Angela Kelly: Hello, empowered principals. Welcome to episode 438. 

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 welcome to today’s podcast. I have an incredibly special guest. She is near and dear to my heart. I’ve known her for almost a decade now, but we have become mentors. 

She is my coach, my mentor, and I have worked with her in different capacities, but in the last few years, she has really helped me evolve personally and professionally. She has so much insight, so much wisdom to share, and I asked her to be on The Empowered Principal® Podcast to tell her story and to share her wisdom with us. So, Melanie Ann Layer, thank you for being on The Empowered Principal® Podcast with us today.

Melanie: Thank you so much for having me. It is an honor to be here. Thank you.

Angela Kelly: Oh, it is my delight and my privilege. I would like to just ask you to tell a little bit about yourself. So some of the listeners may not know who you are, and you have a beautiful story, a beautiful journey, especially as it relates to your educational experience and how you were able to create success in your life in a more non-traditional way. And I would love for you to tell that story. So let the listeners know who you are and your journey.

Melanie: Okay. I’ll go intuitively. There’s a million ways that I can tell the story, that I have told the story because depending who I’m speaking to, there’s different points that matter. But I think for this, one thing that maybe is important to know is that both of my parents came from families that did not have a very solid education. And their parents struggled very much to help them have the lives that they could give them as best as possible, and they were not easy lives. 

And so both of my parents also did not have the, you know, greatest education and wanted that for their kids more than anything in the world. And so from being very young, this is what I knew my parents wanted for me. They wanted me to go to school, they wanted me to get a really good education so that I could get a really good job, so that I could be safe, and so that I could have a life that was better than what they feel they could provide based on their limitations. 

And it was very difficult for me because very soon in my journey in the education system, I felt like I was not good at that. Something would happen for me where, like when I was a little kid, I used to love school, but it was all about arts and songs and it was all about like creating things and as soon as it became about remembering, studying, and exams, something happened.  

It’s as though, no matter how much I would study, I would get to the exam and everything would just exit my mind. It didn’t matter how many hours I studied, it didn’t matter how hard I worked. The minute the stress of this is the moment hit me, my brain would wipe.

And I feel like this got increasingly difficult as my parents were also going through some really difficult times at home. I was the big sister and so trying to help my parents out as much as possible with the babysitting and the sooner or later, my dad actually asked for financial support and then I ended up getting a job. I was helping kids at my school study and do their homework after school and study, like learn English because one beautiful thing I have, I’m French Canadian, and so I went to French school. All my friends were French. My dad is from Quebec and my mom is from England.

So I always could talk in English with my family with my mom, but I didn’t really have any kind of education in English whatsoever. And my mom was so excited to send us to private school because there was an English curriculum even though it’s in Quebec, Canada, and she was so excited for us to learn English. And I’ll never forget the first English lesson I got. My mom was like, “What did you learn?” And I was like, “Pizza toppings.”

Angela Kelly: Oh, that’s cute.

Melanie: She’s like, “You learned pizza toppings?” And I was like, “Yes.” And so I really did not get an education in English whatsoever. It was the kind of spoken English you would speak at home in a bilingual family. And so I kind of started a business where I would help kids finish their homework and study for their very simple basic English. 

And I was able to help my parents as they navigated some really difficult financial times with that job. But with taking the financial responsibility on as my, as this, you know, 11, 12-year-old kid, and then after my job, I would take my brother and sister home, we’d take the late bus and then I’d cook dinner for them and help them do their homework and then put them to bed. 

And so my life wasn’t really about me, it felt. But yet, it was measured like it should have been. So whenever I fell short, everything I fell short in were the things that I knew I had no control over which was the exams, the schools. It didn’t matter how much I studied for myself. It’s the minute I sat in front of the paper that it all went away.

And so I just started working harder at everything I knew I could do that was good, and everything else started to slip. And I started to hate school. Hate it. I had one teacher in high school that I thought was interesting. He was a history teacher. He was hilarious. He told stories about history and I, I forgot I was in history lessons when he was the one teaching. I would just get lost in the storytelling and then the bell would ring and I’d remember everything. But it was the storytelling. I remembered nothing else. Everything would just exit my brain.

And so I didn’t actually graduate high school. My parents were so disappointed. And it was so painful for me to have done so much to support them and for me to still feel like they were disappointed. It just felt like, I’m out. So I just felt like my life, this is my parents unfortunately had hammered this into me for so long. If you don’t have an education, your life will be hard. You will struggle. Things will not come easy and it will be really bad.

And so that’s what I imagined my life would be. And so for a good time, that’s exactly what it was. It was really hard and I got jobs where, you know, I was the manager in a clothing store, you know, making minimum wage plus because I was the manager, trying to get as much responsibility as possible to maybe get a job in a bigger clothing store and kind of made my way up like that until eventually I found sales. 

And I realized that if I loved what I was selling, I had so much fun. It was so easy for me because when I loved a product, I knew everything about it. I would use it, I would love it, and so I was very passionate. And so I became really good in sales, whether I was selling makeup or whether I was selling fashion, clothing, whatever it was. As long as I could love it, I’d have the time of my life. And then one day I found a career that was fully commission, full sales commission.

No salary. As long as I sell, I make money. And I fell in love with that job. I became like a trainer for that job. And it was so interesting because the way I was trained, I found very difficult. I was supposed to learn a script by heart, which felt like school. The minute I got on the stage, my brain froze. I really struggled with it, but I made it my own because I loved the product. 

And when it was my turn to teach, I taught the people very differently because I, instead of using the curriculum that I was taught, I taught based on how I learned it. And I had the best salespeople in the entire company worldwide. We had the smallest unit with the most powerful salespeople, and I had taught them all my way. And so for me, the way I explained it was always like, sales are, it’s emotional. You’ve got to connect to it like the lyrics to a song. It’s art. Like people have to feel, even when we’re selling, no matter what the product is, it’s got to feel like something.

And so everything became more emotional for me, and I realized that my mind, my brain just did not really work with the whole like logical way of doing things. And so I just decided I was not meant for the school system, but I could succeed in sales outside of that. And I got all excited and I brought this boyfriend I had into the system with me and you know, he became the manager, he organized everybody, I was the trainer, I trained everybody, and then that relationship was terrible. So it eventually broke apart and he sabotaged that opportunity for me unfortunately.

And when I was 25 years old, I ended up going bankrupt and just losing everything I had and sleeping in the front seat of a Honda Civic in the dead of winter. And it was just such a scary time because it felt like I had done exactly what my parents said would happen. Like they had said, if you don’t get the education, you’re going to struggle, everything’s going to be hard, everything’s going to fall apart, and then it did.

And so it was so difficult for me because I also knew I was not good at it. It was as if I had nothing else I could do because going back to that was not an option. I was 25 years old now, already so sold by the fact that I was incapable of that. And so what ended up happening was somehow I decided to do some personal work on myself. And the kind of studying that I was doing was all emotional studying. It was all coming from belief systems and like the mental aspect of who we believe we are as people, leadership, communication, emotional intelligence, processing emotions.

And I realized that was in fact a really big issue of mine and one of the reasons why exams became so overwhelming is that my brain, when it gets over emotional, stops being able to function with logic. And so I was able to strengthen my emotional system and all of a sudden I was able to remember things. My mind started working differently. I started remembering things and when it mattered the most. I found myself having conversations with people where I could remember word for word what I’d read in a book from page to page and all of a sudden I could remember things I’d never been able to remember.

I taught myself English at a higher level. I was able to speak properly. I was able to spell properly from being, failing French and English in spelling. All of a sudden, I can speak, I can write. I found passion for something. I attached emotion to what I was learning and suddenly there was a different version of me that emerged. And so I at first was supporting people in learning emotional, relational, leadership, just learning from a place of emotion and it was extraordinary the results I was seeing. And eventually I started merging sales to that. 

And I got invited to be a sales trainer in all kinds of different industries and was able to teach people who were, let’s say, illiterate in sales, how to really become extraordinary salespeople. People who had difficulties with leadership becoming extraordinary leaders. People who had difficulty with money becoming really great with money because the way that I teach actually was starting to land with people who said, I’ve never felt this way when I’ve learned before. I’ve never heard about it this way. I’ve never felt this way. It’s never been this way.

And I felt really empowered by that because suddenly it’s as if everything that I had been through was for something. It was for me to develop this new way of teaching, was for me to develop this new way of relating back to people. And so over time, I’ve met some incredibly important people in this world, people who are part of the education system, important people like you who empower principals in the school system and who have a really solid impact on the educational system, who are hearing my story and are saying, “You know, things are actually changing or do need to change. And we’ve already started pivoting and we’re already seeing these certain things.” 

And I’ve been able to have my hand in some really important conversations that I believe are already shifting things in the world and that’s such an incredible thing because from going from someone who feared that without an education, I would never amount to anything, to being someone who basically created my own understanding of how to educate myself to then eventually having an impact on the educational system, that is a really important arc and something that I am very excited by.

Something that I think is so wonderful that we’re able to even have these discussions because I can just think of that young girl going through all this emotional turmoil, had there been an adjustment in the school system for me back then, I may have had decade of advance for my life. You know, I may have not needed that decade. But then again, I might end up being a part of why things change and then it’ll be, have been an investment of 10 years. I’m all about that.

Angela Kelly: That’s wonderful. It is an incredible story and it is a story that belongs to many children where the institution, as well intended as the individuals are who are in those classrooms and who are leading those schools and those districts, they have great intentions, they love kids and they are there for the right reasons. However, the system itself is structured in a way that has created a very specific way of learning to a specific type of learner in a specific type of environment. 

And so we’ve pigeonholed, you know, who basically goes through the, you know, the threshold of success and who feels like they will not be successful because they don’t have the credentials or the certifications, the, you know, the graduation diploma, those kinds of things. And we have, you know, created a narrative where it’s all or none. It’s this or nothing.

And you were able to break free from that narrative, which was, if you don’t have these degrees and you didn’t graduate and you didn’t go on to college and get this particular degree in sales, for example, then you wouldn’t be successful as a saleswoman. And here you are as a multimillionaire in sales, professional development, personal development, developing people and teaching them in a way that is so relatable and so understandable because it’s visceral. 

It goes beyond a textbook and a curriculum and a pacing guide and a, you know, a test that we are implementing as forms of measurement in our system. This goes into internal dialogues and internal identity and energies that allow us to connect with people and with concepts in a way that allow us to progress in multiple ways. Like there are endless facets to learning when you are tapping into the individual and into their talents, their strengths, their own magic.

Melanie: Yes. What I really do love about what’s happened for me is I remember when I first started with the whole emotional mindset, leadership, self-leadership approach, my dad said to me, “If you want to do this, why don’t you go back to university and do it properly? Like go get a degree in psychology.” And I remember just feeling in the pit of my stomach like, I don’t think he understands. I did not go to school to spite you. I did not continue my journey to spite you. I would have done anything to make you proud. I can’t. Like that’s not it. I know it’s not. 

And at this point now, I’ve been doing this work since 2013 and I think we’ve calculated just from the courses that I’ve done. There’s like, oh my gosh, like tens and tens of thousands of hours of me speaking on camera in the last 13 years. That doesn’t count the one on one calls. It doesn’t count the in-person things. It doesn’t count, like I have spent lifetimes inside of one life inside of these last 13 years speaking with people at what matters the most to them.

Every conversation, a conversation about a desire or something they are struggling with and my entire intention is to help them get closer to that thing. And every single conversation has brought me closer and closer to the understanding that people struggle to believe they’re capable of things, and that is the first barrier to receiving it time and time again. And so you take children who imagine that they’re incapable of learning and you add that barrier so early on in their lives. They carry that for a very long time. 

And it develops not just in the school system, it becomes and it shapes who you believe you are. If I don’t believe I’m good at learning, it doesn’t just discredit the school system, it discredits everything. I think I’m not intelligent. I don’t think I’m a good leader. I don’t think I can provide for a family. I don’t think I can do much at all. And it just starts to imprint so early on. And so a lot of the work that I end up doing with people is reframing a lot of those beliefs. And it’s so crazy because you could go down a very solid path to get there.

And I believe that there are incredibly talented people that have a curriculum that’s been built over decades and decades and decades, and I don’t discredit any of that. I think that for the right fit, the right people that function that way, that there’s a reason that this has been working forever. But there’s also a reason that so many people fall through the cracks. People who’ve done the same thing over and over again for years and nothing changes. 

And I’ve seen the most incredible thing happen with the people I’ve worked with is sometimes all it takes is one conversation. Literally, like it doesn’t take learning. It takes being spoken to like a capable person, which is so wild because that seems like the simplest thing. But for someone who has been spoken to like they’re incapable for most of their lives, it unlocks something that’s quite extraordinary.

And so what I’m working on and what I’m excited about for the future is to really see that there are different people who learn in different ways and it’s not the way that existed up until now is the best way and everyone else needs an alternative way because they’re incapable. It’s more like there was only a way created for one type and the rest of the world kind of deserves other types. Not as an alternative because we’re incapable, but as a priority because that’s what’s best for us. 

Because I do think that being taught something as an alternative also gives us a sense of I need special treatment because I’m not smart, instead of what’s your preference? And I can only imagine had I, you know, growing up if I would have known like, what’s your preference? What do you value? How do you learn best? And it wouldn’t have been this is good and this is bad. My beliefs about myself would have been completely different.

And so I’ve built a huge company and, you know, I help people with things that I should probably have a psychology degree in order to help someone achieve that, but I haven’t needed that. A business degree in order to be able to help someone do that, but I haven’t. A finance degree in order to help someone do that, but I didn’t. Like there’s, even writing, speaking, like so many things that I would have needed to go through the school system in order to have the credentials in order to, I just put in the hours, like more hours than I wonder where I got them sometimes. 

But in doing that with all of my heart, what I’ve come to realize is that there’s just many different ways to learn. And there isn’t one that’s better than the other. There’s just one that’s better than the other for me. And there’s one that’s better than the other for you. And it isn’t like if your brain doesn’t function with this, you’re not capable or you’re not adequate. And I do believe that in the way the school system has continued for a long time, that’s the belief a lot of students are left with is that if they are not adapted to the way, even if there is an adapted way, it’s adapted because they’re incapable. And it starts so young.

Angela Kelly: Yes. It is the identity that gets built around the identity of a student and who you are as a student. And when you learn in kindergarten, in first grade that you are behind grade level, right? People will say you’re below grade level. You’re performing below the line. You build this identity, I’m not a reader, I’m not a writer, that means I’m not literate, that means something’s wrong with me. 

And now we put you into intervention and that confirms because now you’re separated from the mainstream that something is wrong with you. And then you and these children belong here and they belong there and they’re going to continue on and you’re going to have to be held back and so you can learn in the way you were meant to learn, but that way isn’t the mainstream way.

That’s how the system is set up currently. And obviously my mission is to evolve that, is to expand that and to enhance learning for all and to expand the purpose. And really, I feel like we are at a beautiful time in education because life is asking us to ask the question, what is the purpose of education and what is it for and who is it for? And we have the opportunity to express ourselves in ways that isn’t just the mainstream anymore and to not throw away, I love when you say you don’t have to throw out the old paradigm to create a new one. 

The institution of education itself has roots and it’s founded in those roots and instead of trying to throw that out or to work against it because what’s happening now with kids is they’re either like, “Oh, I’m a student, it’s meant for me and I go down this path” or “I’m not a student so what’s the point? I’m being required to come to an institution that has told me I’m not capable of doing the required tasks and to learn the required information, so why am I here?”

And then we get into, well, attrition rates and we get into, you know, attendance rates and now we’re struggling with getting kids to want to come to school. And what I hear you saying is if we were to open ourselves up as educators into just exploring these different concepts at a more individual level, that we might be able to tap into identity work at a very young age and reprogram, well, not even reprogram, just not program them as non-learners.

Melanie: And that’s so well said. And the other part of that is that people ask young kids how things are going at school all the time. It’s the first question, you see your nieces and nephews, you say, “How’s school?” And if they don’t like it and they don’t feel good, it’s the first thing anybody asks them inside and outside of school. And the thing is when you, you don’t feel good at school or you’re not good at school, people know about that. 

And so I also remember having some of the kids that struggled in my class, other kids, like their parents didn’t want those kids to hang out because it’s like, oh those kids don’t study or those kids aren’t good at school. So we want you to be friends with the scholars. We want you to be friends with the ones who do really well in school.

In a relationship, you know, first question at the dinner table when you have a new boyfriend, you know, “So, how you do, how do you do at school?” It’s like, it’s the whole thing. It’s not just in the school system, it becomes who you are for everyone. Everyone wants to measure you based on how you’re doing. Are you a good influence on my child? Are you a good influence? Are you smart? Are you good? Do you care? And it’s so difficult because that is such a one way to look at the world. 

And unfortunately, a lot of the people I knew that were so good at school, I’ve seen over the years post not being able to find the jobs that they wanted or, you know, getting frustrated with they’ve studied, they went all the way down a path, years and years of studying, student loans galore just to find out they don’t even like what they’re doing once they’ve, they’re there and they want to pivot and it’s like so much invested and then they don’t even know if that’s what they want to be. And so it feels like there’s so much good in the way that the school system is built. If it has survived this long, there’s no question about that.

But I just wonder how much it has changed in comparison to the rest of the world changing. Isn’t there a sign there that it hasn’t followed a curve the way the rest of the world is learning and expediting so quickly? How is the school system not evolved more?

Angela Kelly: Yes. That is definitely a question that we talk about in my programs and with my one-on-ones because the world is evolving at rapid rate, right? Technology, AI, you could get online and have any of these conversations around the like how exponential our world is changing in terms of communication, connection, and the beauty of technology. 

And what I see education doing is trying to just input technology on top of the old foundation and just use the same foundation but then add technology. And what we’re finding is that kids aren’t learning better because they now have Chromebooks or they now have laptops and computers and phones. They’re actually more disconnected, more disengaged than ever before.

And you bring up a beautiful point around your, you said you had nieces and nephews. And I was an educator. I was a teacher, elementary teacher, I was a school principal, a district leader, and I have one son who is now, he’ll be 27 on April 24th. And I watched him go through school and he conformed to the system. He was this beautiful little spirit and I watched him conform. And as an educator at the time, I was proud of that. Now in hindsight, I feel differently, but he did, he conformed to the system. So he was one of the top students. He performed for the school. He learned in the way they wanted him to learn and he was miserable. And it broke my heart.

And as a parent and an educator, I started to, there were cracks in my belief system that were starting to chasm because as a teacher, I was proud of him and you know, he was the good kid and the quiet kid and the studious kid and the A plus kid. But as a parent, it felt wrong. And I started to see light come through where the way that I was teaching and the expectations I had and my belief in the educational system as an educator was separate from how I was feeling as a parent. And I couldn’t have seen that difference until I became a parent. 

But what it taught me was I want no child in the future to go through whether they are struggling, I saw the pain in the kids that were struggling. I saw it in their eyes. I saw it in their hearts. And I saw their identity just slip away from them and their spirit. And I was a kindergarten teacher. When my son hit kindergarten and then and beyond, I saw him performing and conforming and he was equally unhappy. And I thought to myself, “Who’s happy in this scenario? Teachers don’t feel happy, principals aren’t feeling happy. The students, whether they’re successful or not, are not happy. Something’s got to give here. Something is off.” 

And that’s where I found this work in terms of the energetics of leadership, the energetics of learning, the identity, and that’s, you have really impacted my work as an educator because you’ve expanded the way I think about leadership, the way I think about teaching and learning. And my mission, my heart is for the children of the future. I do not want my grandchildren one day, should I have them, to have the same experience that Alex had and that I had and that you had and that millions upon millions of people have had through our school system. 

So when you think about your nieces and nephews, Melanie, and they’re so precious, and you think about them entering into the current system, what is it that you wish for them? What is it that educators might be able to bring to enhance the experience and the identities of students moving forward in our current system that would enhance their experience as a student?

Melanie: So I’m going to give you multiple answers.

Angela Kelly: Great.

Melanie: What I hope for them the most from the bottom of my heart is that their journey at school is the least important thing about them and that they know that. I hope that they find a way to love it and that they make it through and that they enjoy learning, but I hope that in their lives, people ask them about their favorite color, about their friends, about what they love, about that they laugh with people, that they make memories with people. 

Like I will never ask my niece how school is going unless she wants to talk to me about it. I ask her about everything else about her life. I know who she is. I don’t know about her school life, but I don’t, I want to be the one person who never asks her about that. On the odd chance it’s not her favorite thing, she’ll have one person that does not care about that. 

Like I want there to be more people in children’s lives that do not go the easy route and only know about the people, the kids that they love based on, “What grade are you in now?” and “How do you, do you like school? What’s your favorite topic? Are you good at school? Do you like school? Do you have a lot of homework?” Like, I just, I wish for them a world where people care about them as people, even as children more than they care about how they’re doing at school. That’s the first thing I care about.

The second thing I hope for them is that they get teachers who chose this profession because they genuinely want to make a difference. Not people who chose it because they would get a really great maternity leave. This is speaking from Canada or people who would get the summer off and it’s convenient when you have kids or people who like the schedule or people who think, “Well, this is the only thing I can do based on the education that I have.” 

I hope they actually get teachers who chose this profession because they wanted to make a difference. Brave, bold people who are looking to make every school year better than the last one because they’re learning something with what worked with their last group of kids and what they can improve. People who actually care about the profession itself. I hope that for them.

I also hope that there are people developing new curriculum, people creating new ways that it’s going to evolve for them, that they’re going to see a different school system than I saw, that they’re going to tell me about things at school because they want to tell me and I’ll think, “Oh my gosh, I’m so happy. This sounds so cool. I wish I would have had something like that.” I wish that for them. 

And above all else, what I really hope is that they develop skills outside of school so that if they do ever find that this system does not work for them, that they do not worry, that they pivot and they go be extraordinary because it’s not the end. No matter what happens, it’s not the end. There is another way. You know, whether kids find that out in the school system or afterwards, outside of it, there’s still another way. And so my hope is that they find that if that’s not the way. And if it is the way that they have the time of their life, that they love it and that they evolve into what they want. But those are all the things I hope for them.

Angela Kelly: That is really the humanity of education. It is bringing humanity back into the field of education and not letting curriculum companies and testing companies be the dictator of who we are, why we’re here, what we are doing, how we are doing it, how we are progressing, and developing humans. We are in the business of human development. That’s what education is intended to be. And it has become, I know, there’s many influences, external influences on education that have educators pressured. 

But I love that you brought this up because I can only imagine we have some listeners out there who are tangled right now. They got their knickers in a knot and they’re upset because you’re saying school’s not the most important thing when educators have been taught to believe that education is the most important thing. And you’re also saying education’s not the end all be all. If this doesn’t end up working for you, there are alternatives out in the world. You don’t need the degree. 

And I think we’re seeing that now with the invention of the internet and YouTube and you can go online and learn just about anything from anyone anywhere. Is it as curated? Probably not, but that’s probably the point, is that it’s not as curated and that you have choice and you have a voice in how you learn and who you learn from and what you learn and the topic and the way.

And I think that’s a beautiful thing. So it invites us, school leaders, I’m speaking to you right now, it invites us school leaders to open ourselves up to more than just what currently is, to expand ourselves as leaders, to lead us through the change and to be open to the conversations we’re having around the energetics of leadership, the energetics of teaching, the energetics of studying and learning and being a student. 

I teach a lot about identity and I learned that from Melanie, my own personal identity as a coach, as a mentor, as a professional development expert, and a mentor for school leaders. But I speak to that also in terms of the identity of teachers and students. And we don’t have to buy into the one identity, which is, this is who I have to be as a principal, this is who I have to be as a teacher, and this is who I have to be as a student. And if it’s not that, then I’m out. It doesn’t work for me.

I think that we are the people who are in charge of the experience that we’re having and that we can create that experience for students keeping in mind our own experiences as educators and bringing back the humanity, as you discussed, in that this one curriculum isn’t the end all be all. This one class isn’t the end all be all. I’ve had to tell teachers, “You’re not going to save every student, but they, luckily, they have 12 more teachers along the line.” 

So looking at education more expansively, it’s not this one grade level make it or break it. It’s not this one teacher or this one class. We are a collective. We are working together. We are teaching and learning together, and we are developing as children and as adults because the learning doesn’t stop at 18 when you get the diploma or not and walk out the door. The learning continues on and on. And this is an example. 

And Melanie, this is one of the reasons I asked her to be on this show is that she is an example that is outside the box, that is outside traditional education, and she is an example of what is possible for children who aren’t currently working well in the current system. But educators out there, the ones whose hearts know there’s something more in teaching, know there’s something more available to provide for students and for leaders out there. You’re listening to this, hearing her story, knowing that there is more we can do. 

We do have more power than we think to influence and to have impact and to not allow school to only be one narrative for one type of child. And Melanie’s story is the perfect example of that. There are students out there who’ve gone all the way to PhD like you said Melanie, and they’re very unhappy.

So can you discuss a little bit about the work you do around leadership, energetics, relationships, communication, and how you would see that integrating into a system that is founded on its current foundation, but bringing this into the current system to enhance the experience for both educators and students?

Melanie: Well, I want to address one little thing you said first, and then I want to answer this question because I wouldn’t exactly answer it the way you’ve asked it and I want to explain why. So first thing I also want to say is that because of the way the school system is created right now, when you said, you know, a lot of the teachers, they can’t save every child and they get really attached, like they want these children to succeed. 

I do think that the other part of this is it’s very difficult for teachers when a student is failing or when multiple students are failing because it’s like their job is to make sure that the kids go through the curriculum. But it doesn’t empower teachers to pivot much. It doesn’t give them the right to say, “Hey, let’s change all of this.” It’s like this is the way and if the way isn’t working, I still can’t change the way. 

I just need to somehow make the child succeed no matter what, which is so difficult because when you’re a kid, you don’t know the difference between someone trying to get you to understand something because they care, because it’s their job, their mission, because that’s what they’ve got to help you with versus because you’re not getting it and you’re not good enough and they’re impatient with you. Like you don’t know the difference.

And so I do think it’s also increasingly difficult for teachers when they don’t have access to anything to pivot to because only having restricted access to certain things and it’s like these are the tools, make them work, that also becomes really draining, especially when you know the responsibility. If it feels like you’re responsible for a child’s upbringing almost. Like a lot of these kids, they’re spending most of their waking hours and most of their supportive hours with a grownup in a classroom. 

And for a full year, these teachers care about these kids, they want them to succeed and when the kids hate the topic or don’t like school or don’t feel good there and don’t want to listen, that is exhausting for the teachers and they’re not really given other options. So there it’s also something to recognize this isn’t like who is, what is the problem? Is the problem the students? Is the problem the teachers? Is the problem the school system?

And I think that this is where the answer to your next question comes is that I really believe that the issue is that there is no long-term vision collectively happening with all educators. There’s a lot of it is trying to fix what’s happening and that doesn’t work right now. And I always talk no matter who I’m working with, whether I’m speaking to the head of a huge organization or whether I’m speaking to someone who’s running a smaller organization, it’s always about the grander vision. 

You’ve got to go out as far as you can first and then change things that are possible to change sooner and then other things are scheduled for a few years from now and then other things a few years from now. But I think that anytime I have a conversation about the school system, what people are hoping for is something that they could do right now. And the fact is we can make small like adaptations right now, but I don’t actually think that’s what’s going to change everything. 

What’s going to change everything is people who have been doing this work for multiple years, who have had so many students, who have so much wisdom, who know so much about the school system, coming together and saying, “What do we want to see in the next decade? And in order for this to look like this in the next decade, what can we change in the next five years? And for that to be there in the next five years, then what’s our three-year plan? And then what’s our two-year plan? And then where do we want to be by this time next year?” 

And I don’t think we can change the school system just by saying, “What are some small adaptations that we can make right now?” I don’t know that we can get to where we really want to go making tiny little shifts. There needs to be a question like, what is the way that’s missing? 

And I’ve contemplated this because I’ve watched so many people come into my work swearing blind that they can’t do this. “I can’t, I’m not meant for this, I’m not good at business, I’m not good at money, I’m not good with people, I’m not good at this,” becoming millionaires within a couple of years. Sometimes in a couple of months because there’s something that happens when you start actually working with the brain of a person that works in an emotional loop.

And so what I found is that the people who have a mind that functions in an emotional loop, what does not work is to have many different topics of conversation in the same day. That doesn’t work. This is like just look at humanity as it is. What is the number one thing people do? They get stuck on social media and they scroll nonstop or they watch Netflix nonstop. 

There is a large majority of the world that the way that they do best is in a momentum loop. It means that you’ve got to create a meaning and that meaning has to have something that comes next and something that comes next and something that comes next and something that comes next that all makes sense and it’s all connected.

And so I’ve thought about this before, what would be the ideal for a person like me, a mind like mine, and the ideal would be that all the subjects are somehow tied together and that the projects are evolving based on the level of skill that’s required, but everything’s connected. So something that would be, for example, in the first year, you’re going to be learning how to make a recipe. Well, in order to be able to learn how to make the recipe, you have to understand the history of where it’s from. What country does it come from? 

You’ve got to understand why those ingredients come from that country. So now you understand the country a little bit more. There’s reasons to do the research. There’s reasons to see what it looks like. Then what type of climate that food grows in or whatever it is, and then, okay, how do you make it? Then math, this is what milliliters look like. This is what, you know, this is what grams look like. This is what this looks like. This is how you weigh it. If you did this minus this, what would you get? This is how all of a sudden there’s a reason for learning this. 

Even if it needs to be like, we want six tomatoes. So we’re going to give you 10 tomatoes. If you wanted six, how many would you take away? Four. Like you would make it make sense with a whole thing where everything you’re doing includes multiple things so that children aren’t just thinking, “I am learning this because I need to be good at this.” They’re saying, “How do I create this whole thing? I need to have a piece of math. I need to be able to read the instructions. I need to be able to do this. I need to be able to do this.” Like all the parts come together. 

And it slowly but surely creates more, “I care about this.” There’s more connection to everything you’re doing as you’re doing it. Then eventually, maybe you learn how to bake, then maybe there’s a bake sale, then you decide how much did each ingredient cost and how much time did it take and then how much should you charge for each thing? And then maybe there’s a bake sale and how much to wrap and then they make their own little logos in art school and maybe and then how much money did they make and then they count the money and then how do they put the money away? 

And then eventually maybe they’ve got to figure out how to get an apartment one day and what does it look like to have a credit score and what does that look like and what does it mean? And everything’s connected. And so year after year, all the projects are connected through a multitude of subjects. And so I’m learning about new places in the world, not just because you’re showing me a map and you’re saying, “What’s that called? What’s that called?” I’m saying, “Oh, I didn’t realize that, you know, guacamole is avocados and this particular recipe of avocado is from Mexico and that this exists there because there’s sunshine and this.” 

Like I didn’t know that. And when I do know that and I know how to make guacamole and I know exactly how to make it, I know how to measure it and I know why it matters, I feel excited to talk about that because it’s an emotional thing. And if my family ever went to Mexico, I’d be so excited because I know about all these things.

And so it’s connecting things because when I see children now, kids now playing games, like adult games, what they love the most is all the connections. How does it work? What does it mean? They know all the characters and all these shows that they watch. They know all the things. If it matters to them, they remember it. But then they’re needing to sit there and remember all the provinces or all the types of clouds and it’s like, is there really not another way to create momentum? 

Because when I look at the way a lot of my clients learn, there’s a momentum, which means the more we talk about it, the more they care. The more we talk about it and the more they realize it touches other parts of their lives, the more they care. The more we talk about it and they realize it impacts more parts of their lives, the more interested they are to read about, learn about, hear about the other parts that are coming next if they complete this piece. Now they’re like, “Okay, this is done. Can I learn more about that? Can I learn more about that?” 

Different people are more interested in the next progression than other things. Like maybe some will be more interested in the baking and some will be more interested in the business and some will be more interested in the measuring and the science part. 

And so all of a sudden you’re seeing the preferences, you’re seeing people come alive. Is it the artist, the scientist, the mathematician? Is it the organized one or the one who was just so excited to bake something? Like what’s emerging from the child? And then you actually get to figure out how to place them next year. And it’s like, “Let’s have a conversation with the teachers. Let’s look at what happened.”

But there would have to be room for the teachers to think. There would have to be space for creation. There would have to be conversation in the school about what goes next and where do people go and there would have to be something that would be occurring. 

But it’s like while everyone is separated and they all have the same curriculum and they’ve got to nail everything on the head and it’s like if it’s measured right and they succeed, it’s a thumbs up and if the kids fail, it’s a thumbs down. No matter how many little pivots we make, we’re not really developing another solution. We’re just kind of adapting, which is still better. But we do think that what leadership really is, what’s the vision?

Angela Kelly: Yes.

Melanie: And my dream would be that by the time a child is 10, 11, 12 years old, they have so many things they’re passionate about at school. They have so many things they’re passionate about. They’re already thinking about what they might be when they grow up. Not because of what they’re learning, but because of what they are so excited about. They love things. They want to try stuff out. They are interested in stuff. They don’t understand like I think kids should understand about money and business way earlier if they’re excited about that. It changes a person’s life. 

I speak to so many people on a daily basis who’ve had, you know, difficult childhoods where they’ve had to be involved in the money making earlier and although it was traumatic and difficult, they’re so grateful that they understood sooner how to generate that money. It was unbelievable how helpful that was.

I feel like there’s so many conversational topics that are completely intertwined with real-life things when you’re making breakfast and you’re putting this much cereal. What’s a serving? How do you know? Like we could be doing so much more connected work where the kids just get in that emotional loop because when I look at what takes a woman in my world from, “I, I not graduated school and I make minimum wage” to “I’m a millionaire,” the difference is the momentum loop of this makes me feel like I get it, this makes me feel like I understand it.

And it makes me feel like if I don’t understand this, I could pivot here, I could learn this instead and all of a sudden I’d circle back and finally understand this part. It doesn’t feel like there’s only one way. It feels like I can trust myself that if this is blocking, there’s somewhere else I could go and eventually circle back. Like if I’m not understanding the math of the recipe, well if I screw up the recipe and I eat it, I’ll realize, “Oh, I put too much of this and this.” Now I’m understanding science. Now I understand science, I care about the math more. Okay, now we’re back into that. It’s like not all the paths are linear like that. Sometimes I only care about something after I care about it.

So you’re trying to explain to me that you need this amount of solid and this amount of liquid in order to create this and I’m trying to figure that out with my mind, but it isn’t until I’ve got pizza dough dripping through my fingers that I care about the ratio.

 You can talk to me about heat, you can talk to me about measurements, you can talk to me about math, you can talk to me about all these things, but it isn’t until I’m, you know, maybe eating something I’ve made or collecting money from a bake sale that I’m going to be able to give to a cause that I’ve researched because of all this that I’ve understood that I care about what next year’s project is going to be because I get it and I like it. I want to, I care about the countries, I care about this and I care. 

And I think that for a lot of people, a lot of kids, the biggest issue is that they don’t know how to care about things. They’re not being taught at home how to dream. They’re not being taught at home how to believe in themselves necessarily. Not everyone has that opportunity. You know, not everyone has at home an imagination, a feeling of I can do anything, a feeling of dreaming or creating. And so if you were to bring that to school, a lot of these kids would come alive for the first time.

A lot of the kids that go to school just learning, they’re lacking a passion of any kind anywhere, and then they’re just trying to be given information. It’s not landing. Some kids are so happy at home and they’re overflowing and their parents have time for them and they say, “Tell me what you learned” and they have so much fun and they take them and they travel with them and their mind is full and it’s an imagination overload and they already understand about so many things about the world and you add education to that and it’s just an overflowing thing.

But for other kids that feel a little empty and not important, you add an education with a grading system, you don’t realize how dull their life is, what’s missing. And so if there were a way to add more emotion, more connection, more care, more imagination, more creation, more responsibility, a lot of these kids would come alive and be some of the most extraordinary learners, but not scholars necessarily, artists, scientists, innovators, visionaries. 

There’s no space for that early enough to make kids not already think they’re not good enough by the time they could even imagine they have that in them in the first place. So I think that if there were more identities than just a scholar, and I know that there’s arts and crafts, you know, an hour of arts and crafts or an hour of physical education, but it’s not connected to anything.

Angela Kelly: Right.

Melanie: So if in a school project, making the little logo that goes on the, you know, baking muffins that you’ve made and you made the most beautiful muffins and the most beautiful logo and at the end you sold the most because you had the greatest sales skills and you made the most beautiful looking cupcakes, like wouldn’t that be awesome for you to know at seven years old when you’ve struggled with making the recipe and you’ve struggled with everything else, that you’re good at that? 

And it’s wild to me how rapid things start to move when people feel like they can do something. And so sometimes you’re just working against what kids are good at because I think back to myself and I’m like, I knew every single word to the Backstreet Boys and the Spice Girls by heart. But I could not remember 13 provinces. 

Angela Kelly: Yes.

Melanie: Like how do we not question this? How is that not…? The kids are capable. My niece, five years old, knew every character of Peppa Pig, all of them.

Angela Kelly: Yes.

Melanie: But couldn’t count in order.

Angela Kelly: Right.

Melanie: So if we actually see imagination, emotion, care, connection, momentum, a storyline, multiple things coming at once, stimulation instead of concentration.

Angela Kelly: Yes.

Melanie: What would we create? And if it were like, “What’s the 10-year plan? How close can we get to that in five? Three, two, by next year?” And people came together and said, “Let’s try it.” Then we’d get closer to it. And I think honestly, listening to a podcast episode like this and thinking about it is already a step forward. 

Even people getting mad at it because I’ve, I’ve had conversations like this that go so well and I have conversation like this that don’t go so well. People are like, “You know, you’re an anomaly and you were able to, you know, good for you. You know, you did it your way, but…” yeah and I’m like, “Cool, except I’ve trained thousands and thousands of women to do extraordinary things in this way that I’m an anomaly in. So why are we waiting till women are 40 years old?”

Angela Kelly: Right.

Melanie: When they could have known they were capable of things when they were seven?

Angela Kelly: Yes. You speak to that so eloquently and the bottom line I’m hearing is, it would be lovely if we stop teaching in isolation because what learning is connecting dots, it’s connection. It’s an emotional connection to create an intellectual connection, an understanding intellectually, cognitively of what is happening in the world around us and why. And when there is an emotional connection, there is an intellectual connection. But when we teach in isolation, it drops off the meaning. 

There is no meaning to two plus two is four. Why do I need to know this? What does it matter? And can’t I use a calculator for that? Who cares that I need to know this? But when you are running a bake sale and you need to learn how to make muffins and brownies and whatnot, two plus two really matters, but there’s a reason that it matters, like you said. 

And it’s the experiential, it’s the kinesthetic learning, it’s the full body encompass learning that occurs when dots are connected throughout the day, throughout the lessons and it sounded like project-based learning where we have a project. There might be smaller projects going on. There might be a larger project that goes for the entire school year. Maybe there are semester projects that are going on. But when there’s a project, you’re bringing in all of the disciplines and they’re integrated together which creates an emotional connection for the student.

And I would venture to say that also brings students together because now it doesn’t matter if you know how to learn in isolation or not. We’re all learning together in the project-based learning model and in the connection of and the integration of learning. So everyone’s learning with purpose, with understanding, with intent, with connection, with value, because they’re now seeing the value of the learning. They want to learn. 

Like you said, your niece knew all the characters of Peppa Pig. She saw the value in learning those characters and understanding them and being connected to them. She felt something emotionally versus 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 or doing it in French, however, whatever language she’s learning her numbers in. Like it was an isolation. It didn’t matter. There wasn’t a meaning to it.

Melanie: No, like my little nephew is two and a half years old and he’s two and a half years old. And he said to me this weekend, “Auntie Lenny, when I woke up, there was chocolate on the floor like this.”

Angela Kelly: So cute.

Melanie: He took his time, but two and a half years old. “Auntie Lenny, when I woke up, there was chocolate on the floor like this for Frankie.” And I said, “That is amazing. Did you, did there, was there something at the end of it?” “Yes. Frankie got a book. Frankie got a toy. Frankie got…” and he explained to me all the things. And later on we were playing and there was this book and there was these 10 ducks. 

And I said, you know, there’s 10 ducks and he went, “1, 2, 3, 7, 8, 11, 14, 12, 9.” And I just thought it was so funny because who cares? This two-year-old took his time and explained to me that when he woke up in the morning, there was a trail of chocolates and when he got there, he had a toy and a book and a this. And then he counted 1, 2, 3, 7, 10, 9, 11, 14, 9. Because that’s the thing. What is captivating is what I care about.

And so if I spend most of my living days in a room where I have to listen, I can’t even be telling you what I care about. I have to be listening to what you’re telling me I need to care about. Can you at least tell me in a way I care about it? 

And if on top of that, you’re going to measure my intelligence based on how much I remember of what you told me, that you’ve told me I need to care about, can you at least tell it to me in a way that I enjoy? If my entire life is based on whether or not I understand it. And if I don’t and you felt this and most of the people that came before you felt this, how long until someone changes it or do we just keep doing it this way?

Angela Kelly: Yes.

Melanie: So my real connected feeling to this is that the school system will change when someone says, “Let’s rework the whole thing. Let’s try something else. We’ve already got this one down pat. Like we’ve got this one. Whatever stuff is coming up is not because this one needs fixing. It’s because another one needs to emerge. You can’t fix this one anymore than it is. It’s like it’s pretty much set. But what else is available?” And who knows? Maybe in developing this one, even the ones who are good at this might say, “Kind of like that more.” You never know.

Angela Kelly: Right.

Melanie: But I feel like this is a way that also prepares people’s brains to be far greater when they come into the real world because one of the things I’m constantly helping women with is juggling. They are very good at running their business as long as there’s no kids in the house. And they are very good at being organized as long as there’s no money problems and they’re really good at thinking about what they need to budget as long as no one’s talking to them about something else because how we’re taught from the beginning is, now we’re talking about math. 

Everyone concentrate, no one say anything, listen, focus, math. That’s not how we need math later. We need math right now. Are the bills going to work? Because math plus emotion goes together as a grown up, but not in school. And then we wonder why we all kind of struggle with all the things that need calculating.

Like how do we isolate emotion from mathematics and then expect grownups to be functional? Because that’s not how it works. Like the topics that go together actually go together. So when you think about even the clouds, you think about you want to learn about the clouds, you want to think about the different climates, but you want to learn that why? Like what does it really matter? 

Like if I’m looking outside and it’s cloudy, I don’t know what kind of clouds are what, but if I want to try to grow a certain thing and I’m like, “Oh, there’s no point in me buying this because this climate doesn’t do it because it needs this kind of rain and this kind of clouds and this kind of thing.” Then it would matter to me. 

And I’m seeing so many people like, “I bought myself this plant, the plant died.” But I’m like, “But where did you get the plant?” “You know, I bought it at the store. They have a million plants.” I’m like, “Yeah, but where did you put it?” “Well, I put it in the window.” “But that’s not a sun plant. That’s a shade plant because it’s from this area of the world where there’s, you know?” “Oh, this needs so much sun. How do you know?” “Well, it’s a rainforest plant. You need to water it. How much, how do you know that?” “Well, it grows in tropical climates.” “How do you know that?” “I’ve been to tropical climates.”

But grown people killing plants because they’re putting like really lush green plants in a corner with no light because they’re, it’s not, they’re not even thinking about, “This is a plant. I should be able to water it and it’s the day it’s enough.” But it’s like, no, where are you putting it? There’s so many things like where am I learning about biology? Where am I learning about the clouds and the mountains? Is in a classroom with no clouds, no mountain, no plants. 

So how am I supposed to care about any of that stuff? If it is important, then let it be important. Let have schools have gardens. Let’s explain why certain things can’t grow here. Let’s say we would love to have this plant, but we can’t because if we had it here, it would die because, let’s explain that. Let’s have winter activities and summer activities because we explain that in certain climates we can do some things and not other things. Like there’s so much to learn.

And I really do believe that when you become a grownup and you’ve got to be able to understand science because you’re cooking dinner and you don’t want it to burn, while you’re figuring out your finances and you need math to make ends meet at the end of the month, and you’re putting out a report for something or you’re putting out an important thing on your website or whatever, you need to be able to think and write and have something in the oven and the math be mathing all on the same day in the same moment right now. 

But in the classroom, French, English, science, and math are one after the other and nothing interrupts any of them. So we have short tempers and an inability to do two things at once. Of course, it’s how we’re brought up. That’s how we were taught everything.

Angela Kelly: Yes.

Melanie: So what would happen if we mixed it? Then maybe we would have people that are able to focus on two things at once.

Angela Kelly: Yes. And the integration, what you’re saying is that integration of learning, if we start that from the very beginning, that is who will, we will become. We will just know, we will become that person. That will be the identity of the student is that they handle a multitude of information from different curriculums, from, you know, different disciplines as we say, all at once, which is what life is.

Melanie: Yes. Like I would love to see even in physical education having like relays where you’ve got to be running through something and you’ve got to remember the list you were given while you’re doing, you’ve got to do 10 laps of this and then you’ve got to run over there and you’ve got to climb up there and come down there and you have to remember the list you went with because that would be helpful when you need to be shopping with three little kids and you’re running through a grocery store and you’ve got to remember the milk, the oranges, the apples, the, like wouldn’t that be helpful? 

But it’s like, no, when you’re doing the physical education, you don’t think of anything. You just hear a whistle and you run as fast as you can. What if we put, there’s more relays. There’s things, you know, if it’s like, okay, we’re going to do the bake sale, but you’ve got to go run for the ingredients. We need you to be able to multitask. You’re stressed about running and you’ve got to remember what you need. 

And that maybe comes in a little later on in the educational thing, but it’s like you’ve got this much time to run with your basket. You need coordination, dexterity, and all the things, you need to be able to calculate how much money you have, how much of all the ingredients you need and you’ve got to remember what you need at the end. Go.

And these are not just marked. Like at the end, you don’t just get marked like, “Oh, 10 out of 10.” It’s more like, here’s what we learned about you. You were excellent at remembering this and this. Here you got really emotional. What happened there? Like these are the things that would change the educational system is to actually look at what do grownups lack that children could be being trained for pleasantly from the beginning that would still integrate everything they need to learn, would probably make them better at learning it and actually help them use it when they grow up.

Angela Kelly: Yeah. It’s like the right of passage you were speaking of in one of your programs where we don’t integrate right of passage into our schools and conversations around different developmental milestones that children go through. But I think this is one way to actually celebrate it and play with it a little bit and have fun because how much more fun is it to go through all of those and have to go to the market and remember and okay, what did I remember? 

And I loved when you said the question about we’re not getting a mark of 10 out of 10, we’re looking at, here’s where you excelled, this is what was, you know, it felt natural to you, and this is where you got emotional. What happened? Because that requires that identity reflection of what was going on for me personally that, you know, not in comparison. You’re not saying little Jenny passed the test and you failed the test. Jenny just didn’t get emotional in this aspect of it, but that’s Jenny’s business. What happened with you is, you know, there was some emotion there. What came up?

Such a great question for students to be learning about introspection and, you know, connecting with themselves and not being ashamed that they got emotional at that part of the project, but to, as an exploration of why.

Melanie: And I will say, in doing this work and developing this work, I’ve often had people tell me, “I wish you would do it for free. You know, I wish that you could offer this course around communication for free. I wish you could offer this course around women’s empowerment for free. I wish you could offer this for free. I wish you could offer this for free.” And honestly, I really hope one day it is offered for free. But the fact is, there needs to be in the world a group of people who are willing to put themselves on the line for things to change. That is just the way it is. 

I did a lot of this work for free before I was recognized as valuable. I did a lot of this work for free until eventually people started speaking out for me and saying, “Gosh, you need to hire this girl. Like my life has completely changed. I’ve, I’ve achieved more within a few months working with this person than I have during an entire semester of education. Like this is unbelievable. It’s just amplified everything I know, everything I do.” But I took years of my life to shape this before it became what it was. And the people who are investing in it see the value in it, but the whole world does deserve it.

And so the other part of this is to say, you know, some of the teachers that are listening to this, you may want to like find other teachers that are willing to do this and come together and create some sort, some kind of like Montessori school, you know, something that is not quite the way it is and give it a shot, extracurricular. If you’re passionate about the education system and you’re doing it for passion, it’s not just for, you know, the job that it is because if that’s why you’re doing it, this wouldn’t be interesting for you. 

But for those of you who are like, “Gosh, this would be my dream to be a part of creating this,” maybe it’s extracurricular. Maybe it’s something that you start doing, you know, during the summer. Maybe it’s something that you bring, it may be that some parents are willing to pay for their kids to have something like this happen until it’s a proven system until it can be presented as a actual curriculum. But this is the thing that’s difficult is that changing the curriculum that’s already been accepted, first of all is difficult, and second of all is not creation, it’s just fixing and that’s never the same.

I really think for something like this to be birthed, there would need to be a bunch of very intelligent minds coming together and saying, “Okay, what is important in first grade? What are we really measuring as a success marker for first grade? What can they do? They can write out the letters, they can read. What is important for them to know? And how could we bring all those topics and move them into integration more? And how do we then bridge that with year two? And then how do we do that? And how did it work?” 

And every year coming together and just bringing it, like it would take some people to decide to take this on and to really build a concept. And there are people who would pay one million percent, especially entrepreneurs, people like me who know like, I would put my kids through that before I’d ever put them through a traditional school system. There just is going to need to be people who are brave and who take a shot and saying, “As long as these children can graduate the same way, if they’re able to do the things, like, can we get there?”

Angela Kelly: Yes. And then some. I think about when you talked about first grade, what do they need? What I think about what are people complaining about that kids don’t have or that they’re lacking? Let’s start there because most of the time, especially in the early years, it’s not as much academics that they’re complaining about. That’s just like on top, that’s just the surface, but really what they’re worried about is self-regulation, social skills, communication skills, being able to express themselves without hitting or biting or tantruming or something. 

Like those skills, those early developmental skills, if we could actually focus and prioritize internal emotional understanding and regulation at an appropriate level, bringing kids up along, their academics will flow, but we are fighting against a system where they’re expected to grow intellectually and academically, but there is no curriculum and understanding of or modeling of emotional regulation, emotional connection, and self-discernment and then building up an identity as a student, as a teacher, as a learner in our system.

So when you speak about the integration, I can see puzzle pieces. You know, I think of like kindergarten, they’re putting together pieces of a puzzle and instead of giving them one piece and saying, “Understand the big picture with this one piece, figure out the rest,” you’re saying, “Let’s work together to build the puzzle so we can see the vision all together.” But then that kindergarten is actually just a subset of a bigger puzzle, of a bigger puzzle, of a bigger puzzle, of a bigger puzzle. 

But when you’re giving kids individual pieces, “Here’s language arts, now here’s math, now here’s science, now here’s social studies,” and none of that connects, it’s like you’re giving pieces to different puzzles and you know, what is this? There’s no comprehension, no understanding, and then we complain that there’s no comprehension and understanding.

I really love that you’re inviting people, there’s two phases I think. If you’re currently in education, there is, you’re working within a system. You need to put up an under construction sign and you need to like work with the system you’re working with, but also be under construction and be having these conversations. 

So I think people within the system can put up the, “We’re under construction, still open for business, but we are remodeling as we go, tearing down, re-examining, revisioning, and going with the new updated,” and there are people who will step out and build from scratch as you were saying in that invitation. And there’s, I think there’s two kinds of educators, the ones who want to do the under construction model and the ones who want to like build from scratch from the floor up. 

My work with leaders has been within the system and I feel inspired to like invite a group to explore what it would look like to just, if we could start from scratch, what would we do taking in the humanity of education and the development, the human development process? I think that’s where we need to go back to, right? We are in, as I always say, we’re in the business of people, we’re in the business of human development.

And what you’re expressing Melanie and so beautifully, I hope that this has been for the listeners an emotional experience, an invitation to explore what you know to be true about teaching and learning, which is, we don’t learn in isolation. We don’t learn effectively in isolation, may I say, but we learn through integration, connection, collaboration, and building the puzzle pieces together so that we can see the vision and expand that vision as we go through school. 

And Melanie does this work. I just want to add this. Melanie does this work at an individual level. She does it at group level. She does it at corporate levels. She does it for institutions. She does this work very comprehensively. This is why I have selected her as my mentor. One thing I love about Melanie is she has helped me connect the pieces that were not available or present in my formal education. 

They are things that even if I had strived to achieve my PhD, so I do have my master’s in education. I had planned to get my PhD. Life took some unexpected turns, but I feel like I have a real PhD in life having worked with you and will continue to work with you in future endeavors. So Melanie, if people want to learn more about the services you offer, the work that you do in the world, where would you direct them?

Melanie: Well, if we’re speaking of people from your community…

Angela Kelly: Yes.

Melanie: I would probably have them reach out directly to me on social media or even like email info@alphafemme.com and to really talk about which skills they’re most lit up by working on right now, and my team would really be able to tell them where and what. What I do find is the most valuable with what I do is the ability to start retraining your mind to think like a leader, an innovator, a visionary, a person who can affect change, because what limits most people is the belief that they can only do with what they’ve got. 

When in fact, we are able to create new resources just by thinking differently. And so being in certain programs that talk about leadership, you know, that talk about emotional regulation, emotional intelligence for women, like just communication, it’s wild what it’ll open. I think you do one program, you realize my, my teaching style and then you go, I would like to know more about that or I would like to know more about that. I think it’s a path. And I think just in touching whatever you touch with me first, you’ll realize there’s something in what I said you wish you could go deeper in. 

And if it was all linear like this and you had to wait forever before you got there, you’d probably give up and then you might realize something else about the school system. I think it’s just coming in and realizing a different way of learning and saying, “Whoa, this,” just watching other people learn in a different way and saying, this, I can see how this is entirely different and seeing how everything’s connected and it kind of creates this snowball. 

So wherever you would feel drawn to start, I think, you know, talk about what you care about and you could come in for money, you could come in for relationships, you could come in for whatever you genuinely feel that you care about and then watch the snowball effect occur as everything I speak about is connected and you just instinctively know what your next move would be. Because I think that’s how we learn the best is we go with what really matters to us and the connection gets made with what the next progression is. 

And just one little thing I wanted to say based on what you shared just before about having the under construction. I loved that vision. And what I really saw, which would be so incredible, because ultimately, I don’t think anything can just be changed overnight. That’s what this conversation really is about. It’s saying, “Can we even think about what is the ideal? Like let’s look at the whole curriculum and let’s create an ideal and let’s reverse engineer the whole thing and go backwards and see what we could do.” 

And even if we don’t do it, what how would it affect things now just to think about it differently? But I think having a mastermind space or a connected space with people who can kind of get behind this under construction model where it’s like every time you test something and it works, you share it with a group and you say, “I just want to let you guys know today or this year, I tested this with, you know, second graders. We did this exercise. We connected this and this together. It was a hit. Try it out. Let me know what happens.” 

And then a bunch of you try it and then you say, “This worked. This is what we found. This is how we refined it. We love this so much, we did something in grade one where we did this and this and that prepared them for grade two. This is genius.” Like just testing little things and giving each other that feedback and trying stuff and like just being connected in a space where people are genuinely trying something out. Even if you only tried one new thing a year, two new things a year and then learned through proxy, like what are other people trying? You don’t have to try it all. 

You can watch other people try. I’m going to test this grade, that grade. You might be so surprised what happens just by being in proximity to other people’s testing. So I would really encourage the under construction phase and I think that being under construction with a collective community of people who are letting each other know what they’re testing would actually have a ginormous impact on the educational system. So I just wanted to point that out.

But the big difference here is not learning in the mind, it’s learning in the being. So I am learning to do this because I need to know how to do this because I am growing up and I’m going to need to know all this information because it matters and I’m already using it and it’s already helpful and I can already see why I’m here and I can already see how this was helpful already. I learned something last week, I used it this week. I’m the one that wants to tell my family at the dinner table what I learned because I’m so excited about it. 

And I think I can help them with what I learned today. I could help with dinner, I could help with laundry, I could help with groceries, I could help with anything. I’m starting to learn how everything works. I feel like I’m a part of this family. I’m excited to have my own home. I’m excited to have my own things. I’m excited because this is all working for me. I feel like all of it makes sense. I’m understanding. I’m getting it. I’m learning it. I’m proud of me. I’m becoming something. I am something. I am something and I’m becoming something. 

That is what over time, over and over again, that being reinforced, this is important. You knowing this matters today. And when you grow up, it’s going to matter even more. This is going to help you with raise your kids. This is going to help you have a beautiful home. This is going to help you stay healthy. This is going to help you, you’re learning it now for now and later, for now and later. You’re becoming this. You’re already becoming this. You’re not learning now for later. You’re becoming this for now and later. 

It’s bridging an identity gap that has people take ownership of their life so young that I think we’re going to have less problems with the way too grown-up stuff that’s being presented to these kids at home, on TV, on the internet because regardless of whether or not the education system changes for this, what kids are being presented now and at the age they’re being presented it is very different than what it was before. The games are different, what they’re seeing on the internet is different, the behaviors, social behaviors, people on the phone, communication, connection, it’s all going down massively.

And so if at school, there’s a structure that’s being built, it’s going to raise their ability to handle all of that stuff. And that’s the vision that I really see is unfortunately, not everyone is being parented at home and taught at school. A lot of these kids are getting all of it at school, all of it. And so the more connected it is, the more chances these kids have of thriving. The more disconnected it is, the more disconnected they are and then it’s harder to get them to care about anything, which is harder on the teachers, harder on everybody. 

It just makes it a job and then it’s harder and harder to remember the passion of why you came into this in the first place, and it’s no good. But if teachers start coming together and creating curriculums that make kids love school, there’s going to be a, there’s going to be a change in how teachers are paid too. I think that as long as this is just a government curriculum, it’s being paid based on a governmental allowance. But I think that if this gets developed as something bigger than that, then it will also be paid differently. 

Like there are people out there that would pay very differently for their children’s education. And when enough people are speaking with their money because this is how the way the world works, when enough people are speaking with the money, that’s when the world changes. And this is why I am so inspired and motivated to help women really become stewards of money so that we can move the money where it’s supposed to be because I do think with enough resources, the education system could absolutely triumph within a few years. 

We could make a such a big change, but we invest differently. Women invest differently. We see things differently, we see what matters differently, we think differently, and up until very recently, most of the power with the money has not been in the hands of women, not to the extent that I am seeing this change occurring now, more and more millionaires popping like popcorn in my world, means investing in things that really matter, means being able to give back to the things that need the resources.

And so I think this is just a collective vision that all of a sudden being a teacher is one of the most well-paid jobs, but these teachers are not just delivering curriculum. They’re genius masterminds that are constantly innovating based on children’s behavior. 

They’re like the greatest behavioral analysis, they’re constantly innovating and creating, they’re connected to each other, they get support, they create a network of innovation, they, and they get paid accordingly and they feel so much more fulfilled and there’s so much more opportunity for wealth and for growth within the education system and like this is how big my vision goes. 

And I’d love to be, you know, to have my energy all over that and to be a part of that happening however I’m invited to do that and will be my honor and my pleasure to do, you know, more of these conversations and, but I mean, I’m a well of ideas and I have so much passion for this. 

But whether it’s the resources, whether it’s the curriculum, whether it’s, you know, just the mentality of the people outside the school system, the parents outside supporting what’s happening on the inside, whether it’s the structure of what allocation is offered for a curriculum change in the world, like what even is the resource available for that and how do we change that amount dramatically? I just, I feel like there’s things to touch all over the place and it’s just our job to do it or else it’s the next generation’s job and the next one and the next one and I mean, why not us? Why not now?

Angela Kelly: Exactly. I feel that. I feel the vision. I feel it in my body. I feel it in my bones. And this is why I invited you to speak because your vision is so grand and it is so full of potential. And this is why for any of you who are listening, I genuinely refer you to Melanie’s work. It’s so multifaceted whether you’re a leader or whether you’re a teacher or a parent or even a student. 

You might be a teenager out there who wants to learn differently than you have been learning. You want to learn in a new more expansive way. I highly recommend exploring Melanie’s work. There’s something for everyone, no matter what facet of life or leadership or professionalism you are seeking to expand or to learn more about, Melanie has it available.

So Melanie, thank you for your time today, your wisdom, your presence, your energy, your love, your passion for learning, for teaching, for expanding the experience of education for not just the leaders and the educators, but for our families and our students as well. It’s just been an honor to have this conversation with you today.

Melanie: Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. This just flew by.

Angela Kelly: It did. It did. Wow. Yes, this is probably my longest interview. So I am delighted and we may be having more based on what we just shared today. I feel like this is just opening the door to many more conversations around all of the possibilities that lie ahead for educators. So there you have it, empowered principals. This is just one of many conversations to be had with Melanie Ann Layer. She is the CEO and founder of Alpha Femme and she leads women to be highly successful, highly impactful, and women of influence. 

And I am just proud to be one of the Alpha Femme members. And I look forward to working with each and every one of you to expand your school, to create impact and leadership influence in whatever capacity you are serving in the field of education. So thank you all. We look forward to more conversations and have a beautiful week. We’ll talk with you next week. Take good care. Bye.

Thanks for listening to this episode of The Empowered Principal® Podcast. If you enjoyed this episode and want to learn more, please visit AngelaKellyCoaching.com where you can sign up for weekly updates and learn more about the tools that will help you become an emotionally fit school leader.

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.