Hello empowered principals. Welcome to episode 351. 

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. 

Angela: Hello, my empowered leaders. Happy Tuesday. Welcome to the podcast. I have a very special and dear guest on the podcast today. Her name is Wendy Cohen. She is an AP in New York City, which I think is amazing. She has been working with me for how long, Wendy? 

Wendy: Since spring of 2020. 

Angela: Yes, we have been on a journey together, and we’re so excited to have this conversation with you all today. Wendy has had some amazing gains, amazing wins, and we’re just here to talk about it and share with you guys the power of coaching, the beauty of coaching. Really, what I invited her on the podcast, in my heart, the intention of this podcast is to celebrate her success. She has so many things to share with you today, and we’re going to dive right in and talk about it. 

But really, my intention is to celebrate her life, celebrate her professional life, her personal life, and to invite you in, all of you as the listeners, into celebrating because this can also be your experience and her experience is just one of many empowered principal experiences. But hers has been so delightful and such a joy to witness that I wanted her to share her story with you in her own way, in her own words. So welcome to the podcast, Wendy. 

Wendy: Thank you. thank you for saying that. It is felt and deeply appreciated. Yeah, I think it’s really just a continuation or a summary of our last three coaching sessions that we’ve had toward the end of June and into July and integrating a lot of things that we’ve coached on over four years, but in particular, in the last six weeks or so. 

Sort of this theme of facing new challenges and feeling like you’re a novice and you’re brand new at something and growing through it and how your identity shifts through that process. Then as you move through, feeling proud about your progress. And, like you said, taking the time to celebrate and reflect and feel like we don’t do that enough as school leaders or in general. So it’s welcome as an opportunity to take a little bit of time to look back on the journey and feel like, wow, look how far we’ve come. 

Angela: Yes, it really is. I am actually working on that myself and going deeper in planning with intention my life in all of the aspects in business, in professional, personal relationships, health, just anything. I’m really shifting from this idea of like having a goal to creating a plan because a goal, to me, is like a to-do list. It’s like you hit it or you didn’t, you check it off or you don’t. It feels like it’s an experience that you have for a moment when it’s a goal, right? 

We’re going to talk about this because Wendy did something new in her life this year that it was a goal, but it really turned into a journey and into it’s an evolution. It was more of a plan and an identity shift. But a goal is I’m going to run this race. Then you check it off. I ran the race. I crossed the finish line. I started, I finished, I crossed it off. That’s a goal. That’s exciting for that moment that you crossed the line or maybe that day. You bask in the glory and then it’s gone. 

But the journey and the intention and the identity shift and the plan of becoming a runner who runs races, that’s a different approach to your life planning. So can you tell them about your experience? 

This has just been such a fun thing to talk with you because I am a former runner. I used to run long distance, short distance. I was really into racing, but I did not start running until I moved to California. So I did not start running until my mid-twenties, but it became such an integral part of my life until my body decided that running was maybe something I wasn’t going to do on the daily. But tell the listeners your experience, Wendy, of becoming a new runner, being a runner.

Wendy: The connection with coaching on the school leadership side and coaching in the personal side really came through in this running journey because there are so many lessons that I learned through coaching as a new leader that I applied to the running journey. Now having checked off my goal, but also gone through this whole transformation through the training months that I’m now bringing back to school leadership as well. It’s sort of feeding this cycle of building a new sense of self and this new identity and new confidence as a result.

But going back to the beginning of the running journey, I have so many friends and family members who run. They love it. It’s their life. My husband is a runner, and I’m someone who never even ran the mile in high school when we had to do the fitness test every year. I faked it. I walked, and I never got it.

Angela: I got sick. 

Wendy: Oh no.

Angela: It really made me sick. I ran, and it made me, they made us run like our senior year a mile. I was like I can’t do that. I physically got sick. 

Wendy: I never got it. It was just not something that I was interested in. Or when New Year’s resolutions come around, everyone’s like, this is the year I’m going to run a marathon. Never really crossed my mind to even add that to my list of goals or things that I was interested in. But this year I reconsidered it, and I said, you know what? This would be a way to challenge myself. Go outside of my comfort zone. Try something new. See if I like it. I might surprise myself and actually find out that I really enjoy it. 

Also to be able to have this shared interest with those in my community. My husband, my in-laws, his sister, it was part of this race. When they signed up for this 25K, now they signed up for it last year and ran in 2023. I said, nope, this is not the year for me. I’m planning a wedding. I have other things I’m working on. Not the time, but maybe next year.

So January 2024 comes around, and they say, we’re signing up for that race again. Last year you said you would think about it. I said, you know what? Let me give this a try. In the past, I would have thought there’s a steep learning curve. I have zero confidence as a runner, especially around people who do have experience with this. 

That feeling of being new at something and just being scared of that uncertainty, the lack of confidence, there’s certain lingo and jargon. I don’t know what intervals are. I don’t know what tapering is. I don’t know how to do the electrolytes and gels. There’s a whole world, a whole subculture of running that was unfamiliar to me that I was really afraid to explore, I think, because of that new feeling. This year I said, you know what? Let’s try it. 

Being new at something in general can be scary. I remember when I was a new AP, being very impatient with that beginner mindset and being new at something and wanting to know how to do everything right away, wanting to go from A to Z overnight and realizing that you don’t start by running 13 miles. You start by maybe walk and run one mile and that you do have to work to get there. So this being new as a runner, I thought, well, let me take what I’ve learned and try and apply it, go outside my comfort zone, and make it an opportunity to grow and expand.

I think when we talked about it in coaching, it was really a conversation about the fear of being uncomfortable, being worth going through that because the things that you might be missing out on and taking a risk knowing that it could be like an assessment of what the outcome might be on the other side of that risk. Am I going to feel embarrassed? Am I going to fall and scrape my knees? I did the fear of all those things. 

It’s worth going through that process of feeling uncomfortable because of what can happen on the other side. I think in becoming a new runner, I said, you know what? Let’s take this risk because it probably will be worth it. Let’s see what comes out of it knowing it will get easier. Knowing I’m not going to know how to do it right away, knowing I have to start with one mile and I would work my way up. 

But through coaching was able to sort of see how in the past, my experiences as a new leader and being new at things, being newly engaged, moving to a new apartment, all these things we’ve coached on over four years of becoming an AP, getting engaged, buying a car, moving to a new apartment, getting married, all of these experiences when I was new or in transition and realizing what could come on the other side of it.

I said, you know what? Let’s commit to this training cycle. Let’s go through these 14 weeks, pretty much 16 weeks with a little bit of a base building in the beginning there. I said you know what? We’re going to jump in, and we’re going to try it. 

Angela: It has been so fun to watch you go through being new in multiple facets of your life because with full transparency, being new feels scary. I think it’s scarier for adults than it is for kids. Like we do feel scared at certain things as a child in our lives, like maybe the amusement park felt scary for the first time or going to somebody’s house you didn’t know, those things. 

But also I think about kindergartners when they walk into a room, they are so excited for the new. They have a sense of humor with the new. Like if they don’t know it, they don’t feel embarrassed. They just ask, what’s this? What’s that? Can I touch this? Can I do that? Bringing that lightheartedness, that sense of humor, just being like, oops, sorry. I didn’t know. I’m new, right? Like having some levity around being new.

You did kind of a trail run. It wasn’t just, so when you said you fell down and scraped your knee, it’s not like you were just running and tripped. It was you were probably on a trail where there was some rigorous hiking or all of that.

But I just love watching you be new over and over again because there’s still that ledge o, as you’re making the decision, there’s this teetering of like, am I going to jump? Am I going to take the leap? Am I going to try the new thing? The fear never stops coming up. 

But what I’ve witnessed in you, Wendy, is the ability to like, I recognize this stage. I know that this feeling is temporary. I know that after I jump, after I say yes, and when I do commit to trying the new thing, being in it and falling and scraping, those things aren’t actually as bad as we anticipate they will feel because you know you’ve handled it time and time again. 

Buying the new car, that actually felt like one of the scariest things you ever did, right? Then the moving was another big thing. Then getting married was a huge deal for you. The process of allowing yourself to be a bride while maintaining the integrity of your school and leading a school, especially in a high power, high stakes situation, state, school, all of that. 

Being new in all these facets has really just blossomed you into a person. I’ve seen the identity shift in I can do hard things. I can handle anything that comes my way. I’m really okay with being new. Being new isn’t a bad thing. It’s actually what I want. I want to be new at new things. 

Wendy: Yeah, and through all of those experiences and coaching the mindset shift from this is so scary that I’m going to shy away from it to it’s an opportunity for growth and an opportunity for expansion and up leveling. This idea of if you’re not growing, you’re staying the same. I actually don’t want to stay the same. I actually do want to grow. 

Knowing, as you said, it’s like phase one of a transformation is oh, this feels a little sticky. Uh-oh, this is uncomfortable. But knowing that it will get easier and being able to take the time to look back and reflect, even on the little gains. Like when on my little running app, I would see it went from one mile to three miles and then from three to four. I was like, wow, I can run a 5k now. I couldn’t even run a 5k a month ago. 

I think seeing that little bit of progress and taking the time to look and see where you’ve come from through this conversation, even, and all the things that we just mentioned through what we’ve coached through over these last couple of years. It’s a nice reminder of like, I remember when I was in the new phase. Even going back to being a brand new teacher, a first year teacher. Like, yeah, like that was a hard year. I got through it. I even ended up becoming a school leader after all of that growth. 

Angela: Yes. I love the part where you were talking about if you’re not expanding, if you’re not trying new things, you’re stagnating. I think there’s a place where people are like what’s too much? Like, am I just going to live in discomfort every single day in order to grow and evolve? You can if you want to. But sometimes we reach a plateau where we take a moment and we look around, and we’re like, I know what I’m doing. I’m not new right now. Things feel really good. 

I say get on that little, I picture like floating out down the river, right? You’re in your floaty. You’ve got a refreshment in hand and life is so good. Take that all in. That’s a beautiful space to be in it. I don’t think consider it a plateau at all. I consider it the celebration phase. 

But if you only — like there is a moment where you start to feel stagnation. It shifts from like everything’s going so great. I love my life. I love my job. Everything’s going great. I think we’re wired as humans that dissonance comes back and there’s this little urge or this like desire for something new or different. 

We actually do want things to be new and different and exciting and challenging and fun. That being new is not all scary and bad. It’s actually engaging and exciting, and it’s curiosity, and it’s growth. So there’s both. There’s the growth. There’s running up that mountain, literally in your case, right? Running up those trails, falling, scraping. It’s that journey and that discomfort and the grit and the strength and getting up earlier, like feeling tired the next day, but feeling good tired. There’s growth. Then there’s the celebration. But eventually you’re right. That tickle of desire for the next growth does come in.

If you’re afraid, if that calling makes you feel afraid of the growth, there are people who literally stay in the same job at the same place for 40 years. that’s all they do. If that continued to feel good for 40 years, do it. But the empowered principals that I attract into my world tend to be people who are like this is fun for this amount of time. Then what else? And what else and what else and what else.

Wendy: Yeah. As I’m getting to know my own tendencies, we’ve coached over the years of how do you know that it’s an authentic one? How do you know when you’re just feeling kind of pressured, or you’re feeling that rushing pace? I remember moving into this apartment and being like well, in three years, we’re going to be buying a house. So I don’t want to buy a couch because we can’t get furniture now because I’m going to have to get new furniture. 

You’re like hold on. We just finished one transition and you’re already rushing forward to the next one. I had to learn that was one of my tendencies of okay, let me sit and bask in the moment of now of being in this apartment and not worry about is the couch going to fit in my house? Because the future is coming up down the line. 

I think going through the new leader process, that was a push year in the professional sphere. Going through the engagement and the wedding planning process, that was a push in my personal life and in that atmosphere. There was a reason that I didn’t sign up to do that run last year when I was invited to because I think I knew that I was expanding in a different way and was wanting to really be present in that aspect of my life.

In this newlywed year, deepening my connection with my new husband through this running journey, it felt like an aligned thing to do in this year, in this time. But notice I’m not searching for a house. I’m not looking for a new job. I’m not trying to do some of these other things because I think we can get on the roller coaster of what’s next, what’s next. 

Sort of finding the happy medium between I love my life, I’m soaking it all in, things are perfect and I love and accept myself just as I am now. I want to grow, I want to expand, I want to up-level. When the time is right, I’m going to have another push year in some aspect of my life to evolve myself and evolve my identity. I do have future goals. I would love to own a house. I’d love to start a family. 

Professionally, I may not be an assistant principal forever. When the time comes to make a transition, I think we’ll be coaching on it, but I’m sure I’ll be feeling into the timing. Does this feel aligned in this moment? 

For me, this year running, it was the time to finally give it a try after seeing other people go through it and knowing that it wasn’t always my challenge or it wasn’t always the right time. This did feel like an aligned time to take on this type of challenge and this type of personal growth. 

We’re school leaders. We’re kind of on the type A. We’re kind of in the personal development world. We’re life coaching all of our staff members on a day-to-day basis. We’re growing small humans in our schools. It’s very tempting to sort of sign up for every challenge and want to sort of fast forward the process on some of these changes. 

In this moment, I’m grateful that we’ve coached so much on the slowing down and the checking in and the why does this feel like the right time versus is it really coming from within, or is it an outside pressure? Is it judgment of myself? Is it perceived judgment from other people? Trying to really turn off the outside noise and really listen to my why and coming from within from me of why is this the time and what is my reason for wanting to do this? 

If it was just to be able to post a picture on Instagram at the end, that was not a good enough why to be coming home after a long day and putting on the shoes and going. You really have to want to do it for a compelling reason to sign up for a 25K trail race, which actually ended up being 17 and a half miles, not 15. But you don’t just do that because you feel like it or because you want to post a picture at the end. 

Knowing your why and knowing that it was an aligned choice, I think through coaching and being able to feel really confident with the decision helped me to be successful through the whole training. Not just checking off the goal, but evolving through the process of going through it.

Angela: I really love, and I want to reiterate something that you said where we are people that love the drive of the thing, right? We are goal-driven. We’re plan-driven. We are achievement-driven, accomplishment-driven. what burns us out faster than anything or what feels actually less fulfilling is to try and have push. I love how you said that like a push area. Like to be pushing in all areas of your life and being new in something all around in all aspects, that is what thins out the process. 

I love your like alignment with yourself. Where is the area I’m going to push this year? We don’t need to push in everything all at once. That’s where you get overwhelmed and discombobulated, but it ultimately, it discourages you. It defeats you. You feel deflated because you can’t be growing in every area all at once. But when you focus on one, it impacts all of the others. That is so, so powerful.

I wanted to reiterate that because we think we’ve got to be healthy and we’ve got to be the best parent and we’ve got to be the best partner and we’ve got to be the best principal and we’re going to do, that’s like New Year’s resolution energy. Then it fizzles because it’s too much. The brain’s just like, I can’t do, the body can’t do all of this. 

But when you focus on with intention, what’s my one area of growth that I want for me that matters to me this year? Maybe it is health. Maybe it is professional. Maybe it is personal. Being decisive about that and sticking to it, knowing there’s plenty of time and space for the rest of it.

Like last year was about the wedding and being a principal and being a partner. But the wedding was the focus, the new. Before that, it was the move. Before that, it was the car. Before that, it was the AP. Now this year was the running. This was the focus. Then you’ll choose something next year, which I think is, it’s a brilliant way. 

This is the concept that I teach in the Balance Mastery Program where balance looks different every single year, every single three-month plan you create, depending on your focus for that time of your life. 

Wendy: Yeah. I 100% agree with, as you said, the connections between these different areas of your life. Last year as I was planning a wedding, I was thinking to myself, if I can evacuate my building for a fire drill and have 500 people get out in four minutes, I can figure out how everyone’s going to get from the ceremony to the cocktail area and then from the cocktail area to the reception. So having gone through that growth as an AP helped me on my journey of the wedding planning. 

Now in this running journey saying to myself, well, I had to figure out how to do time management when I was planning a wedding on top of my job, and I had to figure out how to be more intentional with my time. Now I have to figure out how to fit training for this run into my life. 

Well, let me take what I learned through my wedding planning journey, through my new AP journey, and apply that to how am I going to fit this running training into my schedule. It all is integrated, and it all does apply. Because, at the end of the day, I’m one person, and I have 24 hours in my day, whether I’m wearing my AP hat, my wife hat, my runner hat. It did seamlessly kind of dovetail on all of the coaching we’ve done around expanding my concept of time and not having that scarcity mindset approach to time. 

Because training for a half marathon for 25K, if you’re running 25 miles a week, you’re dedicating four, five, six, seven hours, and that’s not even including eating enough, stretching before and after, all those extra showers, changing clothes, all the other things that go into it. 

I don’t think if we hadn’t coached around time so much when I was a new leader, or if I had gone through some of the other transitions that I’ve gone through, it would have come as easily with this new challenge in the running sphere, just knowing that so many of those coaching principals apply and crossover.

Angela: Yeah. Let’s talk, I was, you read my mind about the time management thing because people are all sitting here listening like, oh my gosh. Like I’m barely able to figure out how to fit work into my life, let alone any other kind of personal project, whether it’s for pleasure or just personal growth or gain. Just can you tell them the process of how you personally were able to do this? 

Wendy: In my 2023 fitness life was not a runner, but liked to think that I was someone who was kind of active. I like to go to Pilates. I would squeeze that in probably three times a week. So I was already making my health a priority to some extent. Now this was like expanding to another level of commitment to physical health. 

The good thing with growing as a runner is that you do have to start small, and that forces you to not overdo it right in the beginning. If I had tried to run five miles in the beginning, I probably would have gotten injured and would have gotten discouraged and just quit. So knowing that all I had to do was go out and do one mile, and it would take 15, 20 minutes and I would come home after. That was all I had to do. It’s kind of hard to talk yourself out of 15 minutes.

 Like if you can’t find 15 minutes for yourself in the day, it’s an opportunity to reflect and see like, how long am I on Twitter? How many hours a day am I looking at emails? How many hours a day am I spending doing things that maybe could be delegated or could be reallocated in another space and time or just done more efficiently? Staying up late instead of going to bed early and then being able to wake up early and having that time. 

So starting out small with that 15 minutes, I said okay, we can get one mile in. I would do that largely on the weekend, but I did try and incorporate it probably two days a week during the work week as well. Then as the months go on, when you start going from one mile to two miles and two miles to three miles and building upon it. 

Knowing that I didn’t have to go home and carve out 15 minutes, but I had to go home and carve out 45 minutes, I would sort of backwards plan and say okay, if I know that I need to run for 45 minutes after work, I’m not going to have time to meal prep on that day. I’m going to make sure that I take care of that on Sunday, or I’m going to make a double batch of this the other day. 

As that grew and then you’re doing eight, 10, 12 mile training runs, and that was like just a Sunday thing, I really made it a point to carve out that time for myself on Sunday and try and front load other things during the week, on the weekend, trying to just be more efficient. Working as a team with my husband made a big difference with that as well. I knew which days he was training, which days I was training. 

We tried to collaborate, but it did kind of force us to zoom out and take a bird’s eye view of the week and where my time was going and do a little audit of some of the ways that I could take time back. Whether that was leaving earlier so I didn’t have to sit in as much traffic and getting that time back when I came home, or perhaps some of the meal planning stuff for the weeknights or going to bed earlier so I would wake up earlier.

It was a little bit challenging in the beginning, but I’m actually shocked at how much time you have if you are intentional with it. When you are very honest and self-reflective, your phone does tell you how much time you spend on apps. I don’t need to be spending an hour on Twitter every day. That hour could easily go towards running, even if I’m using it professionally, even if I’m using it as a healthy outlet and not something like a phone addiction situation. It’s not an essential. 

If it’s a priority, and it’s important to me, and my values are I want to focus on my health and I want to accomplish this goal, and I want to be committed and dedicated to the training plan that I’ve made, you set up a calendar, you write the miles on it, you cross out each day and you go through and you say well, that was the priority. It wasn’t a priority to talk on the phone, to go on Twitter, to stay up late watching a show.

I was able to check in with my values and audit my time and find the time. Just the nitty gritty, knowing that I was going to be building it out over the months, it also helped. Starting small and then okay, what else can I reallocate? What else can I move around? How else can I find more time in my day and building it over the months? 

By the time I was running for four hours on a Sunday, when the race was done, I was like, I just got four hours back. Now look at all these things that I could do now that I have all this time that I’ve created and all this space in my schedule, just from it’s like a secondary bonus of having gone through this process of learning this new point of view about how I want to spend my days, my weeks, my months, and really that becomes your life. 

I mean, that’s my life over the course of 2024 is I spent all that time dedicated to improving my health, to running, and opens up so many new possibilities moving forward that I wasn’t even anticipating that as like a secondary bonus of this whole training cycle. 

Angela: Yeah, here’s what I hear. The theme that I’m hearing is once you decide, you make a decision that something is a priority and you put that first on the calendar. You’re like this is, it’s a non-negotiable. It has to go on the calendar. Then you reallocate, you redistribute the other tasks. 

What you find is that what you end up shaving off are things that were just kind of consuming time versus being the most intentional about the time. Again, there’s nothing wrong with being on social media or watching Netflix or any of that, as long as you’re doing it with intention, and it’s healthy. But when you do have a goal or you have a desire or you commit to it and you prioritize it. 

When that goes in first, it feels like it’s almost seamless or magical that like everything that needed to get done still gets done. But now this running thing is just a part of your new identity. It’s a part of who you are as a person. I’m a runner. It goes into my calendar. I’m a school leader. That goes into my calendar. I’m a wife. That goes into my calendar. 

Now, what I want to say is for those of you who are principals, spouses, maybe you’re caretaking for elderly family members, or you have young children, and you’re listening to this and we’re talking about prioritizing physical health and running or some kind of movement, physical movement in your life, but you are caretaking for young children, older adults, or you are prioritizing other things in your life. Here’s what I want to say. 

Again, be intentional with those priorities and do not use Wendy’s experience to beat yourself up. If you are prioritizing childcare or healthcare of a loved one and you’re thinking to yourself, well, I’m lazy or I’m not managing my time well enough because I’m not running on top of all of these things.

Remember, your push year, what you’re doing is you’re choosing to build up your relationship with your children and your parenting skills, maybe your spouse and your relationship and co-parenting with your spouse or caretaking. I’m just thinking of a couple examples here, but there’s a lot of things that we have to prioritize in our lives. I’ve done this personally. 

So I’m speaking to it because it’s very easy to hear Wendy’s story and say well, like, oh, it’s easy for you. You don’t have kids, or you’re young, but everybody has dualities in their life. Everybody has something else going on in addition to school leadership. Your extra things may be childcare. It may be adult care, healthcare. It may be planning a wedding. It may be going through a divorce. It may be moving that year.

Or I mean, there’s an endless realm of what would I call them? Pivotal moments or like chapters that you go through that you might not be able to go for a run. Just as Wendy said the year before, it was about her wedding. So she said maybe another time.

Just know this. If you’re in a chapter of child rearing or you’re in a chapter of parent care or you’re in a chapter of getting married or getting divorced or relationship changes, family changes, anything personal that’s big and you’re prioritizing it, be still with that. Be at peace with that. Remind yourself, I’m choosing to focus on this right now as my area of newness and growth knowing that it’s a chapter. It is a chapter and it’s a beautiful chapter. Some child rearing is a long chapter. 

Maybe, I know my sister and I are caring for elderly parents right now. I just went home to take care of my dad, and it’s a chapter, right? So I might not be going to the gym five times a week or four times a week anymore. It might be once or twice because my priority is my dad’s wellbeing and taking care of my sister, who’s the caretaker, right? 

So just know that everyone has duality in their lives. You’re never just a school principal. Even if you’re a single person with no children and no home, even if there’s not a lot of other attachments, there’s still the version of you that’s a principal, and there’s other things going on in your life. It’s okay to not be trying to do it all at once.

Again, I just want to reiterate, that is when you go a mile wide, you only go an inch deep. So I invite you to consider one thing at a time. If you have a wipeout year or a wipeout day or unexpected, unforeseen circumstances come up that re-shift your priorities, allow that.

One of the things my coach is teaching me to do, and I’m going to add this to the three-month planning because it’s so valuable. She takes the priorities, and she puts them on Post-its. Because instead of scratching it out or erasing it and say I failed. This was a wipeout. We’re never going to accomplish that. You just move it. You just move it. Because for Wendy, it was never that she said I’m never going to be a runner because she was planning a wedding. She just said, I’m going to move that to another chapter, to another timeframe. 

Where we get caught up in planning and balance and prep and expanding and growing and expanding our identities is we want it to be in this certain timeframe. We want it to happen right here, right now by this date. if it doesn’t, it’s this very all or none feeling. 

But that feels terrible. It’s discouraging. It’s defeating. It’s like graspy. It’s well, you guys know the energy where like I need this to happen right here, right now. We try to control and coerce and force things to happen. Versus this goal is on a Post-it, and the Post-it is going to keep coming with me. If I just find the space and time when I can actually prioritize the running and put it in three days a week and from 15 minutes to 45 minutes to however hours probably when you’re trail running, eventually it comes together into this moment of accomplishment.

Now, Wendy, I guess I want to transition to asking you tell them about. Actually, you have a great story about the actual experience because there was the anticipation of the experience, what you thought it was going to look and feel like. Then there was the actual race day. That’s a great story in and of itself. 

But I’m curious to know for you, what is your identity after the goal, right? The actual moment of goal was checked off, but there’s an identity shift in you. Let’s talk about your identity as a runner in future terms. Like, is it going to be something you continue to do? Is it just something I’ve done. I’ve accomplished. It was a one and done. Is it going to be this balance? Like, let’s first tell the story because it’s so good about the day of. Then I’d love to hear your thoughts on your identity moving forward. 

Wendy: Yeah. So as far as the actual race day, end of June, months and months of training and planning, I did my final longest long run, which was a full half marathon, 13.1 miles. Was so thrilled with that and was feeling like, you know what? I was consistently training. I showed up. I got to see the little chart on my app going up and up. I was proud of myself just for following through and committing to the plan. 

At that point I had sort of said to myself, you know what? Regardless of what happens on race day, I know that I got this far, and I accomplished the training. At that point, even after having run a half marathon and running 20 something miles a week and four days a week, all of this, I will say that I don’t know if I ever really took on the identity of and I’m a runner. I realize that sounds silly because if you’re running, you’re a runner. If you’re running four days a week, you are a runner. 

The same thing happened to me as a new AP as well, where I was like I’m still in this sort of mindset of I’m in this imposter syndrome mode, or I’m still transitioning from teacher to leader. I think I had to remind myself like if your job is an AP, and you come to the school every day and you’re a school leader, you are a school leader. 

So the same happened with the running of all right, I’ve gone through this training process. I’m a runner. I’m going to show up to this race. I accomplished this whole training cycle. I know I can run the distance. I’m proud of myself. Let’s see what happens on race day. Regardless of if I make any special time or anything, I will have succeeded.

Of course on race day, it was pouring thunderstorms, a tornado warning. The trails were completely washed out with mud. All the rocks were extremely slick where people were slipping and falling. I think one girl had to get stitches because she had fallen at some point during the race, like at mile 10 or something. 

So the morning of the race, I said you know what? The goal the whole time was just to finish and not get injured. That’s exactly what I’m going to do, whether it’s sunshine, rain, mud, freezing cold, regardless, heat stroke. We were sort of going in knowing that it wasn’t going to be ideal conditions and knowing that the times were probably going to reflect that. 

By the end of the 17 and a half that we ended up running, we’re soaked through to the bone. Our shoes were muddy. Like every step was like, I had to take my glasses off because I couldn’t see, obviously. The rain was all fogging up my glasses and the water droplets and everything. So none of that was what I had envisioned for how the day was going to go.

At the end, what we thought was going to happen was we crossed the finish line. We’d have a nice celebration. It was a camping situation. So we were going to camp out that night and have a fire and celebrate and have a few drinks with some of the other runners and connect. 

Of course we get back to the campsite after running and we say okay, let’s get out of these wet clothes and change. The tent is blown over. The poles are bent in half. We said I think we got to pack up and head home. That’s exactly what we did. So none of that celebration happened that night anyway. 

We go home. We had to cut our weekend short. We didn’t get to hang out with my sister-in-law and my brother-in-law and my nephew who all ran the race as well and drove from the other side of the state, six hour drive to get home. We unpacked the car. We’re hosing down everything because it’s covered in mud. The next day I said we didn’t really get to have our little celebration. We had gotten some fancy drinks or something, like a non-alcoholic cider, whatever. 

We said, you know what? We’re going to uncork this drink. We’re going to have a little cheers. We’re going to have a little moment, even if it’s not at the finish line with the other runners in Western Pennsylvania in the middle of this town where everyone’s doing the trail run. It’s a whole big deal. I said we’re going to have our own celebration at home because we still accomplished something. We still finished the race. It’s still something to feel proud of. 

Coaching with Angela actually even enhanced that thought to say, not only did you finish, you finished in spite of probably the worst conditions possible and didn’t get injured, didn’t get discouraged. I’m sure there are people who saw the weather forecast and said you know what? I’ll eat the $50 registration fee and just say whatever because I don’t really feel like going out for five hours in the pouring rain and getting soaking wet. We did it anyway. 

Just showing up for the actual race and finishing the same way, just showing up throughout training that alone is something to be proud of. So we had to kind of create our own new vision of what the celebration looked like. We had to change our expectations of what the race was going to feel like in the moment. But we made sure to find a little bit of time to celebrate and to have that standing on top of the mountain feeling at the end. 

Because I don’t want to say that we were denied that, but it just didn’t go the way that we envisioned, or we didn’t have the weekend that we had planned. Yet we still accomplished something great. We still set out to run a certain distance, and we did it. So we said we’re not going to miss out on our celebration. We’re going to still have that moment for ourselves. 

Angela: Yes. This is very important. Wendy and I just talked about this like this week. Celebration is very underrated, and it’s very easy to overlook it. But it’s the one thing that we actually want most when it comes to any goal, challenge, adversity situation. We want the celebration. We need to honor and acknowledge the hard work we’ve done. 

It’s like when you’re in a classroom with a student, and they’re struggling and struggling and then they get it. Oftentimes the kids kind of excited, they’re kind of in shock that they got it. They’re like wow, I just did that. You are celebrating the heck out of this kid because they stuck with it, and it was hard, and they couldn’t get it. There were probably tears and torn papers and eraser marks. Then they get it. When we celebrate them, it teaches them to celebrate them. We as school leaders must celebrate little tiny wins, great big wins, and all the wins in between. 

One of the things that you said, Wendy, that I also want to highlight is that you said you started with that one mile walking or half running. But you had an app that was reminding you of the progress. What your brain was doing was looking for all the evidence that it’s working, and I’m moving forward, and I’m on track, and I’m growing. It is working. The process of learning how to run a, was it 15 mile, 17 mile race? Was you start with walking one mile. 

In school leadership, the race is a race that never ends. Like there are some milestones, some beginnings and ends of school years, but your profession, it is the longest marathon of your life. You can look at the scrapes, the fails, the time that slowed you down. You can look at all of that and you can say well, I didn’t make it this time and look for evidence to kind of bring yourself down. 

Or you can look at the app and say I went from two to three today. Or like this was just the perfect running conditions this afternoon, or Saturday morning, like I really had a great time just running, just being free, like looking for all the little things to keep you motivated and keep you going. 

I wish we had an app. Maybe I need to develop one where we were like looking for the milestones because it’s easy to get bogged down in what isn’t working in school leadership, but it’s also just as easy to focus on what is. 

Wendy: I think it was easier for me to see those small gains with this running journey because every day I would check off my, I had a physical counter, and I would draw an X. I know some people would take those gold foil star stickers and just stick them right on the 1.5 today. Check. I don’t think I did that as much in my first years as an AP. 

It’s a good reminder that it might be my job to show up every day at work and be an AP, but I have finished four years now in the role, and I have grown. Maybe I don’t always take the time to look at that, but even through the journey going from lacking confidence and maybe my identity not really catching up yet. I know that now when I think about my day to day, I feel more confident with decision making and my interactions with staff and with families. 

I have fewer moments of sort of self-doubt and uncertainty in that imposter syndrome. The way I look at challenges now versus when I first started has changed. I’m less scared of not knowing something. I know that I’m still learning new skills, and it’s an ongoing thing in life to be new at something. It’s a pattern that’s going to continue and just gets easier every time you do it. Embracing the challenges, going outside your comfort zone, reminding yourself you can do hard things, and it doesn’t have to be perfect. 

The same way I feel proud of myself for sticking with the running, I also feel proud of myself in the ways that I’ve evolved as a school leader. Doing things scared, feeling like a novice, going for it anyway. Then seeing on the other side once you’ve done it that it wasn’t really about running the 25K. It was really about showing up every day and proving to myself that I could do the training.

Even as an AP, like getting tenure is one thing, but improving every year and doing things better every year and seeing the ways that things are getting easier. Wedding planning, it wasn’t about the wedding. It was about the process of going through the planning and evolving my identity and my relationship with my partner. 

In the future, I have goals of starting a family and becoming a homeowner, growing in my career. I feel a sense of confidence that I can do those things because I’ve taken the time to reflect on all these other challenges and seeing that I have done things before where I felt new and uncertain and moved through the uncomfortable emotions and gone through the process of coming to the other side of it. I think all of the different areas in which I’ve had different practice with this, it just feeds each other and helps it to become easier each time.

Angela: It’s so true. The way we do one thing is the way we do everything. We can focus on one area of being new, one little push area, one little growth. This is something I’m going to invite you guys to do. So this podcast is dropping around mid to late September. It’s the beginning of the school year. I invite you to decide what’s the one area of growth that I want, that I really want for myself. What feels most aligned to me? 

If you tune in, if you listen, it will come to the surface. Is it something professional? Is it something personal? Is it your health, your relationships, your finances, your relationship with your kids or your family? Or maybe you are single, and you want to date or you want to like expand your friendship circles or you want to expand your spirituality and connection with a higher power of your understanding. 

Pick one because when you pick one and focus on that, you’ll be able to see, just like Wendy did, you can apply the growth, the learning, the journey to all of the other areas. It’s how you expedite your identity expansion and what you feel is possible. So maybe it’s time management this year. 

Like in EPC, we have the six pillars. We’ve got time, balance, planning, relationships, leadership, emotional regulation. I also am adding communication. I think that’s an essential part of school leadership. Yeah. Just like the art of and mastery of communication with ourselves and with others. 

But pick one area and just try that for one year knowing it’s going to expand the other ones. Then you don’t feel so overwhelmed that you have to fix yourself or improve all of this all at once because that’s where we jump right into the overwhelm cycle. Then we spin, spin, spin out. So Wendy, oh gosh, there’s so much I know we could share, but do you have any like last words that you want to share with listeners, fellow principals just like you who are out there? What is it that you’d like to say and share with them? 

Wendy: I think the biggest takeaway is you might surprise yourself with how much growth and how much you can get out of something that at first really scares you and makes you doubt yourself, but stay with it because whether that’s taking a new job or accomplishing some other goal, there’s so much that can come out of that process of discomfort. We’ve coached over the years about not wanting to feel that discomfort, and I purposely did something that I knew was going to bring that on, and I don’t regret it one bit. I don’t regret it one bit. 

Angela: Yeah, I cannot wait to see what this year unfolds for you. Do you have any thoughts about what your push area is going to be for this coming year? 

Wendy: Not so much the coming year, but the current moment, we’re still planning a honeymoon, and that is a whole team process that there’s a reason that you plan a big trip after you get married. You learn so much from going on a big international trip together, and we haven’t even left yet, but the planning itself has been a very enlightening experience.

I think building on my health goals probably to get us to a place where we feel good about making other life transitions. I think feeling healthy enough to start a family, healthy enough to take on a challenge, whether that’s moving or taking a new position. I think starting with a healthy foundation is going to help in all areas. 

I kind of knew that going into the running process too I want to get to be the healthiest version of me that I can while I don’t have kids, while I’m not in a new role, when I’m not making up another big life transition, knowing that it was going to set me up for success with whatever’s next. 

Angela: Yeah.

Wendy: Right now is the honeymoon planning, so I’ll let you know how our trip goes in a couple of weeks. 

Angela: I cannot wait to hear about it. I can’t believe you’re going. It’s so exciting. 

Wendy: Not to mention that 25K trail run is going to help us to hike Machu Picchu, so it’s all connected. 

Angela: Yes, oh gosh. This is where it all blends together, and it’s such a beautiful experience to watch. I’m so honored to be your coach, I really am, and to call you a friend and to see you grow. I mean, it goes beyond words, like the emotions and the fulfillment I have in seeing you blossom and be this best version of yourself. You embody personal empowerment. You embody personal growth. 

What’s so cool about it is that you take this with you for the rest of your life. You can’t unlearn this, you can’t unknow this, you can’t undo this. It only expands you more and more. So I’m just so happy for you. Congratulations, not just on the run, but on the journey. 

Wendy: Thank you. When we started, and I was 29, and you said, you’re doing this work now because it’s like compound interest, and it’s going to pay dividends down the line. In four years of coaching, I’m already feeling different and seeing things differently. It just gets me so excited for how much more growth is ahead. With your support, it’s been not always easy, but it’s been a very rewarding journey. That’s for sure. 

Angela: So fun. It’s so fun. Thank you for your time on the podcast today, Wendy, and for sharing your story with us. I really appreciate it.

Wendy: Thank you for having me. Best of luck with the new school year to all the other school leaders out there. 

Angela: Yes. Yes. Happy New Year, everybody. We’ll talk to you next week. Take good care. Bye. 

Hey empowered principal. If you enjoyed the content in this podcast, I invite you to join the Empowered Principal® Collaborative. It’s my latest offer for aspiring and current school leaders who want to experience exceptional impact and enjoy the school leadership experience. 

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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.