Hello empowered principals. Welcome to episode 349. 

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

Well, hello, my Empowered Principals. Happy Tuesday. Welcome to the podcast. Hey, I am actually recording this in place of another podcast episode I had because this came up in a conversation with a client and I wanted it to go on the podcast immediately in real time because this is a topic that comes up for almost every school leader at the beginning of the year. So we’re going to put it here in 349 beginning of September and the topic is this class assignment requests.

So some of you have already started school and you’ve already been through this but some of you have not or some of you are in the middle of it right now and I want to ensure that you have some tools and strategies for the moment and the situation in which a parent or a family member comes and says, hey, I would like to select my class. I would like my child to have X teacher. I would like you to move my child out of this classroom and into that classroom, you know what I’m talking about. Parents who want to request their child’s class assignment.

This typically happens in elementary school, but I suppose, I have not taught middle and high school, I do suppose it happens there from time to time when a student comes home and says, I don’t like my teacher, or I want a different math teacher, or I don’t like this, you know, whatever. I don’t like this teacher, I want a different teacher. So it can happen probably at any level. So most likely you’re going to experience this at some point if you haven’t already. So let’s talk about it.

Let’s say a parent requests a certain teacher or asks for their child to be reassigned to a different teacher. Now the first thing that’s going to happen in your brain is you’re going to have thoughts and opinions about the request. And sometimes your brain is like, you know what, that’s a valid request. They stated what they wanted, why they wanted the impact of the request, why they think it’s reasonable and you’re on board. That might happen. Most of the time not, but it might happen. If it does, that’s amazing. It’s a win-win right off the bat.

Most of the time, principals feel somewhat offended by the request or annoyed by the request. Two, they’re going to have to have a conversation. Three, it impacts a lot of people. Four, there’s a lot of moving parts. And five, you might feel personally offended. I was talking with a client, and she said, hey, I don’t feel respected. I don’t feel that they’re respecting my authority, my professionalism, my expertise. I’m doing the best I can. There’s no perfect placements. They’re just trying to get their way. They’re telling me how to do the job. They think they know what’s best.

Those are very common feelings. Those are very common thoughts, I should say. They generate emotion. If you’re thinking you’re not respected, you might be a little offended or that they’re not appreciating your professional opinion. You might just be annoyed if you think they’re trying to get their way, they’re trying to bully you, they’re trying to tell you how to do your job. Maybe it makes you feel a little incompetent or a little indignant that they think you are incompetent. You might feel defensive, right? Notice this.

When a parent or a family member asks for a request to reassign their child or to put them in a particular teacher’s room, you might have some personal opinion about that. That’s your right as a human on the planet. You’re going to have thoughts. It’s okay. But the key here is to not react to those thoughts without being aware of those thoughts. So when somebody asks you for a class assignment change, you need to check in with yourself first.

Now, obviously, if it’s happening in real time, if they like approach you, they’re at the Lemonade Social looking at the class list and they’re like, I want my class change. They’re going to do that. You’re going to breathe deeply. You might want to have a plan ahead of time to say like, we’re not going to change anything in this moment. If you’d like to send me an email or make an appointment with the secretary, get on my calendar, we’ll have a conversation. don’t feel pressured.

In real time, when they’re coming to you and you do have the time, you can take a deep breath and you can sit with them and just hear them out and say, hey, I’m willing to hear you out. Tell me everything. What’s coming up for you? How are you feeling? What is your concern? What is your worry? Why are you feeling this way? You’re just going to ask them a bunch of questions to gain information. You want to get into their steer cycle. You want to understand What are they thinking? What are their emotions? What is it they’re worried about? What are their fears? what is the outcome that they’re trying to create. You just take it all in, okay? But first of all, you want to notice your thoughts.

So if you have the opportunity to self-coach before you meet with this person, this is ideal. If not, you’re just going to take the information in and tell them you’re going to contemplate it and you’re going to get back to them within 24 hours. You thank them for sharing everything with you. You need to look at numbers. You need to think about how this impacts, there’s a lot of moving parts, and you’ll get back to them in 24 hours. You do that to give yourself time and space to process your own thoughts and feelings about it, okay?

So when somebody’s asking you this and you’re feeling offended or defensive, it’s probably because it’s feeling like some form of attack on your character or your professional opinion or an attack on your level of knowledge or expertise or even your positional authority. So it’s okay if you feel resistant, just notice that. We don’t want to use that energy to retaliate or to react to that parent.

What you want to do is notice how you’re feeling. Notice the urge to want to dig your heels in. This is the way it’s going to be because I said so. Kind of authoritative or authoritarian, whatever it’s called. The strict kind of like because I’m the boss and that’s how it goes and because I said so. Notice if you’re feeling that way.

Now, you probably aren’t not going to want to give in. You’re going to want to prove your authority or your expert position or opinion on this. But if you make decisions and communicate to the parent, to the family, from this mindset and energy, oftentimes what happens is now we’re in a tug of war. We’ve gone into battle. They don’t get what they want. They’re going to go to the superintendent and they’re going to work their way up so that they can get what they want because you’ve locked in with them. you’ve engaged in battle.

It becomes a win-lose or a lose-win. Somebody’s going to win, somebody’s going to lose. It becomes a competition versus trying to see the land of and. What they’re trying to do when they don’t feel heard or they don’t feel seen or they don’t feel validated or acknowledged is that they’re going to try and get those feelings from somebody. If it’s not you, they’re going to go up the chain. They’re going to go to the superintendent. They’re going to want to talk to your boss. They’re going to want to get what they want even deeper than before.

They’re going to make a bigger scene. They’re going to go to the school board, the local paper, the blogs, whatever, Facebook. They’re going to find their validation somewhere else if they don’t feel validated from you. I’m saying this ahead of time if you haven’t had this experience yet because the goal here is to understand the emotion, the energy fueling the request. It’s not as much about the request as it is about what’s fueling the request. The fuel may be valid. It might not be appropriate. We don’t know yet until we have a conversation with them.

But what you need to know is when somebody comes to you and says, I want a classroom change, I want assignment change, there’s a reason that that parent is requesting this. Your goal is to neutralize what you’re making it mean about you and sit down and ask them so you can understand how to approach them. We don’t know how to approach them, and we don’t want to assume that we know, oh, they’re just trying to get their way, or they’re just trying to tell me how to do my job, or they think they know better than me, or they just listen to gossip and hear that teacher, and then all of a sudden nobody wants the teacher.

Well, now we have a teacher’s feelings involved here, too. There’s a student, there’s a family, there’s a teacher, there’s you. And it also impacts, if you’re moving numbers around, now it’s impacting the whole grade level or the whole department depending on what level you’re leading, okay?

So what happens is when people’s emotions don’t get validated, not the request but the emotions, they will seek out a way to get those feelings acknowledged, validated, vented out. It oftentimes can turn into a very big problem. People will turn little problems into big problems because their emotional regulation has not been reconciled.

Now I get it. In a perfect world, adults would learn and know, because we would have taught them in schools, how to emotionally regulate and how to tune into their emotions and understand what they’re asking for and why and where it’s coming from and the fuel and is this a projection of themselves? Of course, we would want every human to be in their personal power, in personal development, getting this. But because we don’t teach it in our schools, you coming here to this podcast, I’m teaching it to you now as an adult.

So our job is to first regulate ourselves emotionally and neutralize the situation by looking at what are we making this mean about ourselves? What are we making the request mean about them? What are we making it mean about the teachers that are involved here, about the student? You got to clarify, what am I making this mean? How am I interpreting this request? Is it firing me up? Does it not bother me at all? Am I curious as to what’s going on with the family? Do I understand already? Do I have some perspective? Do I need to talk to the teachers about what’s going on?

What are you making this situation mean about you, about them, about the greater good here? You’ve got to clarify your own thoughts and opinions first. Why do you think they’re asking for this? Notice what comes up for you. And then you want to think about, let’s look at this from the perspective of the student, the teacher, and the parent. Why might they be asking? If we put our emotions aside just for a minute, what’s going on for this parent? Why do we think they’re asking? Or does the teacher have any information? Or what’s going on with the student?

Maybe the student has a 504 or an IEP and there is a specific conversation that needs to be had in one of those meetings. There is always a reason a parent is asking. Our first step can be to get curious and explore with that parent why the request. And when they meet with you, they’re going to feel very, very validated as to their reasons. Their reasons feel very true for them and it seems like the only response. You can let them have that opinion for a while as you’re taking it all in.

But I also want you to think about the idea that this isn’t a reflection on you as a leader. It’s a conversation to get curious about what’s coming up for them, what’s coming up for their student. And if it is feedback about your leadership, now we’re getting into a conversation around receiving feedback. And if maybe we did oversight something, maybe we agreed at the end of the year, this child wasn’t going to be placed with that child, but we missed that. And they’re together in the same class and we need to rectify it. No problem. It doesn’t mean you’re a bad leader. It means you’re a human who just had an oversight, not a problem.

Maybe we agreed that this child needs a particular style of teacher, or we had agreed this child was going to be in that teacher’s class. And sometimes it just happens. We can’t remember every little detail, every conversation we had last year. So it might be valid. The request might be simple. But when you’re coming from the place of they’re thinking X about me, or they’re judging me, they’re criticizing me, what happens is you do the flip. You also get into judgment and criticism.

You want to dig your heels in because you think they’re digging their heels in. Notice the energy, okay? So instead of responding with reaction, emotional burst of energy, you want to respond with intention. We want to look for the win-win, win-win here. Because oftentimes it feels like it’s an all or none. Either you have to hold firm or you have to give in. It feels like just give in, let them have what they want, make my life easier, they get what they want, but now everybody’s going to demand that, and I can’t possibly get everybody’s requests in, or I have to hold firm and then weather the storm and it escalates up.

It feels like those are the only two options. The empowered principle approach here is where is the win-win? Where might this be a win-win? We have to find out what they want, why they want it, what’s the emotion, how are they feeling, what is their concern? and consider the request from the lens of the parent. What might they be thinking? What might they be feeling? What do they want below the surface of the request? It’s basically they want to feel certainty. They want to be assured. They want to feel like they’re a good parent. They want to feel like they’re in the best placement possible for their child. They’re advocating for their child.

You want to consider what else the request might mean. Can you separate yourself from the request completely? If the request had nothing to do with you, what else would be going on for these people? And is there a win-win here? Sometimes, the best decision to make is to do the change and to have a rationale as to why. Other times, the easiest thing to do is to say, hey, let’s try this. Let’s try it for 30 days, and if it doesn’t work out, we’ll discuss a change of placement.

If it’s truly not working out, this teacher truly isn’t providing the service your child needs, if you’re truly unsatisfied, if the child’s distressed, at any time in these 30 days, we’re going to try it for 30 days. I’m going to observe. We’re going to check in each week, see how it’s going, and after 30 days, if it’s still not a fit, let’s talk about a placement change.

Oftentimes what happens, people are anxious because they hear rumors. about a teacher, or they’re like, I’ve heard that teacher’s mean, or that teacher’s no good, or I had a conflict with that teacher, that teacher’s terrible at, you know, parent communication. They’ll hear something from one person and extract that to mean it’s going to be a horrible year for them, for the kid, for everybody. And so they come to you in a panic.

When we give it a go, if there’s no valid reason, if there’s nothing you can really ground yourself in, and you have strong parameters about a not-appropriate request for a change in placement. You can say, let’s give it 30 days. Let’s try it. I’ll check in with your kiddo. I’ll be in there observing. If I see anything, I’m going to let you know. Let’s do a weekly check-in. If something comes up, you call me. We will be in touch. I want you to be reassured. I’m hearing you.

And we also want to give students an opportunity to try a new environment. Let’s see how it goes. we’ll do it with support, and we will give your student every opportunity to be successful, because the goal is for your child to be successful in any environment, to know how to understand and adapt and advocate, and if there truly is anything harmful going on in a classroom, I want to know as soon as possible. I will be in there monitoring. Let’s check on it for 30 days. Can we give it 30 days? How would that feel for you? What would you need to feel reassured that your student’s in good hands?

I want this to be a win-win. I want your student to be happy. I want you to be reassured that they’re safe, that they’re going to learn, that it’s going to be a great year. What will help you with that? Can we allow 30 days and see what they say? This question is typically so much deeper than what you see on the surface. It’s more about a parent’s insecurities, a parent’s fears, a parent’s anxiety, a parent’s worry. A lot of times it’s playground talk between the parents or now Facebook talk. They’re talking coffee shop talk, talking about teachers, but we want to be respectful of the teacher, the student, and give that child the opportunity to be successful, that teacher to be successful.

What would it look like if it was an amazing fit? What if this is the best fit for your child? We won’t know unless we give it 30 days to try it out. How are you feeling about that? So a conversation with a parent about a classroom placement change doesn’t have to be contentious. It doesn’t have to be anxiety-ridden. It doesn’t have to mean anything about you as a school leader, your capacity to lead, your ability to make decisions. It’s not about your expertise or professionalism. It’s about a parent who’s worried about having the best of the best for their kiddo.

When we can talk from human to human, especially if you’re a parent, you can relate as a parent advocating for your child, wanting the best for them. But what the parent wants in most cases is reassurance. I want to be reassured that this is the best place, the right place, and they want to know that they have some kind of an out if it truly is not a good environment for their student. And that’s where the win-win comes in. Let’s give it a try. Let’s assume and give positive intention and give this child an opportunity to thrive. Give the teacher the opportunity to be successful. And if we need to have a conversation with the teacher or with the student or all together, let’s do it as a team. Let’s make this decision as a team. How does that feel for you? Can you get on board with that?

So again, when you’re working with a parent, you want to look below the surface. You want to focus on how they’re feeling and how they want to feel. You want to give the teacher and the student an opportunity for success. We can’t know unless we try, but the parent needs to be reassured they’re going to be okay, they have a voice, they’re validated, it’s acknowledged, we’re hearing you, and let’s give this a go. Or you might just decide not to. You have to work with individuals, which is why it’s important to have parameters.

But in the end, you want to look for the win-win for them, for you, for the greater good of the student, the teacher, and your school at large. This is about a policy, this is about having a plan and a practice in place, but treating students and teachers and parents as individuals and having a conversation on an individual basis, it’s not a flat one-size-fits-all because there’s different reasons, there’s different emotions, there’s different fears, different outcomes and expectations. You want to get into that individual conversation to see what the next best move is.

So I wish you an amazing start to the new year. Happy New Year! Happy September! And if you’re brand new to the podcast, welcome to the podcast and congratulations! on your school leadership experience. I hope you find this podcast to be extremely helpful. If you do, give us five-star rating, give us a little comment. The more we get five-star ratings, the more we get comments, the more the algorithm allows more people to find us. I’m here to serve you in any way that I can. And as these topics come up, it is my honor, my pleasure to give you as much free coaching as you can.

And of course, you’re always invited into the Empowered Principal Collaborative. Have an amazing week. Happy New Year. I’ll talk to you soon. 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 347. 

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

Well, hello, my Empowered Leaders. Happy Tuesday and welcome to the podcast. Such an honor to be here with you guys today. I love this podcast so much and I’m so proud of it because it provides all of this amazing content free every single week right in your email box. So I’m so happy that you’re here. If you’re new to the program, welcome. And I love giving you all the best content on this podcast. It’s worth millions. And what I love about EPC is we go even deeper into these concepts.

So today I’m gonna dive right in, keep it short and sweet for you, and talk about valuable planning. You are in the thick of the beginning of the year and you are planning out your year. I work with school leaders on planning, and I think one of the things that happens is we greatly underestimate the value of taking time to plan. And I think that the way we define planning might look different, and some planning gets us results, and some planning isn’t giving us the results we want. So there’s productive planning and unproductive planning, but I wanna talk about valuable planning, what valuable planning looks like, the significance of planning and the outcomes of your planning.

So we are taught in education to set goals, very specific goals, and we put timestamps and dates on them, we write SMART goals, and we set all of these goals in education, but we don’t necessarily develop a plan for the goals. We write the goal, we put out some strategies, we hope they stick, we hope they work, and then we feel like they’re out of our control. I remember sitting in my office and filling in the blanks of the site improvement plan, but I had no idea if the plan was accurate, if it was strategic, if it was intentional, if it was going to work. I had no idea. I filled it out and I hoped it would work. I wanted it to work. I believed in the possibility of it working, but did I trust that we had a plan in place to execute the goal, to make the goal inevitable, to ensure that we could fulfill the strategies we listed out? No, in all transparency, I did not.

I filled out the site plan because, one, I had to. It was compliance. Two, I tried to make it meaningful, but you know how it goes. It’s a big document, it’s required, we have to present it to the school boards or whoever your governing board is. And then we go and we get into the weeds of the everydayness of being a school leader, and that plan sits there and we hope and pray that we’re doing right by the plan and doing right by kids and doing right by teachers, hoping that we make some gains for our goal, towards our goal, right? That’s typically how planning happens at a school.

So I’ve thought a lot about planning because it is the essential element of leadership. And when you’re writing a plan that you don’t really believe in, or you don’t feel connected to, or you’re not really sure if it’s gonna work, it makes you feel anxious or it feels like high pressure or high stakes and you’re afraid almost of this plan, no wonder we don’t like to plan. We don’t like to plan because setting goals and mapping them out, it feels constrictive. It feels scary. It feels like we’re going to be held accountable for all of those actions, like implementing all of those strategies, ensuring everybody is doing their job, basically controlling or forcing an outcome.

So goals, for me, it feels very constrictive, and it feels very high stakes, high pressure. It doesn’t feel good to write a goal that, one, I’m not super connected with or attached to, or even if I do have passion behind the goal and I believe in the goal, that I feel it’s attainable. If you have to write a goal that you don’t believe is attainable, then you’re not going to believe in that goal and the energy that you’re fueling to get to that goal, it’s never going to happen because you don’t believe that it’s possible in the first place.

So we feel like we’re on the hook. The minute we set a goal and we write out the strategies, we feel like now we’re on the hook and now we’re going to be held accountable to the goal. And if we don’t hit the goal, we fear some kind of negative consequence is going to happen, or we’re going to get our, you know, we’re going to get a talking to, or the board’s going to scold us, or we’re going to lose our job, like we worry about all these things. What I notice is that when we focus on goal creation, it creates a negative relationship with planning, with goal setting and planning. So, what we do is we set goals that are either not a stretch, we’re like, “I want to ensure we cross the goal. I want to make sure I get accolades for meeting the goal, so I’m going to make sure I set a goal that is 100% guaranteed attainable.” 

And we do that because it doesn’t require us to grow and stretch and evolve and transform ourselves or to get curious and try new ways and expand ourselves. So we set the bar low to ensure we hit the goal because hitting the goal is more important than the expansion, or we set a goal to please somebody else. The goal is really because the district wants it, or your superintendent wants it, or the school board wants it. So you set a goal, even though you don’t personally feel attached to the goal, there’s no connection, you don’t even believe the goal is possible to attain, you’re writing it for the sake of compliance and getting it done. 

But either way, whether it’s too little or too much, the goal becomes the enemy. And the reason I say that is because it’s the enemy in the sense of a too low bar stagnates us and the too high bar puts us, locks us into fear and pressure and forcing and trying to control external situations like other humans. Or we just are apathetic because we have no connection. We have no meaning. 

We don’t believe the goal is possible. So why would we put any effort into trying to hit the goal? And here’s what I want to identify. There’s a difference between a goal and a plan. So when you think about goal setting, people don’t like to goal set because it automatically makes them feel insufficient, insignificant, incapable.

It makes them feel insufficient in some way. Like here’s where you’re at and here’s the goal, but you’re not there. There’s a gap in your ability, so go figure it out. That doesn’t feel good. Or people don’t like planning and they resist the planning process because they don’t really see the value in it because we think like, well, the district’s always changing priorities or the plans are always changing or no one even follows the plan. I put so much work into the plan and nobody’s following it and the plan doesn’t even matter, so why put effort into it? Or if I plan, it’s gonna take time, it’s super tedious, all of those thoughts we have around planning.

And what I started to realize was, we don’t have a positive relationship with planning. So our planning isn’t valuable when we don’t see the value in the planning, when we don’t have a positive, healthy relationship with what planning is, what it actually is, and why we’re doing it. Now, there are people who say, I’ve worked with many clients who are like, “Ooh, I love to plan.” And what they mean by that is they love, like they put a two-hour block on their calendar and they get out their planners and their beautiful journals, or they get their computer out and they plan away. But what I see happening, the actual work that’s happening during the planning session, is that they love the idea of planning, like they like the big picture versus executing on the plan.

So they love the feeling of mapping it all out on the calendar, but they don’t necessarily love having to think through the details of all that’s required for that event or that goal or that task to be accomplished or to be completed. So it’s like, we like that 30,000 foot level where we’re planning out the big picture, but the devil’s in the details, right? And this is me, 100%. That’s how I know the leadership type or the planning type of person, because that was me. I love to get out the pretty journals and plan and map out my year from, you know, August through June. Let’s master calendar, map it all out.

But what I wasn’t doing was I wasn’t looking at those events. I was calendaring. I wasn’t planning. There’s a difference. One of the things we did was a Lemonade Social, so all the kinders would have a Lemonade Social to meet and greet their families for meeting, you know, our school for the first time. And so we did a little bit of extra TLC for our kinders, and then we had a big class posting party where we did pizzas and lemonade for the whole school. So everybody came and they found out who their teacher was and they got their class list and met their teacher and got the supply list and all of that. And then everybody got to pick a backpack because we were a school where we were gifted with backpacks.

So, but for those events to happen, you can put them on the calendar, but you’re no more closer to that event happening if you don’t plan it. What has to happen for the Lemonade Social to be executed with success? And how do we want this experience to feel for kinders and their families, for the grades one through five and their families? We’ve got to get work with Google and get those backpacks and get the pizza order and and we’ve got to get the lemonade order in, so I need to work with PTA. There are things that need to be planned out, okay?

So you can love the idea of this big picture planning and mapping out, but what I realized, mapping out is calendaring, it’s not planning. So whether you avoid the planning because you think it doesn’t matter, or you love the planning, but it’s 30,000 foot planning, the details of planning is where our brains will want to run out of the room. Have you ever had that experience where you put it on your calendar for like, Tuesday, nine o’clock, from nine to 11, I’m going to plan. And you’re so excited, and Monday night you’re like, “Ooh, I have two hours to plan, I’m so excited.” Then you get to Tuesday at nine o’clock, and the minute it comes time to plan, your brain starts to like, fidget, and all of a sudden you’re just checking your emails, or you’re going out of your office, you’re checking in with the office staff, or you’re like, “Ooh, I gotta talk to that teacher,” or you’re taking a moment to kinda check out the snack area, right? Your brain is like, “I don’t want to do this.”

And it finds sneaky little ways to distract yourself. I’ve watched my brain. I’m observing my own brain because it does this too. My brain does not want to sit down and plan because it’s like, “This is going to be tedious. This is going to be hard. It’s going to be uncomfortable. It’s going to take so much time. I’d rather be doing something else. This isn’t important,” blah, blah, blah, right? Your brain goes on and on with all the reasons. It’s like a little kid, it’s like, “I don’t want to do it.” So we listen to that, that immature part of our brain, and we tend to avoid that planning. And we’ll say, “Well, let me just put it on the calendar.”

And then I know there’s some big chunks, but what we’re doing is we’re putting the due dates and the vet dates, and then I’m planned. But calendaring isn’t a plan, it’s a calendar. So valuable planning is when you have a plan for your plans. So if your plan is to host the Lemonade Meet and Greet before the start of school, so that everybody has an opportunity to meet their new classroom teacher, you can put that event on the calendar, but I promise you it doesn’t happen if you don’t plan it. You’ve got to plan for that event and ensure that the details are in place for it to be a success.

Now, I realize that I’m preaching to the choir here, and it sounds like, of course we plan, but that’s what we do, we’re planners. And I know that you know you need to plan for the meet and greet or any event, I know that. You’re going to let teachers know, you’re going to let families know the date, the time, the location. You’re going to have to have someone buy the lemonade. You’re going to create the class rosters, campus maps. You know how to plan an event, okay? But then there’s planning, there’s the basics, the essentials, and then there’s valuable planning. This is one level deeper.

Valuable planning is planning based on the value you want to create and the experience that you want to provide. And what I mean by that is the emotional experience and the memory that it will create for those who are participating in the event. So valuable planning is like, “How am I planning to create value? What is the value that I am providing in this lemonade social meet and greet? What’s the value in it? What’s in it for teachers? What’s in it for kids? What’s in it for families? What’s in it for you?”

Now you’re looking at it and you’re actually planning based on how you want people to experience the event. You want parents to be satisfied. You want kids to be happy. You want teachers to feel connected. You want there to be a community experience. You want people to remember the Lemonade Social as the kickoff to school, as the first time they ever set foot on campus if they’re kindergartners, or the first time those parents that are brand new to your community ever set foot on your campus. You want them to have a positive first-time experience. You want the returning families to love coming back and be excited to meet you guys and talk about your summers and reconnect with their friends who they didn’t see because they’re, you know, PTA mom friends or whatever.

I want you to think about a wedding planner. Now, the entire goal of a wedding planner or an event planner of any kind is to help create an experience. It’s based on how the bride and the groom want to feel, how they want their guests and their families to feel about the wedding, to experience that wedding. They try to capture how they want to remember that wedding day.

An event planner does the same thing with any event. If it’s corporate planning, we don’t say wedding goal. They’re not setting goals. The goal is to walk down the aisle. The goal is to have flowers on the stage of the church. The goal is to have a musician. The goal is to throw rose petals. They say, “We’re planned for this. We’re mapping out a plan to execute exactly the experience that you want so that you can have the emotional memories that you desire.”

So there is a difference here. You can set goals. You can calendar those goals, but you also have to plan them with value. And in EPC, I’m going to teach you all how to plan and enjoy the process and the experience of planning, to get joy out of the actual planning itself, to create the experience and the memory. Remember when we planned this event, how fun it was to plan that event?

I want you to think about something that you love to plan, because what I want is for you to love the job of planning so you can enjoy your job. So think about things that you already love to plan. For some people, they love to plan vacation. Other people love to plan dinner parties. Some people love to plan celebrations, birthdays, weddings, baby showers, travel, your summer schedule. How much of you loved to plan your summer schedule? Way fun, right?

So I want you to think about what is the difference between planning those events that you love and then planning events and tasks at your school. My goal for you all, every single one of you who listen to this podcast, is to enjoy the process of planning. Planning and executing your plans is why you’re paid to be a school leader. Think about this. You do not get paid more money as a school leader because you work longer hours as a principal. Money is not an exchange of time. It’s an exchange of value. You get paid to create valuable plans and then execute on those plans.

If planning and executing your plan is how you as a school leader make that bread and butter, I want you to learn how to make the most of yourself as a valuable planner. I want to help you hone the skill and enhance your ability to create amazing plans that are highly valuable for you, your students, and your staff. Because you’re a leader. You get paid to be a leader. You are a thought leader, a visionary leader, a celebration leader, a momentum leader, a results leader. You create results as a leader.

First, you imagine them. Think about this. Anything you’ve ever done, it starts with an idea. You have a thought. “Whoa, maybe we should do a lemonade social. Let’s think about the value of that. Why would we want to put all this time, effort, energy, financial resources, blood, sweat, and tears into hosting a Lemonade Social for our students at the beginning of the year? What’s the value of it?” Then you start imagining, “Wow, that could be a really good thing. This is a value, this would be great, this would be easier, this would be better, this is good for kids, this is good.”

Then you’re like, “Wow, I’m starting to imagine how good it would feel to offer this. How teachers would feel knowing they’ve seen the faces of their kids. They’ve already met the parents. We’re going to calm the nerves before the first day of school.” Then you start feeling the outcome of that. Now you have a valuable plan because there’s value being generated. And then you decide we’re going to do this because of its value. And then the planning becomes fun. It becomes meaningful. There’s purpose behind it. You’re not just creating a meeting, an event, you’re creating an experience. You’re creating a memory.

So, valuable planning is about enjoying the creative planning process. It’s allowing the planning to be fun and delightful instead of ridden with stress and overwhelm and pressure and, you know, to be honest, sometimes it’s even apathy or resentment when you’re planning.

So, think about the things. Think about how you plan. How do you feel when you’re planning? What is your relationship with planning? And here’s what I’m going to leave you with. What if, instead of planning as though you were going to fail, meaning “I’m going to feel stress, doubt, fear, this isn’t going to work, we’re not going to hit the goal, why are we doing this?” Instead of planning from that energy, what if you planned as though you were guaranteed to succeed? If you were doing it for the fun of it, for the value of it, because you wanted to create an experience? How would planning feel differently if you knew that the time you’re investing in your planning is going to provide you a return on investment?

Not only that, the more you plan and pay attention to detail as a school leader in designing the experience that you want to have, that you want your students to have, your staff to have, your community to have, the more likely your plan would succeed. I want you to lead this year as though you can count on being successful and creating an enjoyable experience versus leading as though you can count on failing and missing the mark and dreading the process.

I don’t want you to lead as though planning is a chore because it’s your job to plan. I want you to take delight in planning and see it as one of the most valuable ways that you spend your time. We are going to be diving in to valuable planning in EPC. This is the time to sign up for EPC right now. The doors are closing in September. If you want to gain all of the bonus courses, I’m creating a course on this, How to Become a Valuable Planner. I’m gonna teach you this approach in a way that’s going to delight you, that’s going to feel better, that’s going to be fun, that’s going to create memories, valuable memories of highly positive experience for you, for them, for everyone.

That’s what EPC is about. We are up-leveling our game. Bonus courses are coming. They’re exclusive only to EPC members. If you want to be a part of EPC, if you want to be a part of this group where you’re going to learn and expand and grow your capacity to lead with passion, with love, with fun, with delight, with joy, with pleasure, and plan in a way that gets more done in less time, this is the day you make the decision. “I’m signing up for EPC, I’m joining, I’m getting all of this bonus material. I’m getting access to all of the Empowered Principle programming. This is my year. This is my time.”

I invite you in. The doors are open. Let’s go. I’ll see you inside of EPC. Take good care. Have a great week. Talk to you soon. 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 345. 

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

Well, hello, hello, my empowered leaders. Happy Tuesday. I hope you’re doing well. Welcome to August. Here we go. A brand new school year is underway. You are probably back at it. Most of you are. I’m inviting you into The Empowered Principal® Collaborative. Let me tell you a little bit about it because it’s so valuable. It’s so valuable that I have a hard time articulating how valuable this is. 

So let me tell you a little bit about it. We’re launching right now. You can join. We start in September. I’m doing bonus workshops and trainings throughout the month of August. So you want to be in EPC to gain access, not just to a full year of coaching, but to all of the trainings and the classrooms and the modules that I’ve created, the workbooks I’ve created. You have on-demand resources available to you for the entire school year.

You get real live coaching once a week for an entire hour in a group of people who are empowered. They are so successful, so intelligent, so savvy. They have so many resources. This is a true mastermind. I do teaching. I also do mentoring, and I do coaching. 

There’s no problem that you can’t bring to the table in EPC. If you have a situation you’re faced with, and you’re not sure, or you want to talk through it, or your emotions are running high, this is the group that helps you process so you can come to a clean, aligned decision to keep yourself, your school, your staff, your students moving forward. 

So EPC, The Empowered Principal® Collaborative, this is the second round that I have been offering. It’s magical. I have refined so many of the processes. It’s going to ensure your success.

So just to give you a couple of things, when you start EPC, you’re going to take a self-assessment of where you’re at and where you’d like to be. We’re going to create your 90-day plan, your first three-month plan to get the first three months of the school year planned, prioritized, prepared, mapped out on your calendar. 

We’re going to ensure that all the meetings, the deadlines, the appointments, all of the projects and events that are happening at your school between now and the next three months, we are intentional with how we are going to approach handling those things and completing those things and ensuring the success of those to-do items on your list. Okay? We do that. 

Every 90 days, we come up. We assess the old three-month plan. We come up with a new three-month plan. That is how you get to the year. The school year is broken down into seasons. There’s a fall season, a winter season, a spring season, a summer season. I help you break down your work into four 90-day blocks of time to make it easy, doable, simple, very clear. Okay? 

Then, we coach on time mastery, balance mastery, planning mastery, relationship mastery, leadership mastery, and emotional regulation mastery. So, there is a plethora of topics in each of the six pillars of EPC. Those are the six pillars. We master time, balance, planning, relationships, leadership, and emotional regulation. All of that’s included. 

Communication is included in those topics, building your culture, everything to do around how you spend your minutes of the day, how you spend your time, how you spend your energy, where you spend your time and attention and focus, making sure you have balance throughout your work day, your work week, your work year, ensuring you’re getting to do the things you love. 

But really, this is about building up not just your skill set, but expanding your identity as a leader. Being the leader who is successful and balanced. You can have both. Being the leader who is highly impactful but not overworked. We look for the land of and. The empowered principals live in the land of and. They have both. 

Does that mean they never have bad days? Of course not. No matter what level you are in terms of your expertise as a school leader, you still will have hard days because you’re a human. They will be different kinds of hard days. In EPC, we teach you how to emotionally and mentally navigate demands, pressures, really crisis situations, really unfortunate happenings.

You are in the business of humans and lots of things happen when we’re in the business of humans. I teach you and the group supports you in how to navigate the ups and the downs and the twists and the turns of school leadership.

If ever you were going to join any kind of leadership, mentorship, coaching program, this is it. I believe we go below the surface. There are the surface things you need to do. Calendaring, master scheduling, teacher observations, hiring, firing. I teach all of that. I teach all of the doing parts and all of the planning parts and the management and all of that.

But we go below the surface to the core. This is about you designing the experience of school leadership that you want to have. It’s about giving you the power back into your own hands so that you are the one who’s designing the experience for you and for your school. You really have so much more power than you think you have. 

I just got off the phone with a new client who just joined EPC. She is trying so hard, and you all are trying so hard. But this woman has children at home and she’s working until 10:00 p.m. at night. The minute she puts her head down on the pillow, her brain’s thinking about all of the work that’s still there when she has to get up and go to work the next morning. 

For most of us, that is not the school leadership experience that we want. It’s not what we thought we signed up for. even if you did know it was going to be a lot of work, it doesn’t mean you want to be working your evenings away from your family, your children, your partner, your spouse. We want you to feel that you have some agency and control over your professional experience.

Because I’m a certified life and leadership coach, I help you blend and balance your life with your profession. You’re one human. There’s one human experience. You can’t separate professional development from personal development. It’s all development. It’s human development. I want to help you expand to experience the greatest experience that you can as a school leader. 

So if you’re interested in EPC, you can sign up one of two ways. You can pay in full. It’s $1,997 for the entire year. You get access to everything for 12 months. Or if you’re not able to pay in full, that’s fine because now this year I’ve added a payment plan option. You can do 10 monthly payments of $199.70 per month for the first 10 months. It’s a 12-month program. So the last two months you’re not even paying because you paid it off. 

I’m not even charging additional for the payment plan because I want it to be equal access. You can either pay in full and be done or you can make payments of $199.70 per month for the first 10 months of the 12-month program. Okay.

With that said, we’re going to dive in to your identity, and I’m going to talk about the essential mindset required for you to continually grow and evolve yourself. One of the things my master coach teaches me is that my potential will never be tapped because I will always be striving to grow and evolve and expand and develop and enhance myself as a human in my life until the very last day I’m on the planet. 

So I want to expand my growth as quickly as possible so that I can experience all that I want to experience as much as possible while I’m a human on the planet. I want this for you too. If you’re dissatisfied or unhappy about any aspect of your life, professionally, personally, whether it’s relationships or friendships or parenting or your spirituality connection with yourself and with a higher power of your understanding. 

If it is your finances, if it’s colleagues at work, or maybe it’s your physical health and your physical fitness that you’re not satisfied with. Perhaps it’s feeling unbalanced between work and home. Perhaps it is when you feel imposter syndrome or when you feel like you’re being a fraud or somebody’s going to find out that you’re actually not really that qualified or really not that good enough to be a school leader and we’re worried about being uncovered as insufficient in some way.

No matter what your thoughts and feelings are about yourself as a leader, what we’re going to do, and we’re going to go deep into this in EPC, is we’re going to talk about how to continually re-identify yourself, to evolve your identity, your self-identity, and just put it on repeat. What else can I do? What else can I grow? 

Not from the point of I’m not good enough, but from the curiosity and the excitement about what else? What else? What else? That is a different energy than I’m not good enough, so now I need to get to the gym. Or I’m not disciplined enough, so now I need to eat less. Or now I’m not capable enough, so I need to stay at work longer. 

Not in a punishing, self-derogatory, neglectful, almost, kind of way. It’s in this where I’m at right now, I’m being the best version of myself today as I stand right here right now, and what else? I’m curious. How much better can it get? How much more impact can I create? How much less can I work and get the same amount done? Is it possible that I can do observations in 30 minutes instead of 60? Is it possible that I can get emails done in 30 minutes versus two hours? Is it possible that I can check my email less often?

I’ve got people who are checking email twice a day. That’s it. 15 minutes in the morning, 15 minutes in the evening. They’re not spending hours and hours on the email. They’ve developed systems for the email. Some people do it three times a day. Beginning, middle, and end. That’s more comfortable for them. Totally great. Add it into your schedule. 

But what would it feel like to be a principal who wakes up knowing what you’re going to do in the morning, how you’re going to approach a day, loving your job, feeling energized, enjoying the people you work with, having a set of standards and boundaries that you live by that feels aligned for you, a set of standards where people are engaging with you at work, and you’re getting what you need to get done because you know how to delegate, you know how to manage your time, and you value having a full life, including your personal life, being a robust, exciting, and engaging life outside of work. 

I’ve noticed myself, I love what I do so much it’s easy to just lean on that for my pleasure, but I have to put limits around that and say yes, I know you love coaching. You study coaching, you coach yourself, you coach your clients, you’re into your business, and I want you to have this other experience outside of coaching, outside of being a CEO of a business and an entrepreneur. 

Learning about the business and the back side of the business where you’re learning and growing and evolving the business, and learning and evolving and growing as a coach. There has to be more to life than just my job as my identity. 

So, you currently have an identity as a school leader. I want you to think about your character traits, how you identify right now, because there are certain beliefs that you think about yourself. You have certain strengths, you have certain weaknesses, you have an identity of what you’re capable of, of what you believe you can and cannot do, what you can have, what you can’t have, what you can learn, what you can’t learn, what you think you can handle, and what you think you can’t handle. 

You have an identity of who you believe you are right now. Now, as you’re thinking about that, when we go out and we interact with other people out in the world and at school, we introduce ourselves and describe ourselves, and we engage with other people based on how we currently identify. 

You might say like well, I’m a new principal. I’m a brand new principal. I just don’t really know anything. I’m super awkward, super confused. I’m really overwhelmed. I don’t think I have what it takes to do this. You might identify that way. You might be a seasoned I know what I’m doing. I know where I’m going. I have this all mapped out. I’ve done this before. You might be in your empowerment and in this big energy space that’s calm but also confident. That’s assured but also curious.

Or you might be somewhere in the middle where you’re like even though I’m seasoned and still fumbling bumbling and I really don’t know what I’m doing, and that’s okay. Or you might be very upset that you’re seasoned and you’re still fumbling and bumbling because you’re a human on the planet, and you think by now you shouldn’t be. That’s a different energy. It’s a different identity. 

So we say things like, we’re young or we’re veteran or we’re experienced or we’re inexperienced or we’re good at this but we’re not good at that but I  know how to do this and I don’t know how to do that. Our brain goes to very all or none thinking, it’s this or this, that or that. We have evolved our self-identity. 

You’ve evolved it a million times, from the time you were born, from infancy, from not being able to talk and walk to being able to talk and walk, from being somebody who doesn’t go to school to somebody who does go to school, from being this kind of a student, maybe you were able to get your grades up, or maybe you had great grades and then you were like I want to just play, take a break from doing all these grades. 

You had identities as a student, you were elementary and then you were middle and then you were high school, then you were college, right? You had identities in your family, you had identities with your friends. They have evolved. 

But what I notice in the world is that we feel like once we become adults that we stop evolving. We stop evolving our identity. That’s not true. We’re still able to tap in, and I think actually at a much more rapid pace because we have adult skills and adult thinking and we have these tools, these self-coaching tools, to manage our thoughts in our brain and create awareness, to create intentional thoughts and beliefs about who we are and who we want to be and direct our momentum and energy and attention and focus in that way, right? 

So sometimes our self-identity grows out of challenging times. When you’re challenged the most is when you have a moment, it’s a moment where it’s, who do I want to be in this challenge? Who do I want to be in this moment where I did not even imagine that I could handle this and yet here I am?

I have coached so many school leaders that called me because they were facing something they couldn’t imagine that they would ever face. School shootings, lawsuits, just criminal activities with members of the district, all kinds of human wild things that happen in schools. No one thinks it’s going to be them until it’s them and then they’re in it and they freeze because their identity wasn’t I can handle anything that comes my way. 

It’s not to say that when something big that shakes your identity, that rattles it, when that comes along that you should be able to know how to figure it out on your own. Not at all. In fact, that’s when I say you leverage support the most so that you don’t have to carry the burden all alone. 

Now, your identity also is challenged on purpose throughout the course of your life. So you might have identified as a really good writer and then you got to college, and you had a really tough English teacher who gave you critical feedback and you got a C for the first time in English. You’re like what just happened? I’ve skated through high school. This person, they’re mean, right? It challenged us. We like, it jolts us. 

Or like you thought that you were a really fast runner and then you went to a cross country meet and got your buns kicked and came in next to last or something, right? You were like, whoa. It’s almost like an identity jolt, right? Where you get shocked. 

Or maybe you identified as a really bad driver and then somebody told you were amazing. Or it’s usually what it is, is like we think we’re good at something and then somebody mentions otherwise. They’re in the car. They’re like hm, you swerve a lot or you change lanes a lot or you don’t use your signal or you drive too fast or you drive too close to other people or who knows what they’re going to say. But you might be like no, I’m a totally excellent driver. Then somebody says hm, I don’t know about that. Right? 

But we receive throughout our lives all kinds of feedback and comments and opinions from other people. If that matters, if their feedback matters to us or their opinion catches our attention or their comment triggers us in some way and it kind of hooks us in, that has us questioning our identity and our thoughts about ourselves. We’re like wait a minute. Who am I actually? Am I this? Am I not? We start to doubt and question. That process is not a bad thing. I actually invite you to do it on the regular. Who am I? What do I believe about myself?

I like to think about it in terms of where am I limiting my own desires, my own wishes, the things that I want. Do I believe I’m capable of running an entire high school, being the lead principal? Am I capable of being a district level leader? 

Some of you listening, you’ve been in principalship for a while, but you can’t imagine going up to the district level. Why not? What’s the block? What are the thoughts? What is the identity that is constricting you from expanding into an identity where it’s possible for you? Where in your identity do you believe you can’t handle the next expansion? What is fearful about that expansion? Right? 

So notice when people trigger you or they have you questioning your identity, that’s not a bad thing. What I do invite you to do is to discern for yourself. If somebody tells you that you’re a terrible driver and you think about it and you take it in, it’s like oh, I see what they’re saying, but that doesn’t make me a bad driver. I’m still a good driver. I just drive fast. Or I just don’t always use my blinker. It doesn’t mean I’m a bad driver. That’s an opinion. 

You can hold firm to your identity if it serves you well, if it feels good. If you have an identity that feels bad, things like, I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t think I can keep up. I can’t seem to meet deadlines, or I’m always running late, or I can never leave on time from work. That’s a big one. People come in and they’re like, I want to leave by 4:30 or I want to leave by 5:00. I’m not leaving until 7:00. I guess I’m just a person who can’t manage her time. See, the identity comes up. 

If the identity you’re attaching to right now does not feel good, that’s because it’s not true. So if you’re not feeling good about who you are, we want to start there. What about you is sufficient enough, is good enough? I find it so fascinating that we can be going along our merry way and somebody can make one comment, say one thing, and it can shake all of our positive identity. 

But on the flip side, when someone makes a comment that invites us in to a more positive identity because it’s questioning one of our limiting beliefs, we resist it. It’s like we’re holding on to the smaller identity because it feels safer. It’s our wubby. We’re like no, don’t take my blankie away. I want this identity. It feels comfortable. It feels safe. It’s what I know. But does it expand you? At what cost are you holding on to the old identity? 

Because we carry around all of these old identities without even questioning it. We just put them in the backpack, and we put it on and we go until somebody questions us or something jolts us and challenges us and shocks us into having to re-identify and re-question. We don’t really take the time to stop and contemplate what the identity is.

The way you do that is to ask yourself how am I feeling? What’s coming up for me? What do I think I’m good at? Just explore it. That’s what we do in EPC. Our job is to evolve ourself, our skill sets, and our mindset, because we’re really doing it anyway. We’re just either doing it subconsciously, or we’re doing it consciously with intention. 

We’re exploring it out of curiosity and delight and wonder and fun and just exploration and to push ourselves like I want to know what I’m capable of. Let me go explore that. How can I expand myself? There’s times for rest. I’m definitely a proponent of not always expanding. Not everything needs to be rough or hard or challenging or difficult. You can have moments of resting, coming up for air, but you’ll know when it’s time for an identity shift because you’ll feel a little bit restless or you’ll feel like you’re spinning, like you’re stuck and just on repeat. 

So we are always evolving our skill set and our mindset. It’s just a matter of whether we’re doing it with awareness and intention or not. We’re letting it just evolve on its own. It kind of just is sitting there in the background and maybe it gets poked once in a while. 

But the way that you expand your impact, your productivity, the more fun you’re having, the more time, when you expand what’s possible for yourself, that is when you expand your life, the experience that you’re creating. Because the more often you intentionally redefine your identity, the faster you’re able to reach goals. 

This is how I see it working. Think back to when you were a kid, and you didn’t know how to ride a bike without training wheels. Your self-identity as a three or four or five-year-old included identifying as a child who couldn’t ride a two-wheel bike. But you saw your older siblings and their friends out riding two-wheel bikes, and you were so badly wanted to ride a two-wheeler bike, but you didn’t know how. You’re like, I’m not capable of that. It’s not possible for me. I don’t know how. So even though you wanted to identify as a two-wheel rider, you didn’t identify that way.

But as of today, I’m going to guess that most of us at some point did learn how to go and ride a bike with two wheels. Today we can identify as a person who can ride a bike. So you had an identity shift, an identity expansion. 

How did that identity expand? You redefined yourself. Your identity evolved. You redefined who you were and what you were capable of doing. You expanded your skillset, which was the actual physical riding of the bike, but first you expanded your mindset. People will say like, what comes first, the chicken or the egg, the skillset or the mindset? Like, I think, this is what I would argue, that the mindset came first. You have to decide in your mind. I’m going to learn how to ride a bike. I’m going to learn how to be a two-wheeler biker. Right? 

You decide first and then you go out. That generates momentum. The decision and the commitment generates the momentum to then get on the bike and try and fall and try and fall and try and fall. You keep getting out there because you desired it so badly. The identity began when you decided that that desire to be a skilled two-wheel bike rider, that you wanted it so badly. Even though you lack the skill, you were committed to learning the skillset because your mind had decided this is what I want. This is who I’m going to become.

So your desire to identify as a bike rider outweighed the discomfort of getting up and getting the bike and going outside and having the training wheels on it and being embarrassed. Then having your sibling run with you in the back and hold it. Then you fall and scrape your knee, get all this, and then wobbly, wobbly, don’t know how to steer. Then you get going and you bump into the back of the garage wall or something. You get out there, and you do it. It’s worth the cost of admission. It’s worth the discomfort, the falls, the frustration. 

In fact, if you think about back then, you wanted to go out and ride. You would bug your older sibling, come out and help me with the bike. It was fun to go outdoors, to practice that bike, even though you weren’t proficient at it. You loved learning how. 

I remember this with driving the car when I was, I think in Iowa, we could get our permits at like 14, but my dad would take me in a parking lot. Just like, it was sheer excitement. It was exhilarating to learn how to drive, much more excited than I am about driving now. Now I’m like oh, waste of time, got to run errands, but I’m grateful to have my car. I’m grateful to be able to go and that I have the skill set. I take it for granted sometimes. But in the beginning when we’re new and we’re learning it and we desire it so bad, we’re so hungry for it. It’s so fun to learn. 

That’s how I want school leadership to feel for you. I don’t want you to feel overwhelmed thinking you have to learn it all at once. I want you to come into EPC and be like, this is going to be so fun. I want to learn these skills because it will feel so good to have them. I want to be able to take advantage of being an empowered principal and just being in that energy and in that identity because that will just be who I am and that will be my life. 

But right now, the majority of principals that I talk to are overworking, overexerting themselves, overextending. Their time management’s kind of out the window. Their self-identity feels lost because they only identify as an employee who’s working their tail off for a job that’s never done. 

Think about this. The same is true in teaching. It’s true in school leadership. It’s true with any identity that you want to create for yourself. You have the capacity to continually evolve your identity in every aspect of your life. You can expand your identity as a wife, a husband, a partner, a spouse. You have the capacity to evolve your identity as a parent, your identity as a sibling, your identity as an auntie or an uncle or a cousin or a niece or a nephew or a friend or a colleague.

You can expand your identity with your relationship with yourself and your spiritual understanding, your relationship with anyone, your colleagues at work, the people you lead. You can expand your identity in terms of your impact, your influence, your legacy. You can expand your identity when it comes to skill sets.

Maybe you want to learn how to play pickleball. That’s all the rage, right? I want to learn how to play pickleball. Let’s go play. How do we do it? Oh, we have to be new. We have to be awkward. We have to feel that we don’t know what we’re doing. We have to go out there and do it wrong and get this coaching and get the skills we need, but we go out there because it’s fun. The learning is fun. Identifying as a person who loves learning, that can be an identity, and that will take you very, very far.

So you have the capacity to go from a person who skips lunch as a principal and then wonders why they’re crashing at 2:00 or 3:00 into being someone who prioritizes lunch because it sustains your energy and focus throughout the day. You can go from identifying as a person who doesn’t do any movement. There’s no time for walking or hiking or running or working out into I’m going to prioritize a little bit of stretching or yoga or taking a morning walk. I value physical movement. 

You can shift into somebody who values that for yourself. You can go from thinking you’re not a funny person. You’re not impactful to the learning the skill of being humorous, to being funny, to having fun, to being a little lighter. You literally can identify as an impactful leader first and then go and learn the skills to become impactful. 

So for people who join EPC, they don’t join it because they’re proficient and empowered and they don’t need any help or they don’t want any coaching. They come in deciding I desire to learn the skill. I want help. I want support. I want to be the identity of an empowered principal. Do you know what empowered principals do? They join EPC. 

So I’m going to be that person. I’m going to be that person right now today. I’m not going to wait until next week, next month, next year. I’m going to decide this is the experience I want to create for myself. I want to be in a community that supports me, that guides me, that can coach me, that can mentor me, that can give me the tools and resources I need to live the life and have the school leadership experience that I want.

Redefining yourself is a matter of deciding who you want to be and then taking actions to obtain those skills that confirm for yourself that you are that person. So you identify your desires, identify the identity you want to have, and then commit to that identity. 

Even if you have to role play right now. Who would I be if I were this empowered version of me? If I were a financially stable person? I know finances are a big concern for a lot of people. I coach a lot on money. If I want to be in the identity of somebody who makes the money I want to make and is a wise spender and a wise saver and I spend and save according to my financial values and my financial goals, if I’m that person now, how do I make decisions? What do I invest in? Where do I invest my time and my money and my resources and my focus and attention? 

Money is just like time. Minutes are like dollars and dollars are like minutes. If you’re really good at time management, apply your time management to your money management. If you’re really good at money management but you need time management, budget minutes like you budget dollars. You’ll find it very fascinating. They’re very similar. They are two forms of currency that we use to leverage to create results and desired outcomes for ourselves. Okay? 

So the more often that you ponder your identity now and the identity you want next, not from a place of insufficiency. That’s the secret. You have to be good with where you’re at now and just explore, not because you’re desperately trying to get out of the space you’re in right now but because you’re just curious to know what else is possible.

I would like to be a principal who leaves by a certain time so that I can go home and get a walk-in or be with my kids or spend time with my partner or go to the gym or meet up with friends. I want to be that person who has a robust life outside of my job and I’m creating all the results that I want at school. I want to be that person. Do I think it’s possible? Maybe yes, maybe no. 

The only difference between having it and not having it is believing that it’s possible. Because when you believe it’s possible then you put systems and structures and planning into place. You map out your time differently and your finances differently in order to be the person who has both. Okay? 

So what is the identity that you want to develop for yourself this coming year? Because your identity is simply what you believe about yourself, what you believe you’re capable of learning, doing, experiencing, handling, creating, having. What is the identity you want to develop for yourself? What is one aspect of your identity that you would like to enhance? What do you want to be skilled at that you don’t feel skilled in right now? 

This is the conversation that we’re going to be having on the first day of EPC, which begins Wednesday, September 4th. We’re going to use a tool to determine your current identity and then select an area of identity expansion. What’s super fun about this is that expanding your identity, it doesn’t have to take months or years. It can happen very quickly when you’re focused on it. It doesn’t have to be hard. It doesn’t have to be tedious. We want it to be fun and light. That’s what makes it worth doing. 

Just like getting out there and learning to ride the bike or learning how to drive, and you want it so badly that the learning process is equally as fun as having the skillset. Learning, the eagerness, the hunger to learn how to do it, that’s part of the fun. 

Then once you’re out riding your bike, you’re just going for it. You feel so free and independent. Then eventually you get a little bit older and you’re like, that’s not a cool form of transportation. Now I want to learn how to drive a moped. Now I want to learn how to drive a car. Right? We evolve even our identity as a person who moves around in space and time.

So when you join EPC, you’re going to receive this tool that I designed called the Wheel of Work that helps you articulate your current identity and map out the next identity expansion. Then from there, I will teach you the foundations of an empowered principal identity, which is time mastery, planning mastery, balance mastery, leadership mastery, relationship mastery, and emotional regulation mastery. Those include conversations, how to communicate, how to converse with people, how to set up and have conversations around culture. 

Culture is just what people feel and think about themselves as a collective. We’re going to talk about influence and impact and legacy. It’s the full package in EPC. This is the time to join. I can’t wait to meet you. This is going to be an epic year. Bring your colleagues. Let’s expand. Let’s have fun. Let’s go. I will see you guys in September. When you sign up in August, you’re going to have access to the bonus classes. So come on in. Let’s go. I’ll see you guys soon. Love you all. Have a great 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 343. 

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

Well, hello, hello, hello, my lovely empowered principals. How are you today? Happy Tuesday. Welcome to the podcast. Hey, you guys, if you’re new to the podcast, come say hi. Join the Facebook group and say hi, or drop me an email and say hello. You’re new to the podcast. Follow me on social media. Come on Instagram, Angela Kelly Coaching. You can find me on Facebook personally and professionally. Come on over and mingle. I want to get to know you. 

You could also leave a review. That helps me. I look through the reviews. If you leave a review for the podcast, I try to shout you out personally here on the podcast. So, I love meeting new people. I love meeting new leaders or aspiring leaders. You all inspire me so, so very much. 

Here we are in July. We’re ramping back up as school leaders, and we’re thinking about next year. We’re preparing. We’re planning. We are getting master calendars scheduled away, making sure everybody’s hired and in the right spot, making sure the schools are cleaned and ready for teachers to come back into those classrooms. You are thinking three months ahead of your teachers, and July, in your mind, you’re already back to school. 

So, I want to talk about you, not your school, not your vision, not your teachers, not your students, not your district admins. I want to talk about you going from being a new leader to a good leader to a great leader to an exceptional principal. 

First of all, I’m going to invite you very quickly into the Summer of Fun Challenge because we still have a couple weeks left. It’s so easy. If you’re on Facebook, all you have to do is search for The Empowered Principal®  Facebook group. You come into the group. If you are a school leader or you’re an aspiring school leader, you’re welcome to join the group. I do a little bit of an intake form because I don’t want robots coming in and ruining our space or spammers and all of that or people soliciting you. I don’t want that. This is a safe, clean space.

So, if you are an actual school leader, you’re an aspiring school leader, answer the three questions, come on into the group, and all you have to do is share photos, pics, posts of your summer fun that you’re having. Just share it in the group, and you can also cheerlead other people on. Every time you either post or comment on somebody else’s, your name is entered multiple times into a weekly drawing. For every single post and every single comment, you get one entry into the drawing for the week. 

It is the easiest way to manifest some significant cash into your life and also to check out what’s going on in the world of the Empowered Principal® programs and EPC. Because there is a $50 gift card from Amazon, which I love me some Amazon. It saves me so much time.

More importantly, the real power, the real money that you’re winning is 90% off of the EPC program for one full year of coaching. It’s normally $1,997. The winner, the weekly winner of SOF, will receive 90% off. So you are getting a full year of coaching for only $197. I think that is insane. It’s just enough to have some skin in the game, but you are going to gain so much. It’s insane. This is an epic program. 

I’m going to talk more about it in a minute, but what I want you to know is that you’re basically going to win $1,850 because you’re getting the $50 Amazon card, but you’re basically saving $1,800 in the Empowered Principal® program. You can’t lose. 

You can come in for a year, check out EPC. If it’s amazing, you can stay. If it’s not your cup of tea, I understand. I’m not everybody’s cup of tea. But for those of you who are interested, this is the perfect way to sign up and be eligible to receive 90% off your entrance fee. 

So I want to let you know that I’ve done one round of EPC and after that round, I’ve really reflected and enhanced the experience for everybody in the program. Because I want you to come into this program trusting and believing that you’re going to receive the support that you need. We’re going to celebrate your wins.

We’re going to track your progress in a way that inspires you, not in a negative way. It’s for fun. We’re doing all of this to celebrate and win and be like oh my gosh, I hadn’t realized how much I’ve grown in this area. So I’ve created some really simple ways to track and celebrate your progress. 

But what I’m going to be doing more in EPC than I did last year was teach. I’m going to teach you, mentor you, teach you the skills that you need to be an empowered principal so you know and you learn how to create the exact results that you want for yourself and your school. Okay? 

All right, let’s dive in. I want you to think about the experience that you have had in the past as you transitioned from teaching to administration, or the experience that you anticipate having as you transition from teaching to administration. I will share my experience with you and then I want you to feel free to share yours in the Facebook group, or you can share with me on social media because the stories of transitioning into leadership, they’re astounding to me, but they’re very consistent and there’s a lot of similarity and there’s a pattern, some commonalities in which we all experience. Okay? 

I was tapped on the shoulder as a kindergarten teacher. You should be a teacher leader. You’ve got great energy, great charisma. Parents love you. You get amazing results with your kids. Your classroom management’s on point. You’re doing all of the initiatives in the classroom. You’re a shining example. 

I didn’t want to go into school leadership, but my superintendent at the time was very charming. He was very charismatic himself, and I really, really followed him. I believed in him as a leader. I trusted him, he was, had his eye on the ball. He knew what he wanted, and he knew how to sell people on themselves. So I really believed in myself because he believed in me, and he sold me on me. 

So I went ahead, and I already had my master’s in education. I went ahead and got my credential in administration, but I really didn’t want to go into administration. So I was holding on to it for a while. I became an instructional, well, first I was a reading specialist. After I was in kindergarten, became an instructional coach. I did that for a year, and that was the year that I started to transition my thinking. I started to visualize myself as a potential leader. 

I was working with one of my best friends, and she was the principal at the time. I was the instructional coach, and that was the closest I’d ever been to a leadership position. So I was watching her do the job. I was listening to her process how she was doing the job, listening to all the highs, the lows, the wins, the losses, the good, bad, and ugly. But there was a moment, I can remember it, where I was standing. I can remember what I was wearing.

I remember thinking to myself I might be able to do this. She kept saying, “Oh, for sure. If I can do it, you can do it.” Everybody tells you that, but you’re like that doesn’t sound as reassuring as you might think it sounds. If I can do it, anybody can do it. It’s like yeah, but you already did it, and I haven’t done it. So there’s still this gap between where I’m at and where I would like to go. There doesn’t appear to be a bridge between here and there. I feel like if I take the first next step, I’m going to fall all the way down into the canyon and never return.

So I watched her, I listened, I really started tuning in. But what I did was I kept envisioning myself as a leader. I kept believing that it was possible for me to learn how to be a leader, for me to grow into being a leader, for me to handle it emotionally, mentally, just intellectually, skill based wise. I went from zero belief in myself to like 10% belief to maybe 25% belief. 

Then I got to a point where I was right around the 50% mark. I was like I’m pretty sure I could do this. I might fail. But what I do know is that I’m strong, I’m bold, I will figure it out. I’m confident in that I will figure it out. I’m not confident in my leadership skills, but I’m confident that I will do my best to figure it out. 

When I thought that thought, that was when I tipped over into being ready to apply, which is exactly what happened. So the spring came, positions started opening, I was asked to apply. I was so scared. Gosh, applying for leadership positions in front of people I’ve worked with for 15 years, it felt scarier than talking to strangers for some reason.

Because it felt like I couldn’t fake it until I made it. I couldn’t enhance. I couldn’t say something that wasn’t true. Not that I would ever do that. But you know how when you’re in an interview, like you’re trying to put forward your best foot, and you want to make yourself sound as enticing as possible? But these are people who knew me super well. So there was no fudging it. 

I was so nervous. I applied for an AP position at a middle school because I thought it would be easier to start out as an AP than to take on a full school by myself. I didn’t get that position. My people had to call me and give me the news that I, they thanked me for the interview, but I didn’t make it to the second round. I was devastated. I cried on the couch after school when I found out. 

I mean, it was a few days later, but I remember thinking like why did they put me through this? That was just so unnecessary. But after the tears, I was like okay, what did I learn in that interview? What worked? What didn’t? What would I say or do differently next time? 

My friend who was the principal when I was her instructional coach and I was applying said, “Just tell them what you know. Speak from your heart. You’re an educator at heart. You know what you’re doing. You’ve got this. But speak to you. Be you in that interview. Don’t try to tell them what you think they want to hear. Tell them who you are and what you know and how you’re going to bring you to the table.”

I applied for an elementary position at a brand new school. They were opening a brand new school at a brand new site with all the construction happening, and I got hired for that position. The superintendent who had encouraged me to come to the surface had an amazing leadership development program within our district, which is one of the reasons I got tapped on the shoulder for because I had participated in that two-year leadership development training program. 

Which I think was like beyond his years of wisdom and vision at the time. I didn’t know of any other school who was offering like a leadership development to develop leaders from within the district to retain the district and to have leaders who taught in the district who had already some clout and some understanding and some relationship and connections and just a deep understanding of the community, of the district, and the operations of our particular district. So it was very avant-garde to me at the time.

I went through that program. I ended up landing this position, but then that superintendent left and another superintendent stepped in. I was very scared because I didn’t have my person. This new person was coming up. I knew this person. He was an internal hire, but his style was very different. What ended up happening was we are so happy you’re here, Angela. We’re so grateful you’re taking on this brand new school as a brand new principal. Like, way to go. That’s very brave of you. Here are your keys. Here’s your office. Bye. Have a nice life. Go figure out life. 

So as you can imagine, I tried to fake it. I tried to pretend I was a leader. I tried to talk like a leader and walk like a leader and dress like a leader. That definitely did help. It boosted my confidence to a point. 

But the truth was, I didn’t have the skills to be a leader, especially to open a brand new school, to create community, to create a collaborative environment, to create a culture from nothing to something, to develop the school site council and to develop the ELAC program and to develop all of it. The PLC foundation, all of it was brand new. Not to mention, I was also doing construction management. For those of you who’ve ever had construction on your campus, you can relate to this. 

I was in over my head. I was assigned a mentor that was required to take me through these modules that I had to go through, but that program wasn’t exactly what I needed. Fortunately, my coach at the time, my mentor, she had the skill set to actually coach me and guide me. Otherwise, I’m pretty confident I would have resigned from the position and gone back to teaching or instructional coaching within the first two years of the job. I’m almost positive of that because it was so hard. But I had her. She kept me going. 

All of this to say, I figured it out the hard way, learning by doing. I felt like somebody had thrown me into a dryer, and I was just bouncing around trying to figure out life. It was learning by fire hose. You can learn that way, by the way. You can do that. It’s very painful, but you can do it, which is what I did. 

So here’s the thing I’ve noticed about school leadership. I have yet to meet a leader in my professional world or now as a coach. I coach people all across the country. I have yet to meet a leader who can refute that there is a leadership development program in the sense that when they hire you, they say, “Hi, welcome to the team. We are so happy to have hired you. You’re such a great match for us. I can’t wait to get to know you better and to work with you. Here’s your campus, here’s your office, and here are your keys.” Now that’s where most of the onboarding stops. 

But imagine, imagine a world where they say, “And we’re going to fully onboard and train you. We’re going to teach you and provide you with all the skills you need to navigate this job. We’re going to teach you how to people manage, how to time manage, how to maintain a balanced lifestyle, how to effectively plan and map out your calendar for the short and long term, how to handle parents, how to navigate students, how to emotionally manage other people and yourself so that you can stay grounded as you work through difficult situations.

“We’re going to teach you how to student manage, manage behaviors, manage IEPs, facilitate staff meetings, develop effective professional development meetings. We’re going to teach you all of this. We’re going to teach you how to be an instructional leader while also balancing the work of being an operations manager of your school.”

Because that’s what the job description is. Please do everything all at once. Be an expert at it all. That’s the job description. Can you imagine if this type of training was included in your new position? 

I wish I could do a raise of hands. How many of the listeners of this podcast have had that experience where you’ve been fully onboarded, fully supported, fully trained, fully mentored, fully coached, and you were given permission and grace and space to be new and awkward and clumsy and not know what you’re doing, to not know the answers, to gradually work up into the position, to get it right, to learn deeply. 

I don’t know, if we did a show of hands, how many people have had that experience, that kind of mentorship. Where someone says hey, here is the real truth about this job. The real truth is this. There’s always going to be too much to do and not enough time. There are always going to be conflicting priorities and demands coming at you from all directions. 

You’re going to be pulled in many directions. You’re going to feel overwhelmed almost all of the time. There’s always going to be pressure to do more, to do it better. But you know what? That’s okay. We’re going to support you in handling that. 

It feels like a dream come true. It feels like the Disneyland of school leadership, which is what I’m trying to create over here. No one offered that to me. They said, thank you so much. We needed you to fill this position. You have fulfilled a need of ours. Here are your keys. Go enjoy your life with a smile on your face. Be the face of the district. Please don’t ask us any questions because we’re too busy figuring life out for ourselves. Go do you. You need to know how to do this. Bye.

It’s like oh, okay. Wow. Let me evolve my self-concept in about two days. That is why I created EPC, the Empowered Principal® Collaborative. I needed to fill a gap. There was a void. Look, teachers, they have all kinds of resources, instructional coaches. They have grade level support. They have PLCs. They get mentors, buddy teachers, right? But we, we get the job, and then we’re expected to do the job.

You might get sent to a conference. Oh, hey, go learn how to improve school culture, or hey, go improve your practice in diversity, equity, and inclusion. Go to a weekend workshop and come back and then have that fixed. How are you supposed to do that? How do you integrate a conference into who you are, into your identity, into your practice as a school leader? 

I want you to think about the business of education. The business of education is to continue to learn and to develop and to grow. When you’re a brand new leader, there is an entirely new skill set that you’re going to have to learn. You’re going to have to decide which skill you’re going to focus on because there’s too many. You have to break it down into chunks. 

You learn a particular skill this year or this quarter or this semester. Build up your muscles one skill at a time. There’s just too many to learn at once. It’s going to require you to constrain and focus your priorities to certain skills.

You’ll also be learning by doing. There’s no way not to do that. So you’re still going to drink it from the fire hose. You’re still going to have things you don’t know. You’re not going to be able to just not handle things you don’t know how to do. 

You will grow multiple facets of your leadership repertoire, but you want to grow as quickly as possible the skill sets that require you to build the foundation of leadership that you want. Focus and constraint is the fastest way to do that. It’s how you keep your overwhelm in check. When you try to learn all of the skill sets at once, you’re only going to expand your overwhelm. 

Hey, I also want to say this. If you’re a new leader, you’re not going to feel confident if you’re in a new position. Even if you’re a leader who’s been in a different position, maybe you went from AP to principal, or you went from principal to district level admin, you’re not going to feel confident. You can’t. You can’t have the identity of a skilled school leader when you’ve never done the job before. 

You’re going to feel a certain amount of uncertainty and awkwardness and just unsure about yourself because most people aren’t getting trained. You’re going to have to learn by doing in order to figure it out. That’s normal. The goal isn’t to avoid looking or feeling new. There is no faking it until you make it when you have no idea what you’re doing.

The goal is in your finesse. It’s how you handle being new. It’s how you handle the feelings of uncertainty and unknowing and doubt when people question you or expect you to know, and they ask you and they put you on the hot seat and you don’t know. It’s not that you don’t know or the goal isn’t to know. The goal is what do I do, how do I handle, who do I be, how do I show up when I don’t know, when I am new. 

So whatever stage you are in the educational leadership experience, I want you to know it’s okay to feel like you don’t know what’s going on. If you’re aspiring, you’re not going to know how to get that job. If you’re brand new, you’re not going to know how to be good. If you’re feeling good about yourself in some areas, you’re not going to know how to make yourself great.

If you’re feeling great and you want to up-level and you want to expand and evolve yourself to exceptional, that’s going to require a stretch. There are gaps in learning. There are gaps in who you are now and where you want to be and who you want to become. That is a continuum of school leadership development that never ends. 

You want to feel good about yourself as a leader. You want to make a bigger and more profound impact as a leader. To expand your identity as an empowered principal, an empowered leader, an exceptional leader, it requires you to expand your skill set as a leader. We need leadership development. It’s a requirement for us to grow.

This is why so many people drop out of the position because they don’t have the leadership development that they yearn for, that they crave, that they want. The best of the best leaders will leave if there’s no leadership development because they’re in the position to grow, to evolve, to expand themselves, to learn. We don’t just drop learning at the door when we step into leadership. But for some reason, that’s how the current system is set up. 

As I said before, teachers have systems built into place. They have mentors and buddy teachers and grade-level collaborations and PLCs and instructional coaches to help them with whatever questions they have and guide them in their professional development journey. You create professional development experiences for your teachers.

But how many districts do you believe are offering PD days that focus specifically on leadership development in addition to teacher development? There might be some, but it is not a mainstream practice. I want to make, it is my mission to make leadership development a mainstream practice in every school community. 

If you want to become a school leader, EPC is where you learn the skills and surround yourself in the energy of fellow empowered school leaders. So if you’re new to school leadership and you don’t know where to start, EPC is where you learn to prioritize and focus your attention and your energy. 

If you feel like you’re a pretty good principal, maybe you’ve been doing this a couple of years, you’ve got some tools under your belt, but you’re working yourself to the bone to try and get it all done. I know many of you are doing this. The EPC is going to teach you how to be accomplished and balanced, to get the same amount done in less time, to add fun to your calendar, to not overwork, overexert, overschedule. 

If you’re feeling good about yourself as a principal but you want to up-level, EPC is going to teach you how to step into that next version of yourself and to evolve your self-concept. Even if you’re feeling exceptional and you want to make an even bigger impact, EPC is going to show you how to expand your legacy as a principal in your current position or how to expand and evolve into a higher level position where you create even more impact.

This program covers it all. The Empowered Principal® Collaborative is a comprehensive container. I have studied this for the last eight years. I cover everything, and I also offer individualized coaching and support. I’ve created the very container that I dreamt of having for myself. This is it. 

By you participating, by you being in this community, you contribute and you expand and enhance the leadership development of this program. You enhance the quality of leadership development by participating and adding the wisdom, the knowledge, the skills, the insights that you’ve learned. 

I’m not the guru here. I am the person who’s developed the container to hold these beautiful and deep and rich conversations about evolving our identity as school leaders, empowering ourselves, empowering our staff and students, enhancing the school leadership experience so we can enhance the teaching experience so we can enhance the student experience and the family experience. 

We want to turn the narrative around. Right now, education has a very negative narrative. Teachers are unhappy, students are unhappy, parents are unhappy, communities are unhappy, school leaders are unhappy. We want to enhance the experience. We want to look at the journey of a student, of a teacher, of a support staff, of a principal, of a parent, and ask ourselves, how do we enhance this experience to make it the best experience possible? 

So this year, for EPC, one of the things I’ve added to make it more accessible and easier for every principal who wants to participate is I’ve set up a monthly payment plan option to make it even more accessible for all levels of leadership. So you could either pay in full and just be done and have it for the full year. If that’s not an option for you, you can break the $1,997 into 10 monthly payments of $199.70. There’s no additional fee if you decide to break it up into monthly payments. Not a problem. It’s never been easier to join. 

This is your year. Come on in. You can be the mentor and the mentee because this is a mastermind experience where we all share. I teach, but I also coach. You also coach. You also teach. This is a mastermind experience. Come on into EPC. There’s never been a better time. It’s upleveled. It’s more magical than ever before. With you being here, not even the sky is the limit. So come on into EPC. I can’t wait to meet you. Love you all. You’re amazing. Go have an empowered week, and I’ll talk to you next week. Take great 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 341. 

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

Well hello, my Empowered Leaders. Happy Tuesday and welcome to July. So you were probably off last week. I hope you were out having fun, celebrating Independence Day. Maybe you were traveling or maybe you were working. I hope you were out having fun. That’s the name of the game. Have a little bit of fun, get some rest, rejuvenation, relaxation in over your summer. 

I hope you are playing in the Summer of Fun Challenge with us in the Facebook group. People are winning prizes. They’re winning spots in the EPC program for 90% off of the regular price. The regular price is $1,997. You can pay in full, or you can do 10 monthly installments of $199.70, and you can get 12 full months of coaching. So come on in. We’re having a blast and I hope you are enjoying your summer. 

Now, this topic is going to help you plan your professional development days that are coming up, whether they’re in the end of July or into August or maybe even September. But I want you thinking about this now. 

I actually coached a client on this topic back in May. She was doing an end of the year professional development training. It was basically like a training that the district had created, and she was given an agenda. She was given a PowerPoint, and she was told here are the things you have to talk about. This is what you have to teach. 

So it made me think of all of you. When you get an agenda for professional development handed down from the district, you may or may not feel exactly aligned with that agenda or with the content or with the time. Like in this case, she was told 90 minutes on this, 45 minutes for that, an hour for this and whatever. So she felt a little off with that, and we had to coach on it. 

So I want to talk about this because as you’re coming back to school for the new year and you’re planning, you’re planning your professional development. Many of you are going to be expected to facilitate professional development days for your teachers. You want them to be effective. You want them to be efficient, and you want them to have a desired outcome. 

You want them to be productive, to create a result, to create an outcome, whether that’s a plan, whether that’s actual work that gets hammered out during that day, whether it’s information and content that teachers need to know. You want to be able to facilitate and administer a professional development that you believe in, that aligns for you. It can feel like you’re being told what to do and how to do it. That can feel a little bit stressful. 

So with this time of season right here, you are doing a lot of planning. You’re planning out your vision for the school year, your site plan for the year, the goals you want to have, the topics you’re going to focus on. So I think this is a really good time to have this conversation. 

Now, when it comes to professional development, you need to keep in mind, at the end of the day, you’re investing time and energy. You are also being given the currency of your teacher’s undivided attention, right? This is a gift. You’re getting their time, their attention, their energy. We want to leverage professional development days as opportunities to inspire people into progressive action. We want to empower them, to motivate them, to inspire them, to ignite them in a way that provides long-lasting outcomes for that investment of time and energy and attention.

If you have professional development agendas being handed down to you, you can find a way, I call it the land of and, where you can find a way to take that agenda and make it your own. So the first thing you’re going to want to ask yourself is okay, what are my thoughts and opinions around this agenda item? 

This is typically what happens. We are told the agenda, we’re given the agenda, we’re given the PowerPoint, and we’re like ugh. This is so dry. This is so boring, or this isn’t what I want to talk about, or I don’t like the way they did this or said this, or I don’t think it’s going to take me that long. Or wait, this is going to take me a lot longer than that. We have our own reaction to the professional development content and materials that we’ve been given. 

Check in with yourself on that. Don’t just be disgruntled and then go into your PD day. Because if you’re not happy with the PD, it is not going to land with your teachers. It’s going to fall flat. You’re not going to be happy. They’re not going to enjoy it. It will not be productive. You will have wasted an opportunity. They’re giving you their time and attention and energy. You want it to be productive for you, for them, for the greater good. Okay? 

So when you think about the district giving you this content, sit with yourself for a minute and ask yourself what is the intention behind this PD? What does the district want as an outcome for this professional development day? What’s the intended outcome here from their perspective? Then ask yourself from your perspective, what’s the outcome for the teachers? Ultimately, what is the outcome for students? So think about the outcome of the professional development day from the lens of the district and yourself and your teachers and students. Okay? 

What comes up for you when you’re thinking about the professional development. When you’re looking at it from all these lenses, you’re going to start to see there are commonalities. We do actually want the same thing. Believe it or not, we are all on the same team. Teachers want to have a great year. They want their students to have a great year. They want there to be progress. They want to feel good about themselves as teachers. 

You want them to feel good as teachers because when they feel good about themselves, they teach better. When they teach better, students learn better. When kids feel good about themselves as students, they learn. When teachers feel good about themselves as teachers, they teach. When you feel good about yourself as a leader, you’re a better leader.

It matters how people feel about themselves, about the work they do, and about the people they’re working with. That’s the belief triad. You have to believe in yourself, believe in others, and believe in the work, in the process. Okay? 

So the intention behind the outcomes matter. You want to understand what is the intended outcome here? What am I trying to do? What am I trying to communicate? What should people know or understand or be able to do? What work, what productivity or actual tangible outcomes are we creating here? Or is it more of a mindset, or is it more information sharing? Is it an understanding that we’re trying to communicate? What is the goal? Okay? 

Think about what’s coming up for you and how you would deliver this content. What is a way that you can use this agenda but deliver it in a way that feels most aligned for you, most productive for you, and kind of curate it to the needs of your site, of your staff. You know your staff. You know what they need. You know what they don’t need. You know how to communicate with them. You know what lands for them and what doesn’t. You know the style that they prefer.

You can, and you actually have so much more agency to create the professional development experience because that’s what this is. You’re providing an experience for your teachers with an intended outcome, and you do have more agency than you realize. You can decide here’s the energy I want in this room. 

Here’s the style I want to facilitate this meeting in. I want teachers engaged and active and working and co-facilitating and discussing and time for thinking, time for planning, time for dreaming, time for imagining how good things can be this year. Talking about what is working just as often as we’re complaining about what’s not. Taking one problem and digging in deep versus trying to cover 10 miles wide worth of problems that we’re not going to be able to get to all of them. 

But this has to be customized and individualized for you so that the PD makes a difference, has an impact, and you want to take into consideration your teachers. 

So I have seen this on, I think I’ve talked about this before on the podcast, but it’s relevant to this topic. I see so many people on Facebook saying, “Hey, I have to fill a PD day. What should I do? What do you guys do? Who do you hire? What book should we read?”

I want to offer this. There is a difference between asking other people who don’t know your school and don’t know your staff and don’t know what the needs are and don’t know where you need to grow or what discussions need to be had where we need to expand ourselves, where we need to push ourselves, where we excel. Nobody out on the internet knows your school and your needs better than you. 

I invite you before you go out and ask 2,000 people’s opinion or 10,000 people’s opinion or bazillion people’s opinion about what your staff should do. I would invite you to ask yourself, what do I believe my staff needs? What do I believe I need? What do I believe my school needs? What’s the one next thing that we need?

I’ve also noticed this. When I was a principal, it was here, read this book. Here’s a great article. Here’s a resource. Okay, thanks. I would read it, and I would be inspired for five minutes, 10 minutes a day. Or I’d read the book, and it would land for me. But I didn’t oftentimes take that book and truly integrate it into my identity as a leader.

The same is true for professional development. It’s like here’s some information. Here’s a one-day course. They hear it. They feel inspired. They’re excited. They get some work done, or there’s great conversation, or maybe we problem solve a little bit. But there isn’t an integration unless the integration into the identity of the teachers is intentional, is a part of the process. 

So any kind of professional development you have, whether it’s a book or a resource or a program or a curriculum, there’s a new math curriculum, and we’re going to cover that. The reason those PDs tend to fall flat is because one, it’s just a one-way street where you’re like, here we’re walking through the book and here’s that, and there’s some questions. But until teachers get into the curriculum, they can’t integrate their expertise as a teacher of that curriculum until they’ve done it, until they get their hands into it. 

If you have initiatives that are rolling out from top down, which tends to happen. The district says this is what we’re going to do. This is what we’re going to focus on. You’ve got to go tell your people all the things. This is how we’re going to do teacher observations. This is how we’re going to do data assessments or data conversations or PLCs. You’re held accountable to rolling that out. You want to ensure that you’re not just talking at them as a one-way street. 

How can we make this integrative? How do they integrate the understanding of the purpose of teacher observations or the purpose of the PLCs or what’s in it for them when it comes to PLCs? How do we integrate PLCs into a teacher’s identity? I am a teacher who understands, who understands PLCs, understands the process, understands the value of them, the significance of them.

I get value from them. I contribute, and I receive. I find PLCs valuable. It’s an integral part of my identity as a teacher. That is different than giving them a handout on what PLCs are or read this book about PLCs or here’s an article on PLCs and here’s why they’re important. 

Do you see the difference? So as you’re planning this summer, and I know why we don’t do this. We don’t do this because it requires our brain to grind a little bit. We have to go dig deep. We have to think deeper. When we’re thinking about intention, the intention means the benefit, the short-term benefits, the long-term benefits. But what we’re trying to do is change the identity of our staff. We’re trying to evolve their identity, to expand them, to inspire them, to transform them, to enhance their identity as a teacher.

So they feel more capable, more confident, more certain, more assured, more skilled in themselves. They trust themselves. They believe in themselves. They can identify as a teacher who knows what they’re doing, who knows what to do when they get stuck, who knows where to go to get help when they get stuck, who feels confident in handling anything that comes their way and knows where to go when they don’t know how to handle what comes their way. That’s what we want. 

So as you’re planning PD, number one, I’m going to be hosting some planning sessions in August. You want to join EPC to be able to be a part of those bonus planning sessions. I’m going to be holding them in August because I want you to be able to either plan professional development that is productive and successful with intention, or you can map out your vision for the year and your top priorities. We’re going to be doing both of those kinds of workshops.

So come on into EPC so that you can learn how to plan effective PD. You can map out your staff meetings. You can map out your vision for the year. You can map out your top priorities and get in alignment with where your district is. 

I teach a process on how to align to your district’s initiatives so they feel good for you and how to present them to your teachers and help your teachers get in alignment so that we can see all on the same team. We actually do want the same things. We want to feel good about ourselves. We want to feel good about our students and the work that they’re doing. We want to feel good about the process and the approach that we’re taking with our school. Okay? 

So if this resonates with you, if it feels like something you want to participate in, please join EPC. The link to join is in the notes. You can either pay in full. I’ll put a link for pay in full. Or if you prefer, you can do the monthly payment plan. They work out to the exact same dollar amount. So there’s no penalty for paying monthly. You pay in 10 months, $199.70, and get you the $1,997 for the 12 months of coaching. 

So come on in. We’re getting started in August. I can’t wait to see you there. Have a wonderful week. Have fun planning, have fun celebrating, enjoy your summer, and come on into the Summer of Fun Challenge. We’ll see you guys soon. 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.