Hello, empowered principals. Welcome to episode 436. 

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.

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Angela Kelly: Hello, empowered principals. Welcome to today’s episode of The Empowered Principal® Podcast. Happy Tuesday. We’re so happy you are here with us today. I have a very special guest. I’m so excited to have this conversation with her. It’s near and dear to my heart as a former kindergarten teacher. I have Holly Britton here with me today. She is, are you the founder? I just should ask that question.

Holly Britton: I am.

Angela Kelly: Oh my gosh. Okay, even better, the founder of Squiggle Squad. We’re going to talk about handwriting. It’s been a hot topic on and off, and people have thoughts and opinions about it. And we’re going to talk about it today on the podcast here with an expert, but we are going to dive below the surface of, “Should we be teaching handwriting or not in our schools?” So, Holly, welcome to the podcast.

Holly Britton: It’s a pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Angela Kelly: And can you just give the listeners a little bit of background about yourself, how you got into this, and how you developed Squiggle Squad?

Holly Britton: Yeah, I have a really eclectic background when it comes to education. I never thought of myself as an educator or getting into education, but I was thrown into it when I started teaching the first of my four children through homeschooling. And that was a long, not to date myself too much, but it was a very long time ago. And it was back before computers were in people’s homes, before cell phones, before I could go on the internet and ask them. I had to actually do my homework in the library, if that’s, you know, that’s dating me.

And anyway, I didn’t realize how, I think I became an educator through the love of my own children. And I later went on to get my master’s, my teaching credential. I’ve taught in private and public settings and am now a curriculum designer and came out of the classroom. I was teaching, when COVID hit, I was teaching classes in third, fourth, and fifth grade at a dual-language school. All the schools in our area are Title I. So I had the pleasure of working with Title I schools and Title I kids, which I absolutely adored and I miss every day. I would love to find myself back in a classroom.

And I get to visit with teachers that are using Squiggle Squad, which is the handwriting program I eventually designed and now market. But I did it because there was a giant gap in instructional materials when it came to transcription skills. And we’ll get into this a little bit more later, but my heart has been really changing the narrative around handwriting as penmanship to handwriting as a transcription skill that we actually still need in order to teach children, in order to do the brain training that teachers are charged with doing.

Angela Kelly: Yes. And I want to dive right into that difference so that people can follow along on this conversation through the podcast. So I was a kindergarten teacher, so you and I really connected on the discussion around developmentally appropriate and, you know, what handwriting is, what it’s not. And I just found this so fascinating. So can you go into deeper detail about the difference between penmanship, like writing the letters correctly and ensuring that we’re doing proper letter development on the page, into the transcribing that you were just speaking of?

Holly Britton: Yeah, so there’s a lot to that. First, it probably helps to go back in history just a little bit to realize that when handwriting was a big deal in society, when it was used for trade and business and thank you notes, etc., kids were being taught proper, if you will, proper handwriting and even cursive at the age of six and seven. 

Since our phenomenon of pushdown academics, where we’re trying to get younger and younger kids to do more and more academically, we are now expecting three and four-year-olds to write by hand using a pencil, which biologically is well, complicated at best. And in some cases, you might even say impossible because what it takes to actually write language requires that you have language in your head to write. 

And at that young age, they are still acquiring language. They’re acquiring speech. They’re acquiring decoding skills. They’re acquiring the whole idea of turning a page in a book and moving their eyes left to right.

Those are all part of learning to write before you actually learn to write. So the fact that we have academically increased the expectation of these little baby brains means that we have to approach handwriting differently. We can’t just give them letters and say, “Write the letter H,” and expect them to even know what a letter H is, let alone have the motor skill needed to form that letter properly on paper. And yet, not only are we pushing it there, we are leaving it there.

So if it’s expected to be taught in California, we call it TK, transitional kindergarten, or pre-K four, if it is being taught there, then by I don’t know what has happened, but going up the pipeline, even in kinder and first grade, they stop teaching it, as if it has been done, as if that skill has been acquired. In the meantime, academic expectations keep increasing, and they are expected to keep writing by hand. 

But you can see how it can become this maybe impassable obstacle for kids when the academic expectations of, say, spelling, vocabulary, comprehension, composition, syntax, English conventions, all of those start getting harder and harder and harder. And meanwhile, the mechanics of getting your thoughts on paper from your mind to your hand have not been explicitly taught or practiced, so there is no skill there. 

And yet, you’re being asked to use it every single day. I mean, I run against that frustration every single day in classrooms, every single day, when it’s not because the child is not bright, it’s not because the child’s not willing, it’s not because they have a learning disability. It is because they have not been given the space, the time, and the explicit instruction to develop a skill that they are being required to use.

Angela Kelly: Yes. And I think that you describe this so beautifully because what teachers and educators are feeling, the frustration that they’re feeling, is coming from this, you’re like butting up against the science of humanity, the science of human development.

Holly Britton: Yes.

Angela Kelly: And we’re trying to impose upon children an aspect of development that hasn’t yet been acquired. It’s like asking a child like who just got their driver’s license to go and drive a semi truck.

Holly Britton: Totally. On a 70-mile-an-hour freeway.

Angela Kelly: Yes, and to expect them to know without having any training other than, “Well, you have your license. Therefore, that equates to you being an expert.” And I also love how you talked about the, how can you write language when you’re developing the skill of language. So having the language in your head, and I think about, you know, I have a girlfriend that has a four-year-old and a nine-month-old, like their little brains are just learning language and learning a second language at that. They’re a bilingual family.

And I’m thinking like how the brain has to have language to be able to transcribe, would that be the right word, it down onto paper. And if it’s not yet developed there, we’re asking them to, you know, drink out of an empty glass.

Holly Britton: It’s really unfair. And it’s so much more complicated than learning how to talk. And this seems so common sense. I think that your listeners could follow us through the skills progression that happens. But, you know, when babies are born, they are hearing language, they’re watching facial expression, they’re watching lips moving as speech is coming out. So obviously, that is more innate for them to start mimicking. They can try themselves, and they can sort of copy.

And then you get to trying to introduce them to print, where you open a book and you turn a page and you point to the letters. And so then they are starting to make sense of the squiggles that are in front of them, even though they can’t read them. They’re making a connection because they’re recognizing pattern. 

Mom opens this book, Dad opens this book. She points here, and she says the story. She says the same story every time she opens that book. And it goes to that picture that talks about that thing. And so they’re just, they’re recognizing those kinds of patterns, which is a huge important aspect to reading and writing, is pattern recognition.

And then all the conventions around that, you know, seeing normally black on white or color on white and all of those squiggles, they start to differentiate those squiggles from other shapes they see on paper. And they can do that super, super early. But when it comes to actually decoding the language, understanding that a B says /b/, and a C says /k/, or in some cases /s/, that has to be explicitly taught. 

And now it stands to reason that learning that that grapheme phoneme connection for reading comes first, it stands to reason that writing it then is the next more complicated ask, because now we have to take those cognitive understandings and put it with motor skill that is still developing.

Kids that, you know, can’t balance on a balance beam, they have a hard time sitting up at a table. They’re still learning how to climb a ladder and, you know, grab and release rungs on a ladder, which is, you know, hand-eye coordination. 

And they’re still doing that in their gross motor skills. In order to have the fine motor skills necessary for writing, they have to have the independent finger movement. They have to be able to understand directionality, eye hand, visuospatial skills, you know, there’s so much that goes into it. And when you ask too young a child to put all that together really quickly without any kind of incremental buildup, you just create frustration, and you take that little excited, willing student and you kind of crush.

Angela Kelly: The curiosity of learning and the eagerness and excitement to learn fades quickly when you’re asking somebody to do a skill they haven’t been taught at a point in their developmental stages that isn’t relevant or maybe even possible. 

And we are having these expectations of not just the handwriting piece, which we’re not teaching in many cases, but to, then you said the layers of communicating, putting an entire sentence together, having it make sense, having it being spelled correctly, having the letters be formed correctly, having the punctuation. And it just when you think of the layers of that, the complexity of what we’re asking of them is pretty phenomenal.

Holly Britton: Yeah, and I think if I were to ask any admin in considering how handwriting should be treated at a given institution, first and foremost, it needs to be given time and space in that child’s life. It cannot happen in one school year, and it cannot happen early and, you know, one and done. 

It really needs time over several school years, which means teachers, I like to call them literacy teams. And you’ve got in literacy, you’ve got the reading and the writing. You’ve got, just to break it down, you’ve got the decoding and you’ve got the encoding. And both of those are absolutely necessary for literacy mastery, and literacy mastery cannot happen without foundational skills.

So you have a foundation literacy team that goes in my mind from TK age four, but more importantly, kindergarten through second grade, no less, maybe more. The science actually backs up handwriting instruction through I’ve heard a minimum of six years and I’ve heard into high school, and this by handwriting experts, researchers. So, you know, take it as you will.

If you think of handwriting as a transcription skill, and we decide that we need to help kids transcribe their thoughts. And by that I just mean take what’s inside their head and get it visible. I like to say, get the invisible visible, which means what’s inside my head is going to go to my hand, whether it is handwriting or typing, it has to become visible. That is what I’m referring to as transcription skills, and they will change as, obviously, as necessary up the pipeline. 

So we start with transcription as a pencil and paper, and we do that for so many reasons, developmental reasons and also language acquisition reasons. It’s necessary for us to map those letters onto our brain kinesthetically. That’s very important. The science will back me on that.

Then we will eventually move into keyboarding, which we’re not teaching either, by the way. And then later into a hybrid of those. How do we use handwriting as a way of accessing pieces of our brain that we can’t access by pushing a button? And then how do we use the keyboarding skills to really get those thoughts out quickly and in mass? Obviously, it’s going to behoove us to be able to use the technologies we have to get that information onto paper.

Angela Kelly: Yes. So what I’m hearing, and I want to say this explicitly to our listeners, there is an inherent value in number one, teaching handwriting explicitly, but number two, doing so in a way that’s developmentally appropriate so that you’re not banging your head against the wall.

Holly Britton: Your children aren’t banging their heads against the wall.

Angela Kelly: Yes. And everyone’s frustrated. And so we throw the baby out with the bath water because we’re like, “Well, handwriting’s really frustrating. They’re not getting it. It’s taking up time. Therefore, we must just, why don’t we just eliminate it because it doesn’t really matter because we’re just going to learn to type anyway and they’re just all the kids are texting and they’ll just kind of figure it out.”

Holly Britton: Yeah.

Angela Kelly: But there is a science to the art of transcribing your thoughts into a written expression that communicates your brilliance, your ideas, your wisdom, your knowledge. 

It’s how we measure children’s growth and progress, and yet we’re not teaching them how to communicate so that we can measure their growth and progress, which is why I feel like students and staff educators alike are spinning their wheels in trying to figure out how do we connect what we’re teaching to why we’re teaching it, to how we’re teaching it, and to the value of it in the long term, right? And the value of this is the ability to express oneself, which is a form of empowerment.

Holly Britton: Yes.

Angela Kelly: Hello, empowered principals. But the empowerment for all is just the gift of being able to communicate and express yourself and to share your ideas, your individual brilliance and wisdom that you were born with, and the ideas that you have as you enter into the world of school. It’s essential.

Holly Britton: Angela, I want to take it one step further because I used to kind of stop there. My thought was, we need to be able to get their brilliant ideas out on paper. But I’m going to take it one step further, and it might be controversial, but I think people will understand this and they, especially if you’re older than, say, 30 years old and you had handwriting instruction, I think you’ll understand this. 

I will go so far as to say, I think a lot of those brilliant ideas will never be realized unless you have been taught language by hand, because we train our brain differently when we learn language kinesthetically. It is just a completely different way of thinking. How many master writers say that when they hit a block, when they need a brilliant idea, when they are trying to troubleshoot or problem solve, they go back to pen and paper.

We need that. We can mine treasures out of the recesses of our brain better. I mean, if you think about learning anything in life, if you are a nature lover, how much better you know that flower or that bird when you sketch it, when you sit out in nature and you actually notice the details of something and you write it down. We used to take field trips as a family, and one of our things to do when we noticed something that struck our fancy was to sit down and get out our sketch journals and sketch it. 

And 100% of the time, we learned more about that thing than we would have had we just admired it as we were walking by. So language is that way. Writing language is like sketching language. It’s like drawing language, and it touches us in a different way. The sad, really tragic part about not teaching handwriting is we are robbing kids of a tool that helps them discover themselves better. We are robbing them of a learning tool. We are robbing them of a skill that they could use for the rest of their life, but they won’t if they never learn it.

Angela Kelly: Right. I think way back to like caveman days with what you were speaking of and how even then, humanity itself, the humans found a way to express and communicate with one another. And not only that, they created communication for all time. 

And now, of course, like modern day people have to figure out what that, what those squiggles meant and what those images meant and how they wrote it. But there was an innate desire to communicate, to express their knowledge and their understandings and to etch it forever in forever time, you know, through their cave person drawings. And I just think about in all of humanity across the globe, across all centuries of time before schools were even a thing, there has been like a human desire to express via kinesthetic communication.

Holly Britton: Yes. And a deep need, a deep need. Handwriting is, writing in general is human. It sets us apart. It is why we know our past. It is why we can tell stories from hundreds and hundreds of years ago. And it is so uniquely human, but it is also a human construct, which means we’re not going to innately pick it up as we go. We all know or have heard of adults who do not know how to read. 

And it’s not because there isn’t print all around them. It is all around them, but they still cannot read. We’re seeing that more and more these days, that adults are illiterate because they were not taught. It is on us, the literate, to teach the children. We have to take it seriously as a brain training skill, a brain training practice that takes years and years and years.

We can’t work in isolation as teachers. I need to know where that child has come from. I need to know where that child is going so that I can prepare them in the time I have them. We are not islands in and of ourselves. We are a point on a progression, and we are charged with doing what that child needs in that moment and preparing them for what they will need in the next moment. 

That was my frustration up in fifth grade, was I was supposed to be teaching them fifth grade, and I could not teach them fifth grade concepts because they did not have second grade concepts. They didn’t have the skills that they needed to make it up. And I felt terrible for these kids. They’re amazing. They’re amazing and bright and willing. But I was going to be sending them, I say was going to be sending them because I didn’t get to see their year end because it was COVID, sending them up the pipeline, and I knew they weren’t ready for sixth grade.

Angela Kelly: A couple of things came up for me. I just want to say this, and then I want to go into what I think are going to be the obstacles or the questions that educators, because I feel like we have hammered in the value of this work. 

Holly Britton: Yes.

Angela Kelly: Then everyone’s like, “Okay, I understand the value, but how?” Right? There’s going to be that. We’re going to get to that in a second. But what came up for me as you were speaking, Holly, was I was taken back in a moment of time of sitting in my principal’s office and then later sitting up at the district office and imagining not having the ability to write or to be struggling to read. 

I would never be in a position as teacher, as principal, as district administrator, if I, had I not been taught the skill of handwriting, the capacity to read and to write the connection between my body, my brain, and the expression of myself. You know, you’re expressing yourself and you’re taking in content, right? So that ability, that expressive and receptive language, but if it hadn’t been explicitly taught to me, and I went to school in like 70s and 80s, we’ll say.

But where would I be? And when you said that we’re robbing children of this freedom of expression, of the ability, of the skill set, the mindset, the capacity, there is an urge, like you said, from all of mankind, there has been this urge and desire to express oneself. And it comes out in its natural form kinesthetically. 

Like I really want people to sit with that for a second as educational leaders and just realize that we are the ones who make these decisions around what education kids receive, what skill sets we teach them and what we don’t, and how we prioritize, which I’m now is going to roll into. I know leaders out there, the question is, there’s so much to do and not enough time and teachers would squawk and now we’re going to have to fit this all in. 

So Holly, can you walk us through what it might look like in a school day where we’re integrating this instruction of writing in a way that fits into all of the other priorities that, you know, educators are expected to implement.

Holly Britton: One thing I find helpful is to change the way we think about handwriting as not a noun, but a verb. So instead of seeing handwriting as a finished product, especially in those early years, we need to think of it as a process. It is part of the learning process. So if we try to feather that in, integrate that in, the same way we integrate reading skill. So we don’t teach reading to kindergarteners by giving them Steinbeck and saying we’re going to just, you know, parse through this. We don’t do that. We break it down.

So when you break down handwriting, so breaking down reading, of course, breaks it down to its base unit, which is phonics. It doesn’t stop there and it’s not the only and it’s certainly not even, you know, the most important, but it is the base unit for learning how to read, for learning how to code or decode that language. Learning how to write takes letter formation. 

And one of the things we are not doing from the very beginning is teaching a child a proper way to write a letter. It sounds so basic, but hear me out on this. If you show a child a shape and you say, “Write this letter quote unquote, write this letter,” to them they just think, “Make that shape on a paper.” Well, that’s all fine and good when you’re writing one letter at a time as a four-year-old.

But what we need to keep in mind is the end goal of handwriting instruction is recall and reproduce. We need to recall words, sounds, words, and sentences in our brain and reproduce them on paper. That means that we’re putting together strings of letters. We’re not just writing one letter at a time. But that teacher that’s teaching that one letter needs to realize that, that one letter is going to go into another letter into another letter into another letter, which eventually leads to writing fluency. So we need to teach them efficient letter formation.

So from the very beginning, they are forming directionality-wise and size-wise, they are forming the letter correctly and making it the right size. So tall letters are tall, short letters are short, and that’s because legibility depends on that. 

So those two main things early on, and then working up the other expectations, which involve spacing between letters, spacing between words, sitting letters on a baseline, English conventions, all those things that are all part of handwriting that obviously, if you listen to that list and you think four-year-old, you realize, oh, four-year-old is not going to be able to get all that. It’s going to take a few years.

So back to your question about integrating it. One of the first things that we need to consider is we cannot integrate it until we’ve incrementally taught it. So don’t have your ELA lessons require a lot of sentence writing in kindergarten when they don’t know how to recall and reproduce the alphabet. They need to be able to recall and reproduce a letter before they can recall and reproduce a sentence. 

And I know that sounds so basic, but that’s what our ELA curriculum is doing to our kids. They have pushed handwriting out. They’ve expected that kids just already automatically know how to do it. If they pay it any mind, it’s very weak and poorly designed. And that leads to the frustration with both the teacher and the student because the teacher is required to do those lessons as instructed by the curriculum, and it’s unfair. They have been asked to do something those kids are not ready or trained to do.

So the first thing I would say is give your teachers permission to extricate writing from other learning, from other cognitive learning. Squiggle Squad does that, by the way, in handwriting. We separate the motor skill from the letter learning. So you are teaching letters, but you’re also teaching directionality, movement, eye-hand coordination, all of the motor skills and vernacular needed to teach handwriting before you actually ask them to pick up a pencil and start writing letters. 

And then it moves into that and they’re not as frustrated because they’ve already been introduced to those aspects of handwriting before they’re asked to write letters.

Angela Kelly: Yes. This speaks to my teacher heart because I think back to all of the years in kindergarten where in my early earliest years of teaching, when I was learning how to teach, we were much more developmental. And I was thinking then the next question that might come up for listeners is like, what is the sweet spot? 

And what I love about what you’re saying is it’s not like teach it all in kinder and first grade so that we can be done with this and move on and by third grade, you know, everybody’s fluent. It’s this slower, kind of a slow drip progression throughout all of elementary. And you can tell us, you know, expert-wise, what the sweet spot is in terms of that time period developmentally for students. But this is really a conversation about going back to what is not just cognitively developmentally appropriate, but also physically.

Holly Britton: Physical. Yep.

Angela Kelly: Yes. And that brain body connection. And I’ve had so many conversations over the last year with experts like you who are focusing on different aspects of learning as it relates to mind body connection. And this one, it’s so, I feel like it’s just like the grandmother of it all because what we’re really asking kids to do in any standard across any grade level is to be able to express themselves and their knowledge, their wisdom, their insights.

We talk about inference when we talk about self-discernment, when we talk about, you know, like summarizing, all of those standards, when I think back to the ELA standards throughout, I was an elementary principal, but regardless of what grade level, it requires them to be able to express themselves from brain to hand to either paper or eventually computer.

Holly Britton: When you want to hear music and you don’t know how to play the instrument, it’s so frustrating. It’s frustrating for a teacher and it’s frustrating for the child. The teacher just keeps saying, “Play Mozart. Play Mozart. What’s wrong? I can’t understand that note. Why aren’t? Go back and try again.” And the poor kid’s like, “I don’t know how to try anymore. I hate it. I hate it.” 

And you shut them down. Whereas when you built them up incrementally, it builds confidence. The very opposite happens. Then they try to play all by themselves. Then you hear them playing the music in their room or, you know, on vacation because they love it instead of shoving it down their throat and not teaching them.

I’m a really strong opinion that the hate for handwriting is not because they hate handwriting. It’s because they hate the frustration that comes with trying to do something they don’t know how to do. So why don’t we give them something they know how to do? Like for little kids, it’s making movements with their gross motor skills, really big movements with their arms and their bodies and their nose and their, you know, and then that’s fun. 

We call our preschool level squiggles and wiggles because that’s the developmentally appropriate way and that brings intrinsic reward from the brain. It feeds the brain that adrenaline and the dopamine and they go, “Ooh, I love this.” And you watch the little lights go on in their eyes, and then they ask me, I have yet to go into a classroom where the kids go, “Oh, Squiggle Squad.” They’re like, “Are you coming back tomorrow?” 

You know, because we’re doing developmentally appropriate things that work them academically. So they don’t know that. They don’t have to know that, but we as teachers know, this is building their academic prowess, and it’s going to get better as they go up the pipeline.

But teachers have to know how and why that happens. Admin has to know why and how a teacher’s doing it that way because there’s purpose in it. And it is going somewhere just because they’re not writing their name the first day of kindergarten does not mean they’re not learning to write their name. They are. It just looks different than forcing their hand onto paper when they’re not ready.

Angela Kelly: Exactly. I love these conversations. I feel like we’re coming back full circle to like we expect kids to learn in the way, like we have an image of what learning looks like and it is sitting at a desk. It’s like an adult version of learning. Which that isn’t even fun for us. If you think about it, like nobody wants to sit in a conference for eight hours on a hard chair writing all day long. But yet we do this even down in preschool and kindergarten. And we have forgotten that we can have a, I call it a grand slam when it’s a win, win, win, win where…

Holly Britton: Yes.

Angela Kelly: Kids are excited and they’re moving. You are having fun. It doesn’t have to be boring and hard and frustrating if we bring in the science, the physical science of humanity and human development back into the classroom. And because we are in the business of human development, we are literally, education is the business of developing humans, and we have to work with the human design…

Holly Britton: Yep.

Angela Kelly: In order for us to evolve.

Holly Britton: Well, you brought up a neat point that I’ll jump off of, this whole part of not wanting to sit at a desk and work really hard. When the kids are little, we are not just teaching them how to handle their bodies and their brains and how to think about what and how to acquire all that, but we are also teaching them to love learning. 

And if we squish that early, then getting them to do the harder things is impossible. I mean, we’re seeing now just a rash of problems with apathy. Kids just refusing to do anything. And there’s a lot of reasons behind that and it’s scary and it’s sad and it’s hard to watch. But I would say that part of it starts with that developmentally appropriate aspect that you were just talking about, where we need to use the biological bents of a little body to teach them so they like it.

And then when things get harder, because it will, learning’s not always entertaining. Learning actually requires struggle. It requires grit. It requires stick-to-it-iveness. But that will come, that is more likely to come if we have built up the confidence of the learner. If they’ve already experienced the joy of intrinsic reward, they actually understand that if I try a little bit harder, I’m actually going to accomplish what I’m trying. And when I accomplish what I’m trying, I feel good about it. 

Those are things we’re also training, but it’s nuanced and it starts super, super young when the kid is wiggling for fun and we are using fun to teach. Later, that fun becomes, it doesn’t look the same anymore. It actually, fun, and we can attest to this as adults, we get this sense of fun, if you will, or more over sense of reward when we do something hard and we succeed. 

And so we’re more willing to do those hard things because we know what’s coming. And that’s a part of it that has to be trained. It’s not always fun, but it will be more rewarding if a child has been trained how to do that up the pipeline.

Angela Kelly: Yes. Yes. Yes. I feel like we could talk about this forever, but if listeners are eager, they may probably feeling a lot of relief that there is something out there because many teachers know the developmental appropriateness of their current class, the grade level, the department, wherever you are along the spectrum of teaching, they know this. It feels true to their heart. It’s like something a song that they haven’t heard for a decade on the radio. 

And here we are speaking the truth of this process again. Where can, whether you’re a teacher, an aspiring leader, a site leader, a district leader, where can they go or what can they do to explore this concept more and to find resources that could support them in this developmental endeavor of really leaning into literacy in a way that works for both students and educators?

Holly Britton: Yeah, you can find me at holly@squigglesquad.com if you want to talk to me personally, holly@squigglesquad.com. You can visit our website, of course, at squigglesquad.com.

I want to throw out there that all curriculum is not the same. All handwriting curriculum is not the same. There are a couple good ones out there. Some of the more common ones are not great. One of the things to think about when you think about getting curriculum is that most of them were written 30 years or more ago when we were teaching six and seven-year-olds without a mind to four-year-old handwriting. 

And there’s a couple that, you know, are traditional that I love. There’s a couple that are not so great. And so be careful what you get. There is a design to it that is biologically friendly. Keep that in mind when you choose your curriculum. Having said that, I am super happy to do professional development. Our materials and programs come with on-ramping and Q&A sessions and a teacher’s lounge with all kinds of resources. So explore those on squigglesquad.com. 

Also, you can find more about handwriting in general through my writings on Substack. So I can be found at Holly Britton or Holly on Handwriting on Substack or LinkedIn.

Angela Kelly: Perfect. And we will drop all of these links in the show notes so you have direct access to whichever, you know, venue you would like to explore further. But I wanted to make sure that people listening to this, there’s hope, there’s and there’s resources available. 

And of course, like if you still want more information on the science and the research behind it, Holly has her substack for that. And you can explore if you’re a person that’s like, “I’m totally in, I’m ready to go.” Like you can go directly to squigglesquad.com and explore all of the resources that are available and the information there. 

So, Holly, I just want to thank you for your time today, for sharing your expertise so openly, so beautifully, for reminding us that as educators we’re, number one, we’re human. Number two, we’re teachers. And we’re here not to be led by the standards that have been written, however long ago now, and that keep changing, but like to go back to the humanity of teaching, to the human development aspect of teaching, because it’s a win, win, win, win, win. It’s a win for kids. It’s a win for families. It’s a win for staff and students and it’s a win for leaders.

And the win for leaders, I just want to say this directly because as an empowered principal, I want you to hear this. Like think about this. When your students are learning developmentally how to read, to write, to express themselves over the course of many years, the short-term impact is that you have less frustration, you have less teachers coming to you with frustration around getting scores up. You struggle less with flatline scores. 

But the longer term impact of this is that you made a difference in the life and the expression of this child, the empowerment of this young person who’s going to grow up and go into the world and be a productive individual globally. It doesn’t matter where you’re teaching around the globe. This matters at such a profound level, and we have the power and we have the ability to start leveraging it at a developmental level as early as TK. 

My little guy that I was talking about earlier, he is in a preschool going into TK next year. I think about this all the time. I’m actually staying at a friend’s house. You can see there’s a crib behind me and, you know, her little grandson. This is a teacher friend I’m staying with this week. But I think about the future of these kids. I want them to love to speak, to read, to write, to express themselves because of the value it gives at a global level as they move through the institution of our educational system, wherever you are on the globe.

Holly Britton: That’s beautiful. And who would have thought that something so mundane and everyday for us as handwriting can actually be a key to empowering a human? It’s wild to think that the pencil could actually be used as an instrument of dissection and you can get into your own brain and figure yourself out. But we have to be mindful of giving kids that skill. 

Angela Kelly: Yes, we do. And I will end with this. Educators, I want you to think about, for those of you who have been following this podcast, this podcast has been going since January of 2018. I talk so often about self-coaching, self-regulation, self-discernment, self, you know, introspection. That cannot be done at the same level if you are just thinking, you can’t think about evolving yourself developmentally, even as an adult. You write about it. 

Whether you type it in on your phone or you write it on your computer or you write it in a journal, you are writing, you are expressing yourself. And that mind body connection, it’s essential to our evolution and to tapping into potential possibility as humans. I think it’s just foundationally the way that we as humans function. And it’s a gift. Like you said, it’s a, it’s a human construct. It’s something that we have created for ourselves that’s different than any other animal on the planet.

Holly, I know your time is precious and you need to run. I want to thank you so, so much for being here. It’s been a delight to connect with you. I do hope we stay in touch as colleagues, as friends, and we continue to network and collaborate on building up the empowerment of our staff and students. So thank you for your time today.

Holly Britton: Well, thank you for letting me talk to you and your audience. And I do hope that we stay connected and I hope your audience stays or gets connected with me and with Squiggle Squad and all that we’re doing there. So thank you so much.

Angela Kelly: Thank you for the work you’re doing. It’s wonderful. All right. That’s it, everybody. We’ve got to run. Have a beautiful 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.

Hello, empowered principals. Welcome to episode 434. 

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 and enjoy this interview with Jasmin Dennis. She’s an expert on burnout. I think you’ll enjoy the show.

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Angela Kelly: Well, hello, empowered principals. Happy Tuesday and welcome to the podcast. I have a very special guest here with me today. You’re going to love this conversation because it’s something we all talk about in education and that is burnout. And we’re going to dive into all kinds of things related to the conversation around burnout, what it is, the symptoms, the signs, what to look for, what it isn’t. And I have an expert here with me on the topic of burnout. 

Her name is Jasmin Dennis. She works with corporations, schools, all kinds of organizations around this topic of burnout. So we want to look at it from all the facets and all the different angles so that you can really identify when you’re feeling burnout. We can talk about what it is, and I also really want to help you with her expertise on how to notice it and what to do because there’s some interesting ways that burnout manifests. And Jasmin was sharing this with me in our meet and greet and I can’t wait for her to share it with you. So, Jasmin, welcome to the podcast.

Jasmin Dennis: Oh, Angela, thank you so much for having me. I’m happy to be here.

Angela Kelly: Yes, so Jasmin and I met through a meet and greet. She reached out and wanted to be on the podcast to support all educators and I thought, let’s do this. It’s an amazing topic. She’s a lovely woman. She has lots of expertise. So, Jasmin, tell us a little bit about your background and what you’re currently doing to serve organizations.

Jasmin Dennis: Yeah, well, you know I’ve been in the health and wellness space for over 30 years. Maybe I started when I was two. 

Angela Kelly: Good for you. 

Jasmin Dennis: So it’s in my blood, it’s in my bone, it’s passion. I’ve been directly involved in getting started in about 20 health and wellness facilities, and within those locations and including four for the former heavyweight champion of the world. And so in those scenarios, you know  I was exposed like one-on-one to individuals coming in and, you know, in our facilities and they would say different things, you know, I didn’t sleep last night. I haven’t slept in four days or I feel so lethargic today. Oh, I don’t feel like going to work. So it’s a continued pattern.

But where it really grounded me and started me to really think now, you know, that we’re not living to our optimum health. So I was Workers’ Compensation Board and I noticed, you know, like Mondays, everybody hated Mondays for some reason. I love Mondays, maybe to get, you know, as a mother and kids and you know getting out of the house Monday was great for me, you know? 

Angela Kelly: Yes.

Jasmin Dennis: Got the kids to school and what, you know, and stuff like that. So, I noticed also a pattern of people would do anything not to go to work, regardless of the, you know, whether they were in school, whether they’re teachers, whether they’re educators, whether they’re corporate, and it started to turn in my head that there’s something here. We are operating not at our optimal, really.

So that spun off into me working closely, you know, in the health and wellness space with, you know, chiropractors, physiotherapists. And the way we would set it up is that I’ll have a conversation with an individual. And it doesn’t matter, and I’m not in the education space, but they’re humans. Teachers are humans like everything else.

Angela Kelly: Yes. 

Jasmin Dennis: Yeah. Our profession doesn’t design how we feel in our bodies. So when I speak, and I speak about to kids, I speak to adults because we are human and this burnout shows up in subtle ways. It almost becomes a buzzword.

Angela Kelly: Mhm, I agree. Yes.

Jasmin Dennis: Urgency is a form of burn, can turn into burnout. So I noticed, it’s, you know, it’s just like a buzzword and people would say, oh, I’m burnt out and they would go along until something really happens. So I decided to, JAZZD Health and Wellness is a company that helps organization go in and really ask the hard questions. 

Angela Kelly: Mhm. 

Jasmin Dennis: You know, what do you want for your organization? How do you see your staff showing up? When they come in, you know, in the morning, if it’s a mother, are they tired? At school, how do your kids come back from school and how do they feel? Is it that they might, you know, feel some kind of attention, you know? Teachers are expected to be superhumans. 

Angela Kelly: Mhm, yes. 

Jasmin Dennis: They’re expected to be the mother, the father, the caretaker, the psychologist, and everything. So, you want to almost kind of, you know, gear it, how was your day today? And most people don’t ask their kids, how was your day today, you know? We know to go to school and, you know, teach your presentation day and bring a gift to the teacher at the end of the year, but do we really touch base with them during the year and find out how can I support you?

So when I speak to the corporations, I dive right down to the individuals. What is your profession? What is your profession? What is your profession? And I tailor the group. If it’s a, if it’s, if I’m addressing teachers, then I tailor the teachers to say, you know what? You might be often overlooked by the parents that bring the kids in because you’re going through something and they’re going through something at work. 

And so we have to meet in the middle and so we’re almost using our children in the middle as a go-between to kind of test the waters. So I always say to the educators, you know, when you see the child comes in, touch base, see how they react, and then I ask the parents, how do your child react when they come home? 

So I’ve come from a background of wellness, Angela, and I just want to see everybody healthy. I think I might have gone around in a circle there and do the whole just to give you a synopsis of where I, you know, how I see and how the burnout comes in. And I’ll delve deeper into burnout and how to recognize it.

Angela Kelly: Sure. That’s a beautiful introduction because it gives us a broad perspective of all of the facets that you work with. When it comes to, you know, I have been discussing this often on the podcast is the humanity behind education and that, you know, our students are humans and our teachers and support staff are humans and we as leaders are humans. And that is what comes first. 

That is the priority and that’s the lens through which we need to have these conversations around not just academic success, but success as a human. Part of that is wellness, feeling well, feeling good about yourself, having a strong identity, feeling capable, feeling loved, appreciated, wanted, feeling like you matter, feeling respected, feeling safe is a real core foundation. 

So the wellness industry can mean, it’s very general, right? It can mean a lot of things. And what I hear you saying is that you’re helping organizations have conversations at an individual level. 

So an individual, what they walk away with is some introspection around what’s working well in their life, what isn’t well in their life, and how can they close that gap and bring more wellness to their life, whether it is at home with their relationships at home, whether it’s with parenting and with their kids or with their partner or spouse, whether it’s at work with relationships relating to their colleagues or their bosses, or whether that is the relationship that parents have with their child’s teacher. 

And that relationship is so precious because your babies as parents are going to these individuals who care so deeply, they care so deeply and they work so hard and they’re being tasked with, you know, the goal, the mission really in education, what we’re being told as educators is to fix it all, do it all. You know, like put society on our shoulders, educate them all, make them successful, help them with their academics, their intellect, but they’re also their physical skills, their emotional regulation, their mental wellbeing, their socialization. And that’s a lot of pressure on the educator. 

And mom and dad are feeling lots of pressure at home. So we’re trying to see each other. And that’s what you said so beautifully is that you’re helping, you know, corporate moms and dads see their teachers at a humanity level and here at this podcast, like it’s educators wanting to see parents at a humanity level and working together in collaboration to raise these little ones here. Yeah? 

Jasmin Dennis: Oh, absolutely. You said it beautifully again. You know, the World Health Organization in 2019 at Davos, Switzerland, categorized, you know, burnout as an occupational phenomenon. It’s real. It is chronic stress that has not been addressed and it just weaves into the fabric. I chose burnout as opposed to, and I’m very passionate about burnout because it can disguise itself in so many ways. 

And that’s one of the reasons I developed the Burnout Pie Framework so that you can look at it at a glance. You know, I want people to visualize it in their home. If it was in everybody’s home and in every school board, to visualize the Burnout Pie Framework and it could be the beginning of burnout, it could be deep in it. 

For instance, if I were to say to you, you know, Angela, I know you love apple pie and I’m going to give you this beautiful apple pie and you’re going to be very thankful for this beautiful pie. But if you ate it, if you consume that pie, right, all at once, no matter how much you love it, you’re going to feel sick. You’re going to have a tummy ache and you’re going to wish you hadn’t, you know, you hadn’t consumed that pie. 

And the reason I do, you know, the pie chart of the Burnout Pie Framework is because you are going to see each, it is divided in eight dimensions, eight slices that gives you burnout. 

And when I do a presentation or corporation, and I put the burnout pie up there and I say to them, you know, this is the burnout pie. If you were to feel all of those feelings and emotions at once, you can’t function. And most people walk around with all eight slices of the pie, it’s sleeplessness, it’s depression, it’s anxiety, it’s hopelessness, detachment. All of that they’re walking around with. And, you know, people figure burnout, it’s not, it’s not a breakdown. It’s a signal. 

Burnout is a signal because under each slice of the pie, you can go deeper and deeper to see the hidden stressors that shows up in three nights sleep. Most people say, oh, maybe if I go to bed early. But then you go to bed early and you still didn’t sleep. Or you feel anxious all day long and you probably figure, I’m just anxious. So what happens is that one thing leads to the other. The sleeplessness leads to the exhaustion. The exhaustion leads to the irritability. And you see that manifest. 

You see people and you know, they say, oh, I’m just so sorry. I’m just so irritable today. I was on a phone call just two days ago with my phone provider because I’m so versed into picking up when someone is exhibiting these traits that, you know, I kind of stop and I paused and I said, sir, I don’t want to interrupt you, but you know, you’re in, you know, do you realize that you’re kind of, from your tone, I’m not accusing you of anything, how do you feel yourself coming across explaining this to me? And he paused and I said, is your shoulders up? Or you feel tight? You know, whatever. 

Because it’s not about me. It’s not about me that’s happening. It’s about what is playing in the background. So every day, you know, when someone apologizes to you over and over, has nothing to do with you. You know, it’s I mean, Don Miguel Ruiz, you know, said once, you know, it has nothing to do in the Four Agreements. It’s not about me. So I take, when I wake up in the morning, I check myself. I want to see how I feel. 

And every day, I’m not like, ooh, you know, I’m not feeling any of these. But the urgency that plays in a lot of people’s lives, they jump, they wake up and the alarm and I don’t use alarm. I train my body not to use alarm because of what it can, you know, and the alarm… they jump out of bed and they run to the shower and run to the coffee machine and they run to work and there’s deadlines to be done. And that is one of the things that shows up as the hidden stressor of burnout. You are constantly on the run. 

So when I wake up, if I haven’t slept well the night before, I sit down for like a couple minutes to myself. I take some deep breaths and I figure, okay, what’s going on here, Jasmin? You know, what’s going on here? You tossed and turned all last night. And I play over my day. And it could be something that I picked up the day earlier that someone said to me that didn’t sit well with me that I took to bed with me. So I train people to, for instance, to not look at your irritability as just that I’m having a bad day and I need my coffee. 

So in the burnout pie, individually, you know, I’ll say there’s a survey that is done and a self-reflection tool that I call it is self-reflection and it asks maybe one to eight questions. I say eight because it relates to the burnout pie of the eight slices. You know, and I say, you know, how do you feel? 

How often do you feel, you know, detached from work? How often do you feel anxiety? How often do you feel, you know, and you just toss it off that you’re having a bad day. That’s another buzzword. Yes, we all have bad days. But there’s a build-up when it comes to burnout and then it comes a crash. 

And that corporate individual is not helping the organization anymore. And you will find some people will say, you know what? I’m not happy at this job. I’m going to leave because it must be the job. Again, it might have nothing to do with the job. You know, to thine own self be true, I always say, look at yourself first before you make, because you’re going to take yourself with you to the other job. You know, when I speak to a couple at home and the wife says to me, oh, he comes home and he just goes to his man cave and crack a beer. 

And it just bugs me that he does that. And I have to cook and clean and get the kids ready for… And you know, and I asked it, I asked the husband and I said, well, why do you feel like and the man cave is an escape. It’s an excuse. Yes, you can want to have a quiet place. I like my reflect time where I reflect my quiet time. I can do that flat on my back in the bed. I can sit at the foot of the bed. I can go in the bathroom and I can do it, but it doesn’t take four hours of sitting in there. 

You know, nothing against the guys, you know, but doing this one thing over and over, that isn’t addressing what they’re probably taking from work and bringing it at home. So sometimes homes become a dumping ground. I take what’s happening at work and I dump it at home. And then the wife takes what happened and she goes to bed and she doesn’t sleep and then resentment builds up about that. 

And then your child figures that you take him to school, but when he gets to drop him off, he’s hugging you really tight and he doesn’t want to let go. And then he goes up to school and doesn’t listen to the teacher, had his head, has his head down. So he’s taking the dumping from the husband dumps it at home. The wife didn’t sleep all last night. She might not be as, you know, warm in the morning and Tommy feels, you know, Mom doesn’t love me anymore. 

And then I don’t want to go to school and then I go to school and don’t want to work, I don’t want to, I don’t want to socialize, there’s detachment. And it takes a great educator and the teachers I give them, oh my god, I give them so much credit. And I taught temporarily just out of high school at a, you know, it was almost like a, it’s a private school and, you know, they were, everybody says I should be a teacher, you know. 

And I remember walking in and I, at that time I wasn’t thinking about anything, but I noticed this little girl just in the corner reserved. And then, you know, what do I do to help? And this is why I give teachers, you know, like, if I could put a crown on their head, you know, I give it to them because they’re taking care of your most precious cargo and they themselves are human. The teacher might be the one that the hubby needs to go in the man cave and she gets to sleep at night, right? 

Angela Kelly: Yes. 

Jasmin Dennis: She’s not going to, you know, and then comes to school and she has to be responsible for the emotions of and especially in these days right now with the, you know, what’s happening in school, the teachers have to be on their P and Q and they they’re watched from every angle, you know, and they have to be this walk in this tight rope. So when I speak to teachers, I basically say, all you have to do is to be, take your self-reflection so that you’re well. When you stand in front of the school teaching, you know you’re okay. So you don’t have to wonder if it’s me. 

Angela Kelly: Mhm. 

Jasmin Dennis: And then when you realize that I’m walking in my truth, I’ve taken my self-reflection, I know I’m feeling okay, I’m not perfect, I might have a headache, but then I can look at my classroom in a very different lens. 

Angela Kelly: Yes, beautiful. Yes. Thank you for that. Yes, there are many stress factors for families, for students, for teachers, and for school leaders out there. So for the school leader listeners out there, Jasmin, what are some of the more subtle signs of burnout that number one, they should be, you know, like monitoring for themselves? 

So you did definitely mentioned like your emotions, they’re not meant to be avoided or just ignored. They’re information. So when you’re feeling certain irritabilities or you’re feeling exhausted or you’re awake at night feeling anxious or you’re feeling very discouraged, I’m trying to remember all the pieces of the pie that you had mentioned. But when you’re feeling these certain emotions, they’re a signal, they’re information. Your body is communicating to you to get your attention. 

So it’s not a problem per se, it’s just you want to explore that emotion with curiosity to understand why you’re feeling the way you’re feeling, what’s coming up for you, and to like just be honest and acknowledge those thoughts and feelings because if not, if you’re just getting up and running from the bed to the shower, to the coffee maker, to the car, and you’re going, I call it, you’re going robotic, right? Or you’re just on autopilot. 

Jasmin Dennis: Yes. 

Angela Kelly: You’re actually trying to disassociate from those feelings that feel uncomfortable or feel negative because you’re under pressure to perform. And that pressure, if we don’t have a tolerance for the pressure or we’re at our bandwidth, we’re just at max capacity, that’s if we’re not acknowledging that we’re at capacity, but we continue to overwork and overschedule and over exert, now we’re hitting that threshold of burnout. 

So, what can school leaders first identify within themselves? What are those subtle signs? And then the second part of that question is when they’re leading staff and students, what subtle signs might they be looking for in other people that would indicate to them this person may be experiencing, you know, or approaching burnout?

Jasmin Dennis: Okay. Yes. Well, the eight slice, thank you, Angela. The eight slices, you know, goes into anxiety, sleeplessness, hopelessness. And I, I’ll break it down because everyone, hopelessness is bad. You know, there’s a depression, there’s a detachment, there’s exhaustion, irritability, and chronic stress. 

So, as an individual, I have had people go through all spectrums of all of that. They’re fully loaded with all of that. They’re a lit match, ready to go off of anything, never sleep in, always anxious, don’t socialize at work, you know, depressed, all those things are happening all at once. And what I do with an individual, if you know, I’m not asking you to say overnight, be free of all these. 

But some main, and people look at this one so lightly and it is the one thing that is one of the most important slice in the pie. You must sleep. The animals sleep, the ants sleep, the birds, you must be able to, you know, six to eight hours. I hear people talk all the time, oh, I can function in two hours sleep. Oh, that’s a volcano, you know, ready to like burst open. You know, and I wrote an article it was in Japan, prime minister that says she functions on two hours sleep.

And I remember one of the a gentleman on LinkedIn from one of the corners of LinkedIn, he said he used to say that, but he quickly changed it. He recognized that he was heading nowhere, you know, fast. So I always say to, you know, to recognize it in someone else, I recognize it on the phone because I’m so clued into individuals, not that I’m watching them, but I have like antennas going around. 

And if you see someone that if they have to apologize to you, you go to work and it might be a coworker, once or twice in a day, that’s a key. If you are with someone and they, you see all of a sudden they were a vibrant individual and they decide to eat lunch by themselves, you know, every day for the, for the last two weeks, you know, pay attention to that. 

If you see someone that, you know, is just constantly feel hopeless and teary when you talk to them. I was in the elevator the other day talking to someone and I know the person was the brink of crying, okay? So when you see that and if someone is saying, you know, exhaustion, you know, is a thing to where someone says, I don’t know, it must be the weather. I just feel exhausted, it must be the weather. 

But then the sun comes out, I’m exhausted, you know, I feel like I have a headache, I didn’t. And so you’re kind of and it’s you don’t go up to someone and says, oh, you must be in burnout. 

Angela Kelly: Right. That’s not the approach we want to take there. 

Jasmin Dennis: No. You empathy. So you, I train the organization, the leaders. I said, if you can lead with compassion, meaning that you can have your privacy, create an open door for your team. Let the door crack. If you have to work, you address your team and you say, I’m going to need these three hours because I have something important to do, otherwise leave it open, right? Try to socialize. You know, the Japanese call it, is it Ikigai? never pronounce it, but a sense of purpose. 

Most people walk around without a, they wake up without a sense of purpose. They’re on this hamster wheel every day and they really don’t have a sense of purpose. Except I’m going to work today and I’m getting a paycheck at the end of the week. So you see all that motions going down. You train them to get rid of and I, on one-on-one, I said, okay, chronic stress is not easy to treat. It’s sustained stress that has not been taken care of. 

So let’s start with, you know, what you’re experiencing today. Look at the burnout pie and I have them physically look at the burnout pie and someone must say, you know what? I feel teary, you know, I don’t know why I feel teary. I don’t feel, I want to cry. I don’t jump to treat them right away because depression is a finicky thing and that is beyond my scope, you know. So I go to something else that might be causing them to feel depressed, right? 

And I might say, okay, why are you constantly irritable all day? The animals, if you look at a dog, he wakes, when a cat, they wake up and they stretch and they move around and they whatever. And I said, I said, you know, let’s work on that. How often do you feel irritable or what makes you feel irritable? 

You don’t have to feel irritable if it’s raining all day. You don’t have to feel irritable if you miss the bus. You don’t have to feel irritable if you get to class late. You don’t have to feel irritable if someone in the class is acting up. So how often do you feel like it just takes that thing to send you off? 

Then you have to apologize and backtrack, right? And how, you know, for instance, you know, I was talking to someone the other day, it was in a group environment, right? And someone brought it up and she said to me, so when my husband comes home, do I tell him to get out of the man cave? I said, no, that is his space. You might say, well, honey, you know, what can I do to help you? Empathy comes in. 

So the fabric all the way through to identify and help others in burnout, first display empathy. How can I help you? I see that, you don’t say I see you’re heading for, oh, I see you’re anxious today. Oh, I see you’re a little bit detached. I just sense something different from you, I always say. I can walk into an organization, walk right through the door and I can pick out right away when I’m walking around who is detached, who is irritable, who is, I can spot it, you know, and I can see that team is in burnout. So I start with the leaders first.

Angela Kelly: Yes. Absolutely. Leaders go first and we go often. So there are definitely, like tuning into your emotional experience and feeling the energy from others that that emotional energy from others, that’s definitely a telltale sign. So I’m going to venture to say that when you’re noticing it in others, your key strategy is empathy first. And I would say that’s the same for yourself. 

So if you are feeling stressed, overwhelmed, exhausted, you know, hopeless, depressed, any of these feelings, irritability, checking in with yourself starting with empathy for yourself. What’s coming up for you, darling? Like, I try to be very kind to myself and ask what is coming up for you? How are you feeling? Like as though I were my own best friend, asking myself, how are you doing truly and letting myself be honest with myself with that empathy in mind. 

As a school leader, we can start there because we want to have the bandwidth when we go out to lead to be able to, number one, spot these subtle burnouts in other people. And then two, we’re starting to go into like, what do we do when we notice this? It’s not to say, hey, you look really burned out. 

Like that’s not going to help someone feel amazing. It is, it’s that, hey, you matter to me. I’m concerned, like empathy, what’s coming up for you? Are you okay? Is there something that you need today? And letting them communicate to you what their needs are if they’re able to articulate it. 

And if not, perhaps are there ways where leaders can proactively in terms of creating a work culture where they’re proactively monitoring how people are feeling and putting things into place so that burnout isn’t the norm, that it may be happens, you know, there’s always ebbs and flows to the school year and so there are times like the beginning of the year where there’s a lot of extra work we put in and then maybe at the end and during testing season, like we have certain seasons that are busier than others. 

But are there things that you can share with school leaders where they could be proactive in supporting a culture where burnout isn’t just the norm, the normal way of existing?

Jasmin Dennis: Oh, it’s not the norm. I’m going to tell you just a little bit of a story quickly. It’s not a long story, but this story will stay with me forever. And I was in one of my wellness centers and someone tapped my glass window and says, there’s a lady and her son, you know, outside, would like to speak to you. And the son is an adult son. 

And, you know, because we’re in a wellness center, we tend to judge people’s by the outlook, right? You so first of all then you, you tend to look at someone if they’re coming to see me, they’re probably over, you know, they probably want to lose weight or they want probably want to do this. So she comes into my office before she comes into my office, I went to the door and I greeted the son and I greeted her and instinctively I said to the son, do you mind if I, this is for your mom, right? Yes. 

Do you mind if I speak to your mom alone initially and then you can join us? And, you know, she came in and she was, I think the super it’s an in Canada we call them but she is like an area supervisor for, you know, the universities, right? So she comes in and she sits down and I look at her and something told me, don’t say a word. Do not say a word. 

And I sat there and she sat there and it was an uncomfortable couple minutes. And I sat there and it was five minutes and it was 10 minutes and it was close to 20 minutes, but from the three minutes in, she just started crying. 

So it’s easy for me to prolong the silence. And she cried and she cried and she cried and she cried. And at the 20 minutes, I see the son looking, he was, you know, see me not talk. And, you know, I said to her, I said, do you mind coming back? I said, we’re going to end this here today. But do you mind coming back to see me? And promise me you’ll come back to see me. 

This is not me pushing you off. Promise me you’ll come back and see me within the next two days. I’m going to write you in my book. I’ll, you know, plot out a time, give me a time when we can sit for two hours. Not an hour, for two hours. And I know she was in deep burnout. Deep. And, you know, so she came back and we sat and the first thing out of her mouth, she said to me, thank you for giving me the space to cry. 

She says, I do need to lose 60 pounds, but that wasn’t the end all. It was taking her work, taking home and not getting the support from hubby and the family. The son decided to come with her because there was probably the pressure, well, I’m going to make sure you go to the gym. They didn’t verbally say that to me, but I can almost play the conversation in my head. 

And we went through a series and we talked and we said, you know what? First, we’re going to get you well. We’re going to get you well. Not by, you know, not a cold, not that kind of a diagnostic well, but we’re going to make sure that up here, a checkup from the neck up, we are going to make sure you’re okay up there. 

So, you know, I went through the series of questions and everything is fine and, you know, she was coming in, she was motivated and by herself, son wasn’t escorting her. Long story short, she became at her age at 56, a professional bodybuilder. 

Angela Kelly: Oh my gosh. 

Jasmin Dennis: She was so into loving herself and she would have blown the burnout pie away. In one of the conversations, it was close to a marriage breakup. Oh, he was, I mean, he has a hot wife now, right? But, you know, and her head is right and you know, and that rubs off on the family. So it’s emotional and my book in The Hidden Signs: Identifying Emotional Burnout, I use the word emotional because it all starts here. 

And so I always say to someone, check in, spot the signs. You’re going to know when your hubby is in burnout. The hubby’s going to know when you and that’s what burnout is. That’s why it’s a buzzword. It’s a buzzword. When somebody says hurry, it’s not in the burnout pie, but urgency also leads to burnout. And if you can just calm and in your podcast, I listen, you know, love yourself, sit in that space, check in with yourself. 

And once you do that, you’re going to heal everyone else around you. Her name was Angela [unintelligible]. She healed herself and her entire household. And that’s the beauty of identifying and recognizing in yourself, you know, you don’t have to have this detrimental going to the doctor, it’s so bad that now you have all these diseases. 

You, we’re mentally free and happy. And that’s why the Japanese say socialize, talk to your friends, at school. Don’t forget, you know, I’m eating my lunch. Don’t want to talk to anybody. You know, eat your lunch and then just walk around and smile and laugh with somebody. You know, it really is. It really helps, you know? Most people go to work all day and they don’t laugh or smile all day long. 

Angela Kelly: Mhm. Mhm. 

Jasmin Dennis: You know, I remember I was giving someone a ride and I was introduced to her as a client and she, I was driving and she was one of these individual that was very prim and proper. You know, I didn’t know her before I picked her up. I had to describe my car, she described what she was wearing. 

She comes in the car and I am driving and five minutes into the drive, I said, I hope you have a strong heart. And she just started laughing her head off. You know, she said, just dying of laugh. She says, but because I thought today was going to be the last day of my life, the way you were driving. You know. 

So it’s even creating humor in someone else. You know, poke fun at yourself if you want to, you know, create a laughter with someone else. Poke fun at you, you know, I’ve often said, oh my God, my this big hair today. And somebody will laugh. You know?

Angela Kelly: Yes. 

Jasmin Dennis: So, yeah, poke fun at yourself to get, instill laughter in someone else.

Angela Kelly: Yes. Yes. Oh, you, the two things I really want to emphasize that you said was number one is the release of the emotion. It’s the acknowledgement of how you’re actually feeling. So that woman who came into your office, she didn’t feel she had the space or the permission to simply feel all of those feelings and let them come to the surface and let her eyes leak water. 

And just let the emotion fully flow through her for a good 15 to 20 minutes and then eventually, right? And it’s interesting, like we’re so afraid to feel those painful feelings and the worst thing that really happens is we kind of cry it out or we, you know, cry ourselves to sleep or we scream into a pillow or but there’s nothing other than just allowing that emotion to kind of go in waves through our body. 

So there’s that feeling of that emotion, giving ourselves that permission to actually feel and not go into autopilot and robotic mode where we’re trying to suppress it all and keep it all together. And I think that’s such a disservice that we tell people like that we should be professional. We have terms where it’s like basically don’t show emotion, don’t feel emotion. And if you’re emotional, that’s a sign of weakness. 

But that’s the opposite of what is true. Like the courage to feel your emotions, to acknowledge them, to process them, to allow them to be present, to let them flow through you. That’s step one. And then the other thing you said is I think it was the same woman where you were saying like she ended up becoming a bodybuilder. It’s when you can let yourself feel your emotions, then you can get more physical and part of the turning burnout around is one, feeling the emotions, and two, getting more physical in your body. 

Whether that’s taking a walk or, you know, taking a yoga class or just even simple stretches when you wake up in the morning. You were saying about getting up and we stretch and, you know, the cats and dogs when the first thing they do is stretch their bodies. They go from that sleep mode into like movement mode and they walk around and that’s what we can do as well is to take a moment, breathe, stretch, and then direct our thoughts. 

I would think that this is the third step is when you’re feeling your emotions and you’re moving your body, it’s directing our thoughts to what’s possible and the possibilities of the day ahead and the week ahead. And, you know, looking forward to lunch with a colleague or, you know, making sure like you’re going to look for the fun in the day and make light and just create some levity in your workplace. Everyone can bring that to the table. You don’t have to be a comedian to do that. 

Jasmin Dennis: You don’t. 

Angela Kelly: You can laugh about, you know, there’s so many times where as a teacher, as a principal, we would joke like somebody would have like two different pairs of socks on or two different shoes, like shoes that looked similar in the morning when you were, it was dark and you came in with a black shoe and a navy blue shoe and you know, like funny things like that. You know, just like or you know, your sweater’s inside out or you know, like silly things that we do when we’re in the hurry of teaching and learning and leading. 

So I really appreciate these tips that you’ve provided for our school leaders today and our educators. They’re going to be so grateful. Are there any last words of wisdom that you would like to share with our school leaders today, Jasmin?

Jasmin Dennis: Like you, your last words, you brought stretching up. I believe, you know, something happens. There’s a release. I love stretching. And, you know, you hold it. Most people, no, it’s not a static move. It’s like the cat is long, slow. And if, you know, if I could just leave this with you to say, if you make it a habit to take five minutes out of your day to just stretch. 

Right now, thinking about it, I’m getting goosebumps because my body has become so used to it that it’s looking forward to it to say, yes, you’ve given me what I want. Now go out and serve others. So that five minutes of breath, they say the yogi says, if you lose your breath, you lose your life. So that five minutes, you don’t have to stop and do them separately within the stretching, you do your breath. The eight breath. 

If you were to just to do that every day and to promise yourself that you will check in with yourself every day, see how you’re feeling. It’s not a weakness to feel burned out. And, you know, this is one thing I would love to change all organization to make it okay for someone to go into work one day and say, you know what? I am not going to serve you well today. I’m not at my best today. 

Please give me permission to go and take care of myself without chastising that person without reminding them of the deadline and the work. I wish and I pray that they feel, that’s why I say to leaders, lead with compassion. That freedom, and I guarantee you, if you give that individual that day to just take care of themselves, they’re going to be 10 times better the next day.

Angela Kelly: Mhm. Absolutely. And that’s true for ourselves and for our staff members. So keeping in mind that everyone on your campus goes through moments of intense pressure or fatigue or exhaustion, maybe something’s going on at home. So we want to keep that in mind. The humanity part of education is that teachers are humans who have lives outside of teaching and leaders are humans who have lives outside of, of leading their schools. 

And we want to first give ourselves permission and we also want to create a culture of permission to be human. And education really has become so pressurized, pressure for the testing, pressure for academic success, pressure to always be improving benchmark assessments and meeting the grade so to speak and getting the kids, you know, to achieve academic, primarily academics, but also socially. And then we want them to be of service as they get older. 

So there’s a lot of pressure we’re putting on the little people, which puts pressure on the adults. And if we were to keep in mind that the real solution isn’t some externalized program even, it’s really within yourself. It’s giving yourself permission to feel, giving yourself permission to breathe, giving yourself permission to take a five-minute walk around campus or a three-minute stretch in your office or for teachers, perhaps, you know, while the kids are at recess, take a five-minute stretch, actually take your lunch. 

And I know I was notoriously bad at eating lunch because I, as a kindergarten teacher, I was prepping for the afternoon, so I would like eat and work at the same time. But on the days where I was consciously choosing and intentionally choosing to go into the staff room, I felt so much better than I did on those days where I was rushing through my lunch. So I started noticing that. And I appreciate you reminding us again to take care of the body and the breath and the leadership and the teaching will follow.

Jasmin Dennis: That’s absolutely true.

Angela Kelly: Well, thank you so much. I really appreciate it. It’s so interesting the way that you serve, it’s in the wellness industry, but it focuses on burnout and it’s helping people identify for themselves at an individual level, where am I at on the pie chart today? 

Jasmin Dennis: Yes. 

Angela Kelly: And then they can, you know, each day is a little bit different and they can focus on one slice of the pie maybe a week at a time or, you know, doing it daily or maybe monthly they have a monthly goal for one of the pies and they’re able to start moving a little bit more and doing things that make them laugh a little bit more and little by little, step by step that burnout can, you know, can turn the volume down there on the burnout. So.

Jasmin Dennis: Oh, yes. The goal is to get over to the well pie, you know? Goal is you know, Angela went out on the well pie because it’s not a matter that like a bodybuilder, you know, well, you don’t have to be a bodybuilder to be healthy, but she was so in tuned and feeling such good thing that her workout, you know, extended to that. And now she’s competing, so in a more different, endorphins are coming in. So we want those endorphins to come in. Find a way to get them coming every day. 

Angela Kelly: Yes. Yes. And that’s an, you know, in my program, I talk a lot about your identity as a leader, your leadership identity. And this person was able to completely re-identify herself as a woman, as a professional, and the way you do one thing is the way you do everything. So one slice of the pie can really have a profound impact on the other slices. Is that true?

Jasmin Dennis: Absolutely. Absolutely. If they’re a great sleeper, right, I and I quickly want to say this because people categorize, oh, I sleep nine hours per night, so I’m good. I always say, when you wake up from that nine hours, how do you feel? So you have to watch how you feel when you sleep. You don’t have to have the, watch how you feel. 

So even though someone says, oh, I’m fine, I sleep. I sleep like crazy. Oftentimes, if I continue speaking them long enough, there is some underlying of depression setting in or hopelessness setting in. So even though sleep is crucial, I always watch when someone says, oh, I have no problem sleeping.

Angela Kelly: Yeah, because oversleeping could be a symptom as well.

Jasmin Dennis: Yes.

Angela Kelly: Yeah. So we want to find the sweet spot. I call it the land of and. Where you’re not too much, not too little, just right.

Jasmin Dennis: Yes. Just right. And you feel so great when you get it just right.

Angela Kelly: Yes, yeah. Yes. I love those mornings.

Jasmin Dennis: Yeah.

Angela Kelly: Well, thank you for your time today, Jasmin. It has been such a pleasure to have you. It’s a delight to meet you and I thank you for the work you’re doing in organizations and supporting them at an individual and at a corporate level and really bringing in the concept of parenting and connecting with the school. 

Like that full circle helps educators when they feel seen and heard and they matter through the parents, that burnout can turn down very quickly when people feel connected and they feel engaged with their students and with their families and at a school level, right, with their colleagues and their leaders. So thank you again for all the work that you’re doing in the world and for being here today.

Jasmin Dennis: Thank you for having me. This is fantastic. I love it.

Angela Kelly: Such a great pleasure. Well, thank you listeners so much. I hope you’ve enjoyed this conversation with Jasmin Dennis. I will put all of her contact info and links in the show notes so you will have access to that. 

And we hope that this has provided some insight on different subtle ways that burnout might be showing up in your life or on your campus so that you can be on the lookout for that and to give yourself a little grace and some compassion along with your teachers. You know, this time of year in the spring season, people are tired and people have been working hard since August, July, and August, and we’ve been pushing through. It’s testing season. 

So be mindful of that and allow your teachers just some graciousness and some empathy when it comes to this particular season of the school year. So you guys are almost at the finish line. Take good care of yourselves. Be well and we look forward to talking with you next week. Have a beautiful 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.

Hello, empowered principals. Welcome to episode 432.

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.

All right, my empowered principals, you are in for an outstanding interview with Dr. Lisa Riegel. She studies brain neurology and its impact on teaching, learning, and leading. I was profoundly moved by this interview. She is exquisite. She’s got some books that you can find in the show notes. There are links to those books in the show notes, and you are going to find this the most extraordinary interview. I loved it. I can’t wait to collaborate with her further in the future. I hope and I know you will enjoy this show.

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Angela Kelly: It is such a pleasure to be here with you today. Happy Tuesday and welcome to the podcast. I have a special guest with us today, Dr. Lisa Riegel. She has some incredible information to share on neuroscience, the brain, how the brain works, how kids learn, how teachers teach, and we just had a really amazing meet and greet session, and I love her work. She has an eight, it’s the eight C’s, correct?

Lisa Riegel: Yes.

Angela Kelly: So she’s got a lot of information to share with you today. You’re going to find this so valuable, and I look forward to this conversation. So Lisa, thank you for being on the podcast.

Lisa Riegel: Yeah, thank you for having me.

Angela Kelly: Absolutely. So I’m going to let her introduce herself and her work a little bit. And one thing I know about Lisa is that she’s a former teacher, and as you guys know, I really work hard to encourage people who are relevant in the field of education, who have the background, who have done the job, who’ve been boots on the ground as much as possible, because I want educators to feel seen and heard. And Lisa is the real deal. She has done all of the work. She’s been an educator prior to the work that she’s doing now. And I really admire that and respect when we get educators in here who are working to help improve the quality of education in the sense of the experience for both students, staff members, and leaders. So Lisa, welcome. Thank you so much for being here.

Lisa Riegel: Yeah, well, thank you. I’m excited for our conversation.

Angela Kelly: Yeah. Tell us a little bit about your background and your teaching experience and how you kind of evolved into the work that you’re doing right now.

Lisa Riegel: Sure. So I started out as an English teacher. I taught English and journalism at a high school near Columbus. And then I did that for nine years, and then I went into administration at a career center, which was super interesting because I kind of learned like how schools are situated from an economic development standpoint. And then I had the opportunity to go do my doctoral work at Ohio State, or the Ohio State, as I have to say. And I focused in, I focused on leadership, but I was really interested in the human system. And a lot of leadership training is really around policy, org theory, the structure piece, but I was interested in how do you move people? How do you engage people?

And so I have been working in schools since, gosh, like 2010, and I’ve been helping school leaders to frame up change and to create the conditions necessary for those transformations to stick and persist. And so I work in schools. I do a lot of work with trauma-informed care because I went into the brain science, because I started when I was in my doctoral work, I was studying the social sciences like engagement and motivation and those kinds of things. And then I started thinking, real change happens in the actual brain. So what’s going on in there? So I started looking into the neuroscience of behavior, and it kind of opened my eyes to a whole different reality and a whole different reason why a lot of the change that I see principals hoping for just doesn’t happen.

Angela Kelly: Yes, yeah. Tell us a little bit more about that because this is something I have been exploring as well. In my work as a coach for school leaders, mentoring them not just on the skill set of leadership, but on the mindset and embodying what empowerment looks like. And then I realized, well, empowerment is the goal of education, right? We as educators are here to empower students, empower our teachers to be the best versions of themselves, to explore their own life, and to have as many opportunities as possible. And I agree with you, I think that one of the reasons that site leaders, district leaders, you know, in even in county and state, you know, all the way up in terms of educational leadership, why we feel like we’re maybe banging our head against the wall is because we aren’t really focusing on the regulation system, the internal regulation systems that happen that need to occur.

And, you know, I feel like I’ve really kind of fine-tuned it down to safety. We need to feel safe, not just physically safe. I know that’s a problem in our schools, of course, but we need to be able to regulate ourselves back to a sense of safety for baseline just to be able to be available for education. So I’m curious to hear more about the work you’re doing, what you found out in your research, and what you have developed to support classrooms, students, teachers, and site leaders to maintain an openness to learning and a safe place for learning from an internal standpoint.

Lisa Riegel: So I have a book called NeuroWell that really gets into like what kind of practices, routines, and culture do we need to have a healthy system. And then I have a book called Aspirations to Operations, which is really a leader’s guide book to making those transformations stick. But in both cases, the foundation for a healthy system and for fulfillment and empowerment is a sense of belonging. So, you know, how do we actually create a sense of belonging in the schools? And I think teachers, you know, for leaders, it’s difficult because teachers come in, they go in their classroom, and it’s a solo sport. You know, they’re alone a lot. So building some of that sense of a collective identity of like, when we’re here, we’re all part of this. And I think for students, it also makes a big difference because if I walk into a school every day and I don’t really feel like I belong or I feel othered or I’m not really comfortable, I don’t have that emotional safety, then I don’t feel a sense of belonging and I close down and disengage.

And then the other safety that I talk about is intellectual safety. If I go into a place and, and I think this applies to teachers and students as well, we’ve been talking about differentiation for 20 years, but when I go in schools, I don’t see a whole lot of it. I still see a lot of teacher-led whole group instruction. So if you’ve got students in the classroom who are not accessing the curriculum or not feeling it’s relevant, then they don’t have intellectual safety. And from a biology standpoint, their body, it’s the same thing. It’s a stressor. And then from the teacher’s side, one of the things I work with teams on is clarity. What do you want people to do? And I think we send teachers to trainings or we have somebody come in and do a training and then we say, well, they’re trained. So we should be implementing. There’s a whole lot that has to go on to support the human system side of change because change is scary.

So really the foundation is that sense of belonging. And there’s a social scientist, actually, it’s interesting, they started studying this out of the big diversity initiatives that we’ve had in this country. And they said, you know, we’ve kind of failed. Like people still hunker down with people who are just like they are. Like, we really don’t have like the stock photo pictures of close friends from all different backgrounds. So they said, what went wrong? So they said, well, let’s study a place that it isn’t that way. And they went to the military and they said, how is it that soldiers form these really tight bonds with each other that last for decades and what’s the difference? Because they’re from wildly different backgrounds.

And what they said is that it’s really this collective identity. When they are in that context, they are a soldier first. And then all the other differences are just what makes them unique. But they as a group identify together in that collective identity as a soldier. And, you know, then having time together over years and then, you know, all the other things that they do together, it creates these really strong ties. So when we think about that in schools, like coming from Ohio State, they have great collective identity. People want to be part of Buckeye Nation, even though, you know, they may be never attended there. So there’s a very strong collective identity of what it means to be a Buckeye. And so that kind of collective identity breeds a sense of belonging. And yet, when you look at a lot of schools, the collective identity is negative. It’s this stinks. I don’t want to be here. This place is mean. This place is dangerous.

So I think, you know, we do a lot of culture work in schools, but that culture work is a lot of words. And culture’s built through actions. And so how do we strategically build a culture that has a sense of collective identity and belonging, and then again, with the teachers as far as emotional safety, how are we building a place that now I come in, I feel like I belong, but I’m also safe intellectually and emotionally to engage.

Angela Kelly: Yes. I love what you said about the culture, and the military is a perfect example. And I was just thinking as you were speaking about that, like isn’t sport, I feel like some sports teams are the same way where when you’re on the team, regardless of what other team you came from when you think of professional sports, you are a member of that team. And colleges and universities are really good at creating a culture, which is just a feeling. When I was thinking about what is climate, what is culture, you know, we’ve been working on climate and culture in our schools for decades. It’s really about how people feel about themselves, about each other, about the collective, about the community. It’s how they feel regarding that climate and culture. And that is what perpetuates and creates that culture, right?

So when you’re saying, one, we need to be physically safe, two, we need to be mentally and emotionally safe, but we also need to be academically safe and socially safe, which all of those are intertwined, right? Because if you’re not feeling safe academically, you’re definitely not feeling safe socially. And it’s about creating safety on all of those levels. And that can be daunting for school leaders. So in your work, what were some elements that you found were accessible for school leaders, kind of tangible things where they could wrap their head around, first, creating their own safety to be able to go out and lead, but then to invite teachers and students into creating a collective culture of safety.

Lisa Riegel: So I think the easiest way to explain this is to think about what my eight C framework is. The first C is culture, and it’s about creating this collective identity. But then there’s three C’s that are about planning for change or improvement. So the first one is clarity. What do you want me to do? The second is coherence. And I had a school that they spent thousands of dollars on training for personalized learning, and then they bought direct instruction curriculum. That’s not coherent. And so now you’ve got teachers who are going to fail either way because so that doesn’t breed that sense of safety.

The third is cadence, and that’s really how fast can change happen, because something we don’t think about is that when teachers, you know, there’s a certain sense of identity and self that we have when we’re an expert or when we’re the experienced person. If I start to ask people to change their behavior or change their job or how they do business, I’m threatening that expertise, and that makes us super uncomfortable. So as we think about change, how do we clearly lay out incremental steps to change that are first of all, not scary, that are within a zone of proximal development, and then how do we support that on the way through? Recognizing that if I’m a brand new teacher, I’m just trying to figure out how to get the kids to sit down and how do I organize my time, where if I’m a teacher in mid-career, I might be ready for change. Or if I’m a teacher who’s a veteran who’s been very, you know, seasoned and is respected among the staff, I might be pushing back against it, and I actually might take a longer time to change. So those first three C’s are the clarity, coherence, and cadence.

Then there’s two C’s that are about engaging the people, and there’s coaching and collaboration. We put a lot of people in rooms and do really unproductive things. So designing purposeful collaboration, it’s a skill. And coaching as well. Like I see a lot of times in schools, we have teachers who are not doing what the principal wants them to do, but they’re not adequately coaching them to make changes. So then it causes conflict and it causes this sense of these teachers don’t want to do this or don’t want to do that, when the reality is maybe you haven’t led them to do that.

Then the last C’s are about sustainability, and they are communication and celebration. And those are the big ones. So back to your original question about culture, it starts by having strategic ways that we are doing action. Culture is a feeling, but how you get that feeling is through action, not through words and posters. And so how do we build much like a sports team? You know, do we have routines? Do we have taglines or sayings? Do we have things that say this is how we do things here and build that sense of collective identity?

But the second thing that we miss is celebrations. And I see a lot of, you know, principals that will think of culture and be like, well, we’re doing an appreciation lunch or we’re doing this. And it’s like, that’s nice. People appreciate that. A free meal is great. But real, authentic celebration that ends up actually reinforcing your culture is when you see someone doing the actions that build the culture you want, and you are celebrating them for doing those actions. It has to be tied to what you want to see and hear, which goes back to that clarity piece. If you don’t have clarity of what it looks like, you’re never going to get there.

Angela Kelly: Right. Yes. And that is where the work that I do is helping principals and district leaders learn how to coach. Like you were saying, part of helping the staff to help students is the capacity to coach and mentor. And they are different. Coaching and mentoring are two different things, and we have to break those down. But no one taught school leaders the skill of mentorship and coaching and the difference between the two, how it looks and feels for the person who’s mentoring and the person who’s being mentored. And that’s a skill that we can add to enhance our leadership capacity. So I appreciate you bringing that up.

Every C, it’s so interesting, every C that you mentioned is something I have experienced as a school leader and as a teacher, the presence of it and the lack of it. And to see the gap between the two, I have felt them, you know, and experienced them both as a leader and as a teacher and a district leader, because the further I went up, and maybe this is the same for you, the further I went up, it was almost like the bigger the gap actually grew in terms of culture, in terms of my connection with kids and families and communities, and then the communication gap, it just seemed like all the C’s got a little bit stretched out as you go up into the leadership realms. And so bringing us all together as a district, bringing us all together as a school, and then teachers learning the skill of mentor and coaching with their children, with the students in their class, so they can bring the students together to be members of a classroom team or a grade level team or a department team, depending on what area of, you know, you’re teaching. So I find this so fascinating.

And the question that comes up for most people, at least that I work with, boots on the ground is, but how? Everyone wants to know the how. And I try to teach them the who in order to do the how. So what are your tips and strategies for getting to the how through the work that you do?

Lisa Riegel: The main thing to know, well, there’s the neuroscience, the real change starts in the brain, right? So understanding the brain science can make people much more effective at leading, coaching, mentoring, teaching, whatever it is. And so any behavior we have, whether it’s adult or kids, work behavior, social behaviors, academic behaviors, is really the intersection of our biology and our context. And so if we understand the biology of how perceptions are made and how the stress system works and what triggers that stress system and what happens to our ability to think and socialize during that, if we understand that, then we reframe the way we look at problem behaviors in staff and students.

The second is the context. We ultimately control that context. And so if we create a safe, supportive, proactive context, then we reduce the stressors in the brain, and our context actually can shape the biology of our brain. So if it would be helpful, I can explain to you how a perception’s formed.

Angela Kelly: Yeah, please do.

Lisa Riegel: Our brain is like a giant department, and 80% of the departments in our brain are below our nose and unconscious. So 80% of the thinking that we are doing that impacts how we behave, we don’t know we’re thinking it. And so part of what I teach people is to be more self-aware. If you’re self-aware and you’re self-regulating, then you have self-control. And when you have self-control, you make better decisions.

So your brain has all these departments. Perceptions are formed in the limbic system, and the limbic system does not know time and can’t tell a story. And you have a little component in your limbic system called the thalamus. And I actually name him. He’s the data manager. I call him Harold. So Harold is in the thalamus. So Harold’s job is to take information from the vagus nerve, and the vagus nerve tells us, you know, is your heart pounding okay, is your stomach empty and like it’s our systems manager, monitoring systems, monitoring where our body is in space so that we’re not going to fall off a cliff. So the vagus nerve, if it’s agitated, and like prolonged stress causes stomach issues and heart palpitations. So the vagus nerve sends information to Harold and says, hey, body’s running okay or body’s not running okay.

Then Harold also takes in all the sensory data from the environment, what we see, taste, hear, smell, everything. And he goes into an amygdala, which is in our limbic brain, and it’s where our sensory memories are stored. And he says, what I’m seeing, hearing, tasting, touching reminds me of this. And he makes sensory associations. And it’s important to note they’re not story associations, not, I remember a time that it was just like this. It’s just sensory associations. So at that point then, he decides whether or not we need to be alarmed and then sends information to our security monitor on what to do.

But the perceptions, those associations are formed by the way that our brain puts two things together. So for example, when I was a kid growing up, my parents were divorced. My dad was always late picking me up. I spent a good chunk of my youth sitting on the front stoop waiting for my dad. My little eight-year-old brain put time and love and worth together. It’s a faulty association, but my brain put that there, right? Even through my 20s, like if I was, if my friends were late or my husband was late, like I would get angry or I would get anxious, and sometimes to the point where it was like, I was just annoyed and I couldn’t come down off of it, and it would ruin my evening. Once I understood that association, now the CEO part of my brain, which is me and my personality, is able to tell Harold, hey, Harold, don’t put those two things together.

And so in the setting of like a principal, you know, a lot of times we’re coaching about the what, what happened. What we need to be coaching about is the why. Why is this dysregulating you? You know, for example, I might be like, you know, Angela is always needling me, she’s always criticizing me, she’s always, and you think you’re helping me. And in my brain, feedback is dangerous, right? And who knows why, but it is. So I am already dysregulated. Harold and my security monitor, who I call Bob. So, you know, Harold and Bob have hijacked my brain and said you’re in danger, and now they’re running the show and I’m not running the show, which is why later when I calm down, I can be like, why did I even say that? I don’t even believe that. Why did I even act that way? Because Harold and Bob were in protective mode.

So our perceptions, it’s like a banana, think of a banana as reality, and then a whole bunch of different filters or screens. If you take a banana and shove it through those screens, on the other side, it’s still a banana, but it doesn’t look like one. So understanding how those perceptions are formed can give us a little bit of empathy when we see someone struggling, and it can help us to keep our professional hat on because it probably has nothing to do with us. It has to do with how that brain is taking something in the context and associating it with something negative from the past.

Angela Kelly: This is so good. I love the way you articulate this because when I became a school principal and I started sitting in IEP meetings, I had an excellent IEP team, and they were so good at navigating the IEP conversations around the why. So, you know, that the ABC, there’s an antecedent, the behavior, and then I don’t remember what the C was.

Lisa Riegel: Yep, the consequence.

Angela Kelly: Yes, the consequence. And so, you know, everyone wants to focus on the B and the C, but they didn’t want to focus on the A. And so I learned from them, there’s always a reason behind a behavior. And then I got certified in coaching and I was like, oh, we have thoughts and we have connections, we have perceptions, and we’re looking through certain lenses and certain facets, and that’s triggering parts of our body and our brain that we’re not, you know, in the driver’s seat even.

So once I learned that, it was such an eye-opener that every behavior, whether a small person or an adult person, every behavior, there is something driving that. To them, to their body, there’s a reason. We might not understand it, but that’s what our goal is to seek to understand at least to have empathy or compassion for and to know it’s actually another, like you said, department of the brain that’s taking the driver, I always call it the driver’s seat, right, that’s kind of driving the train here. And if we can simply have the awareness, and just that can be the hook, there’s always a reason behind the behavior and to separate, you said also like, you know, 99.9% of the time, and I would say almost 100, like it’s not really about us, it’s about a past association or something that they have connected. And I love how you use the example of the sitting there, the time, the worth, like that I’m sure there’s so many people who just could really feel that emotion as your eight-year-old self. I think about smells, like how your body associates certain smells. And every time you smell that, like you have a physical reaction, right?

Lisa Riegel: Yep. Yep. And it can be good or bad.

Angela Kelly: Yeah, like it can be yes, it can be loving, it can be your the smell of your baby’s head or it can be like, you know, I think of nursing home smell, like I just like that to me like brings sadness and pain, but there are just certain senses of our body.

Lisa Riegel: You see that in schools a lot too. You know, when I’m in classrooms with teachers, especially if they work in areas where a lot of the kids are coming from poverty or have a lot of trauma in their life, are you raising your voice? Like the tone of voice can be a trigger. And there’s actually a story I write about in my book that’s incredible. This kid had, he had been removed from his home because he’d been sexually molested by his father. And so he was in kind of a boarding school, orphanage-type school. And he was doing great. And then all of a sudden, he moved up to another grade and the wheels came off the bus, and he was a mess.

And they couldn’t figure out what was going on. And this is the other thing I think that we do is we attribute so much behavior to your character. And the reality, you can only attribute behavior to character if the person who’s holding the character, if the CEO of your brain is making those decisions. If Harold and Bob are doing it, that’s not where character lives in your brain. So anyways, this kid, there was a psychiatrist there the one day and he went in to meet with his father. And his father smelled like Old Spice. And the psychiatrist was thinking there, thinking about his dad and thinking about like fishing trips and, you know, he said he could almost smell the cigar that his dad used to smoke when they would go fishing and stuff.

And then he looked at the kid and the kid was not having that same reaction. So he went to the teacher and he said, what kind of deodorant do you wear? And he said, Old Spice. He said, would you be willing to switch to like an unscented deodorant? And they had a kind of restorative conversation with the kid that said, this is why you’re so angry all the time in here. So if we take this out of the context and get rid of that association, and the kid and this teacher started developing a relationship and it turned around.

So context impacts our behavior, and so we have control over that. And I see so many classrooms that are about control and compliance. They’re not about building relationships and building student agency and voice. It’s I have to get through the curriculum. I’m too busy to deal with your problem right now. I’m going to throw you out. And then I send you to another context, and maybe the principal deescalates the kid and they have a great relationship, but I’m walking right back into the dangerous context and I dysregulate again, and then the teacher’s like, this kid just won’t stop. And it’s like, you have to change the context that you’re operating in to make it safe, supportive, and proactive for that kid.

So I think understanding the brain science, it just gives us for me, it gives me a little bit of humility that like while I think I’m in a lot of control of things, I’m only in control once I’m self-aware and self-regulating. And so that’s become a really important part of my life just personally is to spend time to really take care of my brain and to get to know my brain in a way so that the part of my brain that is me is the one that’s most of the time driving the bus.

Angela Kelly: Yes. This is 100% this is what I do with the school leader, the district leaders, and what is so critical is that you did this example around the principal being able to regulate. So many times teachers will be so upset because the student cannot regulate with them in their environment in their classroom and they can’t see why they, you know, they have their blinders on to it. Then the student comes out, gets regulated, and then the teacher is almost offended that you sent the student back only for them to dysregulate once again. And, you know, that cycle is very common in schools.

And this is where our teachers, like school and district leaders can support in learning this work for themselves. So reading your book, you know, and whatever work that you do with schools and being in weekly coaching programs like my own, this kind of work that we do internally as leaders is how we learn to regulate ourselves in order to help our teachers learn the process. Like this, it’s not something that we’re taught in our teacher programs, in our administrative, you know, prep programs. It’s just it hasn’t really been discussed. We’re starting to explore it as you said, like there’s been a lot of brain research because people are so wanting to regulate students. And when you said you see a lot of classrooms with a lot of control, and that’s because they’ve got pacing guides and they’re expected to be on this page on this day, that’s happening because teachers are dysregulated, because they’re so afraid to be authentic, to take time to build relationships, to stop the lesson and do a co-regulation exercise with their class when there’s been a classroom event or somebody’s been really upset and maybe had to step out to regulate themselves.

You know, we don’t think about the other 29 students who saw that dysregulation are now also afraid or dysregulated themselves. And bringing this to the surface and normalizing conversations around what regulation looks like, what self-awareness looks like, and being able to as a group, which is another form of that collective community and culture, we as a culture stop, self-aware, self-reflect, and get back to self-regulation.

Lisa Riegel: Well, and I think that, you know, this is a leadership challenge because we measure what matters and what we measure matters. And right now, we have the tail wagging the dog. We’ve moved away from teaching kids to teaching content. And you know, it used to be if you had a kid who struggled to learn or maybe was a little bit of a stinker at times, they were more of just a challenge, and you’d work really hard to get a relationship with them. Now they’re an obstacle because I got to move through and I got to get you to testing.

And so principals, if they agree with what we’re saying here, and most of the time they do, they’re like, yeah, these teachers, they won’t develop relationships. And I’m like, that’s because you’re not rewarding it. You’re not clarifying it, you’re not celebrating it, you’re not measuring it. You’re not looking at…

Angela Kelly: You’re not giving permission.

Lisa Riegel: You know, and so teachers are very dysregulated. And so I’ve done a lot of work in schools even on how we can work as teacher teams to become more self-aware and self-regulated and how we can set up collaborative practices that will be calming versus, you know, like so many times I go into teacher-based team meetings and there is so much either underlying rage or just flat out like complaining and Yes. The point is you can’t reason with a kid when they’re not regulated. You can’t reason with a teacher either. So I think that principals understanding the biology behind it, it removes the judgment. It’s like this is this person’s brain, and so let’s give them a little grace and space. Let’s put a supportive context in place to help them fulfill, you know, their potential and to feel fulfilled in their work.

Angela Kelly: Yes. And principals, there’s two things I want to say right now. Number one, your staff is your classroom. So thinking about your staff, not as children, but as members of a collective where you want to understand what makes them tick, and you have to differentiate. And for some people, they fly on their own and they’re very able to self-regulate. Other teachers are brand new and they need that mentorship, you know, with an instructional coach support. And then you’ve got teachers who have limitless potential, but because they don’t have the skill set, they don’t have the skill set of awareness or, you know, self-coaching, self-regulation, that you might find them a challenge and an obstacle. And the way that we see teachers is the way that teachers see students. So if we cannot see them as an obstacle, but more of a curiosity and like seeking to understand, like how can I work with this person to help them feel their best? Because when teachers feel better, they teach better. So it’s really full circle.

And the other thing I really want to offer principals is I know Lisa and I are having this conversation and it feels like, wow, that’s a lot to take on my plate. And maybe I don’t have the authority or I’m not in the position to make these changes. And I now I have to try and sell the district on this or I have to wait till the district gets on board with this conversation. I would invite you to consider that you don’t have to wait for the entire district to have some big initiative to get on board. Now there’s a self-regulation initiative. It’s not that. It’s you learning how to do it by your, read her book, take her courses, join EPC, whatever it is that works for you, but do something that helps you learn how to do it yourself first. And just in that, then you can start to model it, you can start to be it, and the energy, I always talk about the energetics of leadership.

The energy that you are in, when that starts to shift, like Lisa and I both do this personally on a daily basis, I’m assuming, right? This is not, it’s not a one and done. You don’t learn it once and then you’re done. It’s like going to the gym, it’s like taking a shower. It’s something you do on a regular basis. And when you start to do that, as your energy changes, you start to interact with teachers in a different way, they’re going to feel that change and eventually that conversation can kind of spread out into your school, but you don’t have to wait for the district to give you permission to learn how to self-regulate. Would you say that’s true, Lisa?

Lisa Riegel: Yeah. And I think that schools have a tendency to make initiatives, right? And so it always feels like one more thing. But what we’re talking about, like my eight C framework is a framework. It’s a framework, it’s lens, it’s glasses. You put these glasses on and it’s a lens through which you see your work. And so like even with the eight C framework, it’s what you’re already doing, it’s just do it better. If you understand the science of behavior and you understand the obstacles that you’re going to face, you can be more proactive about how you’re designing and supporting change. So it’s not one more thing. It’s a pair of glasses that are going to clarify the whole process and help you understand where things are falling down. And I would argue that when you are self-aware and you’re self-regulating and you feel a sense of self-control, you’re happier, you’re healthier, you’re more successful. So it’s actually also a way to become a better leader and become a better person as a leader for people.

You know, when I used to teach at Ohio State, you know, they’d ask them, write your leadership platform. And I always thought that was kind of a dumb assignment because I was like, it should be one sentence. I lead in a way that others follow. That’s it, because it doesn’t matter what, you know, in the same way, I don’t care if you had a bad day, teacher, you’ve got these kids in front of you, you got to teach them. When you’re leading, it doesn’t matter what you prefer in a leader. It’s what your staff needs in a leader, and it’s being nimble and flexible enough to be able to be the leader they need you to be.

And so I think sometimes we get into these conversations about, you know, I’m going to be a transformative leader, transformational or aspirational or servant leader or all of these things. All of those, you know, I always used to say, I was a great teacher for a certain set of kids. There is no such thing as a great teacher, period. You’re a great teacher for certain kids. Some teachers are amazing at AP, some teachers are amazing working with at-risk kids. So it’s the same kind of thing with the leader is that a great leader is not a great leader in every context because the people in the context should be driving the type of leadership that the leader is using.

Angela Kelly: Yes. That I love using the eight C’s as a lens. I always talk about the lens through which changes the perspective, just like when you go to the optometrist. So you look, let’s look at this situation. So any obstacle, challenge, you know, that you’re facing, look through the lens of culture, look through the lens of communication, like and then see like, is this a culture thing? Is this a connection thing? Is this a communication thing? Is this, you know, a collaboration thing? And looking through to see, it helps you, and this is the when people ask me the how, this is the how. The how is slowing down and not making one decision based on one set of rules or one set of expectations. It’s looking at a school through its complexity, through all the facets. It’s like a diamond and it has all these, you know, many facets. And if you are willing to like explore and allow something to take time and seek to understand it, not from just a, let’s just like check the box, we got this solved, but from a more in-depth analysis of it, from a human analysis, from the humanity of education, I think that we can start to see and understand, which helps us expand our capacity to lead. That is how you become a better leader.

Lisa Riegel: Right. And I think one of the things that I always ask a lot of questions when I first start working with a leader and, you know, listening for the problem under the complaint. So like if a leader is like, oh, my staff hates meetings, I’m like, okay, so you don’t organize productive, useful meetings, right? Because people don’t hate meetings. People hate dumb meetings. So it’s like if you are structuring really strong collaboration that’s meaningful and purposeful, people will want to engage in it. And so, you know, I hear that sometimes or I hear, you know, this staff just they are traditional, they won’t bend their practices. And I’m like, okay, that’s a cadence problem, because you gave them training that is so far different than what’s going on right now that they’re scared to take the first step because it’s too risky.

So how do we start to stairstep some stepping stones to get them from where they are to where you want them to be? Or it can be my staff never reads my email. They don’t read stuff and I can’t get them to do the actions I want. And I think, okay, that’s a communication problem and or a meeting problem. You know, if I go to a staff meeting and you read everything you already sent me, you’ve just disincentivized me to do the reading on my own because you’re going to sit through it. So you have to set some norms about professionalism that like when we come to a meeting, like one of the things I always suggest is put a five-minute timer and say, you guys got the directives and announcements that, you know, of what we’re doing. We have five minutes. Who has questions? And if you go past five minutes, you say, submit them in writing and I’ll submit them back to you. So you train your staff that they are expected to read that ahead of time because you have other things that are more purposeful that you’re going to do when you think about how expensive meetings are. When you put every single person in that meeting, and you’re spending that time reading announcements, like it’s such a waste of money and resources and opportunity.

So I think like, you know, the Aspirations to Operations, I mean, I’m going to say this, but I think it should be required reading for all leaders because it really does help them position like the brain science of behavior and motivation, engagement, all of that, it positions that, but it truly gives them a lens when they start to say, okay, what are your five biggest gripes on your staff or that are happening in your building that are so frustrating? You can almost always point directly to one or two of the C’s. I may be great at the planning C’s and really stink at the engagement C’s. And so then I want to really focus in on those two to improve my coaching and the collaborative teams and all of that, or maybe sustainability isn’t happening because I’m not sustaining it. I’m not celebrating it. I’m not doing those things. So I think it’s a framework that can help fix the holes in the ship, and it can also, if there’s a lot of holes in the ship, it can help you build a new one.

Angela Kelly: Yes, absolutely. What I love so much about this conversation is that I feel like as educators on the outside of education, studying the problem with a different lens, because when you’re, sometimes when you’re in it, you can’t really see it. So, you know, I’ve been out for about 10 years and you’ve been doing this for a while now. When we look inward, we all are coming to these almost like universal understandings. And it really comes down to the humanity, the human part of education, which is what’s going on internally? And the institution of education, not there’s no one person to blame or, but the institution itself has evolved in such a way that it has externalized teaching and learning. It’s externalized the experience, and that leaves people feeling vulnerable, unsafe, unseen, unheard, uncared for.

I had an interview, maybe about a year ago, a couple of professors wrote a book, like something about it, teachers need to know they matter. And I think that’s that sense of belonging. We have to know at an individual level as a student, as a teacher, as a support staff member, and every human on your campus, whether they’re the custodian or the bus driver or the food service, hair professionals, that they matter, that without them, the system does not function as efficiently.

Lisa Riegel: And I hear a lot of leaders give lip service to that. You know, they’ll at the convocation, you guys are wonderful, you all this, we have the greatest staff in the world. But words don’t make culture, action makes culture. And so when teachers don’t feel, and that’s one of the number one things I hear from teachers is like, we need more support. I don’t have support. But yet they can’t even define what support they need. And then the principal is like, well, I gave them all this stuff. They’ve had this training, they’ve done all these things. And I’m like, there is a missing piece in here because you have given them a lot of things, but yet for whatever reason, whether it’s that you made it too scary to change or you haven’t celebrated.

And you know, there’s one of the things I talk about in the book is seven conditions have to exist for us to create a new habit. And so the first is that the easiest way to do this is with a metaphor. So say you and I decide we’re going to get healthy and start eating healthier. Then the first thing is we have to know where to go instead. So say that you and I go down to the Mexican restaurant and, you know, slug down a couple of margaritas and a bag of chips every week a couple of times. We have to know that instead of doing that, we should go to a vegetable restaurant. If I said to you, let’s go to the Golden Corral instead, that’s not a better choice. We assume people know the right choice and are deciding not to do it. But a lot of times people don’t know where to go instead.

Second is that they have to have self-awareness to drive past the exit because it’s a habit. And you and I on Tuesdays and Thursdays when we go out, Tuesday, I’m going to pull my car out and head right to the Mexican restaurant. I have to have the self-awareness to stop and say, I wanted to do something different. I’m going to go to this other place. The third is that we have to be willing to be uncomfortable. Like we’re going to have to put stuff in our mouth we’ve never eaten, vegetables we’ve never heard of, right? Same thing with teachers and I think teachers are under such a microscope and so much pressure that being uncomfortable is not worth it. And so they dig their heels in and refuse to do new things, even when they’re simple things that they can change in their classrooms.

So we have to have that will to be uncomfortable. We have to have the energy to persist. Eventually you and I are going to be like, you know what? I’ve had a bad day, I have no energy. I don’t care to go. Let’s just go back there, right? We’re going to fall off the wagon. And this is when most Americans give up on their goals because then you and I sit and we’d say, well, we were never meant to be healthy. So I’ll see you here again, right? Versus, okay, we’ve been really good and we had one day that was really bad and we’re going to get right back on the bus. And then we have to have the persistence over time because it takes a long time for a neural connection to become automatic in our brain. And we have to have the support.

And so when I look at whether it’s professional development for teachers, it’s the implementation of an initiative, it’s new instructional practices, it’s behavior planning with kids, any of those things when I look at it through that lens, you’re asking for a change in behavior, and I oftentimes don’t see even half of the supportive elements that any human, the smartest person on earth needs these things in order to successfully create a new habit. So I think it’s really about being wiser and more strategic about what you want to see. And I think that understanding, you know, humans and the human system side of education is critical for doing that.

Angela Kelly: Yes. Oh, so, so, so good. Because it really does come down to that example was so relevant and so tangible. And I think about the emotions behind each step. And that’s where we have to understand, we’re going to feel, when we just make that decision to not go to the Mexican restaurant, we’re going to feel deprivation. We need to acknowledge that deprivation, validate it, and allow it to exist without giving into that, without like trying to get rid of the feeling of deprivation. You’re going to feel deprivation. And then, you know, there are emotions that come with this awareness and these decisions.

And, you know, that is the thing I think we just haven’t been taught is like, how do I allow myself to feel deprived and still take the action I want to take? That’s that moment of like being aware of the emotion, allowing it, knowing you can handle that emotion, that’s your empowerment expanding is like, I can handle this. This emotion is just temporary. And what do I want to feel on the other side of not eating the Mexican is like feeling really good in my body, physically, feeling good mentally, emotionally, knowing that I did this. And then the thing about the teachers I was thinking too is, I think one of the hardest things as a human is to take ownership, is to take ownership of our empowerment, to take ownership that we have the power to go and be self-aware and to make different decisions and take different actions. It’s hard to own, like it’s very hard to own a mistake. It feels awful to see the mistake, to take ownership, to see that you’re like as a principal, people are like, yeah, you’re right. I don’t really do effective meetings. That feels terrible to own that, but then from there, you start to like, okay, what’s one thing I can do? But that ownership piece is so challenging emotionally. All of your work goes back to this is like being able to regulate those feelings that come up.

Lisa Riegel: And you can only regulate them if you know they’re there. And you know one thing too, and it doesn’t always have to be so serious. Like my husband and I do pity pride. And so like, you know, sometimes I like, I’ll just be like, I need some pity. Like because, you know, like I’ll say, I’m on the diet, I really want that cake and I can’t have it and I’m feeling sad and I need pity. And then, you know, he’ll come over and be like, I pity you. And sometimes that’s all I need is just recognition that I feel this way and I’m sad. And then the on the other side, that’s pride, but I’m proud of you that you are making the choice, you know? So we do pity pride.

Angela Kelly: That is so fun.

Lisa Riegel: It’s simple and it basically gets it out and it states it out there, so it doesn’t fester and it removes because I think the other thing that people don’t realize or think about is that all when Harold and Bob are running the show, they generate a tremendous amount of shame and guilt. And so when we think about how do we release shame and guilt, part of it is to recognize that those decisions were not made really by us. They were made by that limbic part of our brain. And so really the solution to that is be a better leader in your brain. If you’re a good leader, kind of like my late example, I can tell Harold, don’t couple those two things together. I have more control over how I respond in situations because I’ve gone through sort of the introspection and learning that it took for me to understand what was going on in there. And I advocate that we should be teaching kids about their brain from day one. From the first day they come, we should be teaching them about their brain. We should be putting routines in place that are good for the brain. And not just, you know, I see, I see pieces of it like, you know, the wiggle break or whatever for younger kids. And it’s like, okay, but what I see in a classroom is oftentimes the wiggle break is used as a tool for compliance and control.

Angela Kelly: Now sit back down because you’ve had five minutes to wiggle, yes.

Lisa Riegel: It’s not used as a tool that is to practice skills. I think we do pieces and parts in schools that are great, but if we just put those glasses on and looked through it with a little bit of a different lens, like a NeuroWelll lens, that’s safe, supportive, and proactive. If we just look at it through that, through the brain science of it, all of a sudden we’ll be like, oh, well, that’s why that works so well. Well, yeah, because it’s aligned with how our brain needs it to work, right? And then other things that you’re like, we’re doing, you know, I see this with like positive behavior intervention supports all the time. It is such a time-consuming, expensive waste of time in most schools because the way it’s implemented is not aligned with the brain science on changing behaviors.

And so that’s one of the things I teach about in the NeuroWell book is how to transition your PBIS system. You don’t throw it out and do a new initiative. You look at what you’re doing and you say, okay, these were good ideas. For some reason they’re not landing. How do we start to make tweaks to it that are aligned? And you’d be amazed how some of the easiest little things make all the difference in the world to make that a really powerful behavior change system.

Angela Kelly: That is a beautiful way to end this. There are simple ways to change the internal systems. We don’t have to break down the whole paradigm, the whole institution and build a whole new one in order to make change. Simplicity actually is key.

Lisa Riegel: Right. The problems are overwhelming, but the solutions are really quite simple. They’re not easy. They’re simple.

Angela Kelly: And they’re not comfortable.

Lisa Riegel: Right. They’re simple solutions, but you have to be intentional, strategic, and make it a habit in order for them to become second nature. So the problems are bigger than the solution.

Angela Kelly: Yes, that’s just take that with you today, school leaders, as you’re listening to this, that the problem you see in front of you is much bigger than the solution. So you don’t have to match problem solution in size. You just have to be able to match it in your bandwidth, your internal bandwidth, your capacity to feel, your capacity to explore, your capacity to stay curious and to lead yourself and others with a lot of compassion, grace, and space as you’re navigating the emotional experience of learning and teaching and leading.

So Lisa, thank you for your expertise. It is such a delight to meet you. I can’t wait. I’m getting both books. I want to read them, share them with the world, and I look forward to continued conversations with you because I do think that this work coupled with mentorship, coaching, and just that permission to explore brain research, how the brain is working in our students and our staff members and ourselves, and to just keep that front of mind as we’re leading, as we’re teaching, and as we’re learning, I really do think that we can create significant impact and empower people throughout our school systems worldwide.

Lisa Riegel: Yeah. I’m happy to come back anytime. Even if we want to do little segments on each C and go into the tools and go into how you do it.

Angela Kelly: That’d be great. That would be wonderful. So we’re going to drop the links to her resources in the show notes for you guys and any other information she has. Lisa, any final words?

Lisa Riegel: No, this is my mission and passion because I feel like when people take the information that are in the book or that if I do keynotes or workshops or whatever, when they come back from that, they feel that sense of empowerment and agency because we get to choose. We can choose to be happy and fulfilled. It’s not easy. We have to understand it has to be intentional and strategic, but at the end of the day, people are really struggling right now and they don’t have to be. There’s a way out.

Angela Kelly: There is. Pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional, right?

Lisa Riegel: Yeah, there you go.

Angela Kelly: Let’s support you all. Thank you again for your expertise. Wonderful information, wonderful book. And I invite you to look through these lenses. I do think it can very quickly change not just your perspective, but your actual experience of school leadership. So with that, we will end. Thank you again. It’s been wonderful. And I look forward to more conversations. And for you, Empowered Principals, have a beautiful week. We’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.

Hello, empowered principals. Welcome to episode 430.

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. How are y’all doing out there today? Happy Tuesday. Welcome to the podcast. So happy you’re here. I’m happy to be here. And I love this topic. This is a question that has been coming up with clients, within EPC, and I think it’s a great topic for the podcast. And I hope that you can implement it immediately.

I get asked this question often, and the question is, how do I stay in my power? Your brand is empowerment. You talk about empowerment. Yet we’re human, and of course, we slip in and out of feeling empowered and feeling like we have power, like we have agency, especially when there are things that are upsetting to us, that are outside of our control, people’s behaviors, people’s words, people’s actions, things that are going on in the world, things that are going on in the school systems, things that are going on in education at large, things that are going on in the country, things that are going on with families and students, and superintendents and district offices. I hear you.

So what do we do to stay in our power? What do we do to stay in our power? So, let’s talk about what that question means: staying in my power. How do I stay in my power?

Here’s the way that I see it. Staying in your power is understanding the conflicting messages between fear and courage. So when we’re in our empowerment, we’re feeling courageous. We’re feeling aligned. We are feeling certain. We are feeling safe. We are feeling focused. We’re feeling sufficient. We are feeling possibility and potential. We feel courageous. So when you take a leap and do something out of courage, you are in your empowerment. When you feel good about yourself, your decisions, your actions, when you feel aligned, when the actions you take, the lifestyle you have, the career that you have, the decisions you’re making, when all of that feels in alignment with what feels true for you, the values that you value, your philosophy on life, when all of that feels in alignment, you get this little sweet spot of empowerment.

Then you have conflicting messages. So there’s courage, encouraging you to have courage, and then there are messages of fear in your mind. What will happen if this? Look what happened last time. So you use the past against you, and you leverage this fear. You have these messages of potential pain. So there’s past pain and potential pain. That is fear. It’s the opposite of feeling safe. It’s the opposite of feeling empowered because you lack safety. You feel like you lack agency. It’s when you’re doubting yourself, that you failed, you’re disappointed, you’re upset, you’re angry, you feel out of control. There’s fear that something bad is going to happen.

So you have this ebb and flow between fear-based thoughts and courageous based thoughts. And what is fear, right? Fear is the amygdala, the part of your brain that keeps you alive. That’s its job. The amygdala is telling you to refrain from action, to stop, to defend yourself, or to flee, or to freeze, to not do anything, to placate people, to try and create safety. Because when you feel safe, you’re not feeling fear. It’s the remedy, right? The remedy of fear when you’re feeling afraid is to find a way to feel safe, whether that’s physical safety, emotional safety, psychological safety, financial safety, social safety.

Those different kinds of ways that we feel safe. We feel safe when we have money. We feel safe when we have shelter, when we have food. We feel safe when we have transportation, when we have a car, when we have gas to put in our car. We feel safe when we have a job, when we have a savings account. We feel safe when we are with our family and friends. We feel safe when we’re in an environment that we are familiar with. But there’s lots of times we don’t feel safe. If we’re in another country and we don’t understand or we don’t know the rules and regulations and the policies and the lifestyle. We feel unsafe when we’re not with our people, when we’re in a group of strangers, or we go to a conference and we don’t bring anybody with us and we don’t know anybody, we might feel less safe. We might feel some fear. We might feel unsafe financially if we, let’s say, one of the cars died, we had to buy a new car, we had to, the heater went out and it wasn’t a planned expense. Sometimes that can stir up feelings of fear.

Like when our kids go out and they learn how to drive, oh my gosh, the fears about what could happen and we project those futuristic fears on the woulda, coulda, shouldas, what are going to happen, what happened in the past, or if I made a mistake in the past, I never want to make this again. Just notice, there’s a conflicting message that bounces back between fear and courage, okay?

So fear is the amygdala. It’s just firing off and it’s going straight to your nervous system: fight or flight, immediate, now, action. That’s when, have you ever been in driving the car and something flies in front of you or you have to stop all of a sudden, your heart’s pounding and you have that rush of adrenaline? That’s just your body doing its job, keep you safe. It helps you react in subhuman time because its job is to try and help you stay safe. Not get into that car accident, not hit the box that’s flying across the freeway or whatever, the person that cut you off. That adrenaline rush is just your body functioning as it should.

Courage requires you to use a different part of your brain, your prefrontal cortex. That courage, it has to override the fear’s commands. The amygdala is giving commands. This isn’t safe. When you go on a roller coaster, the front part of you is, have the courage to get on the roller coaster. You’re safe. There’s all these regulations. It has safety bars. It has safety belts. It has the over the shoulder safety harness. I’m sure engineers were qualified to – your brain has to override the fear, but your body is like, “I’m going to die,” right?

So there’s a different part of the brain. So there’s two parts of your brain communicating. The amygdala is safety, safety, safety, safety, safety at all costs. Stay safe in the cave. Don’t go out. Don’t talk to the people you don’t know. Don’t drive the cars you don’t know how to drive. Don’t get on the roller coaster. Don’t go for the job. Don’t, don’t, don’t. Don’t do anything. Just stay safe. But the courage requires you to communicate with your body in a different way and to override the fear.

Now, you must have enough awareness to identify that you’re in fear, to know when your body’s actually reacting out of fear, and to understand your own personal signals. So your body has signals that it communicates. It uses your emotions. It uses feelings. It uses literally vibrations in your body. So you’re going to feel things in your stomach, or you’re going to feel them in your heart, your chest area, or you’re going to feel tension in your shoulders, your back, or your neck, your jaw, tension headache. There’s different ways that your body communicates with you. Getting in tune with that and understanding the difference between when am I feeling fear and is this fear a legitimate fear?

If something’s chasing you, you’re not going to negotiate with yourself and think, “Oh, I have the courage to turn around and fight off this leopard that is chasing me,” or a mountain lion, if you’re hiking and a mountain lion comes across your path or a bear, you’re not going to stop and negotiate, “Is this a real fear or not?” You’re just going to move. You’re going to do the thing you need to do, and you’re going to kick in to let that fear drive your definite need for safety, okay? Or going down a dark alley. When it says no, your intuition is like, “Uh-uh, that doesn’t feel safe. Don’t do it.” You make the decision.

Other times, you go to work and this conversation feels very scary. And your body’s like, “I don’t want to have this conversation. I want to avoid this conversation. I don’t want to do anything with this conversation. I don’t want to even talk about the conversation. I don’t want to have it.” That is when courage is required. Is this an actual fear? Am I in danger or am I safe? Well, technically I’m sitting in my office, but I feel like there is a lion outside of my door ready to eat me, right? So this conversation between courage and fear. We have to have awareness that we’re in fear, that we’re in fight or flight, and we have to also be able to discern whether or not you are in actual danger. Am I safe physically? Am I safe emotionally right now? You might not feel safe, but am I safe?

Oftentimes, the fears that we’re feeling, it’s while we’re driving and we’re thinking about work on our way to work, or it’s coming home and we’re thinking about the conversation we had with our friend or our partner. We’re still upset with the teacher that we talked with today and we’re just, we’re in our mind, but we’re feeling the fear, the frustration, the feelings, right? Am I in actual danger? Do I not have a place to come home to? Do I not have a bed, food, shelter, electricity, water, clothing, warmth? Or am I worried about the heat bill being high this month? And what can I do? Do you see what I’m saying there? It’s like, you have to have the wherewithal to notice the fear and then tap into the other part of your brain that’s like, “Wait a minute. Am I actually in danger or am I actually safe? Technically, am I safe?” There’s feeling safe and there’s being safe.

If a tornado blows through your community, you might not feel safe, but after the tornado, even if a tree falls down on your property, as long as you’re living and breathing, you might mark yourself safe. Technically I’m safe, but I’m not feeling very safe right now in my body. There’s a difference, okay? So discerning whether or not you are safe can help you regain and step back into your personal power.

I have found that questions, when I ask myself questions, it pauses my brain long enough to give me time to go back from my amygdala into my prefrontal cortex. You got to give your brain a hot minute to get back out of that fear or even to assess the fear. Is the fear accurate? You’ll know when you’re in physical danger. Your body will override, it will take over, and you will do the thing you need to do to try and stay alive.

When you’re in distress, emotional, mental distress, financial worries, worried about your kids, worried about your spouse, worried about your best friend, all of those things, you can say, okay, now what I want to do is start asking some questions to get into my prefrontal cortex, to rationalize what’s going on. Is this fear rational or irrational? So am I safe in the moment? It’s a yes or no. And I’ll tell you, if you’re actually in danger, you won’t ask that question. You’ll just act. Okay?

So what I do is when I’m starting to panic about something in my life, a relationship, a financial situation, a legal situation, a business situation, anything, am I safe in this moment? I look around. I look at my feet on the ground, my buns in the seat, wherever I’m at, whether I’m standing or sitting or lying down. I’m either standing, sitting, or lying down physically with my body. Am I safe? Okay. I’m in my office. Oh, okay. I’m in my bedroom. Oh, I’m in the car. Oh, I’m standing in my kitchen. I look at my surroundings. I ground myself. And I physically look around. Yes, I’m safe. There are no tigers, lions, or bears in my vicinity at the moment. Maybe I won’t be safe in a moment. For now, no bears have entered onto my property, okay?

I’m safe. Then I slow my breathing. Give your nervous system a moment to regulate. You can also move your eyes around up, down, side to side. You can physically ground yourself. You can rub your arms. You can put your hands on your legs, or I like to put one hand on my heart, one hand on my belly, and breathe to tell my body, you are okay right now. You’re not going to be eaten alive. You’re not in danger. You don’t feel safe, but you are safe. Just feel your physical presence in the world, in your space. Put your hands on your lap, your steering wheel if you’re in the car, wherever you are in the moment, ground your body in that space.

And breathe. Just breathe slow and deep for as long as it takes for your mind to shift in and say, okay, I’m having thoughts that don’t feel safe, but I’m safe. There’s a difference. And once you do that, then you can start asking the questions. What kind of danger do I feel like I’m in? What doesn’t feel safe? Am I concerned physically, mentally, emotionally? Am I concerned financially? Am I concerned professionally? Am I worried about my career? Am I worried about my impact? What kind of fear am I feeling? What kind of concerns do I have? Is it psychological? Is it a social situation? Is it a career? Is it financial? Is it a relationship with your kids, your family, friends, anybody?

Questions, what it does is it invites your brain to think, and thinking happens in the prefrontal cortex. So when you want to get back into your power and you feel threatened, let’s say somebody at school has said, “I’m going to go to the newspaper, or I’m going to go to the superintendent, I’m going to go on social media, I’m going to blast you, I’m going to get you fired.” This is exactly what somebody said to me, okay? That did not feel safe. I felt under attack. I was afraid that this person was going to actually have a negative impact on my career, and that I would forever be fired and banned from being able to teach or to lead ever again. Of course, your brain goes down that rabbit hole.

And then you have to say, okay, in this moment, I am safe. That didn’t feel safe. I felt under attack. Now, what am I fearing? And then I dig down the rabbit hole, and I let my brain say, well, this and then this and then this. Okay, fair enough. But let’s talk about that. Is it true? Will it actually happen? What’s the probability? What else might be true? Is it true that everyone’s going to believe this one person’s perspective? Is it also true they might work with you? They might listen to your side? Is it also true that you’ve been in integrity? Is there a part where you weren’t in integrity and you need to own that, which feels scary as well, but can you handle it? Get coaching if you need to, get support, but go into the place where you can start to understand and shift from fear back into courage because that’s where your empowerment lies. That’s where your personal power lies.

These questions shift you back into the part of your brain that allows you to explore and examine those thoughts and the beliefs that are rising and creating fear. So there are fear-based thoughts and courageous based thoughts, empowerment thoughts. But then once you get back into knowing that you’re safe, you can start to brain drain and separate yourself and your safety from your thoughts. There are thoughts that don’t feel safe, but they’re thoughts, and they can feel scary, but the thought itself is just a sentence. And when you put it onto paper, you’re like, there’s a sentence that when I read that, it feels bad, or when I read that, it feels scary. But it’s a sentence that’s not happening to my body right now. And then if it did, here’s how I would handle it, staying in my power. And if I feel out of power, I now know what to do. I physically regulate. I remind myself I’m safe. I ground myself. And then I can start to question and look into what else might be true that allows me to step back into my power.

So try that. Let us know, does it work? Does it not? What questions do you have? As simple as this sounds, it’s one of the hardest things we do as school leaders, and I invite you into EPC. You can do one-on-one coaching from now until the end of this year and then jump into EPC for next year. But hey, if you want to just start in EPC, I’ve got you. We’ve got a great group of people. Would love to have you there. I feel like this work is the heart and soul of leadership. It is the internal leadership work that we do, staying in your power, knowing how to get into your power, what to do when you get out so that you can realign and get back into your own personal power.

That is empowerment. That is The Empowered Principal way, The Empowered Principal process. And I really do believe it’s how we’re going to learn how to lead in a way that expands the quality of experience, the quality of education, the quality of impact that we have for staff, students, and our communities. Have a beautiful week, take good care of yourselves, and please, please let me know how this practice of staying in your own power works for you. Take good care. 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.