Last week, we looked at the self-coaching strategy of doing a brain drain – transferring all of your present thoughts onto paper as a method of helping you identify where the drama is in your mind around a certain topic. But what happens when we don’t like the thoughts that we identify?
Well, it’s not unusual for us to have conflicting thoughts, some of which are more conscious than others. It’s very common for us to want something on one level (this happened to me all the time) like an open-door policy, but in reality, being interrupted while I was trying to work on something important made me feel a whole lot of negative emotion. It wasn’t helping me or my staff.
Do you find yourself enduring relationships with people, things, or even jobs for way longer than you should because you believe things “could be worse?” Do you tell yourself every day that it’s not so bad and you can get through it? Well, that was me not all that long ago, and it’s something we all do when we can’t see past something ending.
As a school leader, it’s impossible to get along with everyone all of the time. You have staff, parents, and students that all have opinions on everything you do, and vice versa. We know that molding people and having them behave exactly how we would like is never going to happen, but there must be something we can do, surely?
This week on the show, I welcome my first guest, Stacey Smith! It’s been one year since I launched The Empowered Principal Podcast and I could not be more thrilled to be celebrating with one of the most inspiring people I know.
I’m going to be spending the whole month of January going deep into relationships and how to approach all of yours with finesse and grace. Today, I’m going to be discussing how to deal with challenging teachers so you’ve got some time to really absorb this before the holidays.