This week, we’re diving deeper into the concept of decision making and how to make empowered decisions, even when doubt and fear creep in. I’m focusing this week’s message to new leaders and female leaders in particular, because I know these are usually the groups of clients who tend to struggle to move past their doubts to make decisions from a truly confident place.

As a school leader, you’ve likely experienced the doubt that surfaces when you believe you don’t have the answers or know enough yet to make a decision, or the fear of making the wrong decision and having to deal with the fallout of that result. These patterns of thinking are ultimately disempowering you, and in order to create confidence, you need to understand how your thinking is inherently impacting how you make all decisions.

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Last week, I introduced you to the anatomy of a decision, where we discussed the different stages of decision-making. One important aspect of decision-making is understanding the why behind your decisions, and so today, I’m diving into your reasons for the decisions you make and what liking your reasons helps you do.

As school leaders, our days are full of making decisions, one after another, and inevitably, we’re going to have differing opinions thrown at us. This year especially, where there is still so much uncertainty in the air and some difficult decisions to be made, it’s never been more crucial to dig into your reasons for your decisions and to feel aligned with them.

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Over the month of August, we’ve been taking a deep dive into the topic of emotional resiliency and increasing our capacity to feel difficult emotions. Today, we’re going to discuss other people’s emotions and how to handle them to the best of our ability as school leaders.

When people around us express intense emotions, it can be really tricky to navigate and figure out how to respond. We tend to get triggered by other people’s emotional experiences, and I’m sharing the two reasons why this happens. While these responses are completely normal, my goal today is to show you how to respond in an intentional way and decide how you want to address the situation.

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As the new school year looms, I know many of my clients are feeling anxious. There’s a lot of uncertainty about whether schools are going to open or what changes are going to be implemented, and so it’s no surprise if your brain is spinning right now. We all want to have plans and feel prepared ahead of time, and our brains are constantly having to reassess and shift priorities as new information comes in.

Last week, we talked about what emotional resiliency is and why it’s important for us school leaders to expand our capacity to feel emotion. Today, I’m diving into the process of what this actually looks like and how to start allowing your emotions. We’ve been taught to sidestep negative emotions because they undoubtedly feel awful, but my goal today is to show you why we need to unlearn what we’ve been taught about emotion and start a practice of processing them all the way through.

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So many school leaders are going through a time of conflict right now. There are discussions going on about how to best approach reopening our schools for next year, and chances are, you’re coming up against a lot of opinions from a lot of different angles about what you should be doing.

These decisions are made between a lot of people, and even as a principal, it’s easy to feel like your opinions are being drowned out by the powers that be. So, this week, I want to share a conversation I had with a client recently who was going through exactly this. Valuing your own opinion doesn’t always seem like the easy option, and it’s not always the right option, but it’s important to put this in perspective for when you just know your opinion is of huge value.

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