Hello, empowered principals. Welcome to episode 414.

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

Well, hello, my Empowered Principals. Happy Tuesday and, I can’t believe I’m saying this, but happy December. December 2025 is here. The end of the calendar year. My goodness. Wow.

There is so much to reflect on, so much to celebrate, and I can’t wait to chat with you about all of the things coming up in the world of the Empowered Principal, the Empowered Principal Collaborative. I have a couple of great programs that are dropping, a brand new one that’s coming out this coming week. So, if you’re listening to this on Tuesday, my new program called Luxury Leadership for School Leaders, hosted by the Empowered Principal. I have just created this. I am so excited about it. It has so much energy, so much depth in such a short period of time. It’s a three-day masterclass that will take you through the concept of empowering yourself through a luxurious school leadership experience.

Now, I know luxury and school leadership don’t often go together. Your brain does not connect those two dots, but my brain has, and I’m inviting you into luxury leadership, creating a luxurious experience as a school leader. There is so much that I have learned about the value of luxury and the acknowledgment of luxury in my life, personally and professionally, and I want to share it with you. I want to enhance your experience as school leaders. I want you to love your life and your career. This three-day masterclass is going to do that.

And we’re also launching The Empowered Principal Mid-Year Reboot. You guys have heard of this before. I do this every year in January. It’s the mid-year for us. Actually, not even quite. We still have six months to go. And the mid-year reboot is happening in January. You can sign up for that. I’ll have the links down below for you to sign up for those two courses. If you sign up for EPC, the Empowered Principal Collaborative, you will get access to both of these master courses for free. It’s a part of your membership when you are in the Empowered Principal Collaborative. Otherwise, you can just purchase them a la carte and enjoy them individually. But if you want the full experience and you want access to everything, join in EPC.

When you join EPC, you get full access to all of my programs that I have previously offered and any new programs that I develop within the 2026 calendar year. So if you join now, you have access to EPC for a full year, and you’ll have access to everything in the world of the Empowered Principal included in your membership. So, keep that in mind.

All right. I would like to have a conversation with you. If you are listening to this, I am speaking to you individually. It’s time to have a conversation. It’s time to talk. Not because you’ve done something wrong, not because somebody’s upset at you, but I want to connect with you one-on-one here right now. I’m just going to share with you very openly, very vulnerably, and very candidly about my understanding of, my observation of the schools, particularly here in the US.

Now, I know a lot of you are from out of the country and you are observing what’s going on here in the United States, and that’s a beautiful thing for you. And I appreciate your heartfelt wishes and concern as we navigate the political energy in our country right now.

I’m here for school leaders. I’m here to support you. I’m here to mentor, to coach, to be a sounding board. I’m here to appreciate you and celebrate you. And I’m here to be honest and open and vulnerable and real. And I want to invite you into a conversation that’s talking about the truth of what is happening in our schools.

There is a very distinct duality going on, a very distinct contrast going on, and I feel so much dissonance right now. Yes, I’m sitting here talking about how to have a more luxurious experience as a school leader, and I believe that with all my heart that it is possible. I also believe it is possible for teachers to have a more luxurious teaching experience as a teacher. And I think it’s possible for students to have a more luxurious experience as students, as they are learning, as we are learning as adults, as they are learning as students, as we are learning as leaders.

I do believe it is possible to tap into a frequency that is a more luxurious experience in our schools. And I also am very aware of how nothing feels luxurious right now, how it feels very all or none, that everything is falling apart, that nothing seems to be working, that everybody is stressed out. There is an extreme amount of pressure and tension. There is discord. There is conflict. We are in conflict with ourselves, with other people, with other people’s values, with the very essence of why we get up and come to school and why we are educators. We are grappling with our purpose, with our value system, with our intentions, with the purpose of school.

We’re wondering, why do students need to come to school other than compliance? Why do we have such strict laws on compliance? There’s the history of that compliance and there’s the current moment. We’re struggling with articulating the value of what we offer. We’re struggling to articulate the value to ourselves, the purpose of school for us. We’re wondering, what is the purpose of school? What is the value of school? What’s the value for us? What’s the value for teachers? What’s the value for students? And what we have been identifying and labeling and communicating as the value, people aren’t buying. They’re not feeling the value of that offer.

And I’ve been mentioning this over and over throughout the last few months on the podcast. But I think it’s time for us to look inward and sit down and have a talk with ourselves, especially if you feel that you are struggling. If you feel stressed, if you feel tension, if you feel a lot of pressure, if you feel like you’re at your max capacity, if you feel like you cannot handle all of the discord that is happening, all of the dysfunction, all of the dysregulation, it’s time to have a conversation and talk with yourself about why.

Not because you’re going to sit there and beat yourself up and say, I can’t handle this. I’m at capacity. And maybe you are. That’s okay. If you are, be honest with yourself. If you feel you can expand your capacity, if you want to be able to handle more pressure, if you want to be able to navigate, if you want to hold space for the duality of finding ways to be more luxurious in your experience as a school leader while also navigating what feels like the impossible and holding space for the truth of both of those, then we’re in. That’s what EPC is doing.

We’re grappling with the discomfort of school leadership, the struggle of school leadership, but also the beauty of it, the luxury of it, the privilege of being a school leader. We have a platform. It’s time for us to start sitting up at that table, taking ownership and responsibility. We are leaders. It is time that we lead. We lead conversations. We open the door up, not just to talk about, hi, how are you feeling today? You know, have a good teaching day. But to talk about, what are we doing? Why are we doing it? And look, it’s not to say that we sit down and we have all of the answers. It’s to cultivate the conversations, to kind of, you know, I think about, I’ve been really into building fires. I have this beautiful fireplace in the home in which I’m staying right now.

And in this fireplace, it will look like the fire is dying out and the embers are going gray or black out. And if I just take the little poker and I stoke those embers, a flame will reignite or the embers will glow. And I feel like we’re going into education, we’re looking at the surface and we’re like, well, it may be smoldering a bit, but, you know, there’s nothing below. It’s about dead. But if you were to stoke that fire and have a conversation, so much will come to the surface. A lot of energy, a lot of opinions, a lot of anger, a lot of pain, a lot of frustration, a lot of confusion and overwhelm.

I believe there is so much confusion right now. And the reason that we are suffering in the, you know, sense of mental and emotional suffering when it comes to being frustrated, feeling exhausted, being overwhelmed, actually is coming down to confusion. We haven’t had the talk. We’re not sitting down saying, what is the actual purpose? What is the actual function of school? What is the value? And can we increase the value?

We’re not going to go in and change the entire structure of education. I understand. There are schools who are out there trying to make systemic changes, like structural, physical changes in their schedules, in the way they grade. I’ve had several people on the podcast who are out there, boots on the ground, actually changing what school looks like, feels like. So I know it’s possible. And I’m here with all of you to talk about the mainstream, public education and private education too. Charters, all of you are invited to this table. But it is time to have this talk. It’s time for us to talk about how we can be of value, how we can create purpose, how we can reconnect with kids, reconnect with families, reconnect with ourselves, and reconnect with teaching. It’s not going to look and feel the same as it did 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 50 years ago.

We’re afraid to have the conversation because we are afraid that education is no longer what we want it to be or what we expected it to be. It’s like when you’re in a relationship and you know that something’s wrong, you know that it’s maybe taking a turn where it might not last forever, but you’re so afraid to have the conversation because you don’t want it to end. That’s what feels like is happening in education. We want it to go back to we’re the bosses, you know, we’re the authority figures, do as we say. You know, you have to come to school. You come to school engaged, understanding the value, understanding the purpose. Your parents value it. The adults in your life value it. They support you. It’s just what you do. No questions asked. We’re not there anymore. But we’re afraid to bring that up because we’re afraid that if we do, there might be a breakup with the old paradigm. We’re afraid that things are not going to look the same, feel the same. We’re not trained for what is coming because we went to school 10 years ago, 20 years ago and times are different.

We can put our heads in the sand and try to pretend that education needs to go back to the way it was pre-pandemic, pre-technology, pre-social media, or we can come to the table and have a conversation, explore for ourselves, what is scary about this? What feels off? What am I afraid of? And talking with fellow educators. What do we want it to look like and feel like? What outcomes do we want to create? What do we think would be of service to students in this day and age?

I really believe it’s time we open up and have the brave conversation, the courageous conversation, to be the Brené Browns of education. Can you imagine Brené Brown coming into the Empowered Principal Collaborative? Ooh. She’s my idol. I want to emulate her work and implement it into who we are as an educational society, as an institution, to show up not just for academics, for the humanness of our experience on the planet, to teach children how to navigate the hardest thing on the planet, our emotions, our physical response, that visceral response, the psychological response, the mental, the emotional, all of it.

When we know how to navigate internally, then we can couple that with how to navigate the world externally with the academic skills. We need to couple them together. We’re afraid to do that. Why? Nobody taught us, so we don’t know how. How do we fix that? We get in a program like EPC and we learn. We talk about it. We open up. We listen. We learn. We try it out. We grow. We stumble through it. We are wobbly as we’re learning. We let ourselves try and fail.

I feel so compelled about this. I want to be the voice that speaks up for you, for students, for teachers. But I cannot do it alone. This is a group effort, a mission, a vision that’s bigger than just me. The Empowered Principal world, it’s so much more than just life and leadership coaching. It has a life of its own. It’s expanding into this movement. And I want you to feel like you have a safe place to come and have courageous conversations, not because we’re trying to fix or change ourselves or somebody else. We’re expanding the concept of education through conversation, one conversation at a time, one coaching session at a time, one aha at a time.

So I invite you in. You can join EPC. I don’t usually leave the doors open at this time of year, but with all of the energy going on with the luxury leadership experience that’s happening next week and with the launch of the Mid-Year Reboot 2026 for school leaders, those two things coupled together, I think are going to really take your mindset, your skill set, and your energy to a different level, a different playing field, an entirely different frequency. It’s really time to have this talk. The time is now. I hope you’ll join us.

Join us for Leadership Luxury, join us for the Mid-Year Reboot, and definitely join EPC. I want you to be there having this conversation. Be courageous, be brave. And you know what’s on the other side of that? Empowerment, freedom, and the feeling of complete fulfillment and satisfaction, knowing you are one of the leading forces. You’re the one who’s courageous enough to start these conversations and hold with them, hold space for them, expand your capacity to sit in the discomfort of we don’t know what to do right now. But what can we do? Let’s talk about it. What might we do? We’re exploring. Come on into EPC and gain access to luxury leadership and mid-year reboot.

I will see you all next week. Have a beautiful first week of December, and I will see you next week here at the podcast on social media, which by the way, if you’re on Facebook, I’m doing a Facebook Live 365 challenge in my Empowered Principal free Facebook group. Join us there. If you’re on Facebook, join us for the podcast. Of course, always accessible, always free. And when you’re ready, step into the world of EPC. I’ll see you next week. Take care. Bye.

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

Hello, empowered principals. Welcome to episode 412.

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.

Angela Kelly: Hello, empowered principals. Happy Tuesday, and welcome to the podcast. Today, I’m going to have a conversation with Dr. Michelle Chanda Singh. She is a specialist in teacher professional development and highlighting how we can bring students of color into our classrooms with as much power and diversity and inclusion as possible. I have been in contact with Michelle for quite some time now. We have been trying to coordinate our schedules, and man, life has been happening for both of us in good ways.

So we’re here today. I am so honored to meet her, to speak with her, and to have you hear the brilliance that she has to offer and how we can, especially in these current events, these current times. Life is a little turbulent in our educational system and for families, particularly families of color. I really am honored to be able to promote this conversation on this podcast because I think we need to be having these conversations on the regular and in ways that I hope Michelle can share with us, but how to regulate ourselves when we are feeling all of this uncertainty in the field of education right now and in the world.

But how we can create a sense of grounding and safety and comfort for students to perform and to learn in their highest best self. And I’m really excited to talk with you about that today. So, Dr. Singh, welcome to The Empowered Principal Podcast. Can you please tell the listeners a little bit about yourself?

Michelle Singh: Absolutely. Where do I start? That’s the question. Okay, so well, I’ll start with this. As someone who left my teaching career after 15 years in the public school system in one of the nation’s largest school district, what I do now is I help teachers to find balance and to beat burnout because those are the causes of why teachers left. That’s why I left. It was things that piled up, piled up. Now, what does that have to do with students? It has everything to do with students because if we are not right on the inside, we are not right teaching them. So it starts with us. You talked about grounding and safety and comfort. I wrote it down.

Because what I have realized and what I have experienced from over 20 years in education, not just as someone who was in it and left and I’m in it again because even though I left y’all, I’m still in it because I’m a professor, I observe classrooms, I still connect with students as a mentor. So I’m still very much in it. I just don’t have my own classroom. But as someone who was able to experience different lenses of education from the nonprofit world to the corporate world, to the institution of education world, K through 20, I realized that it starts with us. We have to know and find the things that will help us feel grounded and feel safe and feel comfort before we can create those spaces for our own students. And I’ve done a lot of work. My dissertation is focused on student disengagement and in that research, it goes back to what the teacher is willing to do. How is the teacher willing to incorporate certain strategies and build relationships? And let’s be honest, we can’t build relationships with folks if we don’t have a relationship with ourselves.

Angela Kelly: Yes.

Michelle Singh: So that’s, I guess that’s the short of the long.

Angela Kelly: Yes. Okay, you’re speaking my language. I love this so much. And I think that people are becoming aware, right? They can feel the dissonance in their bodies. They’re calling it stress, they’re calling it burnout, they’re overwhelmed. They’re putting labels on the experience of teaching as it currently stands right now. And yet, they’re unsure of what to do about it, other than I think there’s an all or none mentality out there, which is I either suffer or I leave. It’s an all or none. And we, I think you and I, what we’re working on, you’re working with teachers, and I’m working with administrators is like the land of and. Right?

How can we be educators and do what we love and be in the passion of the work we were born to do and not at the expense of self-sacrifice and self-suffering. And finding that middle ground where we are serving, but we are also tuned in with ourselves in terms of our own sense of safety, our own self, grounding of ourselves. And you know, I just think about a person waking up and going into school every day. I know how I felt on some of those days, like almost in tears or maybe I was in tears driving to work because I was bracing for the day because I wasn’t regulated.

Michelle Singh: Yeah, yeah. You’re not regulated. You don’t know how to name the things. You don’t know how to manage the weight. You don’t know how to say no, you don’t know how to set boundaries. You just know how to keep performing and keep doing because a lot of times when we’re in these roles, we’re caretakers. And we have been caring not just for our students, but we have likely been in caretaking positions a lot of our lives from the time we were we were children ourselves. And so we come into this profession with that idea of us always being the ones being the doers and being the caretakers, and we don’t know how to care for ourselves, to care for us. And so we feel the feelings and we just keep taking and taking and taking and we don’t know how to say just hit pause or stop until it gets to the point where after 15 years, you got to walk away like I did.

Because I, it just built up and I couldn’t take it. It became a different kind of hard for me. My health was at risk. When I left in 2019, in a year I released 100 pounds. My health was literally at risk y’all for all kinds of things that plague my family. I was at risk for those things. And it took me leaving to get control, to feel grounded, to feel safety, to feel comfort, to be able to finally do something about it. And when I teach and when I speak to teachers and whatever it is I’m doing as I’m helping and supporting teachers, I speak to them from the lens of leaving because when I’m in it, I didn’t know anything was wrong because I just kept on doing and being.

Angela Kelly: Exactly.

Michelle Singh: Kept on performing. You are not able to identify the problems that have persisted for years until you step out and look in. And that’s what I’m able to do and that’s how I’m able to help teachers see that. And I’m not calling for teachers to leave the profession at all. My call is for teachers to be more is to be more aware, to acknowledge, to name and to find strategies that are doable within your already crazy busy workload and day and to find to set boundaries and find balance because you literally have to come first. I know it sounds selfish and I had to learn it. Mother, caretaker of lots of family members, wife, dog mom, all of those things.

Angela Kelly: Yeah.

Michelle Singh: Yes, the dogs count too because they…

Angela Kelly: Yeah, they’re like having other children.

Michelle Singh: Yes, yes, exactly. That’s a whole other story, but yeah.

Angela Kelly: That’s right.

Michelle Singh: I didn’t start putting myself first until I left the school district in 2019. Until my daughter left for college in 2022. That was the first time in 2022, this is 2025. She’s a senior now at Howard University. When my daughter left, I had to find myself again because once she’s my only child. And two, I’m like an empty nester with me and my husband trying to figure out, look, I had my daughter when I was 22, and so here I am trying to do life now without this child that has been attached to me since I was an adult. I adulted with her. So like, what is my life now?

Angela Kelly: Yes. Oh, I feel that. I felt the same way when my son went to college in 2017. That was literally the year I resigned from my position, sold my house, started this business. I literally, I’m like, what was I thinking back then? But I think I was so unsettled with him leaving, I just was like off the deep end. But it’s – in hindsight, it’s the best thing I could have ever done for myself because I too, I lost 20 pounds, 20, 30 pounds. I had high blood pressure. My weight had gone out of control because I was, you know, eating and over consuming just…

Michelle Singh: Yeah. Or not eating at all. And just, yeah. It was like all or none, right?

Angela Kelly: Yeah. Or you wouldn’t eat all day, so you’d be ravenous, or you were snacking on like the donuts in the staff lounge or like grabbing a, you know, handful of M&Ms, just something just to get you going. But it wasn’t healthy, but it was the stress that was getting to me. I had like numbness in my fingers that they couldn’t identify or explain where it was coming from. There was all kinds of physical manifestations of the stress. You know, like you said, I just I was just in it so I couldn’t see it.

Now, I would love to hear because I think about the decisions I made and the space I was in mentally, emotionally, physically, when I decided to resign, and I think other people see, look at people on the outside like you and I as consultants and they’ll say, well, I guess I have to leave teaching. So like, tell me about your business and how you support teachers and the message that you send them to keep, we want, we need teachers. We want them in the classroom. And so how can they get healthier, be more grounded, and be a teacher, a mom, a dog mom, you know, a wife.

Michelle Singh: All of the things, right? Yeah, so, so interestingly enough, in October, an article I wrote for the Education Leadership magazine, which is geared toward school leaders and administrators. The title of that article, and I’ll share the link, that article was called Why I Left Teaching. So it’s about a short story about my journey in the education system from when I started to why I left, but what I do in this article is I actually offer five concrete things that school leaders can do to keep teachers of color in particular, because my own experience, the school system in which I did and all of the things that I endured. But it can certainly apply just for school leaders in general just to keep good teachers. So what I do is I work with the teachers directly and one of the things, one of the programs that we have in our company, LCTE Learning Solutions, is called The Restful Teacher. So this was something that I learned when my daughter left and I went on my very first experience without child, without husband, without family. I went on a retreat all by my lonesome.

Angela Kelly: Love it.

Michelle Singh: And it was just me and women that I was getting to know. So at that retreat, one of the things that we learned about was Dr. Sandra Dalton’s seven areas of rest. I had never heard of about this before, ever in my life.

Angela Kelly: Oh, can you share that? I haven’t heard of that.

Michelle Singh: Absolutely. Okay, so I was so intrigued and I was like, I didn’t realize that one, rest is not just sleeping, right? Because we hear rest and we always think, oh, I’m going to take a nap or I’m going to go to sleep early. I’m going to have a bedtime routine and blah, blah, blah, because I need to get, I need to get some sleep because that’s going to solve all the problems. No, that doesn’t solve all the problems. Okay. So that part. So these seven areas of rest by Dr. Sandra Dalton is about what our body’s needs are in order for us to feel that sense of balance. So the areas of rest are your creative rest, your mental rest, your emotional rest, your social rest, your spiritual rest, your sensory rest, and your physical rest. Physical is the actual sleeping and exercising part.

Angela Kelly: Right. That one little part.

Michelle Singh: Yeah, but it’s only one of seven. So then when I learned about those different areas of rest and I started to kind of look back at my just life, I realized, okay, I was deficient in sensory rest. And so that’s why that time when my husband wanted to go out on a Friday night and he took me to like a concert-like event where there was a lot of bright lights and loud music and a lot of people, I completely shut down and we had to leave.

It was Friday at the end of the school week and I was overloaded and I didn’t know how to name it and I didn’t know that I was deficient in it. That is why when I feel stuck and I’m creating something and I’m writing something and I feel stuck and I just don’t know what to put next, that’s creative block. That’s why it helps when I go outside and take a walk or when I just completely do something new, like go play with my dogs or just take a shower, it refreshes. Like, there’s science behind all of these things. And so when I learned that stuff for myself, I was like, oh, this is like the hidden curriculum, y’all. Well, let me unhide it.

Angela Kelly: Yes. We’re not talking about this stuff in teacher prep classes, right?

Michelle Singh: No, they don’t talk about this stuff ever. I had to pay out of my pocket to go on this retreat that was a non-education retreat to learn about this thing. Okay, when are teachers getting access to this?

Angela Kelly: Never.

Michelle Singh: Okay. So I decided that, okay, I wanted to share what I was learning and also what I was practicing along the lines of the seven areas of rest. I’m like, I’m not a gatekeeper. So I am going to just share this on the socials and I did a whole 30-day challenge where I was sharing all the things I was doing every day related to the seven areas of rest. And like, people were messaging me from countries I didn’t even know existed. And I’m telling you, like, it just spiraled. And so created what’s called The Restful Teacher.

And so it is grounded in those seven areas of rest, but it’s also grounded in culturally responsive teaching. One, we have to take care of ourselves, but with what we do to feel well, it’s going to trickle into how we teach well. So it marries those two areas. And I’m able to help teachers to incorporate activities and strategies in their day to day that’s going to help them show up better for their students. But that’s also going to help them model for their students what they can do so that if I’m in elementary school, I can learn about techniques that’s going to help me self-regulate that I don’t have to learn when I’m 40 plus.

Angela Kelly: Thank you. Right.

Michelle Singh: So that’s what The Restful Teacher program is. And so I definitely do workshops. Actually, just did a workshop for a new teacher program here in Miami and it was just on the area of mental rest and what the teachers can do for just all of the decisions and the cognitive overload and all of the things that, you know, we experience day to day. And one of the things I spoke and I truly believe in is the power of reflection. And I launched Breathe Between the Lines, which is a reflective journal for teachers. And what I did in this journal was I framed it around the seven areas of rest so that there are topics and prompts for us to reflect on as it relates to our needs. There are breathing techniques that we can try because we know that breathing, scientifically breathing is also a strategy that we could do anytime.

Angela Kelly: Yes.

Michelle Singh: In between classes, while we’re sitting at our desk, in front of the class. Listen, do it with the kids. We need to calm down together, y’all. Let’s try this. And so there’s that, but there’s also reflection questions that are geared toward being a culturally responsive teacher. So it’s there for the teachers. It taps on what our limiting beliefs are and what we have been told about those different forms of rest, but it also connects it to their craft and it gives them questions that they can think about and challenge some of the ways that we have been taught to traditionally teach. Do my students associate calm with safety or silence with control? So that’s just one example.

But I really put my heart into this because I was like, this is something that I wish that I had as a teacher, especially a new teacher, because it’s opening my eyes and the teacher’s eyes to things that we would need to be that balanced teacher, to find that grounding, to find that safety amongst the chaos and the system that we work in that honestly doesn’t honor those things.

Angela Kelly: Right. Right. Yes, exactly my next question. Like you read my mind there because I was going to say like, I can hear teachers saying, this sounds great. Like, this makes sense to me. And the overworking, all of the pressure to perform, the pressure to, you know, get kids on track, get kids, well, one, get them in school, and two, keep their attention, and then three, get them to perform. And with all of that pressure, what are the common, what are the most common like objections or kind of roadblocks you hear from teachers when it comes to mindfulness and restfulness for themselves?

Michelle Singh: Oh, well, I don’t have time. I don’t have time for that. Or how can I, how can I do this in my classroom when I have to teach according to this and the test and the standards and blah, blah, blah and It works the same as when we have to integrate technology in the classroom. We find pockets within the curriculum, we find space and we find time because this is not something like I got to carve out an entire hour to go to the gym. That’s not what this is about.

This is about finding those moments throughout your day. So even if it’s like three times throughout the day, in the morning, in the afternoon and at night, where can you insert in those pockets just a few minutes to implement some of these strategies. And you can mix them up, but you have to be intentional about finding those pockets and then doing it for yourself, but you then you can also include the children, include the students and it will be a lifesaver for them to be able to be exposed to these things. And I know that there’s also another objection from the teacher standpoint where this is not something that the school or the standards are aligned with, well, we have or if you’re in Florida like me, we’re going to be breaking the law when we talk about social and emotional learning. Right?

Angela Kelly: Yes. I have clients in Florida and we just discussed that a couple weeks ago.

Michelle Singh: Or if we dare say the word culturally in the second most diverse school system in the country, we can’t use the word diverse, which is a whole another thing, y’all. But I digress. We don’t have to name it those names.

Angela Kelly: Right.

Michelle Singh: We can practice it without naming it those names.

Angela Kelly: Brain break, yeah. Call it what…

Michelle Singh: Exactly. We’re going to do a brain break and do some gentle stretches or some breathing or we’re going to do a brain break and do some desk exercises or we’re going to do a brain break and just honor our senses, right? We can do these breaks for ourselves and our students. And so for me and what I teach, it’s not about overhauling everything that we’ve done. It’s about inserting and integrating these little pockets of strategies that are going to help us when we are intentional and consistent in applying them to our daily lives so they become a habit for rather than I’m just going to go to the gym when it’s close to the new year because, you know, I want to get my shape in order for 2020, whatever. Go for a month.

Angela Kelly: Yes. It’s like a teaching lifestyle adjustment, a change, and it’s a mindset.

Michelle Singh: Yes. And that’s the first piece. And so that’s why whenever I teach, no matter whatever the subject is, because, you know, an aside is I also teach emerging entrepreneurs about business too. But that’s an aside thing. But no matter what I teach, I always start with those mindsets. I always start with what our limiting beliefs tell us about whatever the topic is because we want to confront that. Because if we don’t confront and acknowledge it, how can we move past it?

Angela Kelly: Right. Exactly. I think that a lot of teachers, like, once they understand the value of something, like, this is aa valuable use of my time, it’s a valuable practice and exercise because it creates these extended results for myself. Do you have any stories of teachers who have applied these practices that you’ve taught and your journal, what are some of the stories of people who have leaned in and tried this work and their feedback to you or like their success stories that have been a reflection of their willingness to try this?

Michelle Singh: Yeah. So, oh, let me see which ones. Most recently, a part of The Restful Teacher program, we had a series called Cultivate where we would meet just to reflect and just have conversations related to questions that are not curriculum and not school related, but self-related. And these talks that we had in the Cultivate series, teachers were in tears because we were confronting and talking about things like perfectionism and things like the boundaries and, you know, things like that we often don’t get to even mention, right? And so it’s conversations like that. It’s the reflection questions.

It’s the, oh my gosh, I didn’t know doing something so simple could have helped help me to recenter and refocus after getting home where I don’t have to sit in the car for an hour before I go into the house. You know, like it’s those kinds of things. And I will, you know, say, you’re not going to just do a breathing technique today and you’re going to feel, you know, better tomorrow just by doing it one time. These things are habits that you have to develop. It’s things like I have these restful teacher cards in the restful teacher affirmation cards, what I give them is an affirmation as well as an action. So it’s like an affirmation action. And so they have a set of these reminders sitting on the desk and so they could pull one and say, okay, today I release my emotional burdens and allow myself to experience peace.

So I’m going to practice mindfulness exercises like box breathing to let go of stress and find inner calm. So they have these little mini reminders that they can just pick up every day at their desk just to remind them to do something for themselves. They can also be done with your students, with the students to model it. So it’s them telling me that they keep these at their desk and they refer to them. It’s them telling me that they were able to share this with a parent. It’s them telling me that we did this as a family today. It’s the little things that we often don’t celebrate and we don’t pay attention to and we don’t shine a light on.

I’m not talking about you’re going to, you know, find – you’re going to solve all the institutional problems within the educational system and then you’re going to just walk into the school and everything solved. This is not what that is. Because there are institutional, systemic issues within education that we just cannot even touch the surface. And so as individuals, we have to find ways to be good with us so that we are able to navigate those systems.

Angela Kelly: Absolutely.

Michelle Singh: That’s what this is.

Angela Kelly: Yes, because what people want to do is they want to change the system or the institution so that they’ll feel better. They think if we change the system will feel better. And I think what I hear you saying is if you go inward and learn how you want to respond to the system when it, you know, has its imperfections and it has its discrepancy and it, you know, it has its, you know, isms. Like when those things come forward and you are feeling frustrated or whatever, you know, overwhelmed, it’s who are we being as teachers in that moment? And how can I show up one for myself, two for my students.

And I love how you said this isn’t just a one and done. You don’t go to the gym one time and build muscle. This is like – it’s like dusting. You kind of got to do it because the dust keeps building up or cleaning out the closet or, you know, organizing. Things get messy in the classroom and you reset and you reorganize once a week or whatever. That’s what this is. And it’s like those little reset moments, when you do them every single day, then there’s not this big layers upon layers that you have to unveil because you haven’t done the work for days, months, years, right?

Michelle Singh: Yeah. And you can always get back on track. Just like, you know, with our diets and our exercise.

Angela Kelly: Exactly. Yeah, there’s no perfection here. It’s about progress.

Michelle Singh: 100%. Yes, that and that’s something that I still have to practice and still learn because a lot of times we struggle with that perfectionism too because we’re expected to perform, especially in our roles where that’s honestly the expectation, right? And so that’s another thing that we have to undo ourselves to be okay with doing these things in smaller increments and not a big overhaul.

Angela Kelly: Right. Right. Yeah. And I love that you brought up the perfectionism thing because I do think teachers want so badly to do right by their students, but they do it at the cost of themselves because we kind of created a culture of, and I’m not trying to disrespect this term, but I do think that it ended up getting misinterpreted and that’s servant leadership or servant, you know, just we’re servants of our clients, which are our students. And I definitely believe in contribution and providing value and being of service and teachers of influence and inspiration and evolution, like that we’re in the business of human development here, and also not, I think we misinterpreted as I say servant leadership, but I mean servant education and that mindset of like relentless commitment, no matter what, we put ourselves on the line every single day.

And what we’re finding is that is so integrated now into the institution of education that people are – there’s a cognitive dissonance that comes when somebody, you know, like you comes in and says, hey, you have permission, it’s okay to like take these breathing exercises or do a, you know, a brain break and do it with your kids or do it with yourself and to recheck in with yourself because we were like, wait a minute, weren’t wasn’t I, am I not supposed to be in service? And so I like how you said that this practice actually is in service of your students in addition to you.

Michelle Singh: It’s both. You have to feel well first to teach well. Feel well to teach well. And it’s again, I said this earlier, you got to be selfish. And we are taught that we cannot be that.

Angela Kelly: Yes.

Michelle Singh: But it’s okay. I’m giving you permission. We’re both giving you permission.

Angela Kelly: That’s right.

Michelle Singh: Be selfish in that way where you’re taking care of yourself because in order for you to show up whole and right and ready and sharp, if your brain is not sharp, you’re not going to make the right decisions that are going to be the best choice for your students because you’re mentally and emotionally overloaded.

Angela Kelly: Exactly.

Michelle Singh: And the students that need you the most, that’s a missed opportunity because you didn’t take time for yourself. That’s not being selfish.

Angela Kelly: Right. That is the most selfless act you can do is to be, to have your buckets full. Like, like all of those areas of rest to provide yourself that to be 100% ready to serve in the time that you’re it’s go time, right? To be able to serve students. And you see teachers dragging in and just trying to get through and kids feel that. They know. They know you’re coming in, you know, and you’re overworked and, you know, you’ve overextended yourself. But now that we’ve created awareness, I think as an industry, you know, that’s where I love the work that you do and, you know, what I am seeking to do in my mission and my movement into empowering principals and teachers is really now that we’re creating awareness around this skill. And we’re all saying the same thing. I wasn’t taught this as a kid. If I had known this as a kid, now, why don’t we teach it? Because we know that this is – it’s an essential part of the human experience.

Michelle Singh: It is. And it trickles. It trickles. We’re teaching it to the kids. The kids are sharing it with their families. I just workshopped recently for an organization, a community organization. So I called it The Restful Girl Experience because it was about how young girls are able to incorporate these strategies within their teenage to preteen lives, but I also incorporated ways that the parents could do it with them too. So it’s not, this is community impact. This is not just classroom impact. This is community impact. Like, if I knew this as a young mother, as a young teacher, as a young child, how much different would my experience have been had I known this? We don’t know what we don’t know. And so when you know better, you got to do better. And so now that I know, hey, I’m spreading the word.

Angela Kelly: Me too. I get it. And knowing better and doing better is teaching better and makes learning better.

Michelle Singh: Absolutely.

Angela Kelly: Because regulation, you cannot access learning if you are not regulated and if you are not rested.

Michelle Singh: Yes. Maslow, basic. Right? And when I observe classrooms for the teachers who are in my programs at the university, you know, the common thread is these basic needs aren’t met. The basic needs of the students aren’t met, and that’s where the disengagement comes up. And so how do we tap into the things and the strategies that we need to ensure that those students are not disengaged? Well, the same way we do it for ourselves. You just have to do those things and incorporate those things within the curriculum as well.

Angela Kelly: Yes.

Michelle Singh: So yeah, we have to take the lead first, we have to model it and we do it with our students.

Angela Kelly: I love this. How do you, I was just thinking, how do you support teachers in a conversation with their staff? So I know some schools are really strict. Like, they’ll do walkthroughs and they expect to see like pacing guides and, you know, objections posted on – like they have all of this checklist of things they’re supposed to be seeing. And if they walk in, I think some teachers are afraid if they walk into my classroom and I’m doing some kind of breathing exercise with my kids, they’ll be like, what is this? How do you help the administration come into alignment with the teachers to show like this is an integral part of teaching and learning? And how do you work with your clients and your schools when it comes to that, you know, kind of agreement?

Michelle Singh: Yeah, I think it has to do with mindset shifts about what teaching should look like. And so it’s not going to always, you know, silence does not mean that they’re learning and same as chaos doesn’t mean that they’re not learning. You know, so it has to do with what are our perceptions and our biases of what teaching should look like. And how do I get in front of those now that one, I can acknowledge these biases and that they exist. And so when I go into a teacher’s class, I won’t have these biases. And so I got to ask questions. So if they’re doing this, just ask a question, knowing that you have this bias around this. If I understand it better, then I am able to see what the reasoning behind this if I don’t know. But I think it all goes back to the biases and just our understanding of and our expectation of what teaching should be.

Angela Kelly: Yes.

Michelle Singh: We have to disrupt a lot of that. We have to question and interrogate a lot of that because those things have to change.

Angela Kelly: Agreed. I think we need to recalibrate what we what the purpose of teaching and learning is. I think it’s time to have those conversations and to come into agreement that the mental and emotional experience is highly valuable to address and to integrate because, and I think about it, it’s such an easy sell. So, hey, principals out there, if you’re listening to this, and I know a lot of teachers listen to this podcast too, but for the principals and district leaders out there, I want you to understand like if people are learning how to self-regulate, I want you to see the impact and the value it has for you because if a teacher can self-regulate, she’s not going to be in your office crying or venting about a problem that she has or that she’s just on overload and wants to quit.

And the same holds true like when these teachers are regulating and teaching students how to regulate, your referrals are going to go down. And what you’re going to spend your time on is actual instructional leadership versus, you know, managing and maintenance and, you know, investigations and referrals and summaries of meetings and all of those things which are in reaction to the lack of teaching emotional regulation. So if there’s anything that sells you on what Dr. Singh teaches, it’s that helping teachers and giving them permission to practice self-regulation for themselves and their students positively impacts your day, your experience as a school leader. So I just had to sell that.

Michelle Singh: No, for sure. Like, we know teacher shortage is on the rise. We know that. We know there are vacancies, so mid-year, you got new teachers coming, there’s retention because they just can’t, they can’t last. What is the root of that? We may not be able to answer that in one sentence, but it all boils down to we have a system. This system doesn’t work for everyone. So what can we do within our own space as education leaders, as principal as administrators, what can you do within your sphere and in your space to ensure that when your teachers and your students are with you, going back to those three words, they feel grounded, they feel safe, and they feel comforted in the space that you create.

In order to do that, it cannot just be traditional curriculum. Let’s teach to the test, let’s do the. It has to be about holistic wellness. Holistic teaching. And the strategies that I have been teaching are brain-based. They are supported by research. These are not new things. These are just things that happen outside of education that have now been integrated in the education realm because I’ve experienced them as an entrepreneur, as someone outside of the field in different worlds, and now I’m saying, this should have been taught to us in our education programs, but it’s not. So let me do it right now for you.

Angela Kelly: Yes. Yes. Amen to that. I’m here for it. Can I just tap your brain? I’m just dying to ask you this. I know it’s a little, well, it’s not off topic. You had mentioned that you did your dissertation in student disengagement.

Michelle Singh: Disengagement.

Angela Kelly: Okay. So people, I have to ask because I think people are dying to know like what was your findings on disengagement? What’s working, what’s not? What’s what are the components of the disengagement? I mean, not to do the whole dissertation, but if there’s just…

Michelle Singh: Okay, so disengagement is not just something that happens when our students are disruptive in classroom. It goes a lot deeper than that. We have to look at the emotional, we got to look at the social, we got to look at the intellectual. It’s not just what we see on the classroom is just the surface. What’s the deeper thing? Well, relationships between the teacher and the student is the strongest is the strongest antidote because when the teacher understands and knows the student and has a relationship, there’s trust, there’s safety, there’s comfort.

I didn’t find anything that was so outlandish and so crazy that it’s brand new. The things that I found in my studies, there were 10 themes that I found in my studies from the research participants and they’re all things that have been talked about that we should be doing in classrooms with students and it all stems back to what do we know about those people that we’re interacting with for 180 days or more.

Angela Kelly: Six hours at a time.

Michelle Singh: Yeah, what kind of relationship are we building with them? How are we bringing those things in the classroom to brain-based science, help activate prior learning to make that interest spark, to make that curriculum relevant, to make the experience innovative. It’s all back to those, you know, those things that we have read. It’s just making it concrete. Here’s what you can try. So you want to build relationships with students, here’s what you can do. You want to make your curriculum more innovative, have you tried this? This is what some teachers have done to do this. You want to bring the calm and address the social and emotional needs. Here are what these teachers are doing. And another thing that stood out in the research is learned helplessness and how that affects because I did it on Black students in high school language arts classes. That was my focus.

Angela Kelly: Okay.

Michelle Singh: Learn helplessness happens from childhood and they carry that weight all the way to high school. And when that is not addressed, when those stereotype threats and those mindset issues are at the forefront for these students, no way of getting in. No way. And so there’s also that issue where we kind of have to be coaches for the students in addition to teachers. Right? In order to be a coach, you got to have a relationship. You have to know if you don’t know what they are coming from, how are you going to be their coach? How are you going to be their teacher to really help them into developing a relationship? So that’s why I say everything goes back to the relationship. Because that’s how you’re able to know them to be able to do better for them.

Angela Kelly: Yes. That is such a light bulb moment for me. It’s we need to recalibrate or redefine the relationship between teacher and student. And when you said the word coach, that’s when it clicked to me. Like, you know, I identify as a coach, a mentor. Like I kind of wear both of those hats from time to time. Coaching is different than mentoring, right? And there’s a time and a place where mentoring is a little more direct and coaching is that more open-ended letting the client come to their own, you know, conclusions.

And I think we’ve had such an authority figure mentality as teachers, I’m the adult, I should be respected, I’m the holder and the knowledge of all the power and all the, you know, wisdom and the information that and the skills that you need versus seeing children in their empowerment at a developmentally appropriate level, of course, but having a more collaborative, co-facilitating kind of learning teaching experience where you’re coaching people while also coaching them mentally, emotionally, psychologically in addition to academics.

Michelle Singh: Yeah, and not just that, when we think about ourselves not in those deeply authoritative, showing up perfect type of teacher role that we have been taught to see and expected to perform, we become human. And we become able to create classrooms with cultures. I call it the you know, creating a culture of experimentation where failure is a learning opportunity rather than get out my class because you suck. Or I suck, you know?

Angela Kelly: Yeah, somebody sucks here.

Michelle Singh: The end all be all.

Angela Kelly: Right.

Michelle Singh: So we create that culture of experimentation and the students see us processing, failing, learning, growing, reflecting, and they see that as okay and then they then are okay with doing those things and trying and risk taking and curiosity, all of that, you know, flourishes when we become human and not perfect.

Angela Kelly: Yes. And we had such a different, challenging relationship with – it was pass/fail. You passed or you failed. You made grade level standards or you didn’t. And now we’re saying like failure is the path. And so it’s like when you’re assessing students, you’re assessing their progress, not whether they passed or failed. They know or they don’t. You know, and working with them on and changing the way we think about testing and the and data even at large. Like it’s progress based and it’s what we’ve, you know, we tried, this is what, you know, we didn’t understand and now we’re going to learn that and try it again. And this just spiraling, I hate to say spiral review, but like a spiraling of learning.

Michelle Singh: And just the power of feedback. One of the things I will always remember, so I am a teacher of the gifted. You know, I taught gifted students throughout my career as a language art, secondary language arts teacher. You know, I was the gifted department chair for the school with over 400 gifted students. So I have a Master’s degree in gifted education. And the reason I call that out is because I didn’t realize, one, that you could get a master’s degree in gifted education. And when I did, I was like, oh, I need to learn as much as possible about these students that I’m teaching.

And I will tell you that the things that I learned in that Master’s degree program opened my eyes to what teaching should be. And I had to pay for this degree. I had to be a teacher with that specification to be able to get this degree. This is not something that’s open to all teachers. So that’s been another mission of mine as well as I teach teachers, I teach them about gifted strategies because I believe this should not be hidden curriculum that only works for certain types of students. That’s just a whole ‘nother thing that I’m very passionate about as well. But I say all of that to say that I was I was teaching a gifted summer program one year because y’all know as teachers, classroom teachers, we have to have summer jobs.

So this summer, it was at the University of Miami. I’m in Miami, Florida. And it was, I forget, some kind of institute for the gifted program. And in that program, there were not grades. It was performance feedback. And it was the most fulfilling experience for me as a teacher who was sharing with parents and students about their progress because it wasn’t just a number or a letter in the grade book. I was actually able to share this is what the student did holistically. Here’s how you are as a learner and give feedback on the learning experience and what their strengths and opportunities and examples of where they can go next. It wasn’t based on grades at all.

And so I was, I took that and I used that skill when I do, you know, score or evaluate even my college students because I want them to have that level of feedback. I’m not even looking at the percentage that the rubric gives you. Pay attention to the written feedback that you’re getting from me about your work and what to do next and how you’ve grown and what your strengths are. And I think when we focus on that kind of evaluation process where it’s not just about the test and the number and the score and this and that. Sure, those things are necessary. I get it. I get it. But we also have to integrate other ways where our students can feel, can get some confidence from their growth and from their performance. Because the test is not going to do it for a lot of our students. And if that’s the only thing that we focus on and we don’t focus on formative assessments that are frequent and we don’t focus on, you know, feedback that’s rich, our students are never – that learned helplessness is going to continue.

Angela Kelly: It is. It really is. It really is. And that’s something to just be aware of as a teacher. You know, where might we be implementing or like enabling a little bit that helplessness? I was talking to another teacher a while back and she was saying like, you know, I just want my students to need me or you know, like there was something there about really wanting to be needed by her students. And we brought that up the idea of the helplessness. And I would say like for school leaders keeping that in mind as for our teachers, right? We don’t want our teachers relying on us. We want them to be empowered.

I mean, that’s the whole mission of my coaching program is seeing the empowerment in our students and in our teachers and in ourselves and identifying as a person who can continually evolve, who can step into their empowerment, who can redefine what’s going on in their mind and I know it’s scary sometimes to be out there teaching when times are uncertain and when families are being disrupted and when the pressure is on and now you’re being restricted about what you can teach, what you can’t teach, what you can say, what you can’t say. We’re tiptoeing around a lot, but all of this to say, no matter who you are, what seat you are on the bus currently in education, you do have personal power, internal power to regulate yourself and to guide yourself and what a gift to give students, the gift of self-awareness and self-regulation because that’ll take you through life.

Michelle Singh: Yeah, and the gift of you as a human being. And I’ll tell you this, like I’ve learned this along the way, especially after leaving, but I remember doing sprinkles of this, but as a professor in college, talking about my experience has been the most, I would say, impactful thing that I hear from them when they come back to me. Thank you for sharing that example. Thank you for telling us how it worked for you because those stories are the things that they remember. And we have a lot of times we want to separate us, you know, ourselves from the classroom, but we got to be human. You know, I am okay with talking, I’m an immigrant. I am from Jamaica, right? Now, my family, some of my family members are going through the hurricane in Jamaica. My brother just called me not a couple minutes ago. I’ve been checking on them, checking the news. Thank God they’re okay.

But you know, I don’t mind and stray away from sharing those things because I know that in my classroom, there are going to be immigrants too. And when they hear me say things like, you know, my grandfather, you know, passed away when I was or my mother, you know, or my mother did this for me or my cousin, me and my cousins used to – when they hear us talk about those human experiences, those are the things that are building relationships. You may have that kid come up to you that didn’t say nothing to you for the first quarter of the school year and because you shared something personal – and I don’t mean personal, personal, obviously we’re adults. But when you are able to share the human side of you, you’re going to make those connections with the students because they’re going to see you as not a perfect person, but they’re going to see you as a human just like if they see you out at the supermarket in your shorts. You’re like, oh my gosh, that’s Miss whoever. She actually a human being?

Angela Kelly: Why are you at Target right now? I thought you lived at school.

Michelle Singh: What do you have on shorts?

Angela Kelly: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it just throws them totally off. But I agree with you. I think connection is, there’s power in storytelling and in that, in building connection is about the stories and kids are fascinated. I mean, I taught kindergarten and we would tell stories about our lives, you know, going on little trips, you know, we were teaching them how to write and tell little stories, but that connects kids to you and they see you in a more holistic light because you’re sharing and now you can see them and who they are.

Michelle Singh: Absolutely. Absolutely. Tell them about your kids. Tell them about, you know, your experiences growing up when you were, you know, their age. Like these are things that are going to stick to them, especially if you’re connecting it to what they’re learning. Like when I’m teaching, I always connect it somehow to, you know, what we’re about to do, what we’re about to learn because that’s that prior knowledge, that’s that connection, that’s that relevance. You know, that’s that holistic learning experience. You’re bringing all of that into the learning. And I truly believe storytelling is – it’s the truth. It’s the truth in slang and in actual real definition.

Angela Kelly: And an engaging way, right?

Michelle Singh: Yeah, I think that it’s something that we have in our toolbox that we do not utilize enough at all.

Angela Kelly: Yeah. I feel like I could talk with you forever. I’m just enamored by you. I love the work that you’re doing. And if people want to learn more about you or your company and the services you offer, can you just tell them a little just really quickly? And we’ll put all the resources in the show notes, but I just wanted you to say, you know, where to find you and where they can learn more.

Michelle Singh: The easiest way to connect with me is ConnectWithMichelle.com.

Angela Kelly: Oh, nice.

Michelle Singh: So if you just go to ConnectWithMichelle.com, Michelle with two L’s, by the way, Yes. .com, you’ll get a form, you just put your name in there, it’s going to send you an email and then you’re going to see all of the ways that we can stay in touch and we can be in community together. You’ll see links to the website, to the LinkedIn, to the socials, to the thought leadership and all the articles and the dissertation, everything. So then ConnectWithMichelle.com, you’ll see The Restful Teacher program, ConnectWithMichelle.com. That’s the easiest way.

Angela Kelly: Okay, that’s great because then they can just – it’s a one stop shop. They can come and check out all the things and do a little shopping over there.

Michelle Singh: Yeah, just put your name in and then press submit and you will then get entered.

Angela Kelly: Yes. Oh, that’s great. Michelle, thank you for this hour. Thank you for your wisdom. I really appreciated this and it was just an absolute pleasure and I’ve learned so much from this conversation. Truly, I have. I do hope we can keep in touch. I will connect with Michelle.

Michelle Singh: I love it.

Angela Kelly: Yes. And I just want to send like, I know – as we’re recording this, by the way, we are literally Jamaica is in the eye of this storm right now. So I am sending all of my loves and prayers. I’ve been to Jamaica several times. It’s a beautiful country and I’m sending healthy, safe vibes for your family.

Michelle Singh: Thank you so much. Thank you so much. And yes, definitely prayers to all my family, all my friends, the whole island of Jamaica.

Angela Kelly: Yes. Oh, mercy may they be well. So, thank you again for your time. Let’s stay in touch. If there’s anything I can do to support you, I just want to be in sisterhood in this journey together and supporting our educators.

Michelle Singh: And same for me. I love this conversation. It was not scripted. This was all just a conversation, y’all. And very authentic, very real and I thank you for the opportunity to share with your listeners.

Angela Kelly: Yes. I know they’ll appreciate it. Interviews are always top rated on the show. So, thank you for your time and that’s a wrap, empowered principals. Have a wonderful week and we will see you all next week. Take good care. Bye.

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

Hello, empowered principals. Welcome to episode 410.

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

Well, hello, my beautiful empowered principals. Happy Tuesday. And my goodness, welcome to the month of November. How is it November? This year has been lightning speed. It’s funny because at the end of the year, I always feel like the year went fast, but when I think about all that happened in the year, it amazes me how much has happened this year. We’ll be doing some more reflection in December and then for the Empowered Principal Mid-year Reboot, which happens at the beginning of January. You’ll want to sign up for that. More details to follow, but that will be happening the first of the new year. We always do a mid-year reboot in January when our mind is fresh and rested and we have the new year energy to re-decide who we want to be, how we want to develop ourselves, how we want to grow, and what we want to experience.

The mid-year reboot is such a fabulous opportunity to set your intentions for the rest of this school year and to decide what you want 2026 to look like for you and your school and your family. So, I’ll be sharing more about the mid-year reboot in December. But welcome to November, and today’s topic really came from a one-on-one coaching call I had into a conversation I had with my group coaching program, EPC, the Empowered Principal Collaborative, which then became a Facebook Live. For those of you who are on Facebook, I have a free Facebook group, the Empowered Principal Facebook group.

It’s open to anybody who is in education, aspiring to be a school leader or in school leadership and would like to collaborate, connect, and really dive deeper into the daily mindset and skillset of the Empowered Principal movement. So, if you are on Facebook and you’re not in the group, I invite you to join us. I am doing a Facebook Live 365 Facebook challenge where I jump on live every single day for 365 days to just connect with you, to see how you’re doing, to provide insights, value, what’s going on in my life personally, professionally, what’s going on in the world of the Empowered Principal.

And it has been so much fun to just re-engage in a way with school leaders that is so natural and genuine and authentic, and it’s such a beautiful way to connect with each and every one of you. And I am providing what I believe is invaluable insights, wisdom, information that occurs during the course of the day or during the course of the week. It’s something that I want to share with you as school leaders because it’s very isolating to be a school leader, particularly when you are the only administrator on campus.

And even then, even with a staff or you have a team, it still feels very lonely. And I want to create a space where you can come, a place where you can gather, where you can relax, where you can speak freely, where you can express yourself freely, where you can share, where you can ask questions, where you can just sit and listen, or you can comfort somebody else, or you can celebrate yourself. You know, we don’t get to celebrate ourselves as school leaders very often, and I want a place and a space for you to be able to do that. Because what’s required for us to really enjoy ourselves and to really acknowledge any kind of win that we have, we need to do that for ourselves because nobody’s coming to do it.

Our superintendents are not coming to celebrate us. Our teachers are busy. They’re not coming with the goal of celebrating us. It’s our job to acknowledge ourselves, to celebrate ourselves. And I want you to have a space where you feel that is allowed, that you have permission to celebrate, that you have permission to collaborate, you have permission to speak freely. And that’s what this group is. And of course, if you should decide and when you decide to come into the world of the empowered principal, whether that’s through one-on-one coaching or group coaching or one of the programs that I offer, just know that those spaces just take all of this to the next level.

So, I want to share this conversation with you. I call it the one-third perspective. It’s a perspective that my coach taught me many years ago, and I keep it in mind and I apply it regularly because it serves me so well. It serves me professionally in my business. It serves me with my clients and it serves me personally in my life. It also serves all of those that you serve. So this isn’t just for you. When you apply this perspective, my coach called it the one-third rule. I don’t like rules, so I like to call it the perspective because it provides me perspective. So, the one-third perspective is very simple. You’ve probably heard it before, actually. I don’t think that my coach invented this. I don’t know who invented it. Somebody did, but I believe that it’s universal. And I’ve applied it in my life. I’ve watched clients apply it and it works. So I invite you to try it.

One-third of the people, whether that’s your staff, your students, your families, your community, your colleagues, the world. I like to think of it as the world. A third of the people on the planet in your school, in your district, are going to vibe with you. They’re going to be on board with you. They’re going to like you. You call these people your people. They’re the people that you just feel click right in. You click with them, you enjoy them. These people support you, they love you, they care about you, they rally for you. You feel in sync with them. You feel good when you’re around them. You have aligned values, you have aligned visions, and it’s like you’re just in the same lane, floating down the same river, going in the same direction. Easy peasy.

Then, you have a third that in the very big picture, if you’re thinking about a third of the people on the planet, these people aren’t even aware of you. There are so many billions of people on this planet and many, many, many, many, many of them, probably more than a third, will never know our existence. They will never really know us. They’re not even aware of us. But if you bring it into the context of your life and the people you do know and the people that are aware of you, so the people who are at school or the people in your social circles or your family or your community, your district, that kind of thing. These people, this third of the people, and this is all in relation to you, right?

So a third of the people you know are going to like you, a third of the people that you know and are in your sphere, these are people who I define as neutral. They don’t love or hate you. They’re just more focused on themselves, their work, their lives. They’re kind of in their lane doing their thing. They’re not out rallying for you, but they’re not out hating on you. They’re just doing what they need to do regardless of who the principal is at their school. They’re getting up and doing their job and focusing on their kids and teaching. They’re complying. They’re doing what needs to be done and what they’re asked to do as employees. And but they’re not expressing explicit approval or disapproval. So they’re kind of the neutral crowd.

And you can probably think of people on your campus who are like that. They’re pleasant, they’re cordial, they’re professional, but they’re not big ralliers. They’re not people you would want to hang out with 24/7, but you don’t dislike them either. You could visit with them at a cocktail party or at the staff meeting or a staff gathering. You could go to a happy hour with them and they would be lovely to talk with. And you might learn something amazing about them and maybe they become your people. But they’re currently neutral.

And then, you know, the other third. These are the people who do not agree with you, do not approve of you, do not support you, do not like you. You say go, they say stop. You tell them your hair is blonde, they say, no, it actually is strawberry blonde. Right? They just have a little opinion, have a little resistance, have something different to offer in every case. They will agree to disagree. They will blame, complain. They might argue. They might point out your faults and mistakes. It feels like these people are on the planet to cause you pain and suffering and frustration. These are people that really get under your skin. They trigger you, okay? You know who I’m talking about. You know who I’m talking about with your people. You know who I’m talking about, the neutrals, and you know who I’m talking about with those who get your goat.

And here is how we tend to approach this. We first go in when we’re school leaders and we try to find the people who like us because we need them to ground us. We want to know the people who like us. They say go build relationships, but what they mean by that is go out and sniff out the people. Who are the third that like me and then the third that are neutral, feel a little bit aloof, but they’re not. And then the other third are rolling their eyes. Ugh. Here she comes. I can’t believe they hired her. She’s not going to tell me what to do. She’s younger than me. I’ve been teaching for 30 years. What can she possibly teach me? Those people, right?

So we tend to go out and say, okay, who likes me? I need to be grounded. I need external validation. I need to be loved and supported. And hey, look, we are wired for connection. We’re wired to be liked. So this is a real thing that we do because it feels like safety, it feels like survival to know people who like us. You know when you walk into a room, let’s say you go to a conference and you go alone, what do you do? You look for friendly faces who are smiling, who have an open seat next to them and ask, may I sit next to you? Because it builds a connection and it creates a feeling of safety and some trust and you can relax and know that there’s a friendly face next to you and you strike up a conversation. It’s the first thing we do. We want to establish ourselves foundation of safety and trust.

And then we start to notice who’s kind of neutral, who’s kind of aloof. There’s people at your table at the conference who are doing their thing. They’re not like annoyed that you sat down. But we want to try and get them to like us. So we find out who likes us first, and then we notice the people who are a little bit aloof or who are kind of neutral or just kind of busy doing their own thing. They might whiz by us without saying hello or something because they’re so focused on themselves. But then we really will notice and we’ll zoom as fast as we zoom into the people who like us, we equally zoom into the people who we think don’t like us. Even if we don’t know if they don’t like us, we’re like, what if they don’t like me? They looked at me weird, or that girl rolled her eyes, or that girl turned her back to me. Oh my gosh, what did I do? Do I have something on my face? Do I have something in my nose? Do I have something in my teeth? Do I smell? Did I forget to put deodorant on today? What is wrong with me? Did I not smile at her? Oh my gosh, did I make a face? And we are so caught up in what we did to upset them and why they don’t like us and we’re already thinking about what can we do to get them to like us.

So we’re usually we blame ourselves. We’re like, oh my gosh, what did I do? Let me fix what I did. I did something wrong. Do I look funny? Do I smell funny? Is there something unacceptable about me that I need to change immediately? Or we’re like, what the heck is her problem? Why does she get sour face? Why, I didn’t do anything. So depending on where we are with our identity, we either blame people or we blame ourselves. When we feel that someone who doesn’t like us has done something or said something that trigger us, what we will do is go and rally. So like, did you see that face that she made or did you hear they said this about me? We want to bring in the troops that like us, the third that like us. We rally them all around us, gather the wagons and lick our wounds.

And then in that group, we will either blame the other people for not liking us and for what they did and what they said. Meanwhile, we’re not liking them. FYI. We’re in the middle of doing the exact thing that they did to us or similar. So we’re blaming them, or we feel very victim to their behaviors, helplessness, and which is still a form of blame. Or we’re like, oh my gosh, that’s feedback that I’ve done something wrong, that something is wrong with me. We blame ourselves. We try to figure out how to get them back on our team. And the harder we try, the more they resist because they don’t want to be coerced into liking something they don’t like or believing something they don’t believe or standing for something they don’t value or engaging in a practice they don’t find valuable.

And many of us leaders will get lured into the chase. Chasing them for their likes and approvals and their friendship and their thumbs up. I mean, I’ve done it. I’ve observed clients doing it. I’ve seen my colleagues engaging in it. The desire to be liked is so compelling that we almost don’t notice when we’re doing it. It feels like it’s the right thing to do. We don’t even realize how much we value their approval because what we’re really doing when we’re so obsessed with it is we’re trying to escape the emotions that come up when we’re thinking about or we’re believing that somebody doesn’t like us.

I mean, think about that right now. Think of a person that does not like you, that has blamed you, that has accused you, that has wronged you, that has said terrible things about you, whether they’re true or not. Even if they’re true, it’s bad and if they’re not true, it feels worse. But either way, when someone opposes you publicly and doesn’t like you publicly, that feels awful. It’s anguish. It’s an emotion that vibrates so painfully, you’ll do almost anything to make it stop. I think back to how much time I spent thinking about teachers who didn’t like me. I was obsessed. I would stew on what they did or what they said or what they didn’t say. Sometimes it’s the non-verbals that will kill you. Then you spin out thinking about what they did and what they mean and trying to interpret it and what could they have meant and why did they do that? And I don’t understand. And then start spinning on what could I do differently or what should I have said? Or should I apologize, or are they just being jerks?

The amount of time and effort and attention that went into spinning on the third who didn’t like me was astounding, quite frankly. It felt like no matter what I did, what I said, they didn’t like it. I could feel their dislike for me. Just my presence seemed to be a bother. My existence on the planet seemed to be a nuisance. And I really wasted time, energy, attention that I could have been spent leading, loving, growing and expanding. And really, at the end of the day, I ended up doing this because I hired a life coach, but I ended up having to go internal and reflect on why I was doing this to myself, torturing myself, doubling down on their torture, right? There was people not liking me and then there was me not liking me because they didn’t like me.

So here’s how the one-third rule, the one-third perspective, shifted my thoughts, my feelings, my perspective, my approach. I thought about the truth of the perspective, the truth of the one-third rule. There are people who are easy to get along with. If I think about my own life, there are people who are just very easy to get along with. They just click. It feels harmonious. It’s joy, it’s pleasure. It’s a delight to be around them. It feels good to be me when I’m around them. I look forward to them. I admire them. I cherish their relationship. I value it.

In the workplace, it just feels good to have people that you can work with, speak to, talk to, who get you, who like, I’m on it, boss, or I’m ready to do that, or I’d love to take that or I support you and I know this is hard. I see you. And I just want to thank you for your hard work. Like all of that, amazing. And we want to cultivate those friendships deeply, but we can’t only rely on that handful of people. So there is truth. There’s a handful of people that it’s a click. And I would venture to tell you that you can expand that third by getting to know more about the neutral.

So then there are people in my life who are very neutral to me. I may not have awareness of them at all on the planet when you think globally. But in our world, for the people who do exist in my world and I feel neutral about, it’s as though we coexist. They’re doing their thing, I’m doing my thing. I’m not loving or hating on them. I’m not following. I’m not obsessing about them. They’re doing their thing. They’re not obsessing about me. It’s like we coexist and we work in parallel, like two children who engage in parallel play. They’re happily playing. They’re content. They’re living and breathing and doing their thing. And they’re aware of that other child’s existence. That other child is playing, but they’re not seeking out to engage or to seek their approval. They’re not bothered by the other child. They’re just neutral. They’re content and they’re not reliant on that other child’s interaction or that opinion of that child. That child doesn’t have to play their way. They can play in their own way and it’s fine.

And then there are people that we don’t find easy to get along with. They don’t click for us. They have a different energy than we prefer to be around. They have values that we maybe don’t understand or don’t agree with. They have a different approach to things that rubs us wrong or feels, you know, out of alignment with who we are and what we learned and what we believe. These are people we might not feel good when we’re around them. They’re work to be around or we don’t like the way they do things or say things, and we’re triggered by them when they do it. It rubs us wrong, and they’re triggered by us. We don’t want them to not like us, but we are okay with us not liking certain people.

That’s the truth of the one-third rule, the one-third perspective is just leaning into the truth. A third are going to like us, a third are going to be neutral, and a third are not going to like us. And it’s not because we’re doing something wrong and it’s not because we need to be better and it’s not because they need to change and they need to get on board with us. It’s just simply the truth. And you can lean into that and then say, okay, if this is the truth, if there are people we like, people we don’t like, and people who are neutral and in the middle, now what? What do I do with that?

How do I leverage this perspective to enhance my life, my experience, my leadership skills to invite me into connection with as many people as possible and to lead people who don’t love me, who don’t connect with me, who are neutral about me, who don’t follow my guidance or don’t want to? We can appreciate those who do align with us and feel that immense gratitude for them loving on us and being present in our school. So grateful, so appreciative of those folks who give you that smile, who wink at you, who say yes, who step in, who do the extra work, who go the extra mile, who rally the troops, who talk highly of the initiative, who help with the rollout, who come to you in advance and say, hey, think about this or this is brewing. You might want to get a handle on that.

Just be so grateful for those people and take time to acknowledge them and let them know how much you enjoy their presence, their support, their collaboration. Don’t forget about acknowledging them. Sometimes we take them for granted. We don’t want to do that. We don’t want to spend more time chasing the other people and getting them to like us than we take time to appreciate those who already do like us, who are already in alignment with us.

But we can also acknowledge and appreciate those who are independent and focused on their own work. We can be so grateful as leaders that those people are just doing their job. They’re not actively out creating conflict or disruption. We can connect with them, learn more about them. And hey, maybe they’re going to become more of our own people. But even if they stay neutral, we can acknowledge them, appreciate them, validate the work that they’re doing, validate their independence, validate that they’re not out creating conflict and disruption, and just appreciate that.

Because really, that group is also your people. They’re just doing it at an independent level. They’re not needing to cheerlead you on. They’re not needing it for themselves or they’re not needing to do it for you. They’re just out doing, out living, out teaching. They’re doing their thing, okay? And for the people who don’t like us, we can also seek to understand ourselves because of them. And we can seek to understand them. Having that contrast, having people who don’t like us is what helps us to hone in on what we value. It helps us refine our vision. Maybe there’s some holes in our vision that we want to refine, and it also helps us stay true to what we believe in, our values, our philosophy, our principles of leadership and of our lives.

It’s okay to have contrast. It’s okay to have polarity. It’s okay to have difference of opinions in our schools, in our campuses, in our lives. The people that don’t like us or people that we don’t like, they are curriculum. It’s an invitation for us as leaders to expand ourselves, for us to understand why they trigger us below the surface. So we can list out, here’s the ten reasons why I don’t like this person. Here’s all the things they do and all the things they say. And I don’t like the way they smell, and I don’t like the way their face looks, and I don’t like the way they roll their eyes. But why? Why does it bother you? Go below the surface. You can see them as a mirror into the internal work that you can do. And not do this work because you’re not good enough or you’re incompetent or you’re not doing enough. None of the worthiness work, that’s separate. There’s a difference.

This work is about choosing it, choosing to do the internal work because you want to grow. You want to expand your capacity. You want to evolve yourself. You want to learn about these triggers so you can release them so that they’re no longer triggers because you see them for what they are. Oh, when people roll their eyes at me, it bothers me so bad because my older sister used to do that. And I used to think she was such a witch. You know? So rude to roll your eyes. My mother taught me it was rude to roll your eyes. Like, why does I rolling bother you? Why does somebody speaking up bother you?

I can remember, personal example. And this could be a whole separate podcast, which I’ll probably do, but I was so sensitive to feedback. I did not like getting any negative feedback. I used to, oh my gosh, if a parent said something or a colleague or gosh forbid, a superior, I would be so devastated that I wasn’t good enough, did something wrong, needed to fix it right away, or I’d be so resistant to it because I was tired of people telling me what I did wrong and I just wanted to live and breathe and why can’t I just be the way I am?

I had to do a lot of internal work on the purpose of feedback, how I defined feedback, what I made it mean, how I interpreted it. And I would dismiss it if it came from somebody I was like, oh, well, you’re just complaining or you’re just blaming or you’re not taking responsibility. It tended to be people like when I was a principal, it was like the teachers were just complaining versus giving me solid feedback or looking for the truth in their feedback or validating it at the very least. So I had to do the work on how I interpreted feedback, what I was making it mean, how I defined it, the purpose of it, the value of it.

And when I started doing that, then feedback started not being a big deal for me because I released it as a trigger. It was no longer a trigger. It was actually an invitation in. And it’s not that I no longer felt the feels of feedback, but I felt them in the form of the truth of them or the discernment that it wasn’t feedback that I was going to leverage, like somebody says, well, you should cut your hair. Oh, I should. Oh my gosh. Do I run and cut my hair? Maybe. Maybe I’m like, yeah, you’re right. I look in the mirror. Whoa, it’s been a few months. I got so busy with work. I haven’t had a haircut. Yeah, I need to get my highlights done or I need to get a blowout and go out and feel amazing and look great. Or maybe it’s like, no, I don’t want to get my hair cut. I like my hair long or I like my hair this color. I like my this style. So it invites you in to do I want to take this feedback or do I not want to take the feedback? And it’s really when I started working with a life coach. I had no awareness. I was completely reacting. I had no idea of the third, the one-third perspective, the one-third rule that she taught me. It released me from so much from trying to get everybody to like me.

And when I was coaching my one-on-one client, she goes, but isn’t that our goal to try and get more people on board? And I said to her, your goal is to lead them in spite of them not liking you. Even when they don’t approve or agree with you or like you. It’s learning how to sell them on the value of the vision. It’s not about them liking you so that they’ll be on board. It’s about them understanding the purpose of the vision and how the vision does align to their work that they’re doing in the classroom and their way of doing it, or how this way of doing it helps them, makes life easier for them, better for students, more impactful. There has to be value in it.

And all of a sudden, what you start to realize is your goal is not to get a lot of people to like you and then they’re blindly following you. That’s not leadership. Leadership is being able to lead the one-third, one-third, and one-third because you have a clear understanding of the one-third perspective, and you maintain that perspective, and you study your approach to how do you approach the one-third that like you, the one-third that are neutral, and the one-third that you find more challenging.

This is the kind of stuff we dig into in EPC. If you want to get in, now’s the time. We’re going to be doing the mid-year reboot in January. And if you want to gain access to EPC for the rest of the school year and to the mid-year reboot, join EPC. EPC gives you access to everything, to one-on-one coaching, to group coaching, to all the programs that I offer, all the a la carte programs that I offer. You get all access. Plus, you get all the replays in school. You can have me in your ear all of the time, if you would like. Not just the podcast.

I feel like this podcast is so valuable. I give you everything. But what I know to be true is it’s one thing to listen and another thing to implement. It’s so hard to integrate and implement. And that’s where weekly coaching steps in. It invites you to move, to be willing, to stay open to do this work. Not just to consume it, but to become it. So I invite you into EPC. Have a beautiful week and I’ll talk to you next week. Take good care. Bye.

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

Hello, empowered principals. Welcome to episode 408.

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

Well, hello, my empowered leaders. Happy Tuesday. Welcome to the podcast. We’re going to dive right in today because I know that you are in the middle and the throes of class walkthroughs. You’re doing classroom walkthroughs, you’re doing teacher observations, and we’ve been having these conversations in EPC around what the observations are all about and what our walkthroughs are all about. So, a little short, sweet podcast topic to help you contemplate the purpose, the value, the intention behind your walkthroughs. And I’m going to plant a seed for you today that may inspire you into thinking a little more outside of the box when it comes to instructional leadership, your role as an instructional leader, what you’re looking for as an instructional leader, and expanding your impact as an instructional leader.

So, many principals, they are told, be seen in classrooms, do walkthroughs. We love being in the classrooms. It feels good. We feel closer to the kids and to our teachers, and we feel connected. So we very much enjoy getting to classrooms and walking through, and we love seeing when learning is happening and teachers are teaching and kids are engaged. So there is a feel-good emotion that comes for us when we are walking in classrooms.

And I was speaking with a few of my clients about this, and they were talking about what they were doing for the week. They were in their masculine energy. This is what I’m doing for the week, accomplishing for the week, checking off the boxes, getting that kind of boss energy, getting it done, right? And I asked them what specifically are you looking for in your walkthroughs? That was my first question, and it was interesting. I’m glad I asked it that way, which is not the most productive question to ask, but it was what was on my mind at the time they were speaking. But it was a great question in the end because it showed me that they were looking for very tangible evidence such as kids being on task, the quality of the centers, looking for routines, teacher engagement, student engagement. Is the teacher addressing a student or students that are not engaged? Are the centers developmentally appropriate? Are they academically appropriate?

So, there were very tangible things, and I asked them, “Well, how do you know what you’re looking for? How do you know that a teacher has established routines? How do you know that a teacher is engaged, a student is engaged, and how do you know that the centers are aligned?” You know, all of the things they were looking for. And I wasn’t asking them to put them on the hot seat. I was asking them because I genuinely wanted to understand what their mind was thinking.

So, this is a little side note, and I teach this in EPC, and I’m going to be offering a future program on the skillset of coaching teachers. That program is coming up later on. This is a little precursor to that, but I want you to be mindful. When I am coaching my principals or district leaders, when I’m coaching school leaders, I’m curious to know what’s going on in their mind. And I teach leaders how to be curious about what’s going on in the minds of their staff, of their students, of their families, not just to collect tangible evidence to check the boxes, but to go beyond that, to think deeper, to expand your understanding, your perspective, your curiosity as to the why behind people’s actions and behaviors, and the why behind what we believe we’re seeing in those classrooms.

So, stay with me here. I know this sounds deep. However, I asked them, okay, how do you know when you walk into a classroom and you see a teacher engaging in a certain behavior or a student engaging in a certain behavior or appearing to be engaged or appearing to be teaching, how do you know? Is it just through their actions, or is there something more that’s indicating to you, that’s communicating to you, that’s expressing itself to you where there feels like a knowingness when you walk into a classroom?

Now I want to, I can’t talk with you right here, but in EPC, if you were in EPC, I would ask you this. We’ve all had classrooms we walk into. We walk in and we know that there’s good things going on. And then we can walk into another classroom and we can know that there are some hiccups going on. There’s some, it’s not so smooth in that room, okay? There might be a detour happening, or there might be some bumps in the road. We’ve got a smooth sailing, this road trip’s going great, we’re on track, it’s aligned, and then we’ve got this one that’s, you know, maybe stopped and they’re at the carnival for the day. It’s kind of chaotic, okay?

So, more than just how it looks is the energy of a classroom. It’s how the classroom feels. And without saying too much more about that, I want you to contemplate for the week when you’re walking through classrooms, when you’re doing observations, there is the actions and the words that you’re observing behaviors, right? There are words, there are actions, and then there is an energy in that classroom because kids can be sitting on the carpet, crisscross applesauce, hands in their lap, and totally silent. They could look engaged and not be engaged.

Teaching and learning is not what it looks like; it’s what it actually is. And empowered principals, exceptional school leaders go beyond what it looks like and go through to what it is. They think about the energy of the classroom, how it feels, how it feels for students, how it feels for the teacher, how it feels as the leader to be in that room. There’s something more that is expressed on our campuses than just what people are doing, the actions they are taking.

And we call this sometimes in education, a dog and pony show. In our observations, people can do all of the things, check the boxes, have their objectives up on the board, be right on pacing guide, and teach that lesson on that day. They can bribe kids to play the part of student. It can look good, but does it feel good? Does it feel good to be a student? Does it feel good to be the teacher? Are people feeling good in that room, on this campus, in this staff, as a member, as a member of a classroom, as a member of the team, grade level team, department team, as a member of the staff at large, as a member of this campus, this school community, this district community?

What is the energy that is communicated to you? What does that look and feel like? I’m going to leave it at that because these conversations go much deeper, but I plant the seed with you today as you’re walking through your classrooms to consider my intention beyond checking the boxes, beyond compliance, beyond how it looks, how does it feel? And focusing on not just here’s what I want to see in your classroom, but how do we want to make it feel in your classroom for you, for them, for the greater good?

Contemplate that. Have a beautiful week. I look forward to seeing you in EPC where we teach you and we walk together to collaborate, to connect, to support one another on becoming exceptional, exceptional in our profession and exceptional in our lives. EPC is so much bigger than just checking boxes. It’s not about getting it right. It’s not about what it looks like to be a school leader. It’s about what it is, the truth of your identity, the truth of how you feel, the truth of your impact. Have a beautiful week.

Talk to you soon. Come on into EPC. I’ll see you inside. 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 406.

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

Well, hello, my empowered principals. Happy Tuesday. Happy October. It’s fall, y’all. I am in the spirit of autumn. I am in the fall season. I am coaching on the Fall Dip. And hey, for those of you who are interested in participating for the Fall Dip, you still have time. Today, this afternoon, if you’re listening to this live, it is happening today at 4:00 p.m. Central, tomorrow at 4:00 p.m. Central. So when you register, you’ll get access to all three of the sessions. You’ll have lifetime access, and you’ll have access to the replay, so you don’t have to worry about missing out on session one from yesterday.

Furthermore, when you enter for the Fall Dip, you can apply your Fall Dip registration fee. It’s $111 for the entire program. You can apply that $111 to EPC. So if you love what you hear and you want more and you want to dive into EPC for this school year, you can join and you can use that credit of $111 to join EPC. And we’ll take that off the full price of the EPC program for the 25/26 school year. How about that for fall, y’all?

I’m so excited. EPC is so great this year. We are diving in deep. We’re looking at education through different lenses. We’re not just showing up another year, same old stuff. We are here to approach it differently, to feel different, to do differently, to be a different kind of leader, to be a more empowered leader, to empower our staff and our students to be problem solvers, critical thinkers, to be managers of their emotions. Can you imagine a school where everybody has the skill set and the tools available to them to navigate their own emotional experience so they’re not dumping their emotions onto your plate? Wow. I would for one love to run a school like that. That is how I run my business, and it is magic. It feels amazing.

So, welcome to today’s podcast. I want to take a moment to wish you a very happy National Principals’ Month. I know when I was a school leader, October was full of activity, full of teacher observations, full of routines, procedures, getting everything into place, finishing up my site plan that I barely took a moment to stop and recognize how awesome I was being, how big I was showing up, how much work I was doing, how much service I was contributing to my students, my staff, my campus, the community, the families, and in honor of my district. I was serving on behalf of my district, but on behalf of myself and my community.

So take a moment and give yourself a pat on the back and acknowledge and celebrate and appreciate all the work and the effort and the service that you are contributing to your community, your staff, your students, your campus. Happy National Principals’ Day.

Now, we’re going to dive in. In the spirit of appreciation, in the spirit of acknowledgment, we’re going to dive into a topic that has been coming up in multiple conversations in my coaching business, and I wanted to address it here on the podcast. Of course, the podcast is always free. You have access to it. I really invite you to like it, to comment, to give it a five-star rating, to share it with your colleagues. And I know that I cannot coach as deeply on the podcast. So we share insights, we get to the surface, we scratch the surface, but in EPC and in my one-on-one coaching, we take this work from content and conversation down to identity, down to action items, down to becoming the person who can handle whatever comes your way, becoming the empowered version of yourself.

That requires internal change and external change. It requires us to become somebody different than we currently are now, to evolve who we are, to expand our perspective, to look through different lenses, to have the courage and the openness to question what we believe, what we value, and to stand firm on the things that we value, and to believe that we can be bigger, we can have more influence, we can have more impact, and we can create a legacy that’s beyond what we currently believe is possible.

So, back to our staff not feeling appreciated. I know I can relate to this personally as a leader, and my clients speak to this often about themselves, but I want to navigate your perspective through the lens of when staff does not feel appreciated. There are teachers who don’t feel appreciated by maybe the parent community. And then there are para-professionals, there are support staff. In California, we called it classified staff, certificated staff. There’s different ways to label different types of employees, even though we all provide an equal level of value in our contribution. The contribution looks different, but it has great value. Custodians, great value, contributions different than teaching. Our lunch providers that provide cafeteria services for breakfast, for snacks, for lunches, for the bagged lunch program, for field trips, hot lunch program, giving children nourishment throughout the day. Some families this is their only consistent meal. And without those services, our system would not function.

Our school is one big large jigsaw puzzle, and with one piece missing, the program is incomplete. The services we offer to families, to students are incomplete, whether that’s a custodian, a bus driver, a nurse practitioner, mental health supports, emotional health supports, everything from our technology experts to our probably yard duty supervisors, the office staff, support staff, your dean of students. Everybody has an incredible contribution to offer.

So, there are moments when we’re all giving, we’re all contributing to the max. We are being in service. We are working hard, putting forth time and effort into the energy of education and being that puzzle piece that completes the puzzle. And there are times where we’re wondering to ourselves, is this of value? We start to look outside of ourselves. We look externally for validation or appreciation or gratefulness or thankfulness. And we get caught up in, wow, I’m doing all this work and nobody seems to notice, or people don’t appreciate it, or they just want more. They keep asking for more. So this was a conversation I had with a one-on-one client of mine a few weeks ago, and I want to address it here.

So there were two components to this conversation. One was that this particular school leader works at a school that serves a community of abundance. This community has access to money, resources, homes. They live in abundance when it comes to financial and material resources. And there are sometimes when people can take those things for granted and come into your school and ask, demand, request a certain amount of services, a certain amount of attention. They want a request fulfilled in a way that makes them happy or fills their – what they believe is a need that they have.

And you can have conflicting demands, multiple demands, changing demands, and it can feel relentless. It can feel like people are not appreciating you when you are leading them, when you are teaching them, whether this is for teachers or you as a leader, that you can be pushed, your boundaries can be tested when you are the leader of a school and your teachers can feel very strained when you have a parent, let’s say, who’s coming in and asking for a lot of demands, who’s putting demands upon you, who’s requesting, who’s really pushing hard for their voice to be heard, for their desires to be fulfilled by you, by the teacher. Okay?

So, there was this feeling from the staff that parents were feeling that teachers were indebted to them, that because the families donate time, money, resources, that they in return should have their requests fulfilled. Have you had this experience? There are people in your community who might donate their time to the PTA or they might donate financial contributions, or they might provide resources. Maybe they buy materials for the classroom or for the school or maybe they sit on a board where they’re fundraising for a new playground or updated technology or something for the classrooms or something for your campus. And because they’re doing that, in return, they want this quid pro quo, tit for tat. I did this, so now you owe me that. And there are people out here who think this. So this isn’t just thinking that it’s happening, it might actually be happening.

So we want to first check with ourselves to see, am I interpreting their behavior as a tit for tat, as an indebt to them, a quid pro quo kind of situation? Are they saying words? Are there, are they exhibiting behaviors that would qualify as being indebted to them, or am I interpreting something they’ve said or something they did as pressure to perform, as pressure to say yes to them? Am I as a teacher feeling underappreciated, not because I’m not appreciated, but because it’s not being exhibited in the way that I defined appreciation? Okay?

So I was talking with my client about this, and the reframe that I offered her when it came to the parents was that when somebody comes and requests and demands that their request be fulfilled, this person, if you just step outside for a minute of the box and look what’s happening, like why would a person come and make such demands? Why would they start to use maybe aggressive tone or aggressive language or aggressive body language to attempt to get what they want? And when I think about somebody who’s behaving in this way, the reframe for me is that this person has reached their capacity of what they personally believe that they can do themselves to manage or solve or handle something on their own, right?

So, when somebody is pressuring a teacher, do this for me, do that for my child, do it this way, I want that, less homework, more homework, not enough homework, just the right amount of homework, teach it this way, don’t teach it that way, use this book, don’t use that book. When we start to get into a controlling type of energy, it’s typically because they believe that they, they’re maxed out on what they can manage or solve. They’ve used their resources that they can control, the amount that they donate, the time that they volunteered to leverage support for the solutions that they are seeking to create, but they don’t know how to create the solution for themselves or that they don’t feel comfortable or don’t know how to take ownership of the outcome that they’ve created for themselves. Okay?

So keep in mind that when a parent is coming and putting on the pressure and as a CEO of a company, I know how you should run this school or, you know, as a manager, director in corporate, this is how you should run a classroom or because I serve on all these boards, my kids should get X amount of treatment. Okay? Keep in mind that they feel in control when they’re the CEO of their company or when they’re a director in corporate. They feel like they have positional authority, positional control, that they can control outcomes based on their position, their status, their title, their amount of power. And when they come into the school, they can throw money at it, they can throw time at it, volunteer hours. However, they aren’t in the leadership position, in the classroom as teachers or in the school as the school leader, and they feel a little loss of control and they’re not sure how to navigate the system when they aren’t the ones in charge.

So we can feel a sense of understanding like, oh, they’re feeling a little bit out of control, they’re feeling a little nervous. They want to feel reassured. People want to feel control when they want to feel reassurance, when they want to feel safe, right? So at the bottom line, they go into this fight or flight behavior because they are not feeling safe or feeling uncertain about what’s coming, about the outcome. They don’t feel reassured that their child is safe or happy or okay, that they’re going to be fine, that they can handle the classroom they’re in or the amount of homework or the lessons, whatever it is. Okay?

So, keep in mind that they are testing your conviction to your values and your standards. So, my coach says this to me and I say this to my clients, leaders are bridges and bridges are tested. We are being tested by the parents. Now, how do we have a conversation with our teachers when they feel underappreciated by their parents? Well, the bottom line for you and I to know is when somebody’s looking for external validation, they’ve slipped out of their identity of empowerment. They have left the field of empowerment and gone into the field of disempowerment where I don’t know my own value, I don’t know my own worth, I don’t know that I’m doing a good job. I need parents to appreciate me. I need them to be thankful that I’m putting in these hours. I need them to be grateful for all that I’m doing for their students. I need them to XYZ, externally, I need somebody else to behave in a certain way so that I can feel certain for myself, good about myself, trust that I’m doing the right thing, versus going back inward and saying, here’s what I know to be true. This is the kind of teacher I am. This is who I am. This is my identity. This is how I teach. I’m open to feedback. I’m open to expanding and growing. And this is what I believe to be true in this moment. This is my capacity. And I’m open to expanding my capacity.

Coming back to self and reminding ourselves who we are, who we’re becoming. Nobody is a perfect teacher. Nobody is the right teacher, in quotes. We’re just humans on the planet doing the very best we can. We’re serving in a way that feels good for us. And when it doesn’t feel good for teachers, it is because they have slipped out of their empowerment. They have slipped out of their personal power, their personal identity to identify as a teacher who knows what she’s doing and why she’s doing it and is loving what she does and is doing the work because she wants to do the work, not because she’s people pleasing parents or not because she’s employee or not because she has to, or not because if she doesn’t, she’ll get in trouble. She’s coming in every day and teaching because it’s what she chose to do. It’s her profession. She loves it. She loves her students. She cares about being a good teacher. She cares about herself, and she cares about the quality of education for her students. That’s why she’s working hard. That’s why she’s doing these things.

When parents give us attention, appreciation, love, gratitude, that is the cherry on top. I want external validation, external acknowledgement, external kudos, all of that to be your cherry on top. Let it be the whipped cream, let it be the cherry, let it be the sprinkles. But underneath that big old ice cream sundae is the foundation, that’s you. The best part of the sundae isn’t just the sprinkles and the cherry and the whipped cream. The foundation it’s built upon is the beautiful ice cream of your flavor, of your choice. You can be vanilla, you can be chocolate, you can be mint chip, you can be praline. It doesn’t matter what flavor you are. The foundation of you is you. You’re unique, you have your own flavor, but that is what matters. A bowl of cherries, whipped cream, and sprinkles does not fulfill you for very long. We want the sundae because of the ice cream flavors we chose. Are you following me here?

So, when teachers are dismayed, it is because they have slipped out of empowerment. And you can invite them back into empowerment, invite them back into internal validation. Of course, as humans, we’re wired for connection. We are wired to belong. We want external validation. It’s a lovely thing to have, but we can’t rely on it and we know that it’s fleeting. Somebody gives us a compliment today, it feels good today, but tomorrow we don’t get one and now we don’t feel good. We’re relying on external intermittent validation. That’s not going to carry us very far. Versus waking up every day and personally aligning to who you are, who you’re becoming as an educator, loving it, going in, doing the work, and when it’s hard, take a little break, get some rest, recover, and come back at it because we chose this, because we love this, because we are feeling validated in who we are and what we’re doing. Okay?

Second component of this conversation is there are support staff members and there are teachers and many schools have a divide. And that tends to be created because there are people who believe there should be a hierarchy that teachers are more important or more valuable than support staff. I highly disagree with this. I think, again, I’ve mentioned this with the jigsaw puzzle, we are all contributing equal value, but the contribution looks different.

So having these conversations with your staff around what would happen if we took all of our para-professionals away, our support staff, our custodians, our lunch duty, our cafeteria support, our bus drivers, our crosswalk volunteers, take away the secretaries in the office, take away technology support, take away maintenance, take away accounting, take away dean of students, take away our counselors. When you take away any one person, now does it feel less important? No. We want to create a culture, an energy, a vibration. I call it the playing field of equal value, different contribution and making that a part of your climate and your culture at your school and highly celebrating every person on campus.

So, when people feel that they’re not being appreciated, asking them first of all, why are they feeling that way? What’s come up? Was there a specific incident? Were there words said? Were there behaviors? And are there any ways in which they feel appreciated? How do they appreciate themselves? Do they appreciate themselves? Do they appreciate others? Getting them back into the playing field of appreciation, the frequency, and putting on the lens, like putting on a pair of glasses where you see appreciation, you feel appreciation for others and you receive appreciation, looking for the capacity to receive appreciation in big ways and small.

And sometimes appreciation looks differently than how we give appreciation or how we like to receive it, but being open to all the ways in which we receive appreciation brings us back to appreciation. So, I want you to know you are valued, you are loved, you are appreciated. Spread love, spread appreciation, look through the lens of appreciation this month in the National Principals’ Appreciation Month. I value you. Come on into the Fall Dip and we’ll see you in EPC. Love you lots. Take care. Talk 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.