-do list.
  • The difference between reacting and responding to challenging situations and emotions.

 

Listen to the Full Episode:

Featured on the Show:

Full Episode Transcript:

Hello empowered principals. Welcome to episode 372. 

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. 

Well, hello, my Empowered Principals. Happy Tuesday. I hope you’re doing well. I have a very different type of podcast for you today. This is something I have never done before. I have a public Facebook group for empowered principals. It’s a group where anybody who is in education, who’s an aspiring leader, who is currently a leader, whether you’re site leader, district leader, assistant principal, principal, director, coordinator, superintendent, whatever, you can be in this group. Anybody can find it. It’s a public group and it’s a Facebook group.

And in that group, I go in regularly and create comments and support people and offer Facebook Live videos. And recently, a new Principal had just found the Facebook group and she was struggling in so much suffering and pain. And I read her post or her comment and my heart ached because I remember what it feels like to be new. I remember what it feels like to be so overwhelmed, so deflated, so defeated, where you feel so behind that you don’t know how you’re going to get out of it. You feel like people hate you, and they’re actively trying to hurt you or come at you sideways or be ugly. And it’s a very lonely, it’s very isolating, it’s a very painful experience.

And hey, you don’t have to be new for this experience to happen. This happened to me multiple times over the course of my seven years in school leadership. In the beginning, for sure, it happened. But any time that a teacher or staff member was unhappy with something that they felt was impacted because of me, if they thought it was my fault, or they thought it was my decision or they just didn’t like me for whatever reason, because I’m short. Or I laugh funny or I’m super bubbly or who knows? I just annoyed them. I wasn’t their person. And there were people who found ways to be extremely hurtful and talk behind my back and say terrible things and tell the superintendent untruths. It was a very painful time.

I was thinking about this person and I just jumped on a Facebook live and I recorded from my soul, from my heart speaking to this person and to anybody who is suffering emotionally, who’s in pain, and how to handle that pain.

You are cut out for school leadership. Your brain is going to tell you that you’re not because the emotional and the mental toll can feel overwhelming. It can feel like you can’t handle it. I’ve been there. I totally get it.

And so today I thought I would share that Facebook live. It got hundreds of views within the group and I’m just offering it to you in case you or somebody you know is in pain and they’re suffering and they’re feeling like they’re not cut out to be a leader. That isn’t true. You are cut out to be a leader. And how do we know you’re a leader? You’re in the position.

So whether you’re a first year or you’re a veteran, the amount of time you’ve been in leadership doesn’t matter. When you’re in pain, pain is pain. The circumstances don’t matter. What matters is when you’re in pain, it feels like it’s never going to leave, it’s never going to end, and you don’t know how to get out.

And this Facebook Live, it’s pretty raw, it’s pretty vulnerable, and it’s here for you to acknowledge and validate these feelings. They didn’t come out of nowhere. They’re here for a reason.

So tune in, listen to this Facebook Live. If you’re on Facebook and you’re interested, you can always join the public group. And when you become a member of EPC, we have a private group where I upload all of my resources, all of the trainings, all of the webinars, everything that I teach, everything that I train, all of the resources, the workbooks, the guides that I have developed, they’re all in EPC, but this group is for the public.

So come on over, check us out. I hope this Facebook Live audio is helpful to anyone out there who is suffering. And if you want more support, please feel free to reach out and call. At the very least, we’ll do a free consult call. I’ll talk you through it. And if EPC isn’t in your immediate future, but you’d like to join us later, that’s great too.

So I wish you well, I wish you happiness, and I wish you peace and empowerment. Enjoy the show.

I want to take a moment and welcome our new Empowered Principles in the group.

A lot of people have been coming in looking for some reprieve, looking for some relief. And this message is definitely for you. If you are struggling this year, if you feel like you’re in survival mode, if you’re barely hanging on, if you feel like you’re not going to make it, if you feel like you’re being crushed or that you think that you can’t handle this, or you’re not cut out to be a school leader, or this is just too much, I want this message to be directed directly for you.

So the first thing I wanna say is that I can relate. I was there in your shoes in this job. I was a single mom opening a brand new school, my very first two years in school leadership. I had construction nightmares happening on my campus. I had a teacher who applied to the administrative position and did not get it. She was very bitter and hurt and upset, understandably. I had people who did not like me. I had been a kindergarten teacher. They didn’t feel that I was competent in upper grades. I had people who tried, actively tried, to get people to dislike me, to kind of group up against me. So I feel that burn.

I had parents screaming in my face, raging at me, refusing to leave the campus, refusing to leave the office, people threatening to go to the newspaper, people threatening to go to the superintendent. It was rough. And if you’re in, oh gosh, it makes me want to cry just thinking about it.

So first of all, I just want to say I relate to you. I know how painful that is when you’re having one heck of a tough year. So first of all, I’m so glad you joined the Empowered Principal group. This is a free group. It’s open to the public. I try to ensure that it’s aspiring school leaders, new school leaders, that it’s school leader related. I try not to let people solicit in here. Our team cuts that off. As soon as we see somebody marketing or salesy or trying to promote themselves, we delete that stuff because this is a safe space. It’s a sacred space for you. You get to say how you feel in this group. You get to be honest about it. And I want you to know that if you feel you need support in this group, all you have to do is just post how you’re feeling.

Do a brain drain, just get it all out onto this page. I will respond to every single person who hosts in this group. I keep an active watch on, on this. This it’s my group. Like you are my people and you are attracted into this group because you want to feel better. You want to feel empowered and you might feel desperate right now.

So when you’re in this zone and it feels like everything is overwhelming you and it’s crushing you and you feel like you cannot breathe, the first thing you need to do is you need to validate those feelings. You need to acknowledge them. Empowerment isn’t about pretending to be empowered. Empowerment isn’t about faking it till you make it. It’s the worst advice I’ve ever received because faking it till you make it, that is what creates imposter syndrome. That is what weakens your confidence when you’re faking it.

When you’re feeling your body’s in fight or flight, neurologically, your body is screaming at you to get out. This isn’t safe. It doesn’t feel good. Nothing about this is working. I can’t handle this. But ultimately, your body and your mind and your heart and your gut is telling you to get out, to flee. It’s not safe.

Or if you’re like me, fight. And by fight, what I mean is you want to get in there and fix all the problems and prove yourself. And you want to, you want to explain yourself and justify and argue and defend and not really retaliate, but you want to try and prove yourself to like force people to see that you mean well, you have good intentions, that you’re trying to do a good job. That’s a form of fight or flight.

When you, when you feel hurt, when people have wrongly accused you, when you tried to help and somebody turned it into how you were incompetent and didn’t know how to do your job and you failed and they’re pointing fingers and they’re blaming you and they’re accusing you, criticizing you, judging you, it is crushing to the soul. And there is a period of time on this journey. Ooh, I’m really feeling the feels for you guys today. Wow. Ooh.

So the first thing you can do is just acknowledge how you feel. Say it out loud. I’m hurt. I’m sad. I’m frustrated. I am angry.

I am pissed. I am devastated. I am overwhelmed. I’m exhausted. Say it out loud. Claim it. The feelings aren’t going away if you pretend that they’re not there. If you pretend to go in and fake it, and that’s what false positivity is, or toxic positivity, when people say, like, positivity is toxic, they’re talking about fake, faking it, faking positivity.

Especially on the weekends, guys. Here it is Sunday, you probably have the Sunday scaries and they’re probably bringing up some legit shit. I had to say it, it rhymed. But some, you know, it’s legitimate feelings here. And it’s coming to the surface and it feels horrible because what’s happening is you feel like you shouldn’t feel that way. I shouldn’t feel so this, I shouldn’t feel this, I should feel this.

So first of all, you add it to the flames by judging yourself, criticizing yourself, telling yourself you should feel different than you do, when instead the solution, the antidote, is to acknowledge the feelings. I feel this, I’m enraged, I am furious. Sometimes I have to look up emotion lists to kind of like nail how I’m feeling. There’s the anger, there’s all the spectrum of anger, there’s all the spectrum of sadness, there’s the spectrum of depression, there’s the spectrum of apathy, there’s the spectrum of hurt, grieving. There’s so many feelings out that we feel as humans. And seeing if you can label them, identifying them, is step one. Just acknowledge that they’re there.

And then you’ve got to validate them. There is nothing wrong with feeling the way you feel. When it seems like there are tens if not dozens of people upset at you judging you criticizing you it feels like you’re being ostracized. It feels like you’re being disconnected and when we feel disconnected as humans when we’re wired for connection, it’s very scary. It’s like being ostracized out of public and being isolated and alone. It’s a horrible feeling.

So I’m sorry if you feel that way. And I know school leadership is very isolating. It hurts because you are oftentimes the only administrator on that campus. You’re the only one. It feels like all of them against one of you. So I just want to acknowledge that for you.

And I’m sorry if you’re hurting and you feel that way, but I’m here to help. So, a couple of simple, simple things you can do is just to say it out loud. How do you feel? What’s the label? If you can label it, and if you can’t label it, what’s the sound? Where do you feel it in your body? Just scream it out, or punch a pillow, or go cry in bed. Do something that releases that emotion for you. Crying’s one of the best things that ever happened to humans because it is the release of emotion. It is the release of that energy buildup in your body. And eventually when you’re done with the tears, your body’s done, you’re going to feel like a, just going to be a moment of calm and some, just a temporary peace.

And in that moment, when you’ve acknowledged and you validated your feelings, you just said, it’s okay to feel this way, feel it, sit with it, breathe through it. Just take some deep breaths, ground yourself. I like to like, I either like to crawl into bed or I like to sit like on my floor, on my carpet, firm, just firmly sitting, whatever’s comfortable for your back and your backside and all of that. Whatever feels good, okay?

Then take a couple of deep breaths and there’s kind of this now what? I’ve had these feelings. Yes, I’ve validated them. I’ve felt them. I’ve processed them. I’ve let them kind of just rapture in my body. Like they just kind of take over and you just let them all out. Okay. And then you have a moment of like, what next?

This is the time when, this is what I do. I know this sounds kind of weird, but it works. You ask the feeling what it’s there for. Why am I feeling this way? And is there any wisdom? Is there any insight? Is there any knowledge? Is there information? Is there an awareness that I need to develop? What is the emotion here for? I have not met an emotion that I haven’t learned from.

So when I’m angry, oftentimes when I write it all down, here’s why I’m angry, I would write it down, down, down. And then I’ll say, anger, what are you here for?

What wisdom, what awareness do I need to gain here? There’s something here for me. There’s a nugget I need to learn or a skill I need to have or some insight or some information or knowledge. Is there anything you’ve got for me? Why did you show up at my door? I invited in for coffee. Let’s talk. Anger, what have you got for me?

Oftentimes, for me, anger tends to be there’s some kind of injustice happening, or I’ve been wrongly accused. That’s a form of injustice, right? Like there’s an injustice out there externally I’m upset about, or there’s an injustice I feel like has occurred, like, to me. And sometimes I’m just angry because I need to take action. Anger is a lot of energy and oftentimes it can be channeled into an action.

Now, if you’re angry with yourself, if you’re feeling like you are upset with yourself, you mishandled something or you didn’t know something, you weren’t aware of something, or you misspoke or you misstepped, some kind of perceived mistake or failure, you can feel that and validate that. And then what can I learn? You can’t get it right until you get it wrong. That’s the duality. That’s the dissonance required for you to know what to do.

So just know that when you misstep or misspeak or make a mistake, there’s an error, you were just not aware of something and something happened and it upset people. You can learn from that and take it away and then apply it forward and take ownership of it. You can repair it or apologize or whatever it is you need to do, but know that there’s no one on the planet that got it right. Always the first time they had to get it wrong in order to even know what right was. So there’s that.

If you’re feeling super overwhelmed, that’s normal. Every leader feels overwhelmed. And that’s a matter of like, we are thinking in kind of this ambiguous way. If you’re super overwhelmed, if it’s just too much to do in non-adjunct time, and everyone’s coming at you 100 miles an hour, and you’re playing whack-a-mole, and you don’t know how to, it just, it feels like you can’t handle it all.

That, I have a very specific program for. Come on into EPC, join right away, you’ll get time mastery, balance mastery, planning mastery. That’s all technique and skill that I’ve learned over my years in school leadership. That can be taught. That’s a skill. But if you’re feeling it right now, again, acknowledge it, validate it, and you can be overwhelmed. And then when you get to the part where you’re like, and now what? Okay. Then that’s when you brain-dare your to-do list, that’s when you start prioritizing, that’s when you have to start breaking it down.

And if that feels hard, the hardest things about planning is prioritization, delegation, right? And then saying no, like being constraining, basically. Being able to know what to say yes to and what to say no to, and making decisions through the lens of those priorities and what you value as a school leader. Okay?

Now, if you’re feeling hurt, if you’re feeling like people are mad at you or people’s behaviors out of control, a lot of newer principals will feel overwhelmed by other people’s emotions. People can be nasty, they can be mean, they can be sharp with their words, they can be nasty in their actions. And there is a gap from being a teacher and feeling included and belonging and significant and like you’re in a group, you’re in that group to feeling this isolation.

There’s a gap from learning how to handle being the leader, being isolated on your own, being the authority figure, but also having the capacity to navigate your own emotional experience and your own experience as a school leader while also holding space for everybody else’s emotions. And let me tell you people are spraying their emotions all over all over. Kids are spraying emotion. There’s emotional dysregulation in children and emotional dysregulation in adults.

And if that is a problem for you, again, come on into EPC. But my quick little tidbit for you to help you right now is if people are being nasty to you, again, state how you feel. Just acknowledge it. You don’t have to go above it. You don’t have to be walk on water perfect. Just acknowledge it. You’re human. Validate it. It feels terrible that people be so nasty and ugly. And when they’re coming at you sideways, it’s okay to have human emotions.

Again, we’re not faking perfection here. We’re not faking aloofness. We’re not faking that we’re bulletproof emotionally. No one’s bulletproof emotionally. We all have tenderness, tender spots because we’re human, because we care. We’re in the business of people. We’re in the business of human development. That’s what education is. And we are on a human development journey as a leader and as an adult.

Every person on your campus is on a journey of human development, personal development, academic development, physical development, social-emotional development. It’s all a journey, okay? Give yourself a little grace here. And I teach a program within EPC, which is the Empowered Principal Collaborative. It’s a group coaching program for school leaders. It’s called emotional regulation mastery. It’s how to understand and leverage your emotional capacity to be emotionally mature, emotionally responsible.

And by emotionally responsible, what I mean is emotionally responsive. You’re responding versus reacting. There is a difference. Most people react. They feel the emotion and they react. They say something, they do something in reaction to that initial emotion versus I’m feeling a feeling, I’m going to feel, I’m going to acknowledge it, I’m going to validate it. And I’m pausing any decisions and actions in the meantime. And then once I’ve cleared that energy, emotional energy, now I’m in a space to decide with intention how I’m going to respond.

So I know Sunday can be tough. Last week I talked about the Sunday scaries. If you’re still feeling the Sunday scaries, try validating how you actually feel. And you can definitely focus on what’s working, what feels good, what are you looking forward to. But if that doesn’t work, if you can’t tip into feeling good and you can’t bridge that gap, you’ve got to go in and stop faking it. Stop pretending you’re okay. Stop pretending that you’re not bothered by it.

That’s what I used to do. I used to act strong. I used to act resilient. I used to pretend that I was okay. I wasn’t. I feel for you. I’m here for you. I love you. I love the work you’re doing. I know the job, it’s so hard.

And I want you to share this with any school administrator who is struggling, who feels like the school’s against them or the world is against them or the odds are stacked against you. We can help. One, little by little, we can break away and break through and create a shift and we can bridge the gap so that you can get into feeling much more empowered, much calmer, much more grounded, much more peaceful.

So I love you so much. Take good care. If you want to talk to me personally, just DM me and we’ll set up a call. I’m here for you. I don’t want you to suffer any more than necessary. Okay? Breathe deep, acknowledge your emotions, validate them, feel them. And take a couple more deep breaths and then ask yourself, what can I learn from this? What is there available to me?

And then you can get into what’s working. What am I excited about? Is there anything that can give me some energy? Love you. Take good care of yourselves. 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. 

Enjoy The Show?

/0 Comments/by

Ep #371: Blamed the Villain

The Empowered Principal® Podcast Angela Kelly | Blamed the Villain

Have you ever felt like you were unfairly cast as the villain in someone else’s story? As a school leader, it’s all too common to be blamed for other people’s unhappiness, discontent, and dissatisfaction. But the truth is, you’re not a master puppeteer controlling everyone’s lives and experiences.

In this raw and personal episode, I dive into what it feels like to be wrongly accused and labeled as the “bad guy” in leadership. I share my own experiences of being blamed for other people’s feelings, decisions, and actions – and how I learned to navigate those painful situations with grace and empowerment.

Join me as we explore the duality of leadership, the importance of emotional regulation, and how to stand confidently in your truth even when others misunderstand or attack you. You’ll learn practical tools for processing difficult emotions, discerning what feedback to take on, and maintaining your identity as a good person and leader, no matter what labels others cast upon you.

 

Sign up for the Mid-Year Reboot series here!

The Empowered Principal® Collaborative is my latest offer for aspiring and current school leaders who want to create exceptional impact and enjoy the school leadership experience. Join us today to become a member of the only certified life and leadership coaching program for school leaders in the country by clicking here.

Ready to dive deeper into leading with confidence this spring? Join me for the Spring Training Series for School Leaders—an 8-session live program starting in March, designed to empower you through HR, testing, leadership, and more. If you’re not quite ready for the full Empowered Principal Program, this standalone series is perfect for you! Click here to register!

 

What You’ll Learn From this Episode:

  • Why people tend to blame leaders for their own unhappiness and cast them as “villains”.
  • How to drop defensiveness and truly listen when receiving difficult feedback.
  • The importance of processing your emotions before trying to address a situation.
  • How to discern what feedback is yours to own and what is a projection from others.
  • Why your identity and self-perception must be stronger than others’ opinions of you.
  • How to stand in your power and let others be “wrong” about you when necessary.
  • The difference between being a “villain” and simply being human and making mistakes.

 

Listen to the Full Episode:

Featured on the Show:

Full Episode Transcript:

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.

Enjoy The Show?

/0 Comments/by

Ep #370: Embracing Change

The Empowered Principal® Podcast Angela Kelly | Embracing Change

Do you ever feel like you’re constantly trying to create a calm and consistent environment at your school? As school leaders, we often strive for routines and predictability. But what if I told you that embracing change is actually the key to growth and success?

In this episode, we’ll explore why change is essential and how it can lead to innovation, creativity, and evolution in our schools. I share my own personal journey with change and how I’ve learned to embrace it rather than resist it.

Get ready to shift your mindset and see change in a whole new light. We’ll discuss practical strategies for not only accepting change but actually celebrating it. By the end of this episode, you’ll be equipped with the tools and perspective to lead your school through change with confidence and enthusiasm.

 

Sign up for the Mid-Year Reboot series here!

The Empowered Principal® Collaborative is my latest offer for aspiring and current school leaders who want to create exceptional impact and enjoy the school leadership experience. Join us today to become a member of the only certified life and leadership coaching program for school leaders in the country by clicking here.

 

What You’ll Learn From this Episode:

  • Why striving for constant calm and consistency can lead to stagnancy.
  • How change is a natural and necessary part of growth and evolution.
  • The importance of embracing change as a school leader.
  • How to reframe change as an opportunity rather than a threat.
  • Strategies for managing the pace and intensity of change in your life and school.
  • Why showing up for yourself and your emotions is crucial during times of change.
  • How to sell yourself and others on the benefits of change.

 

Listen to the Full Episode:

 

Featured on the Show:

Full Episode Transcript:

Hello empowered principals. Welcome to episode 370. 

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. 

Hello, empowered principals. Happy Tuesday! Welcome to the podcast. I’ve got a short and sweet one for you today. I’m going to talk about how to love change. Because nobody loves change, but yet change is a constant. So, why not embrace it? We’re going to talk about how you as a school leader can learn to love change and embrace it and help others do the same.

Because what we do as school leaders is we spend a lot of energy trying to create calm and consistent schools. And teachers try to spend a lot of energy and time creating a calm and consistent classroom. Calm and consistent feels amazing to our brains. We love calm. We love consistent. And look, it is very important to have routines and habits so that the brain can trust and relax into the knowing of what to expect and what’s to come. So creating calm and consistency is a beautiful goal. It’s one of my goals, personally and professionally.

But what I have noticed in my own life and with my clients is that any goal, even calm and consistency, too much of a good thing is not a good thing. I want you to imagine a world, a school, a life, where everything is calm and consistent. No changes, no surprises, no spontaneity, no dips, no twists, no turns, no change. Just imagine a world that stagnant, that calm, that consistent, that safe. At best, a world like that would be very boring. But at its worst, it’s stagnant. It’s actually death. Stagnancy is death.

When everything’s completely consistent, completely calm, completely expected, completely certain, and there’s no change, that is the start of decline. Everything on this planet was designed to experience change. The planet, as we speak, as you’re listening to this podcast, is changing. The universe is changing. The stars, the sun, all of existence is changing as we stand here on planet Earth. It’s changing all around us, everything. Our bodies, changing. Our children’s bodies, changing. Our school, changing. All of it. And yet our human brain wants to hold on to the belief that calm and consistency is the happiest place on earth, the safest place on earth. So we’re gonna play a little game.

What if for 5 minutes, for the next 5 to 10 minutes that you’re with me on this podcast, let’s just pretend that we decided that calm and consistent is not the only goal in life or with our schools. Let’s say it’s not even the main goal, the primary goal. And what if it wasn’t the goal at all? What if we threw that goal out the window? What if change was the goal? What if the goal was to be different, new, innovative, unknown, creative? What if change was the goal, what about you would be different? What about your life would be different? What about your school would be different? And what about your leadership would be different?

If change was the goal, what about you would be the same? What about your life would be the same? What about your school and your leadership would be the same? Change doesn’t mean everything goes out the window. Change means different, but it also means the same. Change doesn’t happen all at once. Like, your child doesn’t grow up developmentally, and they don’t get all their teeth at the same time. They don’t learn all of the letters and the sounds at the same time. They don’t learn to read all at once. It compounds. The change is slow and consistent and calm and it builds on itself over time, day by day, week by week, month by month, year by year.

So we don’t have to fear change. It isn’t as inconsistent and chaotic as we think it will be. There is a pattern and a rhythm to change.

When you think about how rivers have evolved the landscape, the planet, over centuries, thousands of years, perhaps, and how this earth has evolved and changed, you’re talking millions of years. When you think of it that way, it took a very long time to create those changes, time to embrace the change and to be able to get used to that change, to get comfortable with the change. And it just kept slowly eroding. Like I’m picturing the Grand Canyon, the Colorado River, and I’m assuming that’s how it was created but I know there’s more recent theories, but any river that’s evolved the landscape, it happened over time. Sometimes it happened in a storm and lots of change happened rapidly and it was messy and chaotic. And then other times it was just that trickle of a stream slowly, gently moving, changing over the course of time. But I want you to ask yourself, for this coming school year, how would it feel for change to be the goal?

How would you feel if you celebrated every time you made a change? A small change, a tiny change, or a big change? What if change equaled winning? And that change meant you were living. And that change was the solution to success. And that change means having fun. And that change is a part of evolution. What if change was a part of the equation to everything that we want?

And as I’ve shared with you guys, I’m pretty transparent about my life. Like my life is going through some significant changes. And I will be sharing more of those changes as the podcast comes out, as these events start to unfold in my life. Got a couple of big changes happening more recently, and I’ve got some upcoming changes within the course of next year that are coming up in my life, I can’t wait to share with you. But the plans are still in the works. They’re still tentative. So until I know a little bit more detail, I will hold off sharing them.

But life is all about change. It’s about evolving who we are, who we think we are, who we think we can be, what we prioritize, how we spend our time, how we spend our energy, and how we choose to believe in ourselves, in what’s possible, in the experiences we want to have and create.

Sometimes change is very subtle, but a lot of times change feels abrupt. This has happened to me in my life over the last year. And at first, I was very resistant to the change. I wanted a calm and consistent life. I wanted to stay in my happy place. Everything was curated. Everything had been designed to be efficient and effective and calm, routined, planned, scheduled, all of that.

I think there’s something brilliant about creating that type of life and I didn’t want to disrupt the stagnancy that I had developed in my life because it was so efficient and I felt productive and I liked the certainty of knowing what to expect. But life is meant to evolve and to change. No matter how hard you try to make it consistent, we are designed as human beings to experience change.

And so when resisting the change didn’t scare the change away in my life, then I detested it. I was upset and frustrated and angry and I wanted to control it and take it back to being not chaotic, to being stagnant and calm and consistent.

But I couldn’t do it because life is meant to evolve and change. And so what I finally did was sank into it. I let myself feel the fear of the unknown, the despair of the uncertainty, and the grief of letting go of my need for calm and consistency in my life 100% of the time. And I sat with the feelings that came up, all the fear, all of the uncertainty, and I just asked them. I asked my emotions, what do you want me to know? And you know what? They told me.

And sometimes along this past year, I have been very open to what they had to say. And other times I wasn’t as open. But one significant aspect that I want to share with you is that I never stopped showing up to feel those feelings and to ask them what they wanted me to know. I did not stop asking myself questions. I didn’t hide from my feelings. I didn’t buffer them. I didn’t push them away or resist them. I didn’t stop exploring the emotions and the thoughts that I was having.

I showed up every day for myself. I showed up in my life. I showed up in my business. I showed up as a coach. I showed up in my pain and in my grief and in my attachment. And I asked it, what does it want me to know? And in that showing up, I was able to see how change was not the enemy. I wasn’t a victim to change. It wasn’t the villain in my story, and it wasn’t taking anything away from me. Change ended up being the solution. It was the hero in my story. It was adding something into my life. It was offering me solutions, evolution. It was offering me exactly what I wanted. The only thing holding me back was the fear of the change when right here on a platter it was offering me everything I’ve said I’ve always wanted.

So I wanna offer this to you. Change isn’t a problem and change isn’t bad. No change is the problem. No change is stagnant. It’s stinky. It’s stuck. When you think of something that’s stagnant, I think of like stagnant water or a trash bin that’s been sitting there untouched for weeks. It stinks. It’s sticky. It’s stuck. If you’re not changing, you aren’t living. And if you’re not living, you’re slowly dying.

Change is life. Change is fun. Change is supposed to happen. And look, as school leaders, we ask our teachers to change. We ask our students to change. Change is embraced when we embrace it as leaders. So sell yourself on why change is the best decision or choice you could ever make. How does it change or enhance the quality of your life? How does it expand your experiences? How does it increase your capacity to have impact and contribute?

Embracing change doesn’t mean changing everything at once and creating a bunch of chaos in your life. Embracing change means accepting the truth of it. It’s a universal fact, at least in our humanly experience, in our realm of possibility, what we do know about life and about the planet and about the universe is that it’s changing and that change is constantly in motion. Embracing it allows you to manage it, to take the wheel, to steer it and control how often and when and how hard you push on the gas. And when you tap on the brakes, you do have control over the pace of the change.

Sometimes it doesn’t feel like that because things around you are changing, but you get to decide how much you engage with that change or how little you engage with it. You can have control over your level of engagement. If something in your life is changing, another person is changing, your job is changing, the district’s changing, kids are moving or changing, anything in your life, when all of this change is happening around you, you still have control over how you think and feel about it.

So I invite you that change is just change, it’s neutral. And you can decide that change is for the better, change is for the sake of evolution, and that we are school leaders who embrace change by loving it. We create change by inviting it in and I want to invite you to join us in EPC, which is the Empowered Principal Collaborative. It’s my group coaching program where it is safe to embrace change because we celebrate it, we honor it, we love it, and we leverage change to our advantage.

A brand new calendar year and for us, the mid-year reboot gives us six months to create change that we want to see within ourselves and with our schools. There is so much time, you have so much time, so much energy to make the changes that you wish to experience for yourself.

So come on in to EPC, doors are open in January. I invite you in, we would love to have you. I’ll see you there. And if you have any questions and you wanna talk to me personally about EPC, if you have any questions or concerns, you can simply schedule a 15-minute Q&A with me. I’ll jump on the phone with you and I will answer any questions that you have.

Embracing change and loving it, having fun with it, and not making it mean that something’s gone wrong is exactly what empowered principals embrace. So come on in, we’d love to see you. I’ll talk to you guys real soon. Take care, Have a great 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.

Enjoy The Show?

/0 Comments/by

Ep #369: No More Sunday Scaries

The Empowered Principal® Podcast Angela Kelly | No More Sunday Scaries

Do you dread Sunday evenings, anticipating the stress and challenges of the upcoming work week? You’re not alone. Many school leaders experience the “Sunday Scaries” – that sense of anxiety and dread that creeps in as the weekend winds down. But what if I told you there’s a way to banish those Sunday Scaries for good?

In this episode, I’m diving deep into the root causes of the Sunday Scaries and offering practical strategies to shift your mindset and approach the week ahead with confidence and clarity. As a school leader, your mental and emotional well-being is crucial to your success and the success of your school. It’s time to break free from the cycle of worry and embrace a more empowered way of leading.

Join me as I share insights from my own journey as a principal and a coach, as well as proven techniques to help you overcome the Sunday Scaries and step into your full potential as a school leader. Get ready to transform your Sundays from scary to satisfying and set yourself up for a week of purpose, productivity, and positive impact.

 

Sign up for the Mid-Year Reboot series here!

The Empowered Principal® Collaborative is my latest offer for aspiring and current school leaders who want to create exceptional impact and enjoy the school leadership experience. Join us today to become a member of the only certified life and leadership coaching program for school leaders in the country by clicking here.

 

What You’ll Learn From this Episode:

  • Why our brains are wired to anticipate danger and how this contributes to the Sunday Scaries.
  • How to identify the specific thoughts and feelings that trigger your Sunday anxiety.
  • The power of shifting your focus from anticipating negative experiences to embracing possibility and potential.
  • Practical strategies to coach yourself through moments of doubt and worry.
  • How investing in your own personal and professional growth can transform your experience as a school leader.
  • The importance of building a supportive network of fellow school leaders who understand your challenges and celebrate your successes.
  • Why letting go of the Sunday Scaries is essential to your well-being and effectiveness as a leader.

 

Listen to the Full Episode:

 

Featured on the Show:

Full Episode Transcript:

Hello empowered principals. Welcome to episode 369. 

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. How are you doing today? Happy January of 2025. Here we are already in week three of the new calendar year. How is it feeling?

I read somewhere online that people drop their New Year’s resolutions around the 18th or 19th day of the month. And we’re right around that time of year. So if the magic of New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day and the magic of the new year has worn off for you, it’s understandable. And if you want the magic to continue all throughout 2025, come on in to the Empowered Principal Collaborative, where magic is happening every single week, where we drop all of the heaviness and we let go of what’s causing us so much pain and we lighten up and we have some fun and we brainstorm solutions and we feel empowered week after week after week.

I cannot tell you the magic of coaching. It has changed so many things in my life, so many relationships in my life, including with myself, so much more potential that I have tapped into, into who I am and my relationship with myself, my relationship with other people, my ability to put myself out into the world, and to not let fear be in the driver’s seat every single day. Or resentment to be in the driver’s seat. Or the fear of pain. The fear of failure. The fear of embarrassment. That was a big one for me. I didn’t never wanted to feel embarrassed.

And now, here I am, 369 episodes later, putting myself out there, getting, you know, all the love, but also teased, ridiculed, embarrassed, ashamed, people hating on me, people making fun of my podcast, telling me to f* off. I literally got a response that said f* off with all of the letters in the word. And I can handle it. It’s just, it’s such a beautiful, magical experience. I’ve really let go of many things from my past, particularly the last, particularly, how do you say that word? It sounded like I put in 10 extra syllables, but particularly the last couple of years of my personal life, there was something so magical about New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day for me where I genuinely released old pain, old decisions, past guilt, past mistakes, past decisions that didn’t seemingly serve me. And I just decided to embrace the future.

I’m future-focused. I’m looking at what I can do and what could be and possibility and expanding my potential as a coach, as a person, as a family member, as a friend. I just want to live. I want to feel good. I want to be alive and experience all that life has to offer. The highs, the lows, and everything in between. I want to expand my capacity and live the biggest year of my life.

And I believe that anytime I go through a major transformation, my clients get exponentially more powerful coaching from me. And in EPC, that is what’s happening. It’s unfolding before my eyes. The content that I am creating and offering, the coaching that I’m providing, it’s so laser-focused now because I do everything that I invite my clients to do. I don’t make something up and say go do it but I don’t do it, I work through it first.

So I know the challenges of creating a three-month plan because I’ve had to overcome those obstacles myself. I’ve had to notice the weeks that I did plan versus the weeks that I didn’t and the times I did create a three-month plan and the times I just kind of flew by the seat of my britches, right? I noticed what stops me or prevents me from creating a three-month plan. What prevents me from being future-focused? When do I spin out in negativity or in past or separating on the past and replaying the past in my mind and beating myself up for decisions that negatively impacted me but I had no idea back then.

Coaching is magic. I wish I could gift it in a box and send it to each and every one of you. It’s so beautiful. And today’s topic, I hope, is a New Year’s gift to you, although we’re three weeks into the year. There’s several weeks left. And I want to offer you the gift of no more Sunday Scaries. Are you ready?

If you’ve got a case of the Sunday Scaries, I believe that I can provide you with the antidote. So I want to start with just breaking down what Sunday Scaries are. Sunday Scaries, or I used to call them the Sunday Blues because I just felt this lowering of energy, this kind of lackluster bluey feeling where it was like, aw bummer I have to go back to work tomorrow, have to deal with all the stuff tomorrow. And one of my clients said, “Oh, I’ve got a really bad case of the Sunday Scaries.” He said, “I love that term.” So here we are going to eliminate the Sunday Scaries and say goodbye to them.

So let’s talk about what they are, because we’re going to shed light on them. Because just like the monster under the bed, when we turn the flashlight on under the bed, typically the Scaries aren’t as scary as we think. So what are they? What are the Sunday Scaries? When you break them down, it’s really an anticipation of an emotion. You’re anticipating pain, you’re anticipating failure, you’re anticipating effort, you’re anticipating time. Investing time, investing effort, investing concentration, investing problem solving. You’re having to invest energy, like physical energy, mental energy, emotional energy, and you’re anticipating the failure of trying to solve a problem or the failure of a communication or a conversation or the failure of not getting your test scores where you want them or turning a teacher around.

We spend so much time anticipating failure, anticipating pain, and that’s what the Sunday Scaries are. It’s a shift in thinking. So when you think about Friday and you think about Saturday, what your thoughts are focused on, you’re looking forward to the weekend. You’re thinking about going out or being with your friends or your family or resting or catching up on sleep, doing your errands, getting your hair done, whatever, going on a weekend trip, or just cuddling in and snuggling in for the weekend. But you’re thinking about the anticipation of positive experiences, happy feelings, rest, play, connection, engagement, leisure, pleasure, relaxation, you’re looking forward and you’re anticipating positive experiences, positive emotions. And then we get to Sunday and we shift and we start to anticipate and focus on negative experiences, negative emotions, the anticipation of them.

So the Sunday Scaries are really just an anticipation of future negative experiences, negative emotions, just negativity all around or some kind of lack or scarcity, right? I’m not going to have enough time, I’m not going to have enough energy, I don’t have enough solutions, I, as a human, am not a good enough leader, I’m not doing enough, or I’m not being disciplined enough, all the enoughs, right? All the little tis-tasks, should things that we think we should be doing or we should be better.

So we’re shitting ourselves, we’re anticipating pain, we’re anticipating failure, and we’re also anticipating our capacity to handle what’s coming our way, our capacity to handle the upset parent or the gossiping teachers or the two paraprofessionals that aren’t getting along, or having to find subs for the week, or writing up your observations and getting those up to date, or having a tough conversation with somebody who’s not meeting standard, or dealing with a kid’s behavior, or that contentious IEP.

You’re thinking about your ability to handle or not handle anything that comes your way. And so there is doubt that sets in. So it starts off kind of like, oh, there’s all these things I have to do, or oh, these are the things I’m not looking forward to handling this week. And then it gets into like the feelings that come with not being competent enough to handle whatever comes your way. And then there’s doubt.

And then you’re just dreading what could happen, and then our brain kind of goes down this spiral into the worst-case scenarios. What could go wrong at this meeting or that meeting, or what could go wrong with test scores, or this teacher, or the student, or the parent? Then we’re just in this vortex, this spiral of anticipating pain, negativity, failure, and our identity, our self-concept as a leader, as a school principal or as a site or district leader.

Wherever you are on the bus, whether you’re a teacher, paraprofessional, office staff, nurse, custodian, counselor, bus driver, maintenance, technology, superintendent, everybody is a human on the bus of education and we all feel the same. So we all anticipate the what if it doesn’t work, the failure, the doubt, the worst case scenarios, okay?

And I wanna talk about why that happens. It’s like, okay, I can see where my brain’s going down this spiral of negativity or this spiral of anticipation of pain or what’s going to go wrong and it’s really spinning out, getting itself really worked up in a tizzy, right? And why do we do this? We can intellectually see it, but why do we do it?

Well, our brain, its number one job is to keep us safe. It’s wired to keep you safe. It’s protecting you. It’s like, okay, let me anticipate all the perceived danger, all the possible dangers, whether it’s actually going to happen or not. I want to think about it because if I think about it, then I’ll feel it and my fight or flight will kick in and I’ll have to do something about it. I’ll go into fight or I’ll go into flight or I’ll go into freeze or I’ll go into fawning. I’m going to do something to try and protect my well-being.

But here’s the problem with that. Our brain, in its sweet effort to protect us, is anticipating future pain that may or may not even exist. It may or may not be true. It may or may not really be happening. It’s not that it couldn’t happen, which is how your brain is so convincing. It’s like, well, if you step out of the cave, a lion could eat you, or you could get chased by a cheetah or a mountain lion or a big yak could come and attack. Right?

Like our brain is wired for survival, protection. It wants to keep you safe, comfortable, happy, seek pleasure, avoid pain, make things as easy as possible. And in the quest for that, if you’re not safe, if it can anticipate danger in advance to protect you, then you get to stay alive. Right?

And as we’ve evolved as humans, and we’re no longer living in caves and no longer hunting for our food and no longer out on the prairies or, you know, in the mountains and having to protect our physical life from every little thing, our brain goes into protecting us mentally and protecting us emotionally. So it’s anticipating mental strain, mental fatigue, mental pain. It’s anticipating emotional pain because a lot of the work we do as school leaders, it’s not always physical. Yes, you are very physical.

You’re walking around, you’re moving, you’re, you know, probably always tidying up, cleaning boxes, moving off the things, but it’s not a physically laborious intensive job, if I’m even saying that right. But it’s not intensely laborious on our bodies where it feels hard, and I’m not saying it’s not because I’ve been there. It’s emotionally hard. It’s mentally challenging. It stretches our very capacity to keep it together mentally and emotionally and psychologically every single day. It stretches our capacity to feel without giving up, to problem solve without throwing our hands up in the air, to come back day after day with the capacity to hold space for our emotions and other people’s emotions so that we can lead them, we can model for them, we can inspire them, we can empower them.

This job’s not easy. It’s mentally challenging, it’s emotionally challenging, it’s psychologically challenging. It’s testing your capacity every day and it’s expanding you every day. And the Sunday Scaries are simply a way of saying, oh gosh, Am I ready for this expansion? Am I ready for this test? Am I ready to be conditioned again? Go back to the mental and emotional gym and mental and emotional boot camp of being a school leader. And that’s where doubt sets in. That’s where identity work comes into play.

So one of the things we talk about in EPC is our self-concept of who we believe we are as a school leader. What we think we’re capable of, what we think about our skill set, and our experience, and our toolboxes, the resources we have available to us, how we perceive ourselves, how we perceive ourselves interacting with others, that’s our identity. And that work is coming up in the world of the Empowered Principal again this year. I’ve created a program around identity. I’ll be offering that coming up. But if you’re a member of EPC, you get access to all of it.

But identity work is the work where you expand your relationship with yourself as a school leader so that you really do believe that you can handle whatever comes your way and so the Sunday Scaries turn into Sunday Certainties. This is what I’m certain about. This is what I can handle. This is what I’ll do. I want you to think about your brain is trying to protect you and it’s spinning out.

It doesn’t want you to be in any harm and it keeps your fears on the front burner right in front of you so that you can be prepared. It’s like if I keep reminding her or him or they that they are in potential danger, then they’re going to do something about it to keep themselves safe. But the problem with this, as I mentioned, is that it’s not necessarily going to even be a problem.

So what happens is you end up spending Sunday suffering in anticipation of something that may or may not even happen. You spend energy, attention, time, focus, minutes, hours of your life thinking about work on the weekend, particularly the closer it gets the more we think about it. But think about how many minutes, how much time you actually spend on Sunday, or any day for that matter, just passively thinking about work.

The Sunday Scaries are simply about thinking about work. It’s not about working. It’s not about doing the work. It’s about passively thinking about it. Anticipation of work. Anticipation of conversations. Anticipation of tasks and projects and things you need to do. Anticipation of conversations. It’s not actual work. It’s not planning for the work or preparing yourself for the work. It’s not problem-solving the work. It’s not doing the work. It’s just thinking about it.

You’re thinking about what could happen, what should happen, what might not happen, what could go wrong. You’re thinking about other people, their thoughts, their emotional reactions, their words, their behaviors, wondering how to fix it or change it or make it better or to influence people to change and be different than they currently are.

But I want you to invite yourself to let go of those Sunday Scaries because they are literally robbing you from minutes and hours and days of your life. They are unproductive minutes that don’t result in a plan or the completion of a project or a task. They’re not productive in any way. They’re not creating memories. They’re taking away from memory creation. They’re taking away from the experience of a beautiful Sunday.

Think about how you could be spending your Sundays, what you could be thinking about? How you could be spending your time? The memories and the experiences you could be creating. I want you to take a look at your past Sunday. So if you have chronic Sunday Scaries, every Sunday, whether it’s the morning, the midday or the evening, where you start to anticipate and think about and worry a little bit about you’re trying to be present with your family, your friends and your kids. But in the back of your mind, the to-do list is churning up the worry about how you’re going to handle something or the meetings or how you’re going to get this done or there’s too much to do and you got a deadline and oh my gosh oh my goodness oh my gosh. Take a look at the past Sundays like the Sundays before the break or the Sundays right after the break and I want you to notice if the time you spent worrying on Sunday positively impacted your ability to do your job and lead your staff Monday through Friday.

Was the worry, the anticipation of pain, the Sunday Scaries, did it set you up for success Monday through Friday? Or did spending a half a day worrying and feeling gloomy and feeling down and a little resistant and a little angst about going to work on Monday, did it make Monday better for you? Because if it does, if it kicks you into gear and you get some things done, okay. If it actually made Monday better, that’s one thing. But if it robbed you from your Sunday and it didn’t make Monday any better, it’s serving no useful purpose.

For most people, the Sunday Scaries are just denying you enjoyment and pleasure and leisure and the satisfaction of the presence of your Sunday morning and your Sunday afternoon and your Sunday evening. Breaking down the Sunday Scaries is really just looking at what are you thinking about? How are you feeling? Why are you feeling this way? Is there something that can be done or that needs to be done?

Because sometimes the Sunday Scaries are like, oh, we blew this off and it’s due on Monday. Okay, well, since we didn’t do it last week, we have to do it today. So I’m gonna take an hour and I’m gonna knock this out so that I can go back to enjoying my Sunday. And then you feel good. But other times it’s this kind of blanket anxiety or blanket worry or this blanket anticipation that isn’t specific. And the solution to the Sunday Scaries is in the specifics. What specifically are you thinking about? What specifically are you worrying about? Is there something specific that can be done right now?

If so, do it. If not, remind yourself. I’m capable of handling whatever comes my way. I have shown up for the other past Mondays, and I’ve survived. This fear and this worry and this doubt, it’s simply trying to protect me. But here’s what else is true. What I’m looking forward to. What I’m anticipating as a pleasurable experience. What I’m, who I’m looking forward to connecting with. What I’m looking forward to accomplishing this week, how I’m going to feel by the end of the week when I get these things done, how I want to feel going into Monday, who I want to be this Monday.

There’s so much opportunity to look at what could be and what working and possibility and expanding your potential as a leader versus spinning out and stagnating on what isn’t working and what didn’t get done and you’re not going to have enough time or you’re not going to have enough mental capacity or you’re emotionally spent and these people are driving me crazy and I don’t really enjoy my job. There’s nothing. It goes into all or nothing thinking. There’s just nothing I really like.

And you can stew in the Scary Sundays if it serves you, but I haven’t met a person that it’s actually served. It can pop up and you can handle it or you can coach yourself through it and realize that the anticipation of a negative experience, it’s kind of an illusion that your brain makes to keep you safe. But when you’ve got your own back and you have the confidence in your capabilities and you trust yourself that I will handle it however I need to handle it and I’ll know what to do in the moment and if I don’t I’ll seek out the support I need to handle it the best I can in the moment. You always make it through.

Monday can be marvelous. Tuesday can be terrific. Wednesday can be wonderful. Thursday can be thriving. Friday can be fantastic. And Saturday and Sunday can be satisfying and full of certainty that you are one amazing empowered principal.

Come on in to EPC, we’re waiting for you, there’s spots available. We can’t wait to meet you. We look forward to working with you. In EPC, the Empowered Principal Collaborative, I’ve got some real powerhouse principals in there, come join us. We love you guys so much, take great care of yourselves.

Don’t let the Sunday Scaries get you. I’ll talk to you guys next week. Take good care. 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. 

Enjoy The Show?

/0 Comments/by

Ep #368: The Purpose of Defensiveness

The Empowered Principal® Podcast Angela Kelly | The Purpose of Defensiveness

Do you ever feel defensive when someone gives you feedback or questions your decisions as a school leader? That gut reaction to justify, argue, defend, or explain yourself (JADE) is a natural response, but is it the most effective one? In this episode, we’ll explore the real purpose behind defensiveness and how it may be masking deeper emotions that are uncomfortable to acknowledge.

As a principal, it’s easy to swing between being too nice and too strict in an attempt to avoid conflict or prove your authority. But what if there was a better way to respond to criticism and lead with confidence? Join me as we unpack the layers of defensiveness and discover how to communicate more effectively, even in challenging situations.

By the end of this episode, you’ll have a new perspective on defensiveness and practical strategies for managing your emotions and interactions as a school leader. Let’s dive in and learn how to turn down the volume on stress and turn up the empowerment in your leadership journey!

 

Sign up for the Mid-Year Reboot series here!

The Empowered Principal® Collaborative is my latest offer for aspiring and current school leaders who want to create exceptional impact and enjoy the school leadership experience. Join us today to become a member of the only certified life and leadership coaching program for school leaders in the country by clicking here.

 

What You’ll Learn From this Episode:

  • Why defensiveness is a natural fight-or-flight response to feeling attacked or questioned.
  • How defensiveness can mask deeper emotions like self-doubt, insecurity, or fear of incompetence.
  • The dangers of swinging between being too nice and too strict as a school leader.
  • How to pause and introspect when feeling defensive to identify the root cause of your reaction.
  • Strategies for responding to criticism or feedback without getting defensive or aggressive.
  • The importance of allowing others to be wrong about you without always needing to correct them.
  • How to communicate your genuine feelings and set boundaries in a calm, neutral way.

 

Listen to the Full Episode:

 

Featured on the Show:

Full Episode Transcript:

Hello empowered principals. Welcome to episode 368. 

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. How are you doing? Welcome back to school. Here we are. Let’s go. Are you in EPC? Why not? I miss you. Come let’s go. It’s the best time we’re having the best time. I want you to be a part of the party. We are killing it this year. We’re doing so much. It’s just fun. I can’t even tell you. It’s my favorite day of the week. It’s my favorite time of the day. I love EPC so, so much. I love these people. I love their brains, their empowerment. It lights me up with so much energy and excitement. I can’t tell you.

I feel there’s a new wave coming into education. We are going to mainstream life and leadership coaching for school leaders. I can feel it. It feels good to feel good. This is what I want for you. I want us to drop down the stress, turn down the volume of the stress and the anxiety and the pressure and the negativity and the toxicity and we’re going to turn up transformation. We’re going to turn up empowerment, evolution, feeling good about yourself, your staff, your students, your school, taking that pressure down, turning up the empowerment, having some fun, laughing a little bit, enjoying your job again, not taking things so seriously, not letting everybody else’s opinion crush you, and turning up the volume on how you feel about you.

And that’s what we’re going to talk about today. I want to talk about the purpose of defensiveness. If you’re listening and you’re not driving or walking, you’re sitting down, I want you to just tune into yourself for a second and ask yourself when you feel defensive, when somebody says something to you and you’re like and your urge is to react in defensiveness, I want you just to pause and think about what that feels like.

I know for me, like I’m doing it right now as I speak to you. And when someone says something to me and I feel that urge to say something right back out of defensiveness, there is a term in therapy and it’s called JADE. JADE. J-A-D-E. It stands for justify, argue, defend, explain. When you feel like you want to jade somebody, you want to justify it, your actions or your decisions, you want to argue back with them, you want to defend yourself and explain, here’s what’s going on, here’s why, this is what I did, da-da-da-da, right? You don’t want them to be upset or they said something to you and you want to fire back at them, it triggers you into fight or flight.

Defensiveness for me really puts me in fight or flight and I will fight. I’m an attacker. I am very good with words. Somebody comes at me, I will want to justify and explain and defend myself, I don’t want to feel like I’m put into a corner or that somebody is presuming to know what I’m thinking, how I’m feeling, why I made my decisions. I will want to get right up in there and pepper them with information or question. This isn’t the best approach. It doesn’t work. I want a more refined approach. I want to have more charisma, compassion, a softness in my approach.

My masculine energy tends to rush in whenever I feel the need to defend myself. Whenever I feel that somebody has said something that puts me on the defense, I will go in to fight. Some people shut down. When somebody says something that’s offensive to them, they might just go into flight mode or, you know, freeze. They just shut right down or they get out of there as soon as possible. Or they fawn, which is they placate you, they kiss up because they don’t want the conflict. All of those are fight or flight responses.

So when you are in the feeling of defensive, I want us to talk about the purpose of it. Defensiveness doesn’t just show up at your door and you’re just, for no reason, you feel offended or for no reason you feel defensive and the need to justify yourself, the need to jade.

I was coaching a client on this and I asked her, I said it sounds to me like when the teacher said that you were being nitpicky, so we were talking about observations, the teacher was like, “Oh, she’s so nitpicky with her observation feedback.” And my client was like, ugh, that feels a little crunchy for me. That doesn’t feel good. I don’t like that.

And the client went into a story about why she was being nitpicky or was, then she started questioning, was she being nitpicky? And I want you to notice something. When somebody says something to you and your gut reaction before anything else is to defend yourself, you feel offended, you wanna defend yourself, pause, first of all, take a breath. But I want you to really stop and think about why we feel defensive.

Let’s say somebody says to you, “You’re very nitpicky in your observations.” And you’re like, “No, I’m not. I have 25 years experience. I know what I’m talking about.” Or “Am I? Am I that nitpicky? I don’t think that I am too nitpicky. Am I too nitpicky? Maybe I am too nitpicky.” Or “No, it’s my job. I’m your boss. I’m not being nitpicky. I’m just telling you what’s right, okay?” So you either get on board or you don’t. Or you justify it with, “well, according to the standards, according to the teaching professional standards, this is what we have to do, right?”

We want to get in there and protect ourselves from being attacked, okay? But the purpose of defensiveness, when you unpeel the layers, defensiveness is a mask. It’s a guard. It’s an armor. You go into fight or flight when you feel offended. Like, hey, that’s not right. You’re wrong about me. That’s not cool. Why do you say that? That doesn’t feel good. It’s like, oh, emotionally, I’m being attacked. This doesn’t feel good to me. The defensiveness is an armor trying to protect you.

So when you’re defensive, when you’re feeling defensive and you’re feeling offended, notice that you have an urge to protect. But I want to ask you what you’re protecting yourself from. When you think about somebody who says something to you and you find it offensive, or you find it attacking, and you feel the need to go on the defense, what’s really happening is that it’s trying to mask another emotion. So frustration is the surface level emotion. And then below the surface is another emotion that you don’t want to feel.

So you don’t want them to be right because that might mean, oh I feel incompetent, incapable, insufficient, I’m not doing this right, I don’t have the skill set. Then we get into identity issues. And most of the feelings that we feel really are an identity issue at the very end of the day. I will just tell you that. That is why we do so much work in EPC about identity.

And when you lack confidence or you feel like imposter syndrome where you’re like, everyone’s going to find out someday that I’m actually not really good or I don’t really know what I’m doing. I’m just faking it till I make it for the rest of my life. Right?

When we don’t feel like we have leadership skills, we doubt ourselves, we doubt our decisions, or we question what we should do, we feel very antsy about something. Usually what happens is we go from one end of the pendulum to the other, where you might come in super sweet, super nice. You just want everybody to like you. You’re a brand new leader. And you get a year of that, right? Because everybody’s given you a year to fill you out.

But they don’t want nice. They don’t want a friend. They want a boss. They want a leader. They want someone who has structure. So you start with being too nice, too gooey sweet, there’s no systems, there’s no boundaries. It’s just like with kids, right? With no structure, no boundaries, no sets of standards, don’t hold anybody accountable for anything because you don’t want anybody to be upset or offended or hurt.

Over there, when you’re on that side of town, on that side of the fence, you get people talking about you that, like, she doesn’t have any boundaries, she doesn’t hold anybody accountable. So the people who are doing their job aren’t happy with you because you’re not holding everybody equally accountable. And the people who are loving this approach, they are loving the approach because they’re getting away with something or they aren’t being asked to be at their highest level. They’re like, “Oh, this feels comfortable. This was easy. This was good. I like her. She’s nice.”

Well, you’re nice until you get feedback and they’re like, well, you need to talk to this teacher and we need to get third grade scores up and fourth grade math doesn’t look that great. Or if you’re in middle or high school, this department’s not working well together. You’ve got to come in and work with them.

Now all of a sudden, you feel like you don’t have any authority because you’ve been their friend. Just like parenting, or it’s just like teaching. Too, too nice doesn’t get results. But what happens is, in reaction to that, we swing to the other side, or we come in hot. Now we’re gonna be strict or we’re gonna follow the standards and everybody’s gonna be held accountable.

And when we do that big swing, people are like, what’s going on? And you’re like, well over here I was being so nice because I didn’t want to have to get defensive. I didn’t want to have to be feel offended at all. So I’m just gonna be super nice. Or over here, I’m going to be really firm, really strict. And now I’ve got to come down hard. Right.

And when you think about what that looks and feels like, it means like I’ve got to be more direct. I’ve got to be more consistent. I’ve got to have clear communication. I’ve got to write people up. And that feels very hard.

Notice, like, what feels hard? What feels easy? And when teachers are giving you feedback, where do you feel yourself feeling resistant or defensive or offended. What’s happening within that is there’s a little bit of part of that feedback that doesn’t feel good to you. Why? Because you believe it too.

When someone says to you like, “Man, you seem really discombobulated this week. Are you okay?” And you’re scrambling all over and you’re thinking, “Yeah, I am such a hot mess.” And you’re like, “No, I’m fine. I’m just really busy this week. Sorry.” And then you walk away and you sink down. You’re like, yeah, because I am a hot mess. I don’t have my calendar under control. I haven’t planned. I don’t have time for anything. I’m putting out fires. I’m a big mess.

Somebody’s gonna find out that I don’t know what I’m doing and then I’ll be exposed and then I’ll get fired. Right? We go to these extremes. But I want you to notice when feedback feels offensive and the purpose of defensiveness is that it’s trying to let you know, hey, there’s a part of you that believes this too, and that feels too painful to acknowledge, so we just attack back, or we just avoid it. We go into fight or flight, we attack or we avoid. We shut down or we just turn away, we dismiss it, we avoid it at all costs.

So go below the surface of defensiveness. Defensiveness is there as an invitation to introspect, to sit down and to say, why am I so defensive right now? What about this comment did not feel good to me? Is it because it’s wrong? What they said was not accurate and I want to tell them otherwise? In that case, we have to learn how to expand our capacity to let people be wrong about us because they can’t possibly know us. They can’t possibly know everything about us. They can’t know every detail that you know when you made that decision. So we have to allow people to be wrong without being defensive all the time.

So is what they said inaccurate and that’s why you feel defensive? Is what they said painful because maybe I believe it’s true and that doesn’t feel good? But we want to explore is that you’re believing it’s true, they’re saying it’s true, they’re really just mirroring to you what you believe about yourself, but is it actually true? Are you really a hot mess? Or was it just an exceptionally wild week?

Do you actually know how to sit down and plan? Of course you do. You wouldn’t be in education if you didn’t know how to plan and prepare and be ready and have a schedule and follow a calendar. You wouldn’t have made it this far. So I know you have the skill. Then it comes down to why am I not getting to it? Or what seems to be feeling off this week? Or maybe I feel off every week. Why is that?

And defensiveness is simply an invitation to ask ourself, why am I feeling defensive? What aspect of this? Get very specific with yourself. Why am I feeling defensive? Is it because it’s wrong?

And I wanted to correct this. Is there a misunderstanding? Is it because I believe it’s true and I’m offended, but deep inside I feel like embarrassed or intimidated or I’m self-doubting or I lack confidence or I’m afraid I don’t have the skill set and I don’t want people to know? Is it because it was rude, disrespectful, which are opinions, right?

When someone says, “Hey, did you gain weight? You look a little fuller than you did last time I saw you.” You might be like, that was totally rude. You’re going to be defensive. “No, I haven’t gained weight.” Or, “Yes, I have. So what’s it to you?” Do you see what I’m saying? Versus, are we willing to let people like, “Wow, that’s an interesting comment. Why did you make that comment?” Or, “That didn’t feel good for me.” Being honest with the feedback versus getting defensive about it.

So someone says something to you that feels offensive and rude, whether it’s true or not true, you might be feeling bad if you’ve gained weight or not, or maybe you haven’t gained weight, so you’re like, “No I haven’t,” and you want to defend. Or, “Yeah I have,” and I feel terrible inside and now you’ve just pointed it out making it feel worse. Versus keeping it neutral and being like, “Nope.” Or, “That’s an interesting comment,” just not responding one way or the other.

But notice, when you feel defensive, there’s something going on inside of you. Maybe it’s wrong and you feel the need to defend yourself and to correct them, and then you have to play that out, correcting them, what’s the outcome of that? Is it just for me to feel better, to feel justified? Or is it something they said that feels true for you, and if it does, we want to explore that.

Or if it’s something they did that, in your opinion, was out of line or disrespectful or rude, inappropriate, you want to be able to call it out, but not from defensiveness. You want to clean up any offensiveness in your body and say, when someone makes a comment like that, why did you feel offended? And get yourself to a neutral space so that you can say, “Hey, I didn’t appreciate the question.”

Or, “Hey, that really kind of stung when you said that,” or simply, “Why would you ask that?” Because then you’re just saying, here’s who I am genuinely. That hurt my feelings, or I’m feeling this way. Why would you say that? Or, “I just want to let you know that bothered me, and I’m curious to know why you asked it.” Do you see what happens? You’re not on the defense. You’re asking them and now they have to justify, explain, defend, argue their reasons. Now they’re on the hot seat for having said the thing. You see the difference?

Versus you lashing at them, you stay in neutral energy, take a breath, take a moment. If you have to take some time away, do that too. If somebody says something rude to you and you can’t quite process it in real time, that’s okay. You can go away, process it, and come back when you’re calm and ready. But flying off the handle and going into JADE mode, which is justify, argue, defend, explain, that usually doesn’t have a net positive outcome for you or for them or for the relationship.

Remember, it’s for us, for them, for the greater good. We want to make sure that our communications and our conversations aren’t held in defensiveness because now you’ve got two people who are both in fight-or-flight and that’s just gonna get into gridlock. Everyone wants to be right, everybody wants to feel better, and they think they need you to tell them they’re right or for you to say you’re sorry or for you to do something for them to feel better. Now we’ve got our steer cycles all mixed together.

We want to separate them back out, stay in our own lane, handle our own emotions first, check in with ourselves. Emotions are just an indicator that we need to check in with ourselves. What am I feeling and why? And then you’ll see there’s some probably emotions under the surface. That’s the purpose of defensiveness is to say, “Hey, hey, Angela, FYI, you’re feeling a little defensive right now. We need to tune in because there’s actually something going on below the surface here.” And then you can get to the heart of the matter and clarify for yourself why you’re feeling offended. Was it just out of alignment?

Was it they just didn’t know what was going on? Or they just don’t have privy to the information? You can let that go. Your teachers will never understand what it’s like to be a principal until they’re actually a principal.

It’s like having your own children. People who tell people how to parent without being a parent, you understand that, right? It’s like this person telling you how to do your job but they’ve never done it. It’s like, that’s interesting, but we get defensive about it.

Well, you don’t know how hard this is. You don’t know how busy I am. You don’t need to do that. They don’t understand it. They can’t understand it. You have to have perspective to see that they don’t have perspective.

So try this. See how it works. Let me know. Come on into EPC. I teach you this. I will walk you through it because there’s one thing to understand it intellectually to know the what. But the how is where it’s hard. It can feel hard. It’s emotionally hard. It’s mentally challenging, but you’re expanding and you’re growing and you’re transforming into the most beautiful empowered leader when you do this work.

Come on into EPC. I’ll see you there. Take good care. Have a great 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.

Enjoy The Show?

/0 Comments/by

Ep #367: Take Shoulds off the Table

The Empowered Principal® Podcast Angela Kelly | Take Shoulds off the Table

Can you believe it’s already 2025? I’m thrilled to kick off this epic year with some exciting personal news that I’ve been dying to share with you. As you listen to this episode, I have just relocated to Nashville, Tennessee to be closer to my son Alex. It’s a big change, but one I’m embracing wholeheartedly.

The last few years have brought significant shifts in my personal life, and I’m so grateful to have had the support of coaching to navigate the intense emotions and challenges that came with it. Coaching has been an absolute game-changer for me, allowing me to rewrite the script, find joy amidst the pain, and come out stronger on the other side.

In this episode, I also dive into the power of shifting our focus from trying to change people to looking at the systems in place. When we take the “shoulds” off the table and instead get curious about what is actually happening and why, we open the door to more effective problem-solving and solutions. It’s a mindset shift that can transform the way we lead and support our teams.

 

Sign up for the Mid-Year Reboot series here!

The Empowered Principal® Collaborative is my latest offer for aspiring and current school leaders who want to create exceptional impact and enjoy the school leadership experience. Join us today to become a member of the only certified life and leadership coaching program for school leaders in the country by clicking here.

 

What You’ll Learn From this Episode:

  • How coaching has been a lifeline for me during challenging personal times.
  • The transformative power of coaching for school leaders and their teams.
  • Why trying to convince or control others is ineffective and what to do instead.
  • How to shift from focusing on changing people to examining systems.
  • The problem with having a “mental manual” of how everyone should behave.
  • How to neutralize frustration by taking the “shoulds” off the table and getting curious.

 

Listen to the Full Episode:

 

Featured on the Show:

Full Episode Transcript:

Hello empowered principals. Welcome to episode 367. 

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 New Year. Happy 2025. Can you believe it? 2025. It’s going to be an epic year. I can feel it in my bones. I am so freaking excited about 2025, and I’ve got some exciting personal news to share with you that I’ve been dying to tell you all, but I wanted to wait to make sure it was actually going to happen. So I’m recording this right before Thanksgiving, so I am being premature in my announcement, But by the time you hear this, it will all have taken place. Are you ready for it? Here we go.

As you’re listening to this podcast, in January of 2025, I have just relocated to Nashville, Tennessee. I can’t believe I’m saying this out loud. So as I’m saying this, it feels weird because I’m not leaving for two more weeks. But by the time you hear this, I will have already relocated to Nashville, Tennessee. And there is such a big story behind this, one that’s very personal, it’s very intimate, it’s still a little bit raw, had a lot of family changes and situations come up over the last few years, and I am now single, and I have decided that I want to be closer to my son. My son, Alex, I have one son, his name is Alex, he’s 25 years old. He relocated from LA to Nashville in 2023, so he’s been there for a year and a half now, and he loves it there.

I don’t know that it’s his forever home, but it’s a for now place. It’s a wonderful place. I have visited many times. He has friends there. He’s got a job there. He wanted a change of pace. He wanted to experience something outside of California before he settled down. California was all he knew. He was actually born in Minnesota, but when he was three months old, we moved back to California. We had a two-year stint in Minnesota between living in California.

Anyway, he was born in Minnesota, but we moved out here when he was three months old. So he’s a California boy through and through. And we love it out here. I love California, but I also love exploring and trying new places and being in different parts of the world with different kinds of people with different experiences, different landscapes, cuisines, weather, I don’t know, mindsets. And I just think it’s going to be a fun adventure.

So I’m definitely committing to one year in Nashville. And for all of my coaching friends who live near the East Coast, I can’t wait to get together with all of you, my friends and family. I have friends and family on the East Coast. I have friends and family in the Midwest. So I’m just thrilled for this new chapter of my life, for the adventures that are to come, the memories I’m going to create. And here’s what’s so fascinating, and can I just tell you something? I will share more about my personal story as I am healing and moving forward, but one of the things I want to offer to you is I don’t feel I could have gone through what I went through without coaching. I don’t know how I would have gone through it.

I’m sure I would have gone through it, but the ability to have a coach to talk through the intensity of emotions and thoughts and the dysregulation in my nervous system at chronic levels, it was for months upon months upon months to be able to navigate that and to regulate myself and to still wake up in the morning, find joy in the day, to rewrite the script of the things that unfolded in my life and to make them a plot twist and to make them not mean anything about me or anything about anybody else, but to embrace that plot twist and see it as an opportunity, see it as the path I was always meant to take, and to show up with so much gratitude even in the midst of grief and pain and loss and suffering. I cannot imagine.

Sorry guys, I’m getting a little emotional here. I’m just going to share that raw with you, but I cannot imagine life without a coach, life without someone to process incredibly painful feelings and to come out on the other side, stronger, wiser, more conditioned, my capacity to handle emotion, my capacity to get up and live my life, no matter what comes my way. I am, I feel like a superhero coming through this. I am so proud of myself. I am so grateful for my coach. I am so honored and I’m so humbled by the love that has poured out from family and friends. As I enter into this new phase of my life, and I just want to share it with all of you because I know there are thousands of you listening to this podcast every single week. You know my voice, you know my story, I am as transparent as I can be.

And I am so honored to share this with you because it really is a spectacular, exciting change in my life. And I will tell you what’s even greater than all of that. Anytime I go through a major upgrade, up-level transformation in my life, it transforms and expands my capacity to coach. What’s happening in EPC this year is phenomenal. I have just upleveled in a way that’s extraordinary. And the people that are in the Empowered Principle Collaborative EPC, they are extraordinary. They are getting results. I had somebody just the other day say to me, Angela, I am so grateful that I found you when I did. I wish I had found you five years ago, but I’m grateful that I’m here now. I’m not going anywhere. We’re just getting started. People are so grateful to have a group where they can come in and be coached. There’s also one-on-one sessions for the EPC clients so they can work with me one-on-one and in the group. That’s a bonus that I added. And it’s magic. It’s pure magic.

So I am so grateful to have had coaching throughout my life. I will never not have a coach. And I’m so grateful to be a coach because I see the relief it provides people, the transformations that it brings to people. There’s goals and accomplishments and yes we accomplish goals we achieve great things but it’s about how it feels it’s about getting through the hard times with grace and with skill and being able to navigate the toughest of situations and to condition yourself to be able to handle them and to regulate your nervous system and to come out on top to be so much stronger than you ever thought you could be. It’s brilliant.

And the beautiful part about this is that the way that you feel about yourself, the confidence you gain, the pride you have in how you handle yourself, being the most emotionally mature person in that room at all times, being able to handle yourself, being able to communicate respectfully and concisely and articulate exactly what it is that you need and that you want and to be able to let yourself have those emotional meltdowns and get that energy out. It’s just so remarkable and if there’s any wish I could give to the world, if I could hand out presents, I would give everyone the gift of coaching. There’s nothing else like it in the world.

For those of you who are listening and you’ve never tried coaching, this is your opportunity to jump into EPC. I open the doors mid-year, so throughout the month of January you can jump in mid-year. You start in January, you’re going to get a full 12 months when you sign up. You get access to all of my content, all of my coaching, all of my past trainings, past workshops, the workbooks I’ve created, the resources that I’ve created for school leaders. You get everything. It’s only $19.97, under $2,000 for the entire year, for the entire membership, for weekly coaching, for one-on-one coaching, for all of the resources. And I just feel like it’s such a value. If I were to price it on the market, I think it would be ten times its value. But I want it to be accessible to everybody. I want everyone who feels compelled to have a coach to come on into EPC and just experience the magic of coaching.

And I promise you, we’re going to do a session with the clients of EPC, because I know I’m the coach, of course, but you can take it from them. They are creating transformations, and I can’t wait for you to hear what they have to say about the magic that has been created in their own lives, their own empowerment, them stepping into a version of themselves that they are so proud of and that they feel capable of regulating in any circumstance. It’s spectacular. Okay, so that’s what’s going on with me.

As you hear this, I’m in Nashville with my son. We’re living the dream, having so much fun. EPC is popping. The doors are open. Come on in. I am going to be giving 10x to the empowered principal world this year. So watch out. I’m bringing it this year. So this is the perfect time to get in. Okay? I want to shift gears. Actually, not even shifting gears. This is right in alignment with what I’m talking about. I was coaching a client the other day and the conversation started off with her not feeling great about a comment that a teacher leader made.

There was some teacher leaders going to a conference and these teacher leaders were expected to go to the conference and learn all the things and then come back and teach all the people and change the world. The teachers made a comment to the principal saying like, I’m nervous about this. I think we have some teachers on our staff that they’re not pulling their weight or they’re not going to do this thing that we have to come back and teach. And I want you to think about this for a second. As leaders, we know the pressure of being a leader and feeling like we have to be expected to convince, coerce, inspire people into action. We have to figure out how to do that.

So we try to convince them and we try to, you know, sell them hard on why they should change and create buy-in. And that feels difficult to do because when we’re coming at it with the energy of I need to convince this person, I need to manipulate them, I need to control their thoughts and feelings and actions. It doesn’t land for people. Nobody wants to be controlled or convinced or to be sold to something that they don’t believe in, okay?

We love to buy into things that we believe. We love to buy things we want. We love to buy things that we believe are the best thing for us, for the kids. We love that part. We don’t love it when somebody is selling us something where we don’t think is the right thing, okay? So, I want you to think about the pressure that school leaders are under to create actual leadership where people are following their lead, like they are stepping into the vision that you’ve created and developed for your school. They are sold into that mission. They are on the same team when everybody’s flowing. That it’s a masterpiece. It’s a work of art. It’s a skill set that’s developed over the course of time within yourself as a leader.

So when your teacher leaders are nervous because they’re going off to a conference and then they’re being expected to lead the teachers, they know the teachers well. They know who tends to lean into resistance and who tends to jump on board and do the things. There’s a lot of pressure on them. So they’re nervous because they’re feeling that intensity of leadership, what it feels like to need to be a leader and to now be expected to have people follow their lead. So as I was coaching with this client, we started shifting the conversation from focusing on changing people to focusing on systems that are working versus systems that are not. So instead of seeing the humans on campus as being faulty, as being the ones needed to be changed. We look at systems.

What’s working systematically? What’s a little crunchy? What needs to be adjusted? What do we think will make this part that’s not working so great feel better for kids, feel better for us, feel better for the school? We look at systems versus people. People aren’t the fault. People are people. People are human. Humans have flaws, but they’re not faulty. They don’t need to be changed and fixed or reprogrammed, programmed, right? We want to look at the systems in place, okay?

So, when you’re thinking about leadership and you’re working with people, the human brain will say things like this, well, teachers should do it this way, or we should be getting on board, or we should be doing this, or we should be doing that. Kids should be getting into class, wanting to come to school, sitting down perfectly, listening to teacher, doing their homework, should, should, should, should, should. Any time a teacher or a student doesn’t follow the shoulds, I call this a mental manual. We have this mental handbook of how children should behave, how teachers should behave, how paraprofessionals should behave, how office staff should behave, how our counselors, nurses, bus drivers, lunch duty, yard duty. We have a manual for how everybody should do things and how we should do things. And then when people don’t do the shoulds, there’s a gap between what they’re doing and what they should be doing or shouldn’t.

Kids shouldn’t be disrespectful. Kids shouldn’t get out of their seats. Kids shouldn’t, whatever, touch each other. We have all of these shoulds and shouldn’ts. Now, I’m not saying, no, don’t have rules. I’m not saying we don’t want to have a set of standards and practices and boundaries and consequences for non-appropriate behavior. What I’m saying is when there is a teacher that we’re labeling as resistant or that somebody is not behaving in the way that we would like them to, our brain is like, well, they should do this. They shouldn’t do that. Okay. I’m going to speak to this in terms of students, because I think it’s easiest to wrap your head around it. 

When you have a child in a classroom and they are not behaving in the way the teacher wants them to behave, they’re not in alignment with the rest of the class. Let’s say we have one student who’s dysregulated, maybe to an extreme measure, maybe they’re never sitting down or they’re wandering around or they’re touching things that they shouldn’t be touching, right? And they’re not behaving in a way they should. We can sit down as teachers and principals and parents and say, look, here’s what should be happening, but they’re not doing that.

Instead of putting all the shoulds on the table and all the shouldn’ts on the table and then discussing what’s not happening, basically like here’s what should be happening and here’s what shouldn’t be happening but here’s what is happening, I invite you to take all of the shoulds and wipe them off the table. Here’s why. 

When you think that a teacher or a student should be doing something but they’re not, how do you feel? You’re very frustrated. You get upset. It’s frustrating, you might be angry, you might be discouraged, you might be disappointed, but you’re going to feel a negative emotion. And now you are dysregulated. When you think this should be happening, this shouldn’t be happening, you’re going to feel very frustrated, angry, upset, something along those lines. But if you take all the shoulds off the table and you’re like, what is happening? Not what should be happening or what shouldn’t be happening, but what is happening? So when you have a student or a staff member and you’re thinking to yourself, they should be doing this or they shouldn’t be doing this, we wipe all of those shoulds off the table and all of those shouldn’ts and we just say, what is? What is happening?

Well, what’s happening is the student is getting up out of the desk and walking around the classroom when the teacher is teaching or the students are supposed to be working. So student A is sitting, student B is sitting, student C is sitting, student D, E, F, G, sitting. Student Z is walking around. Oh, okay. When they shouldn’t or they should, when those are gone, we’re just talking about what is, now you’ve neutralized it. Student is getting up out of chair. Then the question becomes why? We remove all of our frustration when we take away the shoulds and shouldn’ts and we look at what’s happening, why it’s happening, what we speculate might be happening, and here’s what you’re doing.

You’re getting your emotional regulation system neutralized so that you can problem-solve by looking at the specific details of what the student’s doing, why they might be doing it. We’re studying the student’s steer cycle. For every behavior, there is a reason. We might not understand the reason, we might not like the reason, we might not know the reason, but there is a reason in a student’s mind. When they get up and they wander about class, they have a thought, they have an emotional energy in their body that compels them to get up and move around. Instead of saying you should do this and you shouldn’t do that. Why? Because I said so or because that’s the way it should be or because the other kids are because the teacher’s frustrated, right? You see where this is going.

The kid has no interest because they’re listening to their own internal compass and their body is telling them to move about the cabin. They’re moving about. They feel compelled to do it. There’s an energy in that body that says, move right now. I can’t sit here. I don’t want to do this work, or I feel completely restless right now, or I don’t understand what the person’s saying, or I don’t speak this language, or I don’t know how to write this down. We don’t know, but we want to study it, not from a place of should or shouldn’t, but from a place of what is.

And what I have found to be true is that if we stop and notice teachers that are resistant, we should say, well, they shouldn’t be resistant. No, but why are they resistant? Why might they be resistant? What do we speculate? We can’t know unless we ask them directly, but it changes how you feel. You shift from being frustrated, mad, and upset, and what am I going to do about this, and how am I going to fix this teacher who’s so resistant, into why might they be resistant? Well, resistance is usually in armor, and I can do a whole podcast on resistance being in armor, but If we take off the shoulds and shouldn’ts, all of a sudden you have a teacher who, well, they are receiving feedback and not applying it, or they are asking for input, but then they’re rejecting it.

You know how people will say, like, I need help with this, and then you give them five ideas, and they’re like, yeah, but that, oh, I tried that, but yes, but, yes, but, yes, but, you might have that. Why might somebody be doing that? Then you’re into problem-solving mode. The solutions are in the specifics. Our brain wants to go into ambiguity. They should be doing this, but they’re not. But we don’t, well, why? Let’s speculate, let’s wonder, let’s ponder, let’s contemplate this. Take the shoulds off the table, focus on what is, and ask why, contemplate that, and dig deep into the specifics. you will find yourself much less in frustration and much more into curiosity, which brings you to solutions.

Take the shoulds off the table. Happy New Year. I love you all so much. If you live near Nashville, let me know. Let’s meet up. I would love to meet you in person. Have an amazing 2025. Come on into EPC while the doors are open. You will not regret it one minute. It’s a blast, we have so much fun, and you feel better about yourself, about your staff, your students, and your school. Come on in. Happy 2025. I’ll talk to y’all next week. Take care. 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.

Enjoy The Show?

/0 Comments/by

Ep #366: The Solution Cycle (Back to Basics)

The Empowered Principal® Podcast Angela Kelly | The Solution Cycle (Back to Basics)

Do you ever feel like you’re spinning your wheels as a school leader, stuck in an endless cycle of overwhelm and doubt? What if I told you that the key to breaking free and achieving your goals lies in mastering the art of solution-oriented thinking?

In this powerful episode, I share the game-changing concept of “The Solution Cycle” – a framework that has transformed the way I approach leadership challenges. By shifting your mindset and focusing on generating solutions rather than dwelling on problems, you can tap into a newfound sense of clarity, confidence, and momentum.

Join me this week as I walk you through the steps of The Solution Cycle and reveal how this approach can help you overcome any obstacle, inspire your team, and create lasting impact in your school.

 

Sign up for the Mid-Year Reboot series here!

The Empowered Principal® Collaborative is my latest offer for aspiring and current school leaders who want to create exceptional impact and enjoy the school leadership experience. Join us today to become a member of the only certified life and leadership coaching program for school leaders in the country by clicking here.

 

What You’ll Learn From this Episode:

  • Why coaching is the ultimate solution to any leadership problem you face.
  • How to cultivate a self-concept that empowers you to generate solutions effortlessly.
  • The crucial connection between your thoughts, emotions, and actions as a leader.
  • How to break free from the overwhelm cycle and step into the solution cycle.
  • The power of believing in your own bandwidth and resourcefulness.
  • Why asking for help is a sign of strength, not weakness, as a school leader.

 

Listen to the Full Episode:

 

Featured on the Show:

Full Episode Transcript:

Hello empowered principals. Welcome to episode 366. 

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. 

Hello, my empowered principals. Welcome to the last show of 2024. This is a replay called The Solution Cycle. It was one of my most requested and favorite podcast episodes. We’re replaying it here during the holiday season and the break so that you can catch up on all of the goodness. 

Be sure to sign up for the Mid-Year Reboot Series, which is going to be held the first week after the break in January, and EPC begins January 8th. Doors are open now. Get signed up. Come on into EPC. Make this the most epic and empowered school year ever. Come on in. It’s not too late. Join EPC. Mid-Year Reboot. Let’s go. Enjoy the show. 

What an amazing year it has been. I just am going to sing my clients praises. I’m going to celebrate them. I have been reflecting on this year, and how much I have loved, loved my clients, and how much I love the results they are creating for themselves and their schools. 

My clients this year are fire. They are smart and innovative. They’re just go-getters. They have been pushing the boundaries of school leadership in a very, very good way. They’re not just accepting the status quo. They’re not just taking the job and well, I guess this is how it is. I guess this is what it’s supposed to be. This is how it’s always been done. 

They’re finding ways to over deliver results in less time, manage people in a way that’s honest and compassionate. They’re leveraging resources in ways that no one has thought of before, and they’re differentiating the difference between hustle and burn out versus working hard and loving it. 

For those of you who have been interested in coaching and you’re desiring to have a coach and you’re ready to coach and you want to coach, but you’re having the thought that you can’t right now or you shouldn’t invest coaching mid-year. Like if you’re thinking, well, it’s the middle of the year. Why sign up now?

Let me tell you something, it is the best time to start coaching. Here’s why. You have six months left of this current school year. Six months. That is six months to create an impact with this year’s staff and students, your current staff, your current set of students, families. You have six more months with them. That’s a lot of time. 

Because the program is a year long, you still get six more months to plan and prepare and kick off the next school year. So people who sign up now, in December and in January, you get the best of both. You get like a double bang for your buck because you are impacting this year and you’re impacting next year. You literally get two years’ worth of value and impact in the 12 months of coaching time that we have together. 

You get to apply everything that you learn to this year’s group of kids, and you have six more months with next year’s group of kids. You have this work for the remainder of your career. 

Listen, I have to tell you guys this stat. I was looking up the percentage of my clients who sign up for a second year, a third year, fourth year. I have an 89% return rate for clients. 89% of my clients sign up multiple years because of the impact that they are creating through coaching. So what this means for you, as a listener who wants to be a client of the Empowered Principal® coaching program is that I am having less and less space available because my former clients are still clients, and they’re filling up the spots.

So listen up. If you’ve been interested but you haven’t made the decision, now is the time. You get 12 months of coaching. You’re going to impact two years’ worth of students in a one season coaching program. So starting mid-year is the best time. When you sign up, you’re also going to get all of my content, all of my resources. 

If you are considering coaching and you want to create impact, and you want to love your job, love your life, have work-life balance, get more done in less time, and really innovate and reinvent the entire experience of education. That’s what this program is about. Okay. 

So talk with your partner or with your spouse. Plan on having a standing 30 minute meeting with me every single week. We talk on the phone. You don’t have to be Zoom ready. I just call you at the same time, the same day, every single week. We have a 30 minute power coaching session. You will apply that coaching for the week, and you come back and we solve another problem. 

Sometimes I get through two and three problems in 30 minutes with my clients. That’s how fast we coach. That’s how fast we problem solve. It’s 30 minutes of your week. You can handle that you have the time. If you don’t believe you have the time, that’s the very first thing we coach on. I teach you how to create more time for yourself. 

So do what you need to do. Get your finances in order or talk to your spouse or your partner. Make a decision that you’re committed, you’re all in, you’re ready to go. Plan on a 30 minute call with me. So get your time schedule in order. I have limited numbers, but I will make it work for you. I promise. I always have been able to make it work. It’s only 30 minutes a week. So make the decision, schedule your consult. Let’s get you on the calendar and let’s go.

Okay, listen up. I am telling you that these life coaching tools are simply leadership tools. So I don’t want you to be freaked out by the term life coaching. It’s simply leadership coaching, right. How you lead your school is how you lead life, and how you lead life is how you lead school. They’re just tools. They are tools that help you implement and speed up your success and the success of your school.

These are tools to help you understand how you and those you lead make decisions. It helps you understand why people behave the way they do. It helps you understand how to hold space for them. It helps you understand how to inspire people into your vision, right? These are tools and strategies that help you leverage everything you need to be successful as a school leader. 

I honestly feel like I have won the lottery when it comes to life coaching and learning about coaching and having a coach myself. My clients all say the same thing to me. Every time I get off the phone with them, they’re saying, “I’m so glad we talked. I feel so much better. I’m clear on what to do.” So they usually walk away either feeling much better about a situation. They’re calmer and more relaxed. They feel more certain and confident about the next steps they need to take. Or they’re feeling very clear about what they need to process or what they’re in the middle of processing. 

So I say you’re in the process of processing some type of thought or situation or emotion that they’re feeling. So when we coach, we problem solve. We create clarity. You get to kind of vent out your frustrations, and then we come up with a plan. If you’re knocking your head on the wall to try and come up with a solution, I will help you with that. Sometimes we just simply celebrate for 30 minutes because there’s so many things going well. 

We work on your three month plan. We work on your life and leadership legacy plan. We do it all. We get your time under control. We help leverage all the resources you have available to you. I help you work with adult individuals. Working with humans is not easy. I help you do that, right. 

So even on the toughest of days, what I see in my clients is that they leave the call understanding why they feel the way they do, and how to hold space for themselves to be human, to make mistakes, to experience a failure and disappointment and not make it mean that they’re not good. They’re not cut out to be a leader, all of that business, right. 

I like to tell my clients that I am the pioneer of life coaching. I consider myself as the pioneer life coach for school leaders. I have embodied that self-concept. I really do believe I am one of the first of my kind to bring the tools of life coaching to education. I’m one of the very first life coaches to ever apply this work directly into my own school leadership position, but I specifically work with principals. 

Now as my work is becoming more mainstream, I do work with district level leaders. I have probably a third of my clients are district level leaders. Some of them are people that I started as principals and they got promoted into district level positions. Other people have just called me when they got into a district level position and hired me as their coach or hired me for professional development. 

So I have to say, though, and this is no disrespect to my district level leaders, I love working with you too. But my heart is with the site leaders because it’s such a challenging position. It’s such a unique position within education. Because the site leader, I call it the ultimate middle manager. Because your responsibilities include working with every level of the district, this community at large, your neighborhood, the parents, teachers, support staff, students, outside agencies, outside programs. 

Then you’ve got your district officials. You’re coaching at your site level. You’re coaching up. You’re talking with the school board. You’re working with the county, the state, the feds, all those folks. You have a lot of management. When it comes to people management, you are managing a lot of humans, a lot of human energy, a lot of human thoughts, a lot of human emotion. 

So what I help you do to thrive as a leader is I help you have a very highly managed mind. Because you must be able to access all of this in order to sustain yourself as a school leader and to feel good about who you are and the progress you’re making even when the results haven’t showed up yet. Okay. 

So you must be able to access your awareness. You have to tune in to what’s going on inside your brain and speculate what’s going on in other people’s brain. You got to tap into how you’re feeling and why you’re feeling this way. You want to observe how your personal and professional values and beliefs impact your decisions and actions. You want to see the connection between those decisions and actions and the results they’re creating. 

If you’re not getting the results that you want, if your intended desires and results are not being met, it’s because there’s a thought error going on or there is an obstacle, a thought obstacle that’s blocking and preventing you from achieving to that next level. Having a coach makes this so much easier because this is very difficult to do on your own. One of the obstacles that I see in school leaders who want to coach but don’t reach out for coaching is they believe that they should be figuring this all out on their own. 

I’m here to tell you absolutely not. You don’t expect kids to come into school and know how to do school without teacher support and guidance. You don’t expect teachers, brand new ones, to come in and be expert teachers and know how to do everything their first year. So why would you, in a school leadership position, magically now need to be perfect and know everything and be able to figure it all on your own. That’s not how this works. 

We are in the business of learning, and learning is about learning from others. Coaching is learning. Coaching is leading. It’s learning how to lead. To lead yourself so that you can better lead others. 

I want you to stop and think about the past week you’ve had. All the issues you were faced with. The people you met with, the students you interacted with, the teachers you spoke with, the meetings you attended, the projects you were handed to complete, problems that you faced, problems that you solved, problems that you have yet to deal with, right. Our to-do list is usually like a list of problems to solve. 

But I want you to just to hone in on this one week. Notice how this particular week made you feel overall. So if you had to describe how you feel about this past week with one word, or if you’re listening to this on Tuesday because the podcast drops on Tuesday, think about last week. If you had to describe last week with one word, one emotion or one word, what would that word be? Would it be accomplished, proud, determined? Or would it be something like overwhelmed, exhausted, discouraged? 

Take a moment, whatever it is, whether it’s a really good feeling, or more of a negative feeling, and just sit with it. Notice how it buzzes in your body. Notice that when you have an emotion inside of your body, there is an urge. There is an urge to either act or an urge to like embrace and sit with it. So the feel good feels. 

If you had an amazing week last week, and you’re feeling accomplished and productive and proud of yourself and determined and motivated. When you’re feeling all of that, you just you want to sit in embrace that feeling. It feels amazing in your body. Your vibration is really high, right? It’s very pleasing to the body. 

But what if you’ve had a really hard week, a really crappy week, and you’re discouraged, and you’re exhausted, and you’re overwhelmed, and you’re doubting yourself, and you’re wondering if you should quit, or if you’re not cut out to be a leader. Like you’re questioning or doubting yourself. Those feelings, those emotional vibrations in your body, they’re very uncomfortable. The body and the brain’s urge is to get out of that emotion. It’s to distract yourself or to buffer or to talk about something else, think about something else, or physically get up and move. 

When you’re uncomfortable with your emotion, you feel, at least for me, I feel very restless. It’s very uncomfortable to sit with discomfort in the body. My body wants to move and shake it out. Or I just want to like succumb to it and just collapse on the couch or in bed and just be there. So notice the feeling. 

This sounds like it has nothing to do with leadership, but I’m going to tell you it has everything to do with leadership. Because your emotional vibration in your body is what impacts the decisions you make and the actions you take. 

So if you’re feeling really good, notice what your body does. It smiles. You might give yourself a little hug. You might raise your head a little higher. Your body feels very content. Do you celebrate those wins? Like are the actions that you’re taking? You’re going out and celebrating. Maybe you’re cheersing with a toast of champagne or something fun. 

Or maybe you’re feeling the urge to quit, to distract yourself, to take a nap, to buffer with wine or with snacks. Just notice the connection between how you feel and the actions you feel the urge to take. Or the actions you feel the urge not to take, like the inaction. You want to sit with indecision or sit in procrastination because you don’t like how decision making feels or you don’t like how taking the action feels. It goes both ways. 

So whatever your week offered you, I’m sure of this. I’m sure that it offered you some problems. There was some kind of problem to solve, whether it was a big problem or a small problem. One of your jobs as a school leader is to solve problems. Okay? 

So, here’s what I want to offer you. I want you to try this thought on and see how it feels. I believe that coaching is the solution to every problem we face, to any problem, past, present, future. I truly believe this in my entire body. Because I’ve just seen too much evidence of it being true to not believe it. I literally can’t unsee it. I can’t not believe it anymore. 

Here’s why. The title of this podcast is called the solution cycle. I want you to stop and think about what a solution is. What is a solution? The easiest answer that comes to mind, it’s the answer to a problem, right? It solves a problem. 

So where do solutions come from? When you think about where does a solution come from? What is a solution? Our brain is what generates solutions. Solutions are ideas, new ideas, different ideas, creative ideas, innovative ideas. Ideas are just thoughts. An idea is a sentence that runs through your head. Thoughts create solutions. 

What we spend time thinking about impacts the solutions we generate. What we believe is possible, or impossible, determines the level of solution we are able to offer our schools. Think about this. Solutions are simply sentences in our brain. They are ideas, they are thoughts. We all have thoughts, which means we all can generate solutions. 

The way to any solution is a thought. We have to have a new idea or have a different way of thinking that generates a different approach, that generates a different set of actions, that generates a different result. 

I want to ask you this, if you woke up each morning, and you really believed this about yourself, I have the bandwidth to work hard achieving my goals at school and take care of business at home and have plenty of time for fun, rest, and recovery. What if you believed you had the bandwidth to live your full life, your professional life, your personal life, and your interpersonal life? 

What if you had the bandwidth to do that all? If you woke up and thought I have plenty of time and energy to take care of myself, to take care of my family and friends and to take care of my school. I have the bandwidth. I have the capacity to do all that I want to do. How would it feel to wake up every day with that thought?

These are some of the sentences that I tell myself every morning. That I have the bandwidth professionally and personally and interpersonally. That I have all the resources I need available to me to solve any problem that comes my way.

Because the truth is what solves problems are solutions, and solutions are simply thoughts, ideas, sentences in our brain. I have sentences in my brain. So I have to be aware of them because sometimes solutions come and go. I’m not aware. I didn’t catch it the first time. I have to think about it again. Okay. 

I can ask for help to solve problems and achieve my goals faster if I ask for help. This was a huge thought for me to lean into. Because as a school leader, I was told that it was my job to figure things out on my own. That I shouldn’t be burdening district level management with my questions and my problems. 

Now, I had some amazing people up at district office who did want to take time to mentor me and coach me and guide me. Thank goodness for those lovely humans. A special shout out to my friend Cathy who was a friend through and through throughout my years of school leadership. But we really are told not to ask for help. 

Because if you think about it, the only reason your district level administration is saying don’t ask for help, figure it out on your own, it’s because they are so time constrained. They are so burdened. They are so overwhelmed trying to solve their own set of problems at their level that they don’t feel like they have the bandwidth. But if they had the bandwidth, they would say sure, come on in. Let’s go. Let’s problem solve. We got this. 

I want you to believe that you do have the bandwidth, you have resources available, that it’s acceptable to ask for help. I also love this thought. I have all the time in the world. Doesn’t that thought feels so good? I spend about, I would say, at least 60% of my coaching week is spent on some form of I don’t have enough time, or I don’t have the bandwidth. I coach on those two thoughts. 

But if you really borrowed the thought and tried it on, and just let yourself see how it would feel to wake up and be like ah, I have all the time in the world to solve any problem that comes my way. It doesn’t have to be solved today. I have time. Just say that out loud. I have time. How does it feel? 

I love this one too. I am a master of solutions. Ooh, I get goosebumps just saying it out loud. I am a master of solutions because that means I’m a master of thinking. I am a thought leader. I am a solution leader. I am in a solution cycle. One of my favorites, I am the pioneer of innovation in education. 

I want you to borrow these thoughts. Download the notes, write these down. What if this were your self-concept as a leader? Imagine your impact. Imagine the changes that you could make. Imagine how much fun your work would be each day. 

So try them on, see how they feel. Even if you don’t believe these statements are true about you, maybe you think oh they are true for you or they’re true for somebody else, but not for me. Try them on anyway. What if they were true? Then what would happen? How would you feel? What would you do? What results could you create? 

I want to show you this. If this really were your self-concept, here’s what would also be true. If you believe these things about yourself then your brain would be spending more time thinking about who you are waking up to serve each morning. The more you think about who you’re serving, your students and your teachers, the less time you’re spinning out in confusion and in doubt and uncertainty. 

I want you to think about a classroom teacher who knows they are great teachers. They aren’t spinning out wondering if they’re good enough, or if they should teach or how to teach it. They’re not spinning out in being new and being B minus. They’re not even thinking about that. What they’re spending their time doing and their mental power on is refining and tweaking and individualizing their offer to their kids, their lessons to their students. They’re thinking about how to reach each and every student, and what approach is going to work best for this group of students. 

Teachers who have momentum are future focused. They’re planning for the future. They are certain and they are assured that they are creating results for each and every student every single day. They’re not doubting their ability. They’re not spending their time and energy and brainpower thinking about how they’re not able to do it. They’re thinking about how they are able to do it. 

So they’re not worried when little failures come along the way. They just redirect themselves and stay focused on the prize. They’re focused on their vision for their classroom and their students because they believe that that vision is coming true. They work hard, but they love what they do. 

This means that when you truly believe in yourself, your brain is now open to think about other things, new ideas, new solutions, because it’s not bogged down with spending its energy trying to convince you and sell you on the fact that you’re good enough, you’re worthy enough, you’re smart enough, you’re capable enough. 

Now you’re tapped into a more advanced thought cycle, a more advanced thinking and solution making process. This is when you get out of the overwhelm cycle, and you step into the solution cycle. Here’s what the solution cycle looks like. It’s basically the opposite of the overwhelm cycle. 

So it looks like this. There’s chaos at your school. There’s chaos at every school. I just call it for what it is. It’s a busy place. There’s a lot going on. Sometimes it’s chaotic. I know that word might be a little charged, but there’s a lot of stuff going on, right? There’s chaos at school. It happens. Situations are coming at you left and right. 

Now, a solution cycle goes like this. Because you feel certain about yourself and your self-concept as a leader, the chaos being presented to you isn’t a problem. Because you’re not spinning out worrying about if you’re good enough to be able to figure it out, or if you have solutions or if you know or if you don’t know or what somebody’s going to think. You just believe and trust I’m capable. I have the bandwidth. I can do this. I feel certainty. 

From that certainty you create clarity because you develop your school vision based on your leadership values, which grounds you in belief. You prioritize that vision one thing at a time based on the steps that you believe is the next best step for your school. Clarity is created when you prioritize and constrain down to one step at a time. 

From there, you’re able to make empowered decisions because they’re grounded in what you value, which makes you even more assured that your decisions are the right ones for your school. You don’t spin out in indecision and procrastination because you trust yourself and your decisions. 

The more quickly you’re able to make decisions, the more inspired you feel. The more inspired you feel, the more motivated and determined you become. The more determined you are, the more committed you are to the goals in terms of taking massive action. The more massive action and commitment you exhibit towards those goals, the more certain you are of reaching them. 

Which means you don’t have to hustle and be in a rush to do everything all at once because you trust that reaching the goal is inevitable. That implementing the vision is inevitable, that higher test scores and better adjusted students and more emotionally regulated staff and students is inevitable. That is when you’re able to allow tomorrow’s work to wait until tomorrow. 

As you continue to generate solutions, you feel more adequate as a leader. This solution cycle is what generates new ideas. You go round and round in this high energy high level thinking solution cycle. That’s what perpetuates your momentum and moves your school forward faster and faster and faster. I can’t wait to work with you. Schedule your consult today. Let’s get started. Happy New Year everyone. I will see you in January. Bye. 

Hey empowered principal. If you enjoyed the content in this podcast, I invite you to join the Empowered Principal® Collaborative. It’s my latest offer for aspiring and current school leaders who want to experience exceptional impact and enjoy the school leadership experience. 

Look, you don’t have to overwork and overexert to be a successful school leader. You’ll be mentored weekly and surrounded by supportive like minded colleagues who truly understand what it means to be a school leader. So join us today and become a member of the only certified life and leadership coaching program for school leaders in the country. Just head on over to angelakellycoaching.com/work-with-me to learn more and join. I’ll see you inside of the Empowered Principal® Collaborative. 

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.

 

Enjoy The Show?

/0 Comments/by

Ep #365: Next Level Results (Back to Basics)

The Empowered Principal® Podcast Angela Kelly | Next Level Results (Back to Basics)

Are you ready to take your school from good to great? What if your school is simply ready for the next level rubric – one that goes off the charts of the current rubric and extends you into greatness?

In this episode, I share insights from a recent coaching call with one of my amazing clients who is a first-year principal. Through her example, I explore how to create next level results for your school by focusing on enhancing the quality of the experience for everyone within your community, and it goes beyond more than just academics.

Listen in this week to learn how to create a vision for your school that goes beyond test scores and metrics, and instead focuses on how people think, feel, and engage with the environment, curriculum, and each other. I share how I help one of my clients do this for her school, and invite you to explore what’s possible when you aim for extraordinary results.

 

Sign up for the Mid-Year Reboot series here!

The Empowered Principal® Collaborative is my latest offer for aspiring and current school leaders who want to create exceptional impact and enjoy the school leadership experience. Join us today to become a member of the only certified life and leadership coaching program for school leaders in the country by clicking here.

 

What You’ll Learn From this Episode:

  • Why it’s important to acknowledge and celebrate what’s working well in your school before trying to fix what’s not.
  • How to create next level results that take your school from good to great.
  • The importance of designing your own rubric that goes beyond the current measures of success.
  • Why focusing on how people think, feel, and engage is key to creating a successful school culture.
  • The value of allowing your brain to explore new possibilities and ideas for your school.

 

Listen to the Full Episode:

 

Featured on the Show:

Full Episode Transcript:

Hello empowered principals. Welcome to episode 365. 

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 and happy holiday season. We are here. We are here for the break. You’ve made it. You’ve made it to December. Congratulations. I wish you a restful, peaceful, relaxing, delightful holiday season, holiday break. May all of your wishes come true. 

Please plan out the experience you want to have, make sure it’s balanced with fun and activity and friends and family and self-care and rest and replenishment. This is your time to celebrate the first half of the school year, and we are going to be holding the mid-year reboot for empowered principals this coming January. You need to sign up. Get into EPC. 

We’re going to be talking about how to reflect and celebrate in December, and then we’re going to reboot mid-year to rejuvenate and generate more awareness, clarity, momentum. We’re going to talk about how to overcome obstacles for the second half of the year, get you planned and prepared so you can feel good, you can remain rested, you can stay inspired, and you can lead. We want you leading with empowerment.

Join the mid-year reboot and be sure to register for EPC. The doors are opening in January. You can pre-register here in December. We begin January 8th. The mid-year reboot is the first week coming off of the break in January. You’ll want to be there. The registration links are in the show notes. So be sure to check those out and get registered for both the mid-year reboot and EPC. 

It’s going to be fun, invigorating. We’re going to get planned, prepared, energized, and ready for the second half of the school year. Have an amazing break. Enjoy the replay show. 

I just coached one of my A++ student clients. She’s amazing. She’s wonderful. She is a first year principal. I am telling you, it is magic what’s happening over here with the Empowered Principal® Program and the coaching results that these clients are creating. It is madness. I am so, so excited to talk with you about this today. 

So the topic of today is next level results. We’re going to talk about how to create the next level of results for your school. What I mean by that is going from good to great. So I was coaching a client this week, and she said she was working on her rubric for her school. They were creating their site plan and looking at their goals. 

She said, “Actually, I’m struggling a little bit to find the lack in my school.” She said, “We’re in a really good place. There’s a lot of good things going on, and it’s hard to find the lack.” Which I thought was so fascinating that her brain was struggling to find the lack. 

Now, to be fair, she said to me, “Actually, I’m harder on our school than I maybe should be, or I’m not sure.” This is her first year. So she’s trying to figure out what that is, how to calibrate herself. But she was saying, “I tend to be harder on us. I tend to give us a lower rubric score. But then teachers will say no, we are doing that. This is how we’re doing it, and this is what’s working, and this is where we’ve improved it, and this is how it’s being implemented.” She’s like oh, okay.

Part of being new, right? You don’t know everything that is happening on your campus when it’s your first year, especially when it’s working, right. If it’s not working, you know about it. People are talking about it or it’s obvious to you or somebody is complaining, or you can tell that there’s a system or a protocol that’s not quite working as well as it could. Or if your test scores are not where you want them to be. There are certain things that you can definitely tell when you walk into a school if it’s working well. 

Now, this client of mine, she’s a first year principal. So when she walked into her campus, it actually is a pretty well-oiled machine. A lot of things are working well. She said, “I’m trying to figure out how to write the goals so that I’m not discounting or dismissing what is working and what people are doing well. I don’t want to write a goal that’s already been achieved, and I don’t want to make problems up that aren’t there just to create a goal.”

So she said, “I want to find the middle ground.” She goes, “I keep thinking it’s too harsh. Then the teachers are telling me where it’s good. We definitely have some things to improve upon, but I want to have goals that have high impact.”

As I was listening to her talk, what came up for me as her coach was the brain is always trying to look for the next problem to solve, right? It’s looking for what’s not working so it can be fixed so that it can go on to the next thing that’s not working and fix that. 

Sometimes our brain wants to create a problem where there isn’t one. So I want you thinking about your school. When you’re writing goals for your school, are you writing the goal because you have to have a goal? You’re kind of finding something wrong so that you can spend time fixing it? Or are you acknowledging all of the things that are working and asking yourself to push higher than what the rubric is asking you to do? 

You might have a school that’s functioning really well where kids are happy and teachers are happy and things are performing. You want to be honest with yourself if it’s going well. Don’t create success intolerance by creating problems that aren’t there, or by looking to tweak something that isn’t going to really give you the best bang for the buck. If you have a system that’s working at 95%, 90%/95%, why would you spend all your time and energy for a full school year trying to get it to 98%? Do you see what I’m saying? 

So if something is working, why don’t we create new goals, next level goals? It’s going from good to great. You guys know that book, I think Jim Collins is the author. We’re talking about taking our school from a place that’s working and making it magical, extraordinary. Sometimes the reason we don’t do this is because our brain is like it’s good enough. Things are working. Why would I break it down? Why would I change it? Why would I push people to work harder and think outside the box and be more creative and all of these things? Why do all of that extra work if it’s working? 

Well, option number one is to let it work. Let it work until it breaks and then fix it. Or my recommendation and the approach that I invite my leaders to take is where are things working? Celebrate that, and let’s bring it with us, and then 10X that. Let’s take what we’re doing well and double down on that and go from good to great. 

Sometimes we’ve got to tear down good in order to create great, which is why the brain is going to resist thinking about next level problems, next level solutions, the next level of being extraordinary as a school and as a school leader.

So I was talking with this client. She said, “I always score us a little bit lower because I don’t see us being good enough.” But that’s just the brain telling you it’s safer to stay here and play around with tweaking maybe a 2% or 3% or 5% because it’s a known entity and staying in the middle road. But my personal coach calls that the miserable maybe, when you’re staying in the land of maybe. You don’t want to stay in the middle road. You want to go to the next level. You want to go to the freeway. You want to go to that higher level, okay? 

So let me invite you to think about this. What if your school is simply ready for the next level rubric? One that goes off the charts of the current rubric and extends you into greatness? You can make up your own rubric. If something’s working, don’t piddle around with the old rubric. You can take yourself in your school to the next one. It might not even be out there yet. You might have to invent it to create it for yourselves. The fun part about this is that it gives you greater possibilities to aim for. 

Here’s the thing. You don’t have to wait for everything to be perfect to take your school to the next level, to the next rubric. You get to design that rubric. You can bring your current problems with you and look at that rubric. So when I asked my client what’s coming up for you as I talk about taking your school from good to great, she said, “Well, I can see that we are really good. There’s lots of good things happening, but I wouldn’t identify us as great.”

I said to her there’s where you need to create clarity because that’s just your brain wanting to hold back from acknowledging the truth of what’s working. I think we spend more time holding our school back when things are working and celebrating them and then finding other ways to take us to the next level of greatness versus when something really is broken. When something’s really broken, you know right away we’ve got to fix this. It catches your attention. It just zooms you in, right? You can’t not see it. 

So for many of you out there, you know exactly the top three things you need to be working on in your school, do those things because that work is taking your school to the next level. But if your school is pretty high functioning, what else can you work on that’s not the same thing over and over and over, rinsing and repeating?

So you want to be honest with yourself, but you also don’t want to keep spinning on the same old rubric, shooting for the same results and the same middle of the road efforts. So if you knew you were taking your school beyond the current results of the rubric that is available to you now, if you were going to skyrocket past that rubric, what results would come next? 

I’m not just talking about academic scores and test scores and all of the current ways you’re measuring. Most of us measure by academics and performance based and we do our mid-trimester assessments, end of trimester assessments, state testing. We have lots of measurements already in place. 

I’m talking about finding other aspects of your school that actually enhance the performance and the experience for yourself, your teachers, your staff, your students, your community. Think about what it would look and feel like if you were focused on enhancing the quality of the experience for all of the people that are involved at your school, for all the stakeholders. What would a school look like that is at that next level? What would it look like? What would it feel like? 

So what we’re doing here is we’re asking your brain to project out into the future into your vision, and sit in a moment in that vision having been realized. What does it feel like? What does it look like? What does it sound like? How do you feel? How are you showing up? What are other people doing? How are kids learning? How are they engaging? What do parents think? How do they feel? What does your district think of your school? 

This is going to require your brain to go out into a new portal of possibility. Stay with me. I know this sounds very meta, but what I’m showing you that it’s almost like we’re playing in the little leagues on the rubric of the little leagues, and we want to go to the big leagues. But we’ve never thought about going to the big leagues because we’re so focused on looking at the little league rubric. I’m asking us to like even if we are in the little leagues, that’s okay, but what about the big leagues? What would it take to get us to the big leagues? 

So I asked my client. I said let’s just have fun. I said we’ve got 10 minutes left on this call. I want you for the next eight minutes to tell me everything. So here’s some of the things that she said. Teachers are prepared and excited and ready for their day. They have time to fit in all the curriculum. This is just her brain drain, by the way. I’ll talk about her list in a minute here. 

But they have time to fit in all the curriculum. They make learning fun with the kids. They’re building relationships. There’s a lot of trust building going on. There is an equal amount of time and behavior and emotional regulations for both adults and students. You hear me on that one? Parents are involved. Teachers are involved with parents. Teachers aren’t afraid to engage with parents and invite them in and work with them as a collaborators. 

Parents feel valued. Kids feel valued. Teachers feel valued. Kids are feeling successful. They’re excited to learn. Failure is the path. I loved when she said this. We’re going to talk more about that in a minute. Two kids are excited to learn. Teachers are excited to learn. Everyone’s feeling motivated. 

The kids want to help their friends out. So they’re learning collaborative skills. The topics of instruction are exciting for adults and students alike. We’re celebrating wins along the way. We are a culture where struggling to learn is not a problem, and we celebrate the struggle. We have a clear vision and a clear path. We have permission to keep trying things until they work. 

I just had goose bumps when I was listening to her brain go into that portal of possibility, and here’s what I want to offer. Go back and listen to that list again. What I noticed was it wasn’t about making the school board happy or the superintendent happy or the test score people happy or the state happy with all of the numbers and all of the percentages and all the awards. Right? It’s not about the state awards. It’s not about School of the Year, Principal of the Year. 

It’s about the way that people think and feel and engage with the environment, with one another, with the curriculum. It’s how we function as a little society within our school that makes it so successful. These aren’t the things we tend to measure. 

Now, I know there’s a lot of conversations about school culture and climate, and I want you to bring everything you know, equity, diversion, inclusion, all of it with the culture, all the culture work. Like, I don’t know all of the work out there. There’s a lot of work. Bring it all together. But what I’m noticing is that our brain wants to focus on the test scores and the assessment scores, but there are so many other rubrics we can use to measure our success. Be thinking about that. 

Now what I asked her to do, her homework for the week was for each statement that we wrote down. I take notes for her. So for each statement that I typed up, her work this week was to ask herself look through each one of these. Define what that means so that you can create a tangible measurement that you will know if you’re on the path to this achievement, to this goal, to the success. Right? So what would it take to create that result? 

Solve for them. Just brainstorm all the ways that that might be possible to achieve. So back to the first one, right? Teachers are prepared and excited and ready for their day. We need to define what does that mean, prepared? What is how will we know they’re excited? How will we know they’re ready? What will that look like and feel like? 

This is the tedious work our brain doesn’t want to do, but actually this is how we create intangible results by making them tangible. Teachers have time to fit in all the curriculum. What does that mean? That would mean prioritizing curriculum, identifying what curriculum we’re going to focus on, and what we’re not going to focus on. It’s around the time. It’s how we use our time. It’s what we make that mean. What does it mean to fit in all the curriculum? We have to define that really clearly. 

Now, I know this was her brain drain, so I’m not picking on it. I’m just saying that you have to get yourself to a place where this isn’t the final list. You have to weed this out and really define what it means. So it’s very simple, clear, tangible, and doable. But I want you to notice that the list is a lot about how people feel at the school. 

So I invite you to do this. What does your next level school look like? What are the emotions that people are feeling? What are the thoughts that they’re having about themselves, about their school, about their instructional quality, about their students? What are students thinking about teachers? What are students thinking about their school and their peers? What are your thoughts? Think about all the angles here, right? 

What are the decisions that are being made? What are the approaches that you’re taking? That just means your actions, right? What actions are you taking? What are the behaviors that people are exhibiting? Now, we’re not painting a fairyland with rainbows and daisies. Let’s be realistic. The human experience is the human experience.

This is not an exercise to avoid or bypass or circumvent any kind of negative experience. I would invite you to ask yourself what are we going to do when unpleasant experiences happen, when emergencies arise, when tragedy strikes, when trauma hits, when kids are dysregulated, when something happens to a teacher. 

Like I want you to think about real life scenarios, but talk to yourself about how do I want our school to handle this, right? How do I want my school to handle when a student is sick, or a teacher passes away, or something tragic happens in our community? How do I want to set up my school so that in the worst of times, we’re still at our best? Supporting each other, allowing time to process and grieve, and to hold space for one another. 

This isn’t just about academics. Schools are about community in addition to academics. I would invite you to even reconsider like are these academics teaching kids the skills they need in this current day and age? Right? You can go down a pretty significant rabbit hole here, and that’s okay. I invite you to do that. I want your brain to go for it. I want you to go deep. I want you to explore your thoughts and go deep and mind your mind, right? Dig down deep. What else is possible? What would work better? How good can it get? 

So take your school to the next level, and that starts with your brain, your brilliance, and your ideas. Go into that portal of possibility, and let’s see what can happen. Have an amazing week. I’ll talk to you next week. Take care. Bye.

Hey empowered principal. If you enjoyed the content in this podcast, I invite you to join the Empowered Principal® Collaborative. It’s my latest offer for aspiring and current school leaders who want to experience exceptional impact and enjoy the school leadership experience. 

Look, you don’t have to overwork and overexert to be a successful school leader. You’ll be mentored weekly and surrounded by supportive likeminded colleagues who truly understand what it means to be a school leader. So join us today and become a member of the only certified life and leadership coaching program for school leaders in the country. Just head on over to angelakellycoaching.com/work-with-me to learn more and join. I’ll see you inside of the Empowered Principal® Collaborative. 

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.

 

Enjoy The Show?

/0 Comments/by

Ep #364: Silencing Overwhelm

The Empowered Principal® Podcast Angela Kelly | Silencing Overwhelm

Do you feel like you’re drowning in overwhelm as a school principal? Like there’s too much to do and not enough time, and you’re constantly putting out fires and trying to keep up with everyone’s demands and opinions? I’ve been there, my friend. 

I’m here this week to tell you that there is a way to silence the overwhelm – or at least turn down its volume. My guess is that you’re currently trying to outrun the overwhelm by working harder and faster, but the truth is it’s only leading to even more of it. The key is to stop, take a breath, and listen to what your emotions are trying to tell you, and I guide you through this process in this episode.

Join me in this episode as I share my insights on managing the emotional intensity and fatigue that can come with being a school leader. You’ll learn the value of stopping to listen to what your overwhelm has to offer you. Discover what happens when you slow down and get specific about what’s working and what needs adjustment. I also share my top tips for untangling overwhelm so you can return to doing what you love as a school leader.

 

The Empowered Principal® Collaborative is my latest offer for aspiring and current school leaders who want to create exceptional impact and enjoy the school leadership experience. Join us today to become a member of the only certified life and leadership coaching program for school leaders in the country by clicking here.

 

What You’ll Learn From this Episode:

  • Why trying to outrun overwhelm by working harder and faster only leads to more overwhelm.
  • How to regulate your nervous system and calm down the anxiety, stress, and frustration that come with being a school leader.
  • The importance of taking a pause and listening to your emotions when you’re feeling overwhelmed.
  • How to identify the specific reasons behind your overwhelm and use that insight to make adjustments.

 

Listen to the Full Episode:

 

Featured on the Show:

Full Episode Transcript:

Hello empowered principals. Welcome to episode 364. 

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

Well, hello, my empowered principals. Welcome to December, the month of head colds. I have a little bit of congestion. So I apologize for the change in voice on this episode, but the show must go on. I’m feeling better than I sound. I’m feeling much better than I did a while back, but this podcast feels very important to share with you because I’m speaking to all of you who are feeling overwhelmed. I want to offer some thoughts, some insights into silencing that overwhelm or at least turning down its volume. 

So this year has been emotionally intense. It’s been emotionally intense for a lot of reasons and with that emotional tension and that emotional intensity can come fatigue and overwhelm. For many principals, people have been reaching out to me in droves asking for help, for guidance, for support. They are eager to jump in EPC because they are looking to feel grounded. They want to silence the overwhelm. 

I have been working in EPC to help school leaders regulate their nervous systems, calm down the anxiety and the stress and the worry and the overwhelm and the frustration and the fear of not being good enough, capable enough, competent enough, fast enough, smart enough, decisive enough, just overriding insufficiency.

I have a principal who’s not a brand new principal. She’s been in the position for a few years and she has some experience under her belt, but she’s feeling more overwhelmed than ever. When you’re feeling that intensity of overwhelm emotionally, when it feels like everything’s coming at you at once, you can’t seem to get control of your time or your schedule, or it feels too difficult to prioritize. 

On top of it, you have people’s judgments, criticisms, accusations, requests, demands, their unhappy responses, thinking you should be doing things differently than you should be. When you have tasks on top of people’s opinions, on top of emergencies, fires, interruptions, behaviors, it can feel like there’s no going back. There’s no way to reconcile this and to get back on track. Okay.

When you’re feeling this way, the first thing you need to do is stop. It’s very counterintuitive, but the goal is not to go faster or schedule more or work longer hours. The goal is to stop yourself for a minute and take stock. You’re not going to feel like doing this because it feels like you’re revving at the start line. Why can’t I go just do the things and get them done so I can feel better? 

But if you take a stop and you pause and you look at that approach, let’s just think this through. You’ve been working harder and harder. People are asking for more and more. The demands are increasing. The timelines are coming. Observations aren’t quite getting done. People are not, you know, maybe behaving in the way that you want them to. Teachers aren’t teaching in the way that you want them to. Students are not engaging the way you want them to, or you have parents or you have IEP meetings that are not getting scheduled in the right time. 

When all of these things are coming at you at rapid fire, your brain eventually is going to want to shut down. It’s the overwhelm cycle in motion. You’re going to try and keep up and eventually you’re going to run out of steam, and you’ll want to shut down. It’s almost like you, you just want to close everything off. You just want to jump in your car and drive away. Have you ever felt that way? I have sat in my car a couple of times pondering if I should come back or not. 

First of all, it’s normal. The overwhelm is normal because there is too much to do in the amount of time you’re provided. If you were to fulfill every request, every ask, every demand, attend every single meeting, connect with every single human, connect with every single student, every parent, be in tune with the district office. 

If you were to literally do all of it per everybody’s opinion, yeah, there would be too much to do and not enough time. So if that’s a given, trying to outrun the overwhelm is what’s creating more overwhelm. But you go past the point of overwhelm into either frustration, discouragement, or complete shutdown, complete apathy. 

When the overwhelm is so intense that you feel like running, that is the time when the most important meeting on your calendar is a meeting with yourself to sit down and take a breath, take a few of them, and to pause your body long enough to start to regulate your nervous system, your emotional intensity, all of that overwhelm, the panic, the fear, the overwhelm, the doubt, the frustration, that all combined into one big intense emotion. It needs you to pay attention. It’s there for a reason. It is inviting you into awareness and reflection. 

So when the emotions get big, when overwhelm gets to be so much that the only solution feels like quit, run away, you are definitely in fight or flight, my friend. Sit down, ground your feet, take a breath and notice that if you actually sit in your office with the door closed and you take a couple of deep breaths, you’re actually safe physically. You’re actually safe mentally. You’re actually safe emotionally. 

It might not feel safe, but you can regulate yourself just like we ask kids to do. We ask them to learn how to emotionally regulate themselves. This is what we’re doing when we are in extreme overwhelm. We’re taking the breath. We’re going to pause for a moment. That pause is the magic wand to turning down the volume of overwhelm. It’s like saying oh, okay, I need a minute. Let me breathe. Let me slow down my body, my heart rate, my blood pressure, my nervous system.

Let’s say okay, I’m feeling overwhelmed. My mind is racing. My heart is beating fast. There’s a lot of energy in my body. When I’m overwhelmed, I know that overwhelm is simply a message to get my attention, to get me to slow down and stop and regroup and recalibrate so I can reboot and get back to business doing what I was meant to do. 

When overwhelm is overwhelming you, the quickest solution is not to run away from it, not to do more, take more action. The fastest response to turn down the volume is to listen to it, to let it guide you, to let it inform you. There is a reason that you’re overwhelmed every single time.

You want to identify why you’re overwhelmed. That is how you can untangle being overwhelmed. One thing I’ve noticed a lot of times when my clients will slow themselves down after they’ve done all of the venting and sharing as to all the reasons why they’re overwhelmed and the reasons why they can’t get out of overwhelm. One thing they notice is that they have dropped the reins of time mastery, of planning mastery, of balance mastery. 

They’ve just forgotten that they’re the ones in control of their time, of their planning to create balance, that they are the masters of their time balance and planning.

Now listening to this podcast right now, you’re like easier said than done. To that I say, of course, if it were easier done than said, we wouldn’t be having this conversation, and I probably wouldn’t be a coach. But the truth is that when we’re overwhelmed and overwhelmed doesn’t get acknowledged or validated or have a voice to share with you the insight and wisdom and wonderings that it has for you, and you rush away from it.

You’re like I’m overwhelmed. I’ve got to go do more. It’s a way of avoiding the emotion versus just sitting with it. Wow, I’m really overwhelmed right now. I’m spinning. I feel like I’m whack-a-moling. I feel like I don’t know what to do. I’m feeling incompetent. I don’t feel like I’m a good principal. See how your identity has shifted because of the overwhelm? How your actions are impacted because of the overwhelm. 

If you ask the overwhelm, what insight, what wisdom do you have for me? What knowledge do you have for me? It will tell you. It’s like, well, I’m overwhelmed because we didn’t plan for this, or there’s not a system for that. Or I didn’t schedule this or I’ve been overworking to the point of exhaustion. I can’t even think straight. Overwhelm will have some insight for you. 

That’s why it’s here. It’s knocking on your door to let you know it’s here. If you invite it in and listen, it immediately turns the volume down. Then when you take in that wisdom and you’re willing to use that wisdom and apply it to, Oh, I haven’t been planning very well. Why haven’t I been planning very well? Well, it’s because I’m whack-a-moling all day. I’m putting out fires, and I’m thinking the reasons, the excuses that my brain is offering is there’s no one else to do it. I help kids co-regulate faster and better. Teachers can’t do it. They’re overwhelmed. I feel bad for them. 

Your brain’s going to offer you all kinds of reasons that feel very valid. You have to look at them with a critical eye. Is it absolutely true there’s no one else, or do we just not plan for this or train for this? Then you’ll say well, there’s not time for that. You might feel like there’s not time to prepare somebody to delegate a task to, but what is it costing you in the end? Which is more time effective in the long run? Training somebody to support you or you doing it yourself for the rest of time. 

That goes from everything from newsletters, staff bulletins to cleaning the staff room. There’s so many things that we get our fingers in. Event planning is a big one, right? We think we need to be the person that plans all the events. We think we need to be the only person who can do the master schedule or facilitate every single meeting or write the bulletins or write the newsletter to the parents. There’s so many things that we actually think we need to do that we don’t and they feel very true.

So we increase our own overwhelm when we’re not willing to sit down and say how am I actually spending my time and what is the return on investment of that time? 

Back to the client I was working with. Her brain was being very mean to her saying she’s not doing anything right. She can’t keep up. Nobody’s happy. Nobody likes what I’m doing. Everybody has this opinion of me that I’m dropping the ball and I’m not doing this. I’m very scattered.

Why that felt so painful is a part of her brain that actually believed it. That she is dropping balls and she is scattered and she’s overworking at the cost of her friends and family and personal time, but not feeling like she’s creating the desired results she wants. Then you get into an argument with yourself. 

So now there’s a peanut gallery in your brain judging and criticizing every little thing you do, whether you do it right or whether you don’t. At the same time, the other half of your brain is defending yourself from the peanut gallery. So now you have an internal conversation going on that doesn’t serve you because half of you is being critical and the other half of you is on the defense and trying to justify your actions when the truth of it is we want to clear both of that. It’s not an all or none game. You’re not doing it all right or all wrong. It’s always the land of and. 

So being able to silence the overwhelm comes from you listening to the overwhelm. I’ll give you a little secret. This is true for every emotion. You feel slowing down, stopping, pausing, listening to it. What does it have to offer you? 

The same is true for people. When people are at you the most, when they’re coming at you sideways, the hardest listen to them, acknowledge them. Even if you don’t like what they’re saying, even if what they’re saying is not true, listen, because that person is creating overwhelm for you. The best way to turn down the overwhelm is to listen. 

Once you listen, the insights will come. I can show you how to do this. I know this is a practice nobody teaches you, which is what I teach in EPC. So I can teach you how to do this. But when you listen to your emotions, let them have a voice, validate them, acknowledge them and listen what they have to say. You will be surprised at how knowledgeable you are, how wise you are, how you actually know exactly what to do to turn down the overwhelm, to reduce the overwhelm, to silence it. 

You might not want to do those things and be in resistance to those things, but you know. So you know if you haven’t really been planning, but if you have been planning, then there’s something else. Maybe there’s a system that needs to be smoothed out. Solutions are in the specifics. 

Your brain wants to stay general and ambiguous, and overwhelm is very general and very ambiguous. It’s just everything’s wrong and it’s like Henny Penny and running around calling chaos. But the truth is that when you slow your brain down and you get very specific, what’s working, what’s a little crunchy, and what do I want to adjust so that I feel less overwhelmed? You’ll be shocked to know that you already know the answer, and you already have some solutions. You just might be in resistance to those solutions.

If you’re in resistance to the solutions, that’s where EPC steps in and helps you unblock and remove those resistant obstacles in your mind. Those thought obstacles, the reasons that you think you just can’t, we change that into, I can. We make it from hard to easier. We make it from complicated to simple. That’s the magic of EPC. 

So step one, you have the volume control for overwhelm, and you can turn it down as low as you’d like. It’s all up to you. EPC doors are opening in January. I would love to have you all join us. Join us now as an early bird, get on the wait list because we’re going to be doing the mid-year reboot. We’re going to reboot, recalibrate, get your momentum going for the second half of the school year. Have an amazing week. I’ll talk to you next week. Take good care. 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. 

 

Enjoy The Show?

/0 Comments/by