Bonus #2 (Morale as the Priority)

Hello empowered principals. Welcome to episode number two of the September 2021 bonus series.

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

Hello my empowered leaders. Welcome to bonus number two. So the first bonus I talked about how you can shift from frustration and resentment that COVID is still with us into feeling and allowing yourself to feel the disappointment and sadness that the pandemic is lingering on and on and on.

Really that first bonus is all about you processing the truth of your emotions, what’s going on below the surface. Acknowledging it, being honest with yourself, being truthful about that, and then letting yourself process the emotion. That’s step one, what you have to do as a school leader. You can’t expect other people to process emotion or you to be available to help them process emotion if you haven’t yet processed your own.

So step number one is getting yourself to get real with what’s going on with you and asking yourself, “What’s going on? What am I actually feeling here?”  A lot of times I know for me when I’m angry, that’s really masking fear or sadness. So consider if you might be layering emotions on top of one another to avoid processing the actual emotion that’s down below the surface.

In this episode, I’m going to be talking about the next obstacle that leaders are facing. That is staff morale. So your entire staff is just as frustrated and disappointed and resentful at the pandemic. Not to mention that they have additional challenges, you all do this year.

At the beginning of COVID when you had to shut down, those challenges involved figuring out how to do remote learning, figuring out how to keep students logging in and engaged on video while they weren’t in your physical space in classroom. There were concerns about the wellbeing and safety for some of our students. We were figuring out how to do special education services. How to get students the lunches and the breakfast programs that they needed.

There were all kinds of challenges with logistics and technology and engagement and wellbeing and safety of kids when they weren’t in our physical campuses. So that’s what you were dealing with last year.

Now this year is a different beast. Because you’re dealing with people being back onto campus and the emotions that come with that and the challenges that come with that. Both physical challenges like social distancing and mask requirements and how many people can be in a large group, all of that, right.

You’re also dealing with the opinions of your community. Opinions on vaccinations, opinions on masks, how to keep students socially distanced when they’re five years old, right. Some of you are still juggling this balance of distance learning, in person learning, hybrid learning. There’s all kinds of madness out there.

One of the things my teacher friends here in the Bay Area are talking about how much effort they’re having to put into teaching very basic school routines, even for children who have been in school prior to the pandemic. Things like raising your hand, actually waiting to talk while your hand is raised, standing in the line. Like all of these little basic things that…

I work with elementary teachers. My friends are elementary teachers. So kids who are like third through fifth grade who the teachers are typically thinking, “Oh, by this time they kind of get it. They understand the basics of school.” The teacher may have specific routines she or he is putting into place, but they feel like those basics, those foundational routines and procedures are ingrained in the students. That’s not the case right now.

Because they haven’t had to raise their hands. They haven’t had to wait in lines. They haven’t dealt with social conflict in their peers and peer pressure and learning in a physically enclosed environment. So you’re having to teach these basics all over again. The teachers are telling me they’re feeling more exhausted than ever. I’m sure that you and your staff are experiencing this as well.

So teachers are extremely fatigued from the last two school years figuring out all that came with remote learning. Now with no end in sight, they’re trying to figure out how to come back, and this doesn’t feel any easier than before. Not to mention it’s layered upon the COVID fatigue that we’re experiencing. So overall morale is pretty low.

When I think about morale, I’ve talked about this with several of my one on one clients. We’ve talked about it in Mastermind too actually. We’ve talked about staff morale. Teachers and principals are saying the staff morale is really low. So I’ve been thinking about morale and what that is and what it means, and its value, its importance, in how we work, how we teach, how we collaborate, all of it, right. So morale is basically the mindset and the energetic level of your team.

So when we say morale is high, it means that people are feeling good about themselves. They’re doing great work. They feel good about the work. They feel good about themselves. They feel like they’re being productive. They feel like they’re creating. That they are getting through to the kids. They have connections. They like the people they work with. They’re feeling engaged and supportive and collaborative, productive, and accomplished. All the good feels, right.

When people are thinking things are going well and they’re liking the people they work with and enjoying their students and connecting with families and kids, and in the teacher’s mind, kids are making progress. We’re making gains. When we’re having all of those thoughts, our energetic level, our emotional level is good. It’s high. It feels great, right. So teachers having energy coming into the school year and into the work week. They’re feeling great at the end of the day at how things went.

Even when times are tough, when morale is high your staff can tolerate tough days or tough situations. Even when you have an intense circumstance going on at school. When morale is high, when generally speaking people have really positive thoughts and really positive emotions, they’re able to weather during a storm, an intense situation, and maintain that positive mindset. Like we’ll get through this together. We’ve got one another’s back. We’re all grieving together. Whatever it is. When they’re believing this cohesiveness is happening, they’re feeling supportive. They’re feeling productive, right.

So that’s the goal. We want people feeling amazing to come into work. Because when they do, they have more to offer, right. Their energy becomes another asset that we can leverage as school leaders. When teachers are feeling great, when they’re thinking things are going well, when they’re feeling really good, the actions that they take have high impact. Because they believe that they are creating high impact results. When you believe you’re creating high impact results, guess what. You create high impact results.

So you as a school leader want to value very highly a high teacher morale because that is an asset to you. Their feeling good about themselves, their having processed their emotions—the negative ones, the ugly ones—and getting themselves back to a state of what is working, what is going well, what does feel good. When they are in that state, it’s much easier for you to lead and for your school and your community to get the gains and results you’re looking for.

So for all the clients I am working with right now, and I imagine for most of you out there listening, teachers are not coming back to work with that same enthusiasm and excitement and energy as they have in past years. This is happening because their brains are focused on the COVID fatigue, just like yours is. It’s hard not to think about COVID because it ends up being the focus of every conversation at some point it feels like. So what’s happening is that your teachers are coming in with an empty tank. Their energy tank is empty or very, very low.

So if you as a school leader are trying to kick off the year with all these new initiatives and curriculums and programs. You’re explaining the expectations. Like we have to double down and get these kids back on track because they’re so behind, and you’re pressuring your teachers. Your teacher’s brains are going to push back really hard. They’re going to tune out. They’re going to resist. They’re going to ignore you because what they actually need in this moment for this school year isn’t pushing and pressure and learning and messages of urgency. What they need is the morale to be the priority. They need to feel like they are a priority.

Yes, I get it. Your job is to lead teachers, and their job is to teach students. We aren’t taking into account the emotional toll of this pandemic on the adults in the room. Of course we need to talk about it for students as well, but we are not giving any leeway or very little time for people to get back into a space where they can process the emotions that have just happened to them. This is the trauma tsunami I had feared would happen for schools at the beginning of 2020. I did a webinar and a training on this. I can put those links in the show notes as well. But what’s happening is we are not calculating for the curve.

So when we talk about learning, we say there’s a learning curve. What we mean by that, which happens for everyone on the planet by the way. Basically a learning curve is that anytime we are exposed to something new, we require more time and effort and energy and think time, brain power at the beginning of that curve for us to be able to understand and practice and implement and integrate and apply a certain skill. This happens to every human on the planet.

The learning curve takes into account not just the amount of time it might take, but the emotions that come with learning something new. Learning, especially something challenging or difficult that’s so out of our realm of understanding, it can feel difficult mentally and emotionally. It hurts our brains a little bit, and it fatigues us emotionally. People have a different tolerance level for the learning curve. We have to take that into consideration for the adults and the students.

This pandemic has thrown us into a new kind of learning curve. We are learning how to handle the slow burn of a long lasting pandemic. We haven’t learned this skill before, unless you are over 100 years old. So this one has impacted every aspect of our lives, and it’s turned us upside down. Even the most basic of routines that we took for granted have been altered or changed or impacted because of this pandemic. We have to take that into account you guys.

As school leaders, we must take into account the human experience curve that is taking place. Thinking teachers should be able to shake it off because they’re adults and step up and do whatever it takes, relentless commitment to kids. Which what we’re really saying is do whatever we’re asking you to do without pause for the emotional curve that they’re experiencing. That’s going to land you as the school leader in the river of misery my friend.

So what if instead of pushing forward with no regard for the emotional impact of this pandemic, what if we made staff morale the priority? Can you imagine planning your professional development and your staff meetings all around staff and school morale? When I say that, what comes up for you? Does it feel resistant? Does it feel like there’s no way we could do that? That’s not possible. That’s not even appropriate. Just notice what your thoughts are when I offer that suggestion. When we talk about it just as a possibility.

I’ve thought through why don’t we feel comfortable with this? Where is the resistance coming from? The reason we don’t do this, which is prioritize morale, which is prioritize mental and emotional wellbeing, is number one, we think we shouldn’t do it because academics are the priority because that’s what school’s supposed to be about are academic.

Number two, even if we did believe it should be the priority, even if just for this year, let’s say, we don’t have the “permission” from our district. Because even if we believe kind of secretly deep down that yeah, we should focus on this a little bit more and slow down and help people. The district doesn’t believe it. The district’s going to push us. So we have to push them. So we can’t make it a priority.

Three, let’s take it even further. Even if we did believe it was the priority and we had permission from the district. Let’s say the district even said yeah it’s the priority. That we should focus on mental and emotional wellness. We get into this place of okay, now what? We don’t know how to do it.

On an even deeper level than that. When we say we don’t know how to do it, what we mean is that we don’t know how to handle emotions. We don’t know how to handle our own emotions and other people’s emotions. We don’t know what to do with it. It feels uncomfortable. That means we don’t know how. It means we don’t want to. We don’t like it because it feels uncomfortable. It feels awkward. It feels strange to us. It’s not what we are used to.

So what happens is we don’t prioritize mental and emotional wellness because we’re afraid of it being uncomfortable. The truth is we are already really uncomfortable. We’ve been pushing emotions aside for a very long time, basically as long as there have been schools in this country. If there’s one lesson from this pandemic, we cannot and should not shy away from prioritizing mental and emotional health. There are tangible specific tools and strategies and skills that can be implemented to help you process your emotions, other people’s emotions, and then your emotions about other people’s emotions. I call this my emotional triad. I teach this in my program.

So I want to invite you to the empowered principal coaching program. I work with you weekly one on one, and I teach you the tools and strategies for building up the morale and navigating through any emotional situation. It is not too late, and it’s never too late to start prioritizing your own emotional wellbeing and the wellbeing of your staff and students.

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.