What is balance? This is such an important question. We’ve all said before, “I wish I had more work-life balance.” And typically, what people are thinking about when they say this is the way that they’re spending their time. They want to spend less time working and more time engaging in their lives outside of work.

Often, it feels like we’re spending our entire time working and not enough time doing what makes us feel happy and rejuvenated, and that is imbalanced. We want to think of it as a mathematical equation. But the truth is, balance is something that we feel. And even if you spend equal time working and playing, that feeling of balance isn’t guaranteed.

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I hope you all had a fun break from school over Thanksgiving. But today, we’re talking about something that’s not fun: the emotional tsunami that we are experiencing in schools. Last week was all about building up your emotional resiliency so you can lead others, and today we’re discussing how you can apply this work to help your students and staff through their emotional experience.

I’m seeing some definite trends around how teachers and students are showing up at the moment, what the principals are going through, and how all of this has impacted education as a whole. And now is the time to regroup because this job is not going to get any easier on its own.

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I recently had a phone call with one of my clients, and the conversation we had was so insightful and relevant for this time of year, so I knew I had to bring the topic to the podcast. So, this week, we’re discussing planning data meetings.

Many of you school leaders have decided to meet with your grade levels or individual teachers to have conversations around student data. This is what my client needed help with. I helped her plan her data meetings, and I’m sharing that process with all of you because, when you can predetermine the outcome that you want to create from these meetings, you’ll feel so much more at ease around them.

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Over in the Empowered Principal Facebook group: Emotional Support for School Leaders, I’ve decided to create a monthly challenge that revolves around the theme we’ll be working on for the month. The month of November is going to be the 50:50 challenge, which you’ll hear all about in this episode.

As a leader, there are definitely good times, but you will also face countless challenges. And sometimes, the difficulties you experience will feel like they outweigh the fun parts. But the truth is, it’s meant to be challenging sometimes, and it’s meant to be easy sometimes, and the 50:50 challenge is all about embracing both the positive and the negative parts of leading a school so you can be the most effective leader you can possibly be.

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Our outcomes often feel out of our control, so it’s natural that predetermined outcomes sound like something that’s not available to us. We’re taught all our lives that things happen to us. We’ve been surrounded by people who feel like victims of their circumstances and our brain has found evidence to support this notion. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

I worked with a brand-new client of mine recently, and we did some incredible work on predetermining her outcomes. So, I’m going to share her story on the podcast this week, of course with total anonymity, so you can see where you can start predetermining your outcomes too.

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