Hello, empowered principals. Welcome to episode 425.

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. Welcome to the podcast. Happy February. For those of you who know me, it is my birthday month and I have had the best time just delighting in spending time with some family, spending time with friends. Just I’ve been a little bit all over the place. I have enjoyed it. I was back in Iowa, where is my family of origin’s home. This is where I grew up. And I’m currently recording this in Iowa, but by the time you hear this episode, I will have driven from Iowa back to California.

I am staying with a friend. She’s actually my mentor teacher, and I’m just supporting her during this time of life. And it’s been an honor to be in Iowa with family here. As you know, spending time with my dad before he passed, spending time with my grandma before she unexpectedly passed, supporting my sister through the pressure and stress of being the POA, the power of attorney for both my dad and my grandmother, as she’s the local person here and this is just what she’s excellent at doing in her life. Supporting her through the struggles and the grief and the legality of it all, just kind of being her cheerleader, not really doing it for her, but just being by her side. That has been very important to me and that’s really mattered to me.

And of course, I have an entire life out on the West Coast in California, where I was, you know, been living for the last 30 years, where I raised my son, where I held my career for the 30 years in education before becoming a coach. So I have an entire life out there. And I am going back for a period of time to support my mentor teacher. And I love that I get to spend this time with her during this stage of life and you will hear more of the adventures as they unfold.

So, speaking of pressure, speaking of stress, school leadership can have a little bit of those two things in it. There’s some pressure, there’s some stress. And many people will reach out to me, my one-on-one clients, my EPC members, we come together and we have the most powerful conversations. I have to tell you, this group of EPC members is the most dynamic, the most dedicated, committed leaders.

The conversations we are having, we are really evolving the way that we think and approach school leadership where it’s blowing my mind at the way that these women leaders—not that men aren’t invited, but at this time, we are a group of women leaders—we’re having these really deep, intense conversations around what it means to be a school leader, the expectations we have, the identity we uphold, the pressures that we are facing, the stress that we feel, and wondering how to create mastery in leadership, mastery in life. How do we be this exceptional leader while also being an exceptional human and an exceptional partner, friend, spouse, mother, father, auntie, uncle, friend, all of the things, right? We want to have a full life as a school leader and sometimes it can feel like the pressures of school leadership consume us.

So we started talking about this and we had a very in-depth conversation around it. And that conversation sparked me to contemplate deeper these experiences that we have as school leaders. So there is pressure and how I define pressure in my coaching is that pressures are these external demands. They are the situations that arise. They are the circumstances upon which you are experiencing in your school or in your school community, in your district.

So, there’s the circumstance that you are leading in, living in, working in. Then situations arise in those circumstances and there are external demands that are happening, right? Things you need to get done, people you need to meet with, people you need to discuss, people you need to hire, people you need to fire, meetings you have to go to, meetings you have to facilitate. All of the pressures and demands, you know, getting more kids to school. So we’re looking at attendance, we’re looking at tardiness, we’re looking at test scores, assessment scores. We’re looking at all these numeric data points and we have pressure to improve those data points.

So, there’s external forces that we feel internally as a school leader. We take ownership and responsibility for them and we feel that pressure. We physically feel the pressure in our bodies, right? And then there are these situations. So circumstances are kind of the factors that are at play in whatever neck of the woods you are leading in, and those situations are just the moments that are arising within that set of circumstances, while the demands are the requests and the expectations of us based on our role, our title, our status as a school leader, that position that we’re in, right?

So lots of pressures arise during the year. The pressure of hiring, the pressure of assigning positions, the pressure of preparing the master schedule, the bell schedule, the site plan. The pressure of both facilitating meetings and being a participant. Are you an active participant? Are you a passive participant? Different pressures, right? The pressure of meeting with a parent versus meeting with a teacher versus meeting with a board member versus meeting with the superintendent versus meeting with an attorney. Different pressures.

All of the pressures of implementing the initiatives, rolling them out, getting people to buy in. The curriculums that you have to roll out, the curriculums you have to sample and test, and people will try on the curriculums before we say yes to them. The technology we have to learn, the platforms we have to figure out. There’s a lot of pressure. The pressure of being the building manager, the professional mentor, right? The instructional coach, the instructional leader. So there’s the managing, it’s the little tasks that you need to do to get the ship sailing. And then there is the leadership part, the visionary, the mentor, the person who inspires, who ignites, who influences, who creates impact.

And we have thoughts about all of these pressures. We have opinions about the pressure. Some pressures we’re like, I’m on it. I’ve got this. Other pressures, we have different opinions about. I’m not so sure about that. I don’t really like that. This doesn’t feel good. There are pressures as school leaders that we believe we are equipped to handle and then there are other pressures that we question if we are equipped to handle.

When we believe that we’re capable of handling the pressure, we perform. We just do it. We take action. We do, right? Just do it, as Nike says. We do, we solve, we communicate, we facilitate, we coach, we mentor, we complete, we execute, we handle. We’re basically the Olivia Pope of school leadership. When we believe that we’re capable, when we believe we have the ability, the tools, the skills, the knowledge, the wisdom, the confidence to handle something, we simply handle it. We go in, we do it. Doesn’t mean it’s always comfortable. No. Doesn’t mean we’re like, oh gosh, this again? No. But we do it. We just perform.

However, when we are unsure if we are capable of handling a certain pressure, we tend to stagnate. We question, we overthink, we doubt, we procrastinate, we avoid, we ask other people, we blame, we abdicate, we deflect. We’re not exactly in Olivia Pope energy. We’re kind of more in the energy of nervous Nellie or a whiny Winnie. I don’t know, I’m making this up. But we aren’t in belief. We’re not in courage, confidence. We’re not in trust, faith. We’re not in the energy of doing. We’re not in the energy of completion, just performing, getting it done.

When these pressures build up that we don’t believe we know how to handle, there are pressures that we have every single day in school leadership and we just perform most of those. We don’t really even think much about them. We just do because we trust, we’re capable, and we handle it. That’s our identity. But then there are these pressures that build up within us that we believe we don’t know how to handle or we don’t think that we’re equipped with the skill set or the emotional bandwidth to navigate the pressure that we feel. And when we feel that, that’s what I label as stress.

The emotion of stress, the vibration internally that we have that we call stress. I’m so stressed. I feel stressed. I’m under a lot of stress. That kind of thing. Stress, I believe, is generated from the belief that we cannot handle the pressures of school leadership. Whatever pressures that you feel you’re not capable of handling, whether that’s you don’t have the skill set, you don’t know how to handle it, you don’t know what to do, or if it’s just the emotional bandwidth. Like, I’m tired of dealing with this. I don’t like this person. I don’t like the way they’re coming at me. This keeps happening. I don’t know how to get their energy away from me. I don’t like this. I don’t like all this pressure. We feel stress.

So, we feel stress when we think there’s too much to do and not enough time. And we say things like, it’s just too much. I can’t do this all. I can’t keep up. I can’t get to everything. I’m spinning my wheels. We feel stressed because we don’t know how to solve it. We don’t know how to perform to overcome the stress and the pressure. We can’t handle like being under this pressure and holding space for that pressure without there being stress.

So sometimes it’s about not having enough time. Sometimes we feel stressed when we don’t know what to do or we don’t know what to say, or we don’t know what decision to make because we go into a story around not knowing what to do, not knowing what to say. What will other people think? I don’t know what to decide. I’m not sure of the impact and we kind of spin out. We stagnate. Sometimes we feel stressed when we think we cannot handle the discomfort of a conversation, the discomfort of a decision we need to make, the discomfort of an approach that we know is best to take. You might feel stressed when you think that you’re in control of other people’s feelings. And when I say that, we tend to feel stress when we think we’re in control of other people’s feelings. What I mean by that is we think it’s our job to make people feel a certain way. We think we actually have control over their emotional inputs, right?

I think of it like an equalizer on a stereo and it feels like we’re the DJ and we’re turning up this volume and turning down the treble and turning up the bass and making their heart pump harder and making them angry or turning this down. Oh, we’re gonna make them feel good. We’re gonna, you know, that we’re equalizing their emotions. We are not their emotional DJ, but we think that. So we feel stress when we’re like trying to get everybody to feel a certain way, trying to get the equalizer to balance just perfectly so everybody’s happy. So we feel stress when we think we’re in control, but then we also feel stress when we realize we can’t control their emotions, but we want to, right? So we believe that it’s our responsibility, it’s our job to keep the staff happy. But then we also realize, oh my gosh, no matter what I do, the staff isn’t happy. Stress either way. Now we feel trapped, right?

We feel stress when we think we should be able to influence and control people’s actions and outcomes. I’m the leader. I should have them in line. I should have them on point. They should be in their most empowered selves. I want to be able to influence that and control, you know, and really have an impact on these people and how they’re behaving, what they’re doing in their classrooms, how they’re handling student situations, how they’re communicating with families. We feel stress in trying to get them to see the light or to get them to do it the way we want them to do it. And then we also feel stress when we realize we cannot control what people think, say, do. We can’t control their outcomes, and yet we still feel the responsibility for doing so.

So when there is a disequilibrium between the amount of pressure we believe we can handle and the amount of pressure we believe we cannot handle, when the disequilibrium shifts over to there’s less than I know how to handle than know how to handle, when we feel that disequilibrium and there’s pressure mounting and the stress is rising, we eventually hit a threshold where we are at max capacity and all we want to do is seek relief.

So relief from the pressure, relief from all the stress and the tension, relief from the discomfort of not knowing what to do and feeling incompetent and not feeling like you’re doing enough and overworking and not being able to please the people and not getting the test scores. Like all of that spirals our identity downward and we’re just like, I want relief from this. Relief becomes desired when we do not see how it’s even possible to handle the pressure. So when we can’t handle the pressure and I’ve been told this, like point blank, well, maybe you’re not cut out for school leadership. You can’t seem to handle the pressure. And you know what? That stung so badly, but it was absolutely right.

I was complaining. I was blaming. I was venting, commiserating. I wasn’t handling the pressure. I was at capacity and I was looking for relief in the form of venting, blaming, abdicating, you know, commiserating. It was blowing off the steam, right? It was relief. So the pain of not believing that we’re capable will compound until we’re at that emotional bandwidth and we end up relieving the pressure somehow, some way.

So oftentimes these behaviors are quite subconscious. We don’t even realize we’re doing them. We go on to autopilot. It’s almost like we numb out our awareness, the awareness portion of our brain, and we just go into like subconscious behavior. So we walk through the staff lounge and there’s a day-old box of donuts and we end up eating one or two. Or we like keep grabbing a handful of candy as we’re going through the pass through the office, right? We start to like give ourselves little hits of relief. Or we, you know, hold our breath until we get to happy hour and then we blow out steam, have a glass of wine, talk about it, vent about it.

Sometimes we like, I can’t take this anymore, we take a mental health day and everyone’s like, it’s good to take a mental health day. And I think it is good to take a mental health day if we’re being intentional about why we’re taking the day off and what we’re doing with that day, which is to restore mental health, which is to call our therapist or hire a coach or work with somebody who can give us a new lens, a new perspective through which to look so that we can kind of clean up some of this pain, some of this, you know, tendency to relieve ourselves.

Other things we do, we delegate things. I don’t want to do that. I abdicate responsibility. I don’t want to do it. I don’t like to do it. I don’t think I can do it. I just delegate it or I just leave it. I just don’t do it. But what happens is we end up playing small. We end up eroding our identity. We think less of ourselves and we start looking for that evidence subconsciously of how we’re not good enough to be a leader. We’re not cut out for school leadership. We don’t know how to handle pressure. We don’t know how to handle stress and we’re just looking for relief. We’re like, I give up. I’m not cut out. Or, you know what? It’s this district. I’m gonna go look and I’m gonna go find a new principalship in a different district. It’ll be better over there.

We’re looking for doses of mini relief, immediate gratifications, right? Anything that will temporarily relieve us from the mental and emotional pressures of the stress. And the really hard part about relief that at least I’ve noticed this in myself is that it positively reinforces the behavior because it gives us the relief we’re desiring for a moment. It feels good for the amount of time that we’re indulging in the relief. So the sugar high feels so good for the moment when we’re eating the donut or the candy, the little wine buzz we get when we go have a glass of wine after work with friends or colleagues, the food intake because we’ve had this hard day and it’s we’re too tired to work so we’re just gonna pick up takeout, binge on it when we get home along with binging with Netflix. We’re going to binge. It feels good to catch up on Bridgerton or to, you know, binge one of your shows over the weekend, to win that next level on your video game of the of the week. Candy Crushing it, right, on your phone. It’s like the booby prize. It feels so good. In the world of Candy Crush, when you’re killing it and you get past that hard level and you win, it’s relief. You’re not thinking about work and the ways that you’re incompetent or the skill sets you don’t have. You’re thinking about the skill sets you have in Candy Crush.

It provides us the relief that our mind, body, heart, soul are craving. It’s like just give me a break from this. And the relief works, which is why it’s so hard to stop doing it. If it didn’t work, we would our brains would like, well, that didn’t work. Let’s try something else. But it does work until it doesn’t because the stress and the pressure after the relief is over, it’s temporary. But the stress and the pressure, they’re still there waiting for us. They haven’t gone anywhere. The stress relievers were just buffers. It was a temporary distraction. But the stress producing thoughts, the stress producing identity is still there. It has not disappeared. Your circumstances haven’t changed. The situation you’re facing at work, it’s still there. It hasn’t gone anywhere. What do we do?

So what do we do with stress? And I believe this is the hardest part of school leadership, the hardest part of any kind of leadership is how do we expand our capacity to hold the pressure without creating as much stress, without creating stress to the level we can’t handle it. So we either cave into the types of those reliefs that are out there and available to us or we learn how to hold out for satisfaction. And satisfaction is the feeling that we get when we can hold the pressure all the way through to the end.

It’s the feeling we get when we figure out how to do the thing we don’t know how to do. It’s when we hold that conversation that we were afraid to have. It’s when we make the decision that we don’t want to make. It’s when we say no to the candidate that’s not an ideal match, even though no other candidates applied, but they’re not a fit. And we say no because we trust that the right person is coming.

Satisfaction is the way that we feel when we ask the question that we fear people will judge us for asking. But we raise our hand and we say, hey, I have a question. We ask it. Satisfaction. It’s when we facilitate the meeting we didn’t think we knew how to facilitate or we didn’t think we could handle facilitating, but we got up there and did it. Even if we did it shaky, we did it. That’s satisfaction. It’s doing the thing we think we can’t do. That is satisfaction. It’s allowing the uncomfortable emotions to vibrate in our body without numbing it out.

So satisfaction doesn’t come when something’s easy. You don’t feel satisfied with yourself when you drive to the dentist because you know how to drive. It’s easy. You don’t consider it to be a problem. You just drive there. You don’t sit in the parking lot and just, wow, I’m so satisfied that I was able to drive from my house to the dentist today. You can be grateful that you know how to drive, that you have a car, that you didn’t have to take the city bus. You can be grateful. But is satisfied the way you feel? You might feel satisfied when you leave the dentist and your teeth are all shiny clean and they polished them and they flossed them and they cleaned them and they did the X-rays and like, ooh, my mouth is in good shape. You might feel satisfied when you get a no cavity report.

It’s when we do the things that pay off, that we achieve the outcome. We have the clean teeth. It took us six months to know, were we gonna have a clean teeth report or not when we went to the dentist? We brushed, we flossed, you know, we used the water pick, whatever tools you used, but you used them, but you did them consistently. You did them because you care about your health. You are satisfied with the health of your mouth.

So then, as we were talking about this in EPC, the question that I get asked by many clients or even people on the internet who are following me, they’ll say, well, okay, so in order to be satisfied, we have to be perfect. Should we never treat ourselves? Should we never eat a donut? Should we never grab some candy? Should we never go out for a glass of wine? Should we just grin and bear it? We have to bite on a stick and scream as a school leader in your office? Grab a pencil and just gnaw on it. What are we supposed to do here?

The answer is no. You don’t need to be perfect. Of course, you can treat yourself, but do it with intention. Treat yourself with intention because you’re satisfied, not because you need relief. So sometimes you treat yourself because it feels good. It feels satisfying. Like you intentionally eat the fresh donut, not the two-day-old donut that’s after everybody else has picked through them and tore them in half and you get a third of this donut and a half of that donut that’s all dry and crumbly. You go and have one fresh, your favorite flavored donut with all the satisfaction in the world.

And sometimes you exercise your capacity to hold the pressure. So sometimes you walk through the staff lounge and there’s a donut and you don’t pick it up and eat it. And you feel satisfied that you said no to yourself, that you were able to hold the pressure of smelling the warm donuts, of wanting the donuts, and then exercising your empowerment to say, no, thank you, not today. Sometimes you have to bear it. You have to hold the pressure, to bear the emotions that come with the school leadership experience, to allow them to be present and to validate them. I feel this way. Name it, claim it, own it, feel it, allow it. And even though I’m feeling this way, what needs to get done? Or is there a better feeling thought that’s accessible to me? To acknowledge that your emotions aren’t present just because you’re a school leader. They would not vanish if you stopped being a school leader.

Your emotions are present because you’re a human. So people who think, oh, I don’t have the bandwidth, emotional bandwidth to be a school leader can go and do something else, but those same emotions, you’re still going to experience pain, anger, frustration, disappointment, annoyance, failure, sadness. You’re going to feel all the negative feels, no matter what you’re doing on the planet, not because you’re a school leader, but because you’re a human. So we want to understand what the emotion is and where it’s coming from. What are the thoughts triggering those emotions? It’s important to know that you were born to handle the emotions that come with the human experience and to acknowledge that sometimes the human experience is quite painful. It’s very awful.

And even in the worst of times, even in the hardest of days, and there’s a lot of stuff going on in the world right now, guys and gents and ladies and all of us. There’s a lot of stuff going on. It’s painful. It’s disgusting. It’s awful. It’s heartbreaking. It’s gut-wrenching, and we were born to handle it. Not to condone it, not allow it. That’s different. But we can handle the pain.

And when you feel yourself spiraling down to a place where you don’t, you feel so much despair, you don’t think you can handle it or you’re feeling so defeated, you don’t think you can take it one more minute, then you come up for air. It’s different to just numb out and not do anything than to like, I’m going to change course here for a while. I’m gonna get off social media. I’m gonna not watch the news. And I’m going to go volunteer somewhere, or I’m gonna go and love on my kids and my teachers today. I’m gonna do something that feels really good because that’s empowering. And doomscrolling or watching the news to ad nauseam and getting depressed and not being able to function does not serve me, my family, my school community.

I promise you that you’ve been through very painful emotions in your past and you will experience future painful emotions, and you maybe you’re going through them as you’re listening to this. But you have the capacity to handle them. You’ve been through fear before, doubt, frustration, annoyance, disappointment, sadness, anger, grief, embarrassment. That’s a big one. Feeling guilt, feeling shame, some really socially isolating feelings that can almost curl you up into a ball and never want to go anywhere again or feeling like the world is coming to an end. We felt these feelings before and each and every emotion you have has a purpose, but you can handle the pressure of them.

And it sometimes requires you to get external help because it’s hard. We have blind spots. It’s hard to see what’s going on inside of us. It’s like you can’t see behind you because you don’t have vision back there. That’s why when you drive a car, you have all these mirrors, and even then, there are blind spots. That’s what therapists can do, a friend that you trust, a coach, a mentor, someone that you can feel safe enough with to discuss how you’re actually feeling, what you’re actually thinking, where your identity is caving under all of the pressure.

You’ve already experienced these emotions and it’s because you’ve experienced them and handled them that your brain is like, please, those were so painful last time. Let’s not do this again. I don’t like the feeling. I don’t like the feeling of guilt or shame or embarrassment or disappointment. I would prefer not to ever do that again. So I don’t want to do that. I don’t like what I make it mean about you, about me, about us. I don’t like that it pushes my capacity to have to stand up and be strong. I don’t like that it questions my identity. So let’s do something else that provides a little more relief because the satisfaction of overcoming this feels just too big, too insurmountable. I don’t want to have to work. I don’t want to have to wait to feel good. It makes me have to feel my feelings. And I don’t like that.

But satisfaction is that delayed gratification. It’s the feeling you get when you put in the time. You allow time and space. You wait for the delayed ending. You go to the finish line. It’s when you hydrate your body and in a couple of weeks, the energy you feel is amazing. Or you eat nourishing foods and in a week or two, you’re just feeling incredible and you’re not getting that afternoon lag anymore where you need a Starbucks or you need a Diet Coke.

Satisfaction is like knowing that the outcome you desired from a conversation and taking the time to craft the words and the intentions that feels empowering for you and for them and then hitting it out of the ballpark. Satisfaction is going home with energy to spare for your family or your friends because you were able to prioritize the tasks at hand so that you don’t have to overwork in the evening. Satisfaction is knowing that when it’s been a hard day, that you lead from your heart and you are in full alignment and integrity and that even after this hard day, maybe it was heartbreaking, maybe it was frustrating, maybe it really triggered you, but you made the decisions that you needed to make for yourself, your staff, your students.

This isn’t about living a life that we just endure. The empowered principal and empowerment as a school leader is about living a life that you love, a career that you love, a life you enjoy, a career you enjoy, a life that you were born to live, a life where you are alive for all of it. But what about being perfect, says the people. What about treating ourselves? Isn’t that what life’s about? And there’s a difference between treating yourself for relief and treating yourself for satisfaction as I mentioned before.

So if you’ve had a bad day, and all leaders do, even the empowered ones, and that is you, by the way, you are empowered. It’s always within you. If you’ve had a bad day and you’re feeling like you want the relief, you can treat yourself with intentional kindness. Treat yourself and give yourself the kind of relief that will feel good in the long run.

If you’ve had a rough day, go to bed early. If you’re tired, go to bed. Don’t watch Netflix and then you’re up too late and now you’re even more tired. Take a walk, movement, momentum, a bubble bath, maybe order in versus cooking for the family, giving yourself that treat. You feel satisfied to let the kids have pizza. Asking your spouse to do the bedtime routine so that you can clean up and relax and get to bed early. Maybe come home and just read a book that you enjoy, just for the pleasure of it, for the satisfaction of it. Call a friend who’s not in education and talk about everything but. Talk about something else.

And trust me on this one. I share these insights with you because I am zero different than you. I am no different. I feel the same things. I experience the same inadequacies. My identity has earthquakes. You know, I call them identity quakes all the time. But changing your circumstance does not necessarily mean that you’re going to eliminate adverse – I still must invite myself to consciousness on a daily basis and choose with intention, satisfaction over relief.

So changing your circumstances does not mean that you eliminate adverse situations that arise or the feelings that accompany those situations. It’s human to feel pressure. It’s human to have stressful thoughts and feel stress in your body. It’s human to crave that immediate relief. The human part of you wants to give in. The human wants to be impatient with satisfaction, but the empowered level of you, when you’re in that moment of empowerment, what’s bigger than that initial urge for relief is the desire for satisfaction.

Try it on. Look at where you feel pressure, where do you feel stress, where do you desire to give into the urge to relieve yourself and where do you desire to experience true, deep satisfaction? Play with this, have fun with it, see where it takes you. Have a beautiful week. I love you all. Take good care. Talk to you next week. Bye.

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

Hello, empowered principals. Welcome to episode 423.

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, welcome to the podcast, and welcome to the month of February. My goodness, we’re already in the second month of 2026. By the time you’re hearing this podcast, we have already completed the Mid-Year Reboot. We have signed up our new EPC members and we are heading into the spring season of the school year.

So this is the beginning of February. You are at the end of your winter three-month plan. You are preparing your spring three-month plan and you are heading into all things HR. You’re heading into who you’re going to keep, who you’re going to let go. It’s all of the HR, the staffing, observations have to be completed and turned in, the conversations have to be had, the discomfort starts to churn in the staff wondering who stays, who goes, who’s moving, who’s going on leave, what positions are open, do I keep my spot, all of this just energy and uncertainty around staffing. So if that feels highly uncomfortable for you, you can one, join EPC, two, sign up for one-on-one coaching, or three, you can take the spring training series that I will be offering towards the end of February, early March, and this will gear you up for all things HR. Okay?

Today, I want to talk about something everyone hates to talk about. We’re just gonna put it on the table, we are going to pull off the band-aid, and we are going to expose it for the truth that it is. It is the feeling of shame. It’s probably one of the worst feelings in the world, because it has tendrils of other negative emotions attached to it. Embarrassment, remorse, guilt, insufficiency, incompetency, disempowerment. It’s all of those things wrapped into one terrible package. And it is universal in that every human experiences the multi-emotional experience of shame, and yet we act as though when we’re in it, nobody understands it, or when we’re in it, nobody will allow us to be in it, or when we are in it, that we’ll never get out of it. It feels so all-encompassing.

So I just want to talk about it, because we all feel it, we all experience it. And once I share with you my take on it, and the perspective that I was granted by my coach, then I feel like you will be able to leverage shame as a call to action versus a call to hide, stop, play small, okay? So for the purposes of school leadership, there are many layers to shame. We’re talking about it today in terms of the purpose of school leadership and the emotions that come up with school leadership.

So for example, you might feel shame for doing something that was not in alignment with who you want to be. For example, perhaps you reacted emotionally versus intentionally responding. You got upset and you reacted and you fired off an email or somebody said something to you and you reacted with a snide comment, a little bit snarky, a little less than your standard of how you want to show up in the world as a school leader. Okay, we all do it because we’re human.

Somebody hits that nerve, we’re tired, or we’re in thought about something else, we’re grinding on a problem we’re trying to solve, and somebody says something, and boom, we get triggered and we react. and then we feel some shame around our words, our actions, our behaviors, our comments, our facial expressions, right? It doesn’t even have to be verbal in what we do. We can simply roll our eyes or make a face that can put somebody into a tailspin, and then we feel shame around the way we behaved or the thing we said or something we did. So there’s that kind of thing. kind of shame when we have acted out of alignment with something other than who we would like to be. And then there is the shame that comes from the feeling when we are not doing something that is in alignment with who we want to be. And I think of that as procrastination.

So we’re procrastinating with some kind of distraction. We know we have to get something done, but we are distracting ourselves. We are buffering. We are doing anything, but thinking about the thing we should be doing. And then we have a moment where we’re like, why am I doom scrolling? Why have I been watching cat videos for the last 45 minutes? Why am I watching, you know, YouTubes or Netflix or, you know, TikTok when I’ve got stuff to do? Why am I zoning out here? Then there’s an awareness that we are distracting ourselves, and now we’re thinking about it.

We’re still not doing, we’re just thinking about the procrastination, and that’s where the shame comes in. I shouldn’t be doing this, I should be doing that. I don’t know why I do this, I just need a break. And we go into this shame spiral, we call it, and then we further procrastinate as we’re thinking about our procrastination and how we shouldn’t be procrastinating. Meanwhile, we are further procrastinating. So what happens when we are feeling shame for doing something that isn’t in alignment or for not doing something that is in alignment? Well, let’s talk about it. I’ll just give you the answers right here, right now.

If you’re feeling shame or guilt, it’s often associated very closely. If you’re feeling shame for doing something that wasn’t in alignment with who you are or who you want to be, the response to that is to own it. Is to process how you feel, acknowledge what happened, own it, and then repair, apologize. Acknowledge publicly or to the person or to the situation at hand. the behavior, genuinely apologize, repair what you can, and then moving forward, adjust your behavior. That is how you diminish shame, is you take ownership, you acknowledge it with yourself and feel those feelings because it hurts, and then you go and you repair and apologize and acknowledge with the other person and share with them how you want to respond moving forward. And then you create intentionality and awareness to the best of your ability for future interactions. And when you do that, you can be proud of yourself, not for the reaction that you had, but for your willingness to repair and respond and move forward with more awareness and more intention.

Now, when it comes to feeling shame for not doing something that is in alignment, so if you are not getting things done or you know that you need to get your observations done, this just popped in my mind, I need to get the observations done, I know that I do, but I continue to resist them, delay them, procrastinate them, push them away, find anything else to do on the campus other than observation write-ups, then we feel shame about being behind, or we are upset at ourselves for having to work late, or nights, or weekends, or when we want to be doing something else. Or, even worse, we continue to put it off. Like, well, I can’t do it now because I’ve got to pick up my kids. Well, I can’t do it now because I’ve got to take them to soccer. Well, I can’t do it now because I’ve got to make dinner. Well, I can’t do it now because kids need a bath. And I can’t do it now, I’m too tired. and then there’s another day. Right? So what’s the solution?

It is owning it, acknowledging it, and putting it on your calendar. There’s something about putting the task that you’ve been avoiding and putting it square blank on your calendar so your eyes can see it, your body is typing it kinesthetically, your eyes can see it. It has space, which means you have assigned it a date, time, and duration on your calendar which prioritizes the task, and then you go and you do the thing. No excuses, doesn’t matter what your mood is, you do the thing. And your subconscious is going to be desperately searching for other ways to procrastinate you that feel very important, very reasonable, and you have to have the awareness to be on to yourself unless there’s blood or fire or unless there’s a 911, I’m doing the task.

Even if you do one tiny bit of the task, what you’re doing is when you do something you’re creating movement and once you’ve stepped over the threshold of starting, now you have momentum. Little baby steps creates movement, which creates momentum. That is the cure for shame, for not doing something, is just to do it. And what we wanna do is we wanna sit and we wanna think about why we’re not doing it. Why am I not doing this? What is holding me back? What are my blocks? I should think about this.

And the reason I know this so intimately is I am the queen of contemplating my delays, contemplating why I’m not doing something, why I’m not getting it done. Oh, what are the fears behind this? What am I worried about? Sometimes that is the distraction. And I have noticed that in myself. Sometimes I’m feeling shame because I feel sorry for myself. Sometimes I’m feeling shame because I’m telling myself I need more time to rest, more time to recover, more time to figure out my shame. When the actual antidote to shame is action, a call to action.

So here’s what my coach said to me. She said, what if shame was the code word, the call that tapped you on the shoulder that said, hey, GPS correction, recalculating, redirect back to action, right? Instead of it being some internal flaw of my human being character or my personality or my ability to focus, it’s simply my GPS system saying, tap, tap, tap. This feeling feels so bad because it’s trying to get your attention because the simplest response and call to action is to do something in the direction that you were meant to go. To repair something where you feel that it wasn’t in alignment with who you are or to start something that will keep you on the direction of where you’re headed.

So I now view shame as simply the signal that guides me towards alignment. It’s a course correction from that internal compass that you have, your internal GPS system. So I’ve been thinking about the different ways that shame shows up in school leadership. I’m gonna cover a few of them. I know there’s more, but these are the ones that came to me immediately. Number one, shame can feel like a form of defeat.

So let’s say you’re feeling very defeated and then you feel shame about that. When you’re spinning in shame about a defeat, what shame doesn’t want you to do is stand up, dust your pants off, and show up again. It doesn’t want you to go back into harm’s way and to fail yet again and yet again. It wants you to hide your face after a fail. It wants you to play small. Don’t do this again. You might get hurt again. You might get disappointed again. You might actually fail again. But if you follow that GPS guidance, which is an error, system error, that’s gonna take you down the path of don’t ever try again, don’t do anything out of your comfort zone, and don’t ever move forward. We’re just gonna stop the car. Do not move forward. Do not go one inch forward. Do not try and find your destination. We’re just gonna sit here in the middle of the road, engine off, not even trying, done. That’s certainly not gonna get you to the destination, now is it?

Versus the solution is, I’m going to keep driving. I will never stop making progress towards my vision, towards the destination, if I don’t give up, if I don’t turn the car off. When your car GPS – you could make 20 missed turns. You could be so lost in the city and loop around and get lost and get on the wrong exit. You could be lost for hours. Your GPS system never gives up on you. It never criticizes you. It never laughs at you. It never judges you. It just keeps redirecting you. Knowing the destination, knowing where you want to go, it’s like it understands how complicated it can be to navigate a new place that you’ve never been before. So it just stays with you, strong and steady. Your internal compass does the same.

The simplest way, when you’ve been defeated or you’ve taken a hit or you’re greatly disappointed or something didn’t go your way, is to dust your pants off, feel the feels, get up again. and turn the car back on and let’s keep going, okay? Other kinds of shame, shame that shows up as insufficiency. I’m not good enough. Why even try? This is never gonna happen, so why bother? It’s me. Everybody else can do it but me, poor little me. I’m not sufficient. I’m not good enough. This type of shame will spin you out for a lifetime if you decide that you were not given the tools and the resources to lead your school, or that you were not given the tools and resources to figure things out.

It’s so interesting because I have friends with little tiny babies, and they can’t do anything. And not once do they give up living, do they give up trying to grow themselves, to learn new skills. Never once do they stop believing that they’re not going to be fed or loved or held or changed, never. They don’t feel insufficient, not at all. They were born completely sufficient. So really look at what insufficiency does to your mind, your heart, your soul, your body. It has physical repercussions. When you allow insufficiency to take you down this shame spiral, you will not be able to lead yourself, your life, to lead others, to lead your school.

So try this sentence on, see how it fits. Insufficiency is a myth. There is no not good enough in a human, not any human on the planet. You were born sufficient. That would mean if you were born insufficient without the tools to survive and thrive, if you were not provided with those, then it would mean there was a universal mistake. And I don’t know that that’s possible. So if we were to try on in our human brain, look, I know you wanna offer me insufficiency, but insufficiency is a myth. There is no not good enough. I’m good enough. I was born sufficient. And look, the human body, it is born in all kinds of ways, all kinds of ways. And every way that any human could ever be born is sufficient. The brain is also born and wired with different levels of functionality. And every kind of brain is sufficient.

People without legs still have the capacity to find transport for themselves with the appropriate tools. Which by the way, some human brain invented and created to make it easier for people born without legs to be mobile and transport themselves. People who are born with cognitive or intellectual differences are still 100% sufficient and whole and loving and lovable. They are 100% sufficient at being able to be a human on this planet. It doesn’t matter what the body is born with or without or the cognitive abilities. Sufficiency doesn’t apply. You’re sufficient 100% from the day you were born until your soul passes on to the next chapter and your human form is put to rest.

I really invite you to consider dropping the belief that insufficiency is a part of your identity. It can feel difficult to do because we’ve allowed ourselves to believe that some part of us is insufficient and incapable. Not true. And on that note, when shame shows up as incapable, now I think of incapable and insufficient as separate. Insufficient is something is inherently wrong with you that you cannot fix, that you were born or wired insufficient of tools, resources, capacity. Incapable is simply a gap in learning.

It’s like, I don’t know how to ride a bike, but I want to learn how to ride a bike. So the solution to closing that gap from not knowing how to ride a bike to knowing how to ride a bike is to learn how to ride the bike, is to sit on the bike, hold the handles, start with training wheels, have a human behind you pushing, having someone show you how the pedals work, sitting on a bike and pushing down on the pedals and feeling with your body how it feels. Sitting on a, what is it called? A recumbent bike, incumbent bike, something like that where it doesn’t move, but you’re just sitting there on the bike and you get the feel for the pedals. Having a trike instead of a bike, starting with a big wheel, understanding how pedals work, understanding the motion.

Then you get onto the bike with training wheels. and then you learn balance and you’re toddling around and eventually your core inside of your body understands balance and it’s able to start doing it on its own because it doesn’t want to fall because it’s fallen. You take the training wheels off, you fall. But you’re capable of learning. There’s just a gap between where you’re at and where you want to be and the skill you don’t have versus the skill you want to have. So we can expand and evolve our capacity at any time. We can expand our skill set. We can expand our perspectives. We can expand our physical skills and strength. We can evolve our thoughts and beliefs and ideas and intellectual processing and our mental state. We can evolve our emotional bandwidth and regulation. Shame in the form of incapacity is simply an invitation to expand your capacity, just as every other person on the planet is invited to do. No shame required.

Thinking about the incapacity is where the shame comes in. I want to do that and I don’t know how. I should know how. It’s too hard to learn how. I don’t think I can do it. What you’re saying is I don’t have the patience, I don’t have the will, but it isn’t the skill. The shame you feel is in not having the will or not having the patience, not having the will to try, the willingness, the openness to feel clumsy and awkward and to fall down and scrape your knee and to maybe feel a little embarrassed and to try again until you figure it out. This is why I love being a teacher. I love being an educator. I love working with kids. They have such an enormous capacity to fail in public, to get up and try again, to explore with curiosity without so much internal dialogue and external worry. They just go and explore the world, they jump on the bike 200 times because their will to learn, their will to build that capacity is so much stronger than their fear of embarrassment or their fear of scraping their knee. They just go. So if you’re feeling incapacitated, it’s the thoughts around it that create shame.

But here’s what happens. Shame steps in when you’re thinking about the incapacity, but pride, Being proud of yourself steps in when you stop thinking about expanding your capacity and you start practicing and exercising expanding your capacity. Taking action, doing, eliminates the shame. Now shame in the form of disempowerment is where we have abdicated our personal power to somebody else. We have delegated our personal power and given our power to somebody else.

This is why we believe people have control over us, that people trigger us, that people make us feel a certain way, that people make us do certain things. This is the most loving thing I can tell you and I tell myself this whenever I feel triggered, whenever I’m angry, whenever I’m disappointed with somebody. Whenever my feelings are attached to somebody else or to even a situation, that situation is not triggering you. You are triggering you, Angela. People don’t trigger us. And I know that it feels like it because I have been tested on this over and over again.

People in my life, family members, friends, colleagues, just the world, circumstances. I have been tested on this over and over again. It’s like, oh, you think you have the ability to stay in your empowerment? Try this exercise. Ooh, ouch. I had to really take a minute for that one. But again, do I want to abdicate my power, my personal power over to somebody else and let them write the script, write the narrative of my life, create the memory for me of that moment? Do I want them to have the trigger button, have the red push explode button on me? No, I want to have the button. I want to have power over the button. I want to have the say over the narrative of my life. I want to write out the script of my memories and what I make situations mean for me.

We simply forget in moments of disempowerment that we have the power to think and feel and do what we want. Even if you were imprisoned physically, you would have the ability to have power over what you’re thinking, your belief system, what you’re making it mean, how you’re feeling, how you want to react or respond, what you wanna say, what you wanna do. We have the power to interpret any situation in any way that we want to. to. You have the power to generate the perspective and the understanding for yourself of any situation in a way that serves you and serves the greater good.

So when something bad happens to you, you’re going to have the human experience and also you have the power to say, hmm, what’s the learning here? What’s the perspective I want? What’s the next step I want to take? It’s the most empowered thing I can do to enhance my capacity to handle anything that comes my way. We have the ability to decipher meaning into anyone who triggers us or any situation that sets us back and develop the narrative that either serves us or disempowers us.

You’ve heard this before, but I say it again. You are the captain of your ship, the master of your soul. You are the one thing on the planet that you’re in charge of completely. So in moments of shame, and we all have them because they are a call to action, when you’re feeling shame, ask yourself, where do I have power? You will have the power to look at the situation through various angles and lenses. You will have the power to contemplate the meaning and the interpretation that your brain is offering you, and you get to select the narrative that feels the best. You will have the power to process your emotions. You will have the power to set the intention of how you’re going to respond with your words and actions and behavior towards others.

Shame is simply a call to action. So when you’re feeling shame, let it be the signal, oh, I’m just a little bit out of alignment. There’s a call to action, means do something. Either repair something if you’re feeling shame for being off course in your intentions and who you want to be, or do something towards the progress that you want to make. Thinking about doing it is not doing it. FYI. Because I am the queen of thinking about all of the things. but I have really stepped into just do it mentality. Thank you, Nike. We appreciate the slogan. It is serving our world well.

Empowered principles if you want to leverage shame, use it as a call to action and just do it. One final thought. Back when you wanted to be an educator, when you first wanted to be a teacher you first wanted to be a school leader, why did you want to do that? And imagine if nothing were in your way and you were just teaching and leading from pure service, what would you be doing? And go do that. Have an empowered week. I love you all. Take good care, and I’ll talk to you next week.

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 421.

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.

When we think about what are the luxuries we would like to experience in school leadership, we’re not just talking about having all of the things at our fingertips. We’re talking about the energetic experience that we have as a human, like what it feels like to walk on our campus and be proud of who we are, what we stand for, the people we work with, the work that goes into those classrooms, and the commitment of our teachers, and the commitment of our students, and the fun and the celebrations, and the learning that’s happening, and the engagement of our staff and our students and our communities. When families walk in proud that they send their children to this school, that’s luxury. It’s a win, win, win, win, win. It projects out into the ethers.

And then the experience of today, if you are having a luxury experience, the way that you show up, the way that you treat people, the way that you speak to them, the way you engage impacts their experience. And now they’re having a more luxurious experience of their principal. And how you act today is the memory that they create. And then they have future, like a positive expectation, anticipation of additional future positive interactions. Right?

When you have an interaction with somebody for the very first time, you don’t know what to expect.You’re like, I don’t know. But then let’s say this person is very loving and kind, and they’re interested in you, and they’re engaging, and they’re listening to you, and they’re genuinely interested in your passions and your school leadership conversations and what you have to say and what you think. And they just embrace all of you, and you just feel so held and seen and loved and enjoyed in that moment. It feels like they really cared. Your anticipation of the next interaction with them is going to be very positive.

And you’re thinking about them in a more luxurious way, even though you’re not with them in this moment, in the here and now today. You’re anticipating that the next interaction with them is going to be lovely. Right? And the memory of that first experience, you’ll always remember that first experience. That becomes the story, the narrative that gets written. And we get to be that person for everybody we interact with. That’s luxury.

So there is a desire that we have for luxury. And this is where it can get a little, it can feel a little conflicting. And just hold that pressure for right now. Stick with me here for a minute, okay? Because I know it’s uncomfortable. I feel it in my chest when I talk about it, too, because of what we’ve been taught luxury means or doesn’t mean, and who it’s for and who it’s not for, and if you should want it and if you shouldn’t want it, and who gets to have it and who doesn’t. But just hold a little bit of pressure with me right now. Okay?

Humans were wired to desire luxury. We were born with it. As little tiny babies, we were born into the world expecting luxury, expecting to be held, expecting to be loved, looking for mom and dad to care for us. There was no other way. We expected to be fed, to be held, to be changed, to be bathed, to be caressed, to be swaddled, to be rocked, to be put to bed, to be picked up. We’ve always desired the luxury of living, the luxuries of life, the essential luxuries.

And there are different forms of luxury in different time frames of our life. So, as a child, right, when you think back to your childhood, you experienced the desire for, you know, a friend, to go to the park, to go outside, to have a cookie, to get a treat, to you walk through the department store, Target, and you want a toy. You want to take a trip. You want to go to the water park. You want your mom to take you to the pool, or you want to run go to your friend’s house and have a play date. Right? Very simple luxuries. Just what I would call essential luxuries. The luxuries every kid wants, every human wants. They desire to be engaged, to love, to play.

And then we grow into like our preteen and teen years, and now we have the awareness of our peers and a little more awareness of the world. So we’re desiring, you know, peer relationships. They become very important. We desire, you know, being accepted by our peers. We desire certain friendships. And then we get into puberty and we desire romantic relationships. We start having an interest and a curiosity about more romantic relationships. We start to have a desire within us for a different kind of love and connection, however that love looks, whoever you’re attracted to. But that is wired within us. We’re supposed to have desire for luxury, the luxury of love, the luxury of being loved, the luxury of loving someone else.

I remember like desiring so badly my driver’s license, right? We got our permit, and you could drive with your parents or whatever the rules were back then. In the 70s, they probably let you drive your own car. But we got a permit, which probably allowed us to drive with an adult. And then for me, back in the 80s, at the age of 16, in my state, we were allowed to get our driver’s license. I desired that so badly. Now think about this.

As a 15 year old, 15 and 11 months, right? I thought about my license day and night. I dreamt about it, I thought about it. As soon as I was eligible to schedule a DMV appointment to get that license, it was on the books for the day of my birthday because I did not want to wait one more day. I desired that experience. So the current me that was 15 was anticipating that luxury. I was desiring it. I didn’t have it yet, but I was already living it through my mind. I was feeling the feelings of what it was, I was anticipating what it was going to feel like to be able to drive on my own.

And then once I got the license, so, you know, my past self, I always knew I would get a license one day. But the anticipation of the license, the desire for it was half of the fun. Just like when you go on vacation, you desire, you anticipate that vacation, you desire it. You feel the feelings of the trip in advance. And sometimes those feelings are actually better than the real experience. We’re going to talk more about that in a minute.

But you desire it, and then when you get it, when you get something you really desire, it feels like a bazillion dollars. It’s just like feels like the best day in the world, the best experience in the world. We want those experiences as adults in our career, but we’re not thinking about our career in that way. Therefore, we’re not really creating those experiences or generating them.

So then once I got the license, then I wanted the car. Then I had a desire for a car. So I worked. I upped my hours. I was working at the local grocery store. I worked around 20 to 30 hours a week, and I was a full-time student, and I was babysitting, and I was in a program called Upward Bound, which was a college prep program, and I was in marching band. So I was doing all of the things in order to get that car. I had a deep desire for the car.

And then from there, and because of that, right, it’s like, and because of this, I got my license. And because of that desire, I wanted the car and I got the car. And then because of that, I asked for a later curfew. The teen years were much more peer related luxuries. Right? I wanted the friends, I wanted the relationships, I wanted to be able to go on dates. I needed to get my license. My parents had a rule, like you had to be 16 before you went out on a solo date by yourself with a boy. And then we got the car, like all of that peer stuff. There were luxuries that I desired to have.

Now, there were luxuries that I desired in my teen years that I didn’t get. But there are luxuries that I did get. And then we go into adulthood, right? And then there are different luxuries. We start looking at like money, income, title, positions that we get, status, kind of personal agency, personal freedom, independence. And then we get into our careers and we start thinking about the luxury of making an impact, the luxury of influence and impact and accomplishment and success. And we have that form of luxury, but we also, once we do that for a while, then we’re looking for the luxury of simplicity and calm, quiet, peaceful time. We want the luxury of time.

You know, we were working to have these luxuries, and then we want the other luxuries: time and space, flexibility in our schedule, maybe location independence. So we’ve different luxuries that we desire depending on our identity at the time, depending on our development, depending on the type of impact we want to create, whether that’s individual impact, peer impact, social impact, you know, global impact, and based on the experiences we want to have.

So desire in and of itself is pure. It’s clean. There’s no good, bad, right, wrong that comes with it. And yet, we have feelings about desire that can feel bad. So we have feelings about the desire for luxury, feelings about the desire to have what we want. And is it wrong to experience the desire for luxury?

So when we’re young, we’re kind of unaware. We just have this desire and we just believe like I want this because it feels good. It’s going to make me happy. It’s going to be fun. It’s just kind of like how it’s going to feel. I desire it because it will feel good. It will bring me joy, it will bring me laughter, fun, connection, and experience, engaging life, just interesting.

And then when we’re teens, we become more socially aware, we start to see this luxury as like the haves or have nots. And depending on what we were taught, right? In some families, we were taught that luxury was a bad thing, that people with luxury equals people with money equals not good people. They lose touch. They’re not in touch with reality, or they’re not kind anymore. They’re entitled now, or they don’t know what it’s like to be a real person. They just kind of lose their humanity. Or luxury’s kind of a sin because it’s immoral. We should be giving it to somebody else to have. Questions of like worthiness. Are we worthy of having this? Do I deserve this? Should I be gifting it to somebody else? Is there a zero sum game here? Is it if I have this, then somebody else loses? And if I have it, am I taking it away from somebody who needs it?

And then our guilt will creep in, and we might get shamed for expressing that desire. Like as a teen or as a younger child, maybe you expressed these desires and your parents were like, hey, that’s a little selfish, that’s a little too much. You know, there’s starving children in another country, right? Our desire for luxury gets dimmed or blown out like a candle, or we get shamed for it, and then we internalize that. And we think, oh, we shouldn’t have luxury. Either I’m not worthy of it, or it’s not appropriate.

And we might secretly still desire it, because we really do want it, but we don’t want to be a bad person. And we don’t want to make our parents upset, and we don’t want to look selfish and greedy and unkind and dismissive towards other people. And then if we want it and we express that we want it, we might be embarrassed because we might get shunned or shamed or ostracized by our social circles. So then there is this there’s this relationship brewing with luxury which feels like a problem. And we associate shame or guilt or selfishness around desire.

So I was thinking right before this call, I started thinking about what is this about the shame that we have around desire, particularly when we desire something luxurious. Like we desire something luxurious for our staff. We want our staff to have more planning time. What a luxury. Or we desire for them to have para-professional support in the classroom. What a luxury. Or we want them to have a barista. Or we want an assistant principal for ourselves, or a dean of students, or an instructional coach. What a luxury to have that bandwidth to double down on instructional leadership. But there is some shame associated with desiring a luxury that you want.

And I thought about this, like why would a person, it doesn’t matter who did it, whether it’s parents or some kind of leader or mentor in your life, adult mentor when you were a kid or even peer to peer or your boss, anybody. But somebody who tends to have positional authority over you, so like a parent or a mentor, a religious person, or a coach or a, you know, like one of your coaches, like a sports coach or anything, anybody who’s out there. And you can feel this. You probably have a memory of this, right? Where you desired something, or you asked for something, and maybe you got shamed for it.

Now I thought to myself, why would a person shame someone for wanting to have an enjoyable experience, an enjoyable life, a luxurious experience? Why would somebody want another person not to have that? Why would a parent not want their kid to have a luxury in life? Well, they’ll be entitled, they’ll become a brat, they’ll be a little spoiled brat, or they won’t appreciate it. Or people will see them differently, treat them differently. Or well, I didn’t have it and I lived. They’ll be just fine without it. They can suffer right along with me.

Right? People, they think either they believe that you can’t have it, and they want to protect you, or that you shouldn’t have it, and they want to protect you. So if they couldn’t have it, and they shouldn’t have had it, then you shouldn’t have it, or you can’t have it. So there’s this kind of, well, if I couldn’t have it, you couldn’t have it. Or they wanted something when they were younger, and they got disappointed. They either didn’t get it, or they were shamed. And so they feel like, oh, when someone you know, expresses a desire for some kind of luxury experience, let me shut it down because that’s what you’re supposed to do.

Or they were so disappointed and so hurt that they don’t want their child to experience the pain of disappointment. They want to bubble wrap them, right? Which is interesting because we’re actually giving them the luxury of not feeling disappointment versus saying, go for it. Go for what you want and you might get it. And then celebrating if they do receive that type of luxury in their life, or if they go for it and they’re disappointed, then they learn the bandwidth to feel disappointment and then move on and keep going for it. Right?

Sometimes we’ve been taught it’s immoral or wrong. And that’s basically like that zero sum game, like where if you have it, somebody else can’t. You know, your gain is somebody’s loss. That’s where you kind of feel really guilty. You feel bad if you believe that’s true. And the flip of that is kind of like if you decide, oh, I don’t want that, I don’t need it, then somebody else gets to have it, and somebody else can receive it.

So I believe this comes down to the intention behind our desire. So what’s the reason for wanting a better experience? What’s the reason for wanting to become a stronger school leader? What’s your reason for it? Why do you want to be happier, experience more joy, expand your capacity for influence and impact, create a legacy? What’s the intention behind it? What’s the why? Why are we doing it? Is it to help or to harm?

Are we creating an experience because it feels good for us, and when we feel good, we lead better? Or is it I want to feel good because I don’t feel good about myself right now, and because I don’t feel good, I want to feel better. And so if I feel better, then I can not have to deal with the part that I don’t like. Or I want this because I want to look the part. I want it to look like I’m leading, look like I’m luxurious, look like I’m having a happier, better, more fulfilled experience.

Or do I want to look the part so that others can admire me and wish that they had what I had? So is the intention to not just experience joy for ourselves, but to then share that and to bring it use it to leverage leadership in the world in your school? Is it helping? Are we asking for it, desiring it because we want to leverage it to help and amplify our messages and our impact? Is it because we want to show off and we want to feel important and we want it to look like luxury? Because the frequency of truth is always the loudest. It’s not what it looks like, it’s what it is. So the intention matters.

So in its purest form, the reason you would ever desire to create a more luxurious experience, professionally and personally, is because of the emotional experience we have with it. So when we’re in a moment of having something that is a luxury, it feels like a luxury, we know it’s a luxury, we acknowledge it, we embrace it, we’re grateful for it. Those feelings, those emotions like abundance and gratitude, satisfaction, fulfillment, appreciation, joy, delight, those emotions are what we’re going for because emotions are fuel.

And when we’re fueled with these higher vibration feelings, right? The feel good feels, when you’re feeling on top of the world and really productive and really zippy and really locked in with your and you’re really aligned to your mission and you’re going for it and you’re getting things done for that day, you know that feeling? That’s what we’re looking for. We want more of that. Why? Because it serves better. It helps us serve better.

The energy of luxury is a higher frequency. You know the days where you’re like low energy. You don’t feel good. Maybe physically, you’re super exhausted. You’ve run yourself ragged. Maybe you’ve got a little something, you know, cold brewing, and so you then you’re kind of where your sweatshirt for that day, like can I you know, you put on like your comfiest clothes, you don’t look in your best, maybe you didn’t do your makeup full on today. You just throw on some lip gloss and some, I’ve done this. You put on that, you know, mascara and the lip gloss, call it a day, go. That’s it. Low vibration days, lower energy days. What we crave is those higher vibration days.

So once we’ve kind of dismantled like that it’s safe to desire luxury and it’s okay, like you have permission to desire the luxury. What blocks us from expanding our capacity to receive it, to allow it in our lives? What I have found in myself and in my clients is that it is the duality of luxury. There’s a polarity of luxury that occurs, and we don’t really take this into consideration.

So I remember coaching a client a few years ago and she was aching to have an assistant principal. She was the only elementary principal in her entire district that didn’t have an assistant. And I believe that they were trying to find one. There was somebody left and then there was an opening. They couldn’t find anybody. It was not because she was being isolated or excluded from having one. It’s just that there was a year of not having one. And she probably, if I remember correctly, had an AP, which was the luxury and then didn’t have it and then had to double down on the work and really felt the loss of that luxury and was aching for it.

But in that journey, while she was she coached with me for several years, so before, during and after all of this, but on that journey, they hired somebody who they thought would be a fit, and she was just grateful to have somebody, but then the person wasn’t a fit for the job. It wasn’t a match. I call it a want match where you want them, they want you, it’s a match, and it clicks. It wasn’t the click that they were looking for. So the luxury of having it was, yes, you had a person in the position, but there was a duality to the luxury. Right?

So with the experience of a luxury, there is a balance that comes with it, right? So think of things outside of school. The luxury of travel, which to me, I absolutely love to travel, but there is there is a balance that comes with travel. Sometimes when you travel, there are delays, there are cancellations, there are weather related events, there’s turbulence. They double book your seat, they move you even though you’ve paid for your seat. And that’s just on the airlines, right?

When you’re traveling, maybe you’re in your own car, but you’ve got to stop and get gas, or maybe there’s a delay, or there’s a detour, or there’s weather related. You have to pull over, you don’t want to drive during a tornado or something, right? There is a cost or a balance associated with the experience of luxury, right? So if we have the luxury of lots of money, let’s say, because a lot of people associate luxury with money. To have a lot of money in your life also means the responsibility and ownership of that money, of the responsibility of caring for it, of being a good steward of that money, using money to amplify light, love in the world.

So when we are thinking about luxury, at the time we want it, we’re just thinking about the good part, the good part that fulfills us. We’re not always thinking about what comes with that, all that’s associated with it. And that’s something I’ve really had to expand on because here’s the thing, we can easily receive the good half of the luxury, the part that we’re like, yes, this is what I’m imagining. This is how it’s going to feel. Like going on this vacation. Vacation’s the perfect example.

When we imagine vacation, we’re thinking about bliss. Fun in the sun, you know, pool time, piña coladas, getting caught in the rain, walking on the beach. We just imagine just perfection, this idyllic, beautiful tropical experience, if that’s your favorite kind of holiday, right? Whatever your holiday is. But you imagine it just going smoothly. And then the reality of the luxury of going on vacation, because it’s still an incredible luxury to go on a vacation, it might come with some delayed, you know, some delays at the airport or somebody luggage got lost or, you know, they had to switch your room because, you know, the air conditioner broke, whatever, right? Sometimes there are little hiccups in our luxury experience. And can we hold space for and allow those hiccups to happen, but still appreciate and receive the fact that it actually is a luxury to go on vacation.

And we forget that sometimes. Have you been with somebody who you’ve gone on vacation with them or you traveled with them, and all they do is notice what’s going wrong? They complain and complain and the food’s not good or this was on time or this was late, or the room’s not big enough, or we don’t have a good view, or blah, blah, blah, you know, the service was slow. That chips away at the luxurious experience. And we do this in education. We have luxuries that have just become normalized, and then we just start to like, well this and that, and we complain a little bit, or we chip away at the fact that it’s a luxury.

So if you have an AP who’s brilliant, you cherish them with all your heart. But you can also take them for granted and not be in appreciation, and then you’re it’s no longer a luxury because you’re not in the energy of luxury. You’re not in the good feelings of luxury. Now you’re just in the what’s not working energy. You’re down in the lower vibes, right?

So this is what I call luxury dissonance, where it’s like we want the good stuff, but we don’t want the bad stuff. So I’ll take an AP only if they’re perfect. But I don’t want to have to like mentor them or meet with them or you know, I just want them to go out and like go do their job. I’m too busy to like hold your hand, to be holding your hand. I want the part of the luxury that feels easier, better, and more enjoyable, but I don’t want the part that’s requires any kind of work or discomfort.

So there’s a duality we have going on here, right? And this is how we kind of bring it all in. Luxury isn’t about, it’s not as much about what you have at your school. It’s about how you feel about what you have. Do you feel the luxury of your amazing teachers? Do you feel satisfied with the students who are learning and progressing and happily engaged and who aren’t fighting, who are being good citizens and model students? Do we appreciate the bus drivers? Are we grateful for the fact that we have yard duty when other schools, the teachers are doing it?

So the luxury is much about what the particulars of what we have, it’s about how we feel when we have them and holding the pressure of the duality of luxury. When we have what we want and it requires a little bit of effort to have it, a little bit more responsibility, so there’s having the luxury and then holding space for the duality of it. But then there’s also holding the pressure as a school leader to have desires we don’t have yet. So when people say it’s not possible for you to create a culture that’s you celebrates failure, why would we do that?

Okay. There’s pressure on the outside of your desire. People are like, no, you can’t have it. No, you shouldn’t have it. You shouldn’t desire that. That’s selfish. They’re going to have opinions, and those opinions are pressure. Can you hold strong to that while you’re getting external pressure? Can you hold the desire for the belief that it’s possible to create that luxury at your school? Is it possible to create a culture where everybody’s not suffering all day long and just trying to race to the end of the day to feel some relief, or are we able to like hold the belief that it’s possible to work hard and be satisfied, even if there’s hiccups in the day.

It’s allowing the tension of desiring something that anticipation of it and desiring that about what you don’t yet have, while also continuing to appreciate the luxuries that you do already have. Think about this. There’s a certain pressure that comes with being the lead principal versus the assistant principal. I’ve coached hundreds of APs and they’re like, yeah, at the end of the day, there is a little less pressure because I know the buck doesn’t stop with me. It actually really stops with the lead principal.

And then the lead principal is holding that pressure. It’s a luxury to be the lead principal, but it comes with more responsibility. So there’s a certain level of stress and tension that we all want to practice and learn how to hold. And there’s a certain amount of pressure of the luxuries that we have accepted. So when we accept the luxury of an AP, there is a pressure to lead them. We’re still their leader even though they are an administrator.

So we start to view if we let ourselves do this, we can start to feel like the luxuries are now burdens. Well having all of this is just more. It’s just it’s not a luxury. Now it’s a burden. Now I’ve got to do this and I’ve got to do that. Well, you know, we start to lose the gratitude, we start to lose the appreciation for it, for the very thing we said we wanted, now it’s a burden. Until we sit back and say, wait a minute, like what about this is a luxury? How can I get back into luxury energy? The feelings of delight, satisfaction, joy, abundance, gratitude, fulfillment. Right?

And we have seasons. There’s different seasons of what luxuries we desire. So sometimes we desire to have lots of time and space, like don’t want a lot on my calendar. I just want to be able to come in. You know that morning when you wake up and you’re like, my calendar is, you know, I only have like two meetings all day. So the calendar is nice and full and it feels really good. and you have the luxury of like coming in a little bit slower, getting a cup of coffee, talking with your office staff. Maybe you check your emails, you get your calendar ready for the day, and you just feel space, spaciousness. You go greet students, you get into classrooms, you connect, you’re smiling at teachers, you’re out for yard duty, you’re serving pizza for lunch, just the spaciousness of that day feels so luxurious.

Maybe going home at 4:00 today is a luxury. Sometimes you’re there until 8, or 9, or 10, because you’ve got a an evening event. Right? And I think about high school, they’ve got sporting events and music events. Those go late. And as a little birdie who likes to go to bed early, I’m like, I’m literally my brain is I’m turned off right around 9:00. Put me in my jammies, brush my teeth, and put me to bed. I’m done.

So it’s a luxury to be able to come home early once in a while. It’s a luxury to have space in our day. And then other days, it feels like a luxury to have a full day. I can remember coming in when I had, we had kid talks. We had these kid talk meetings. So we would hire subs, back when there were subs. We would hire subs and we would have, I think we did kid talk, yes, we did kid talk for three days in a row. So we’d have each grade level got a half a day. So the sub would do like morning, they would go to kinder and then afternoon they’d go to first grade. We would meet with the kindergarten team and we would have a half a day. We called it kid talk. We were going through and assessing what every single student in that grade level needed. We called it win time, what I need, what’s working for them, where are we taking them? It was almost like creating individualized plans for every single student.

And then we would, you know, create plans, teaching plans based on kids that needed to be excelled, kids who were on grade level on moving forward, and kids who needed additional supports. I loved those days, highly productive. Not a minute to myself, right? I would have to, you know, you barely eat, you’re barely, you know, getting to the restroom, you’re just not really on campus, you know, visible out there other than being in these meetings. I love those days too, a different kind of luxury.

So different seasons, different luxuries, right? Winter and each calendar season, each like planet season, right? We have spring, winter, fall, summer. Each of those is a different kind of luxury. So in the fall season, think of all the energy and the excitement, anticipation of the start of school. It’s such a luxury. And then we have the fall dip, but then winter comes, and it’s quiet, magical. There’s just there’s kind of a lull that happens usually. But there’s also the excitement and the energy of the holiday season and the celebrations and the end of the year and then the Mid-Year Reboot that’s coming up in January. So we have different desires for different kinds of luxury. Sometimes we desire the luxury of festivities and other times we desire the luxury of quiet and calm and contemplation and rest.

So then we start to wonder, are both possible? As a school leader, because I know this question comes up in my coaching sessions all the time, can I have both of these forms of luxuries? There’s kind of these internal luxuries I desire, like calm, peace, contentment, and these external luxuries that I desire. Is it possible to have both? Is it possible to have the materials my school needs and the resources we need? And also, can I create an ease of managing those resources and managing those materials? Because for all the materials you get, more can be more. And if there’s not a system for organizing it and managing it, the resources just become chaos and lost in the shuffle.

Is it possible for me to be an accomplished principal? To have influence, impact and legacy while also being a rested principal, not being right? and an exhausted principal. Can I contribute as a leader in my community, in my district, and can I also receive support? Can I give and receive? They’re both luxuries. Contribution is a luxury. It feels so good to give. Receiving is also a luxury, to receive support, to receive the help when you need it, and also to be the receiver and receive in a way that allows the person who’s giving to us the joy of giving. Can we do both? Do we have the capacity for both? Those are both different kinds of luxuries.

Can we contribute and create impact and really go for it and be super productive, but also create the luxury of downtime and rest and recovery and play? Can we receive financial wealth, financial abundance in our life and work towards that and create an exchange of value in the world while also being able to play? Or is it all work and no play?

So we attach meaning to all of these luxuries. We want to be impactful. We want to earn, you know, our most financial potential that we can, but we attach earning and receiving with working, with effort and time. It’s like an equation. Like the more work plus the more effort plus the more time that you work equals more earning. We’ve been taught this, but it’s not true. It can’t be true. And the fastest way to dismantle that is there are humans on the planet who work less hours and make a lot more money.

And every human’s given 24/7 on the planet, and how is it that we’re not making the same amount of money? How is time equal money? It doesn’t work that way. Because if effort plus time plus the hours that you worked equaled a certain, you know, guaranteed you a certain amount of income, then everyone working those amount of hours, giving this amount of effort for this amount of time would be making the same amount of money. That’s not how it works. Money’s an exchange of value, the value that we contribute. And we can feel very frustrated and very defeated when we cannot outwork to attract more luxury and a more luxurious experience.

Or we work really hard and we get one type of luxury, right? Like maybe we work hard and we work our way up and we have title, the luxury of title, status, power or position, and we make money, but we work so hard to get there, and we’re at work all the time that we don’t have any luxury of rest or play or, you know, time outside of work with family and friends. So we think that we can have one or the other. Do we have the luxury of time or do we have the luxury of working? So we want this, and then we want this. It’s like a yo, a teeter totter. It’s all or nothing thinking.

So here’s what we think we want. We think we want to experience luxury without having to hold the space for the balance of it. We think we just want the good without the bad. It’s like we want the dream home, but we don’t want the dream home mortgage payment. Right? We don’t want the property taxes, and we don’t want all those maintenance costs. Cost a lot of money to heat that big house. Right? Cost a lot of money to clean that house. Cost a lot of time to clean that house.

So we might want more time at work. We want the luxury of time at work, but we also want the impact. We want the impact, but we don’t want the failures that come with impact. That’s what we think we want. But here’s what we actually want when we peel back the layers, okay? What we actually really want is we want as humans to have the capacity to experience the space for both. We want to be able to hold the pressure of all of the luxury, the balance of it.

We want to be able to handle the pressure that comes with receiving support at our school and holding space for our capacity to organize, manage it, maintain it, lead it. Right? Pressure, the pressure that we feel and our capacity to hold that pressure is what creates balance. There is pressure in balance, right? If you’re thinking of a teeter totter, there’s pressure on this side and there’s pressure on this side. So for it to balance, there’s equal pressure on both sides. There’s no lack of pressure. It would just be sitting on the ground. There would be no teetering or tottering. It would just be, you know, flat. But when you’re on the teeter totter, there has to be an equal amount of pressure on both sides. If there’s one, it’s this way. If there’s one, it’s that way. Right? The pressure’s what kind of holds us all together.

This is the most tangible way I can describe it. Think about a box. Like let’s say you pick up, I wish I had one with me. Here, my water bottle, okay? Let’s say, let’s say this is a big box, and I want to hold, I’m going to carry a large box. Both of my hands have to be on, there’s got to be pressure on this side and pressure on this side. If I pull, this falls down, right? Both hands must be applied to carry the box, if not, you’re going to drop the box.

So this is where we get into the land of and, the balance of life, the balance of leadership, the balance of our careers, the balance of the luxuries we have. It’s not a matter of trading this for that, moving my left hand or moving my right hand. It’s not paying tit for tat. That’s not what luxury is. The truth is that you don’t get to have, it’s not one or the other. That’s how we think about it, right? I can either be successful and work really, really hard and lose time with my family, or I can be really lazy and not contribute in value. But I’ll have a lot of time on my hands. We think we can have money or time because we associate an exchange of time for money. Time does not create money. What you do with your time, who you are being, the value you’re contributing creates money.

You can sit at your desk for eight hours, that eight hour, if you just sit there and do nothing, you have created no value. That time sitting your buns in the seat does not is not what gets you paid. It’s what you do within the eight hours that gets you paid. Okay? So this is another way to think about it. Think about people that you would define as having luxury items or luxury, a luxury lifestyle. There are people who have it all, right? They have the things, they have the external luxuries. They have the car, the house, you know, they have vacation home. They have lots of money in the bank, but they don’t feel luxurious. It’s because they’re not in luxury energy. They’re not in the abundance, in the gratitude of it, in the awe of it.

This is how we create luxury at our schools. We’re in awe of the luxuries we have. We’re in awe of the people. We’re in awe of the growth we did make. Let’s say 47% of kids are on grade level, be in awe of your teachers for doing that and awe of students. And the 52 or three that are below, look at the progress they have made. Who cares if they’re on the line or below it? Have they made progress? And if they haven’t, be in awe that they’re still showing up every day, even though school is so hard for them.

And hold space for their potential. If someone slips a little bit, it doesn’t mean it’s forever. We all have slips. We all have mishaps. But there are there are people, and I feel like in education, we’ve stopped to considering what a luxury it is to be a school leader, to be a teacher, to be a student. And I know you’re taking a lot of shade from all the angles because of we’ve forgotten to be in alignment with the luxury that school leadership is, the luxury that education is, the luxury that teaching and learning is. Take away schools, shut everything down tomorrow. What will happen? Now it’s a luxury. Parents are like, please open the school. I’m not going to tell you how to run it. Just please take my kid because I’ve got to get to work. Right? We’ve forgotten. But we can bring it back. We can be the spark that ignites the idea of luxury.

So there’s people who have it that don’t feel it, don’t experience it. And then there’s people who don’t have it who do experience it because they desire it, and they’re in the anticipation of it, and they’re planning on receiving it. But they’re also looking around for what do I have? And I can be in luxury right now. So you can have what you label as luxury and also feel it, or you can be surrounded by luxury and not feel it at all.

You can desire to experience more luxury while also enjoying the luxuries you have, or you can sit back and just resist luxury altogether. Believe you don’t have access to it. It’s not for you. Other people deserve it. Other people are more worthy, but it’s just not in the cards for you. And you can think it’s not coming to you and you can be like, and look, there’s nothing luxurious in my life right now either. There you go. There’s proof. Never had it, never will. So not being grateful for what is in your life that you could consider a luxury, and also negating and just resisting that it’s even a possible to create more in your future.

So there’s all those different angles. You can have it and be in complete luxury. You can have it and not be in a luxury at all. Just kind of overlooking it as like, yeah, yeah, that’s just expected. You can not have it, but be grateful for the things you do have and desire for more, or you can resist it all together in the having or in the anticipation of having.

So luxury really comes down to our capacity to expand. Instead of seeing it as just the taking the good part and not wanting the bad, we can expand by holding space for the duality of both. And it really does grow us. We really do want to handle both. Like if the universe wrote you a check for $1 million right now and just handed it to you and said, here you are, tax-free, could you hold the pressure of having the money? Not spending it, not giving it all away because it’s uncomfortable to have it, but could you just sit there with it and hold it until you come up with a plan and that every dollar that you choose to save or you choose to spend or pay off whatever your plan is for it, that it’s in the frequency of luxury.

It’s a luxury to write this check and pay off my credit card. Thank you, money. I’m so grateful. It’s a luxury to let this money just sit in my bank account. It’s a luxury to give myself permission to spend $1,000 today on whatever I want. Believing that it’s possible for you to have more luxury in your life, the simple ones and the big ones, appreciating the little things, the beautiful first snow, if you live where it’s cold, you can appreciate the beauty of the snow. If you live where it’s warm, you can appreciate the beauty of the warmth. If you celebrate Christmas, you can appreciate the beautiful lights on your tree or if your kids decorated the tree and it’s it’s all crazy, like kids do, you can just appreciate that and the love that you feel for that tree because your children decorated it. Right?

Being capable of handling the duality, that’s what this is about. So the luxury leadership experience here, the duality of what we’re looking for is enjoying our job as school leaders and holding space for those hard days and not making the hard days mean that you are insufficient or you’re not cut out for school leadership, making it mean that you can handle hard days, because you’re a boss. Right?

Can you be paid as a valuable school leader? Expand your capacity to receive without needing to overwork, people please, overschedule yourself, overexert, trying to serve people from a place of obligation or resentment or frustration or disenfranchisement, right? To create value as a leader and still have space in your life outside of school leadership. Can you have both? Can you hold the duality of that? The luxury of being impactful here and having a beautiful life outside of school hours. Can you be a person of influence and impact without leading from fear, intimidation, coercion, placating people, fawning your boss, or faking it until you make it? Can you be authentic in your influence and impact? Duality, right?

But how, we always say. How can we have hard days and still feel gratitude? It’s been a rough year. How do we get anything done without overworking? How do we become the leader who creates all this impact without being consumed? The luxury is in the who, not in the how. How do you have hard days and feel gratitude? You acknowledge it was a hard day, and you also acknowledge that there’s something in your life today to be grateful for, no matter what. If you want the and, create the and.

This was a hard day. I’m not dismissing it. I maybe even cried on my way home from work. But when I got home and I was received by my family, or I came home to a quiet house because I live alone and I could just be in the gratitude of that solitude or the gratitude of being received by my family, I live such a luxurious life, and tomorrow’s a new day.

How do we get everything done without overworking? We ground ourselves in purpose and in trust that we know how to prioritize and that today what we got done today was what needed to get done today and we trust that what needs to get done tomorrow will get done. Both. We do and we trust duality. How do we become the leader who creates impact without being overconsumed by what other people think? We align to our values and we use our values as a compass to genuinely care and listen to others and not make it mean about us all the time. We’re not here to get accolades as a leader, we’re here to serve and we still serve them even when their opinion differs from ours.

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 419.

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, happy, happy New Year, my empowered principals. Welcome to 2026. Happy New Year. This to me is one of the best times of the year because there is so much energy. There’s so much excitement and enthusiasm and hope and just this openness to all possibilities. And it happens to us this time of year every single year.

All of the anticipation of a fresh start, a new year. It’s the time where we renew commitments or we develop new commitments to ourselves. It’s the opportunity of that clean slate, the openness to change, to evolve, to expand ourselves, to develop ourselves, to try something new. It’s that positive anticipation of what you will experience in this upcoming year. Can you feel it? That energy of hope and possibility and expanding your potential this coming year?

It’s at its peak in end of December and into January. There’s just a vibe and an energy to this new year, a new feeling. There’s a vibration inside of you. It’s this feeling of aliveness. And the feeling that you feel right now is energy. It’s passion. It’s mental and emotional engagement. It’s soul feeding and fueling. It’s how you feel when you are so interested and curious about something, when you’re immersed in it.

It’s not just about the outcomes or the goal accomplishment that you’re trying to create, but it’s for the experience of the creation of it. You know when you’re going on vacation and you’re anticipating the vacation and you’re planning it and you’re thinking about it, and you could spend hours researching airlines and hotels and locations and restaurants and museums and shopping, whatever it is you do on vacation, but you’re planning it and you feel the excitement and anticipation of the actual experience of it as you’re creating the planning of it. You’re not actually doing it, but you can feel the energy. That’s what the New Year energy feels like to me. It’s like we’re mapping out the vacation of our lives this year, the dream come true experiences that we want in our lives.

Now, we do this for vacations. We can be very meticulous at planning, or we say, this is where I want to go and I trust that the experiences I’m meant to have I will have. Some people are very laissez faire and very open-ended with their planning. Other people are very meticulous in their creation of the plan. But either way, what you’re doing is you are personally, internally cultivating and anticipating the experience you want to have. We go to great lengths to do this for vacation or maybe for the holiday season, you planned out how you wanted to experience your holidays, your vacations. But we don’t tend to put this much eagerness and curiosity and effort into planning our everyday lives, our personal lives, professional lives, the combination of that experience, the lifestyle that we want to live. And I’m really feeling this year.

It’s not about where you live or who you live with or, the specifics of your life right now. You can generate the feelings, the emotions of an experience. So whether you live in the Midwest like I’m currently living, or you live on the West Coast where I used to live, or you live over on the East Coast where one of my best friends lives and I’ve spent time living with her and spending a great deal of time being in her lifestyle, you can be anywhere on the planet listening to this podcast and being in the energy of life creation, leading creation, leadership energetics, leading your life, leading your career, and cultivating the experience that you want.

This is an internal experience that you have when you are in the energetics of leadership. It’s the experience of creation, the experience of helping other people, the experience of problem solving and figuring something out. It’s the experience of contributing in whatever way feels good for you. The experience of interacting with other people you adore and appreciate and respect and lead. The experience of collaborating with them and working together with them. It’s the experience that you have today while you are working towards an outcome.

The way you handle yourself today when you are working towards something and when something doesn’t go the way you had hoped it would or that you had planned it would go. It’s the way you connect with yourself and with others today as you’re planning to roll out something coming down the line in the future. It’s the way you communicate today, the way you support today.

You know, I have to be honest with you, I was obsessed with Taylor Swift’s new album. I’m not a Swifty, I would not identify as a Swifty, but I highly respect her, one, as a woman on the planet, two, her leadership energetics, and she’s just off the charts amazing in terms of income generation, marketing, connecting with her audience. She’s so authentic in who she is and she stays in alignment, which to me is why she is so successful. She has leadership energetics available to her. She’s aware of them, she’s aligned to them, and she implements them. And I saw a conversation with her, you know, she’s been on endless interviews and shows discussing her new album and discussing all of the nuances of it. And she was talking about how much fun it was to create the album.

She’s not just excited that the album dropped and that she broke the internet with record sales and record sales. She’s excited about that part of it, but she was also equally as eager and excited about the creation of the album and how much fun it was to be in the experience of creating the album, writing the songs, creating the music to go with the songs, working with her, you know, producers and her band members and her dancers and her choreographers. Like she’s got a whole army of, you know, teammates that she works with. But the creative experience itself was just as fun as dropping the album and making however much money she made on this album.

She’s not making albums to make money. She’s making albums because she enjoys who she’s being in the creative process, who she’s working with, who she’s connecting with. She’s loving the day-to-day existence and identity of her life. She’s not trying to reach some kind of number on a screen. And yet, here we are in education. We are so focused on the numbers on the screen, the student data points. We’ve turned students into data points. We have turned our careers into test scores. We’ve turned our identities into what other people score us as or believe us to be or think who we are, versus us being in the leadership energetics of enjoying our lives, our careers, the work, the people, the children, the students, the families, the communities, our bosses, being in it.

So I invite you to consider, even if only for the time you are listening to this podcast, just consider that your leadership energy has the power to transform the educational experience for students, staff, family members, the community, the district. I want you to really imagine for a moment that you were to believe in this truth. Imagine waking up every day and thinking, my leadership energy has the power to transform the educational experience for my staff, my students, and the families of this community. Say that sentence out loud. Say it with me now.

It gives me so much energy and emotion because it’s true and it feels electrifying to lean into and to just try on this belief. Say it with me. My leadership energy has the power to transform the educational experience for my staff, my students, and the families of this community. Imagine how that feels inside of you when you believe it to be true, when you see the truth in it. Visualize the experience that you as the leader will have. You as the principal, you as the assistant principal, you as the instructional coach, you as the, you know, coordinator, assistant superintendent, superintendent, district leader, whatever your title is.

Imagine the experience that you have knowing that you are creating a more positive experience for people on your campus and that you have the power within you to invite others to experience their own powerful energetics. Just sit with this and imagine this as the truth. Every day you make a positive impact. Every day you are making progress. Every day you are helping someone. Every day you are impacting and changing a life. Every day you are learning and expanding your capacity to lead. Sit in the truth of this. Sit in the energy of this reality.

Imagine if tomorrow or if today, if you’re listening to this first thing or you’re driving home tonight, today, tomorrow, imagine that if this became your new identity, this became your new reality. The principal, the district leader, the state leader, the county leader, the leader who believes they are making a positive impact, truly believes it, knows it in their soul. I’m making a positive impact.

The principal, the district leader, the site leader, the county, state, federal leader, the teacher leader who believes and trusts they are making progress, even through all the ups and downs and setbacks. Progress moving forward. There is progress even in setbacks. That’s called learning.

The principal who knows they are helping someone and changing a life each and every day, not that you know, or always know whose life you’re helping or how you are changing it, because it might not be impacted today. The interaction you have today might not impact their life until next week, next month, next year, next decade. You have no idea your impact, but you trust that you are changing a life, impacting somebody with positivity and helping them for their future. You don’t know how it’s changing. You might not know who you’re changing, but you know that you are and you’re showing up in that belief. Today I’m changing a life. Today I’m going to help somebody. Today we’re making progress. Today we’re making a positive impact.

Now, I want to say explicitly, leadership energetics is not about being happy all the time, feeling comfortable all the time, having things feel at ease all of the time, having other people be completely satisfied and happy all of the time. There is not an absence of disagreement, an absence of growth, an absence of struggle, an absence of conflict. In fact, it’s the opposite. It’s the openness to question, to explore, to expand what we believe is true. There is internal conflict, internal disagreements at times, internal dissonance. There’s external disagreements, external conflicts, external exploration of what’s possible.

This is not about tapping into your leadership energetics so that you can control others or convince others or change others. That’s not what leadership energetics is about. Leadership energetics is about a way of being. It’s a way of living. It’s an identity that you embody.

Accessing and applying your leadership energetics is how I believe school leaders create positive impacts. And this requires a level of trust and faith and surrender. It’s less about what you’re doing and more about who you are as you’re doing it. It’s showing up today, being in the energy of leadership, believing your leadership is working, believing that you are making an impact as you’re taking action. You’re believing in the impact as you’re taking the action today. It’s trusting that today’s next best step or next best decision is the next best thing as you’re in the decision-making process, as you’re deciding what steps to take. You’re trusting it.

It’s having faith in your abilities and in other people’s abilities. It’s seeing other people in their highest, most empowered identity and speaking to them at that highest level and speaking to yourself in that highest level. It is surrendering up resistance, confusion, overwhelm, suffering, disempowerment. It’s surrendering those things. We allow the resistance by exploring it or moving forward. We refuse to stay in confusion and overwhelm and let it sink us down and stagnate us and make us feel stuck.

It’s about dropping the stories that you cast yourself in, in the role of victim, of villain, of the person who’s unable to release any suffering, where you replay the pain points in your past, in your history over and over and over, or you cast yourself as the person who has no power, or you’re the person who is always the problem, always the villain, always the bad person, or always the victim, always the one who has a villain in their story. Exploring that, understanding it, exploring your resistance to release those blocks so you can remove them and reopen flow back into your life and trust and belief and keep moving forward.

It’s about getting specific with what you’re confused about, getting clear and not allowing yourself to drown in confusion or drown in overwhelm, to break them down and get specific and figure it out. It’s about releasing these stories that keep you from feeling empowered. These stories of disempowerment, of stagnancy, of being stuck, of not knowing what to do, of too much to do and you don’t have the control, you don’t have the power. Those stories hold you back and they stagnate your leadership energetics.

My perspective is that we have tried and applied external pressures to improve education, to improve student learning and student outcomes. And in my humble opinion, this external pressure that we keep trying, it’s not working for at least half of our students. And I would say it’s not working for any students at some level. It’s not working for teachers. It’s not working for staff members. It’s not working for site and district leaders. It’s not working for members of our community, families, and it’s not working for society at large.

You could just google what people are talking about in the field of education. Education’s broken. Education’s not working. Educational system this, the students that, the teachers this, the leaders that, the test scores this. Plenty of information out there around how it’s broken, how it’s not working, how people aren’t trying hard enough, how students are off the chain, how teachers are exasperated and leaving, how leaders feel their hopeless, they’re throwing their hands up in the air, they’re not sure what to do.

I’ll tell you who it is working for. This current dialogue, this current narrative, this current perspective, it’s working for testing companies. It’s working for curriculum companies, and it’s working for those who want to remain in power using the fear of test scores and accountability and career consequences to intimidate educators. It’s working for those people, but it isn’t working for those who are doing the work, students, staff members, teachers, families, leaders, districts, educational systems, colleges, universities, preschools, all the way down from the babies up to postgraduate doctorate students.

And you might say, yeah, but it’s working for somebody. People are graduating, people are getting degrees. Those people have just learned how to play the game, how to play the system. I believe this is the perfect time. It’s the perfect opportunity to test out the power of leadership energetics and what we can accomplish when we acknowledge and when we leverage our ability to guide ourselves, to harness the power of our own energy without holding ourselves back in fear of its limitlessness.

When we believe that we have the power to feel how we want, to believe what we want, to take action, to serve and help and contribute and empower people, when we get up and lead with that kind of leadership energy, there’s nothing holding us back. When we understand and hold the energetics of personal leadership and personal power, we will beat the odds. This is when we burst past all expectations and all the predictability. We move beyond the current paradigm that we’re living in, while still operating in it, but we excel beyond what’s predictable. We excel beyond what people say is the limit of possibility. We blow past that.

We’ve seen it done. There are schools who are doing it because they refuse to agree and buy into the one story that is this is what school looks like, this is what it feels like, this is what it should be like and continuing to believe that’s the only story and that’s what creates success. Because the truth is that story only creates success for a very finite group of people. And in the world of The Empowered Principal, we’re exploring beyond that. We’re leveraging leadership energetics.

The mentorship within the programs of The Empowered Principal are designed to help you expand your capacity to leverage your leadership energy so that you can empower others to leverage their own personal power, their own leadership energetics. We want to leverage our own energy to model that, to be the example of that, and to empower people to try it on. Let’s test drive this baby.

Let’s leverage the energy of the new calendar year here in 2026. And I invite you to join us in The Empowered Principal Collaborative. And when you are a member of EPC, you also will be able to participate in the midyear reboot series, which is starting this January 6th. If this speaks to you, if this calls to you, if this energy feels like the energy you want to tap into leading your school in the upcoming calendar year, this is the time. Join EPC, join us for the Mid-Year Reboot and let’s see how limitless we actually can be. Have a beautiful 2026. Again, happy New Year. I look forward to seeing you in The Empowered Principal Collaborative. Have a beautiful week everybody. 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 417.

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 principles. Happy Tuesday. Welcome to the podcast. And happy holidays. Wherever you are in the world, I’m wishing you a beautiful holiday season. Whatever holiday you celebrate, it can be personal, it can be global. Whatever holidays you are celebrating this time of year, I just want to wish you the happiest and loveliest of holiday seasons.

As you know, this podcast is intended not just for school leadership, but for life leadership. This is a life and leadership coaching podcast. So today we’re going to talk about how to embrace your personal empowerment over the holidays. This is a stressful topic for many people, and I want to offer this. It’s quick, short, sweet, but it will give you some things to consider as you’re preparing and planning for the holiday season. So, a couple of topics that tend to come up for individuals this time of year are, number one, all of the pressures of the holidays. You are working full-time, you are leading a school, there’s a million celebrations going on at your school, and then your kid’s school, and then you have all of the personal obligations and responsibilities and festivities of the holiday season.

So it can feel like a lot of pressure when you are working full-time, if you are a parent, if you are a spouse, if you have an extended family that does a lot of celebrating, or your community or your church, any place of worship does some kind of celebration over this time of year. A lot of the time, there is extra contributions in terms of charity or donation work, helping those in need. There’s a lot of ask on us. There’s a lot of requests for our time, attention, effort, energy, and focus, and it can feel extremely overwhelming. There can be a lot of pressure. So, I want to offer you kind of a little process that you might be able to use to ensure that you actually have fun over the holidays and that the holiday things themselves don’t become the problem, okay?

So, I think back to my own days of school leadership and things that I felt were pressure points in the holidays were greeting cards, sending out hundreds of greeting cards to everybody I’ve ever known, family, friends, acquaintances, colleagues. I loved to do them, but it was so much work, and they felt like a lot of pressure. Another thing: so many gifts. Did I give everybody I know a gift? My neighbors, my family, my friends, Alex’s friends, friends of friends. It just felt like I was, colleagues. I wanted to gift everybody.

Gifting is my love language and it became pressure, and I would feel so badly if I accidentally forgot somebody or missed something. So gifts became pressure. Parties… they were both fun and pressure. So I would host a holiday celebration in my personal home for my staff, or we would have it out depending on the situation and the year, but there were a couple of years where I did have it at my own house just for ease and cost-effectiveness to not have to rent out a place or a hall. And it was both fun and stressful.

So, notice if you have a lot of parties, celebrations going on. Decorations can be stressful. My sister and I were talking about this where she has this big, beautiful, historic house. It’s four stories tall. You could decorate for miles and days on end in that home. It could be a winter wonderland, should you want it, Santa’s workshop kind of a thing. And she said it no longer became fun when you had to take it down, and it just took so much time and effort. We were talking about how decorations can even be a chore and another pressure on top of working full-time and leading all the parties, all the festivities, doing the cards, getting the gifts. Then there’s hosting. If you’re cooking or cleaning or you’re hosting people, that can be another pressure. Those are just things off the top of my head. I’m sure there are other pressures in your mind that you personally have dealt with before.

So whatever pressure comes from the actual holiday time, the holiday season, just consider, first of all, go through your list of things to do, your holiday things to do, and say, “Do I love this? Does this make me feel good? Do I want to do it? Is it a pleasure? And does it add value? Does it add pleasure to my life? Does it add a memory? Do I love the greeting card process? Do I want to send out 200 greeting cards for the holidays?” If you answer yes, you love doing it, you don’t mind the time, you don’t mind the effort, you don’t mind licking and sticking and stamping and mailing and you don’t mind all of that stuff, by all means, say yes to yourself if it brings you pleasure. If it does not bring you pleasure, say, “No, thank you.” Send out an email. Don’t send anything. You don’t have to do it. Did you know that?

Now, Step One is to go through your list. Anything that doesn’t feel good, say, “No, thank you.” Now, you’re going to go through your list and you’re going to be like, “Oh gosh, I would love to cross off this, this, and this. I’m not going to host. I’m just going to have it catered in at school. We’re not doing a holiday party, we’re just going to do a holiday lunch.” Great. Done. Ask PTO for some funds, get some money, get it catered in. We had family members who owned restaurants and they were more than happy to donate food for staff celebrations. It was so beautiful. I loved it. It was so fun. So think of creative ways to take things off your plate.

And then when you go through the list, there are things you would say to yourself, “I would love to cross this off my to-do list. I don’t like this. It’s a lot of pressure. I would rather not. I’m tired. I want to relax on my holidays with the week off or the two weeks off that you have, but I feel like I can’t.” And when you hit that little milestone, what you have to ask yourself is, why do I believe that I have to? And this is where you self-coach. Why do I believe I have to? What’s making me feel obligated? If I didn’t have to, what would I choose instead? What would I choose to do with my time, my energy, my life during the holidays? How would I want to celebrate? Get to know yourself better. Who am I? What do I love about the holidays? What brings me pleasure? What memories do I love to create and what am I happy to let go of? And then work towards saying no to that or to adjusting it to making it somewhat better. Even 10% better can be a big relief.

If it’s difficult for you to say no to things, try one teeny tiny no. See how empowering it feels to say no to one thing over the holidays that you don’t want to do. Maybe decline a party or maybe send out electronic greeting cards versus paper ones. Or again, maybe downsizing the number of celebrations or the amount of decorating. Just a 10% reduction can make you feel amazing.

Part two of this: navigating family events, dinners, conversations. Politics have been really intense this past few years. So if you are planning to attend a family event, ask yourself why. What is my intention for attending this event? Do I want to attend it? Do I desire to attend it? Even though I know it might not be perfect or I know there will be conversations that I need to navigate or emotions that I need to internally regulate, do I want to go? Why? Do I want to connect? Are there people I really want to see? Do I desire this? Do I want this for my kids? Do I want my spouse to have a connection with his family?

So we’re going to the in-laws. Whatever it is, why are you going? Are you going for connection because you desire it, because you want to create these memories? You want your kids to create memories? It might be fun. You want to go? Or is it, “I hate going. I don’t want to go. I can feel it in my body. It’s an absolute stop. I don’t want to go. It’s obligation, pressure from the family. You’re expected to attend without your consent. There’s family dynamics that you don’t want to deal with.” Again, get in tune with yourself. What is triggering you and why? How do you want to feel?

And if you’re going to decide to attend because you do want to attend, but you’re nervous around navigating the discomfort and the differences of personalities, difference of opinions, you can still set an intention for yourself and create some internal calmness, some internal tethering, I like to say, so that you are still enjoying yourself as much as possible.

So, how do you want to feel? With whom do you want to connect while you are at this family event? What do you want to connect over with those loved ones that you desire to see? So what is it about them you want to know, learn, catch up on? What do you have in common that you could ground yourself in conversation to keep things pleasant and feeling light, love, connection, those kinds of things? What kind of conversations also interest you? So what are you interested in about the other person? What would you like to know about them? And then also, what are some topics you would like to bring up and connect with your loved ones, okay?

So even with all of that pre-planning, there still can be some stressful moments. So you want to prep yourself in advance for that, too, right? What are your standards of engagement? What are the standards by which you want to present yourself? Who do I want to be coming into my family? Because I know for me, I can get sucked into old patterns of behavior, old ways of thinking, old ways of reacting, from facial expressions to mannerisms to shutting down to pouting. I can go into very childlike behaviors, and I don’t want to do that. It can be hard with your family of origin because they trigger you back into a space and time when you were much younger. So what are your standards for yourself of engagement? And what are your boundaries? What do you plan to do if a standard has been violated? So let’s say somebody starts attacking you verbally about politics, or they start gossiping about other people, and you choose not to engage in gossip.

What is your plan if someone starts to gossip or someone starts to bring up politics, trying to poke the bear within you to get you to react and respond and engage? What is your plan? And where do you draw the line? Where you just say, “No, thank you,” and shut them down? Or is there a point at which you would have to take your family and leave? Just think about this in advance so that you can be prepared and you’re thinking about it with your prefrontal cortex versus thinking about it when you’re in fight or flight and you’ve already been triggered. And if you know things are going to be a little intense, you can set a time limit on how much time you spend there, okay?

So think about things, how you’re going to handle comments, things about your weight, your look, being present, what you brought, what you didn’t bring, your personal status, your professional status. People who like to poke at you, if there’s somebody in the family who does that, notice in advance what triggers you personally and what triggers you emotionally and why. Do the self-coaching work. This is preparing yourself, doing that internal work, knowing yourself in advance. You’re not trying to avoid it or shove it down or just suck it up. You want to be aware of it and have what is called a gray rock response.

So a gray rock response is just a flat line response that’s short, sweet, but it’s neutral, and it doesn’t give a lot of ammo for them to get you engaged in a tug-of-war conversation. So, here are a couple of phrases that can just shut down some kind of triggering comments. So, “Hey, Angela, looks like you’ve gained some weight this year.” “Maybe.” Dead, right? It just stops. “Maybe I have.” It just stops. I just say, “Maybe.” “You look so tired. That job must be too much for you.” “Maybe.” I love this word. “Maybe. Maybe. Maybe you’re right.” Just, it doesn’t engage at all, right?

The other thing that I say when people are making snide comments, “Nice of you to come this year,” because I used to live in California and come home. You know, some people might say like, “Well, so nice to see you. So nice for you to be here this year.” “Thank you.” “Thank you. It’s nice to be here.” I love this. “Thank you.” I say thank you to just about everything because what can they say back to that? They just look at you like you’re a little bit off, and you’re like, “Maybe.”

So, another comment, maybe like you’re traveling for the holidays, so you didn’t bring green bean casserole, or you didn’t bring the turkey. Everyone else did the hosting and the cooking and they’re going to let you know how much work they put into the red carpet event for you. You know, they’ll say like, “Well, we went to all this work for you,” or like, “It took us hours to decorate,” or, “You know, every time you come home, everybody goes crazy.” “Thank you. I appreciate that. I appreciate the work. I can see the house is beautiful. The turkey smells amazing. Thank you.” Boom. And you don’t even have to go into all the things that I just said. You could literally say, “Thank you. Thank you.”

When you gray rock respond, there’s very little room to pull you in because what they want is a tug-of-war. So just keep your intention in mind, focus on being in the energy that you want to be in the room. So what kind of energy do you want to cultivate in that room? Be the leader of that. Be the energy. Be the love, the light, be the funny person, be the excited, the eager, the enthusiastic person, be engaged, be interested, be interesting. Be that person whether or not people like it. Be you because you want to be you. You want to be that version of you.

And people are either going to meet you at that energy and things are going to go so much better than they have in the past years or your past experience with them, and they rise to the occasion because they just, they don’t even understand that energetically they’re matching you because it’s attracting them in. They like it. They like that there’s not conflict. Or you will have people who are resentful and resisting because they internally just can’t handle light, love, enthusiasm, and they want that argument because they think it makes them feel better, when inside you know that’s personal for them. They’re struggling internally and they’re projecting it externally.

So, with that said, happiest of holidays. Celebrate. Be the version of you that you want. Say yes to what you want, no to what you don’t. Practice it. I know it can be challenging at first, but it’s so liberating, it’s so freeing, and it’s so empowering. Have a beautiful holiday season. I love you all. 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.