The Empowered Principal® Podcast Angela Kelly | Ensuring Teachers Matter with Ryan Donlan and Shelly Wilfong

Today, I’m joined by two special guests with an important message to share. Shelly Wilfong and Ryan Donlan coauthored a powerful book, bringing hope and inspiration to school leaders everywhere. The book is called Ensuring Teachers Matter: Where to Focus First So Students Matter Most, and it’s all about the topic of mattering.

Mattering as a concept has been around for the past 50 years, and it’s about making people feel valued, and feeling like they add value, and how both of these things together help people feel like they matter. I’m sure that even from this brief description you can start to see the massive positive impact this concept can have in our school system and for our teachers.

Tune in this week to discover how to help your teachers feel energized and valuable in the work they do. When teachers and administrators feel like they matter, everybody in your school benefits, and you’ll learn in this episode how to support your teachers so they can feel valued and, in turn, support the students to the best of their abilities.

 

The doors to the next cohort of The Empowered Principal® Collaborative are open! This is the time to decide: do you want to lead your school for the rest of the year as you are right now, or take your leadership skills to the next level? Join us today to become a member of the only certified life and leadership coaching program for school leaders in the country by clicking here.

 

What You’ll Learn From this Episode:

  • Why putting teachers first in education ultimately helps kids the most.
  • How Shelly and Ryan became aware of the term ‘mattering’, and what it means.
  • What needs to be in place for teachers to feel like they matter.
  • Why teachers and administrators need the support of a community around them.
  • How Shelly and Ryan help teachers and administrators build community from authenticity.
  • Ryan and Shelly’s tips for showing up for your teachers and helping them feel valued.

 

Listen to the Full Episode:

 

Featured on the Show:

Full Episode Transcript:

Hello, empowered principals. Welcome to episode 339.

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

Angela: Hello, empowered principals. Welcome to the podcast. Welcome to this episode. I have a very special guest with me here today. You’re going to love them. We’ve already had a coffee chat. I don’t know, it’s probably been over a month now, but we just hit it off. I felt like I have two new friends in the field of education, and I really love the work they’re doing. So, Shelly and Ryan are here today. The book that you wrote, Shelly, was called what again? Ensuring Teachers Matter?

Shelly: Yes.

Angela: Yes.

Shelly: Ensuring Teachers Matter: Where to Focus First So Students Matter Most.

Angela: Yes. So, I want everybody to get on Amazon and buy this book. It’s amazing. I was gifted a copy, so I feel very special, but the book is phenomenal. It really aligns with what I teach in school leadership, but I wanted Ryan and Shelly on the podcast to speak this language in their way and talk about their work they’re doing with schools and with school leaders.

I really want to highlight this book because it is uplifting. It brings hope and inspiration to school leadership. School leadership does not have to be this big drag. It doesn’t have to be overwhelming and exhausting and burnout. It can be fun and lighthearted and joyful. So, let’s talk about that, Shelly. I know you just presented. You’ve been out presenting, I think, all school year. I know our schedules have been like we’ve been two ships crossing in the night. So, tell us all about the work you’re doing. Talk about the book. Let’s just dive in and have this amazing discussion.

Shelly: Thank you so much for having me and Dr. Donlan on the show. I really want to spread this information far and wide because I really do feel like it can really make a difference in education. I don’t say that lightly either. We’ve been struggling as a profession in a lot of different areas as far as the importance of the teaching as a profession, people feeling like they can have a sustainable career in teaching, and then all of the leadership things that go along with it.

So, for me, this book is really from the heart, but it’s also really backed in research, which is incredibly important for me as well. So, Ensuring Teachers Matter is a book about a concept called mattering. Really, Dr. Donlan was actually the one who first introduced this term mattering to me.

I had never really heard. I heard about yeah, you have to matter, but the actual word mattering. As I discovered, this concept has been around for about 50 years. It’s been studied in a lot of different contexts, but never in the K-12 world.

Mattering is about a person feeling value and feeling like they add value. So when you have both of those things together, someone feels like they matter. So, in my research, I wanted to find out what had to be in place in order for a teacher to feel like they matter to other adults in the building. So, Ryan, do you have anything you’d like to add to that beginning part?

Ryan: Oh, I absolutely do, Dr. Wilfong. Shelly, thank you so much for bringing me alongside, and Angela for having me in this podcast. It’s truly a pleasure and an honor. Particularly so because, Shelly, your research has made relevant and has ratified what I have been shouting from the rooftops for 25 to 30 years in that it has to be about the adults first in education if we’re going to be about the kids most.

So, thank you, Shelly, for putting that in your book title because it has to. To me, it’s like as obvious as oxygen mask dropping on an airplane. Every plane ride I’ve taken, no matter at what age, I have heard the steward or stewardess or the guide up there in the front of the airplane say, is you in the event of cabin depressurization and a mask drops from the ceiling, please affix the mask to yourself first before putting it on the person whom you’re providing caregiving to. Always.

But in schools, we haven’t been doing this. Dr. Wilfong, Shelly, when you came to me and we had your dissertation conceived on a whiteboard in front of us in the Bayh College of Education, Indiana State University, your passion and purpose was coming together to help our profession. You were concerned about attrition, and you were concerned about keeping great teachers, helping out great kids.

That’s when we started talking about mattering. Because there was little, if any, research in education, the conversation adults need to be having with themselves. Every once in a while, it has to be about the adults in the room. Shelly, not only did you show that during your dissertation with thousands of teachers through exploratory factor analysis, but you found me on sabbatical and talked me into a follow-up study with thousands and thousands more teachers.

Confirmatory, I mean, the science is what it is.  It’s mind-blowing that it’s been hiding in plain sight until Dr. Shelly Wilfong came along. Now we have, with the support of an incredible publisher, Solution Tree, and your kind wisdom and guidance in getting us on here, Angela, and bringing out the story to your audience.

We’ve got something that’s going to turn education upside down because finally the adults can go home with as much energy as they entered into the day because it’s all about having a posse at work that takes care of one another. It really is about the kids most if we allow the adults to be their best selves from the gate.

Angela: Yeah. Yes. This book and your research, Shelly, aligns with my work in the world, the company that I decided. The reason that I created this business was because I saw the gap. I was a school principal. When I was a teacher, I had a mentor. I had a buddy teacher. I had a master teacher. Then later on came instructional coaching. So I had some level of support, and I had my grade level.

When I went into school leadership, it was like here’s the key to your office. Yay, you got the job. Now go run a school. I was like oh, okay. First things first. You don’t know what to prioritize. Your time management gets out of whack. Then because you’re so depleted, you’re not thinking about how your teachers are feeling because you’re trying to keep your head above water, right? You’re trying to look for the oxygen mask to put on before you can assist others, right? When you’re scrambling like that, it’s hard to think about what your teachers are going through.

So I feel like I’m here putting the mask on them so that they can go and assist put the mask on others, right? So this work aligned so beautifully. I was reviewing the book today before I got back on because I love the titles of the chapters. They just invite you in.

One of the first chapters is celebrate team, not just the score. I love that so much because it talks about building community. I think about principals are very isolated. You’re usually alone, especially I was an elementary principal. You’re a party of one. Maybe you have an AP, maybe. Then you have to like have a good relationship with that AP to not feel like you’re isolated.

So community, if you don’t have that foundational community, like if you’re not getting along with your grade level or your department in the upper grades, that loneliness and that isolation can really take a teacher down or really take an admin down. Can you speak more to that? How you help teachers and administrators build community from authenticity?

Shelly: Yeah. So community is one of my favorites of the eight elements because so often we look at community either as community. Oh, we want to all be friends and just be very congenial to one another. Or we look at community as in a professional learning community where we’re very collegial with one another. The reality is we have to have that balance between the two. I always worry when I hear a new teacher or a principal coming in for the first time says well, I’m not here to make friends. I’m here to do my job, do what I’m supposed to do, and then leave.

We spend way too much time and energy in our buildings that we have to have some connections with one another. It doesn’t mean that we have to go out and go to the movies together or go to Christmas parties together or shopping together. We have our other friend set, but we have to have workplace friendship.

We have to be able to balance that collegial part of a professional learning community with the congenial part of friendship and have work friends. If we don’t, then it is incredibly difficult for us to enjoy our job. We have to enjoy who we work with. One of my great principals that I had while I was a teacher was talking to me about going into administration. He said, “Shelly, being a building principal is the loneliest job you’ll ever have.”

Angela: It’s so true.

Shelly: He said, “You have got to build your network. You have to build your community. You can’t just sit back and not have people around you to support you that knows what you’re going through.” You can have your support with your friends and everything, but if they’re not principals or if they’re not in, if you’re a classroom teacher and they’re not teachers, they don’t know what you’re going through.

So you have to have those work friends that you can commiserate with and brainstorm with and all of those things if you’re going to have a long career that you’re going to be satisfied with.

Angela: And that feels fulfilling. You’re doing this job for a purpose. There’s a why behind you getting up every single morning and going in and doing this job for 8, 10, 12 hours a day. Yes. I remember being a principal at a building by myself going home, and you can tell the stories. You can’t make up what happens in a school. So I always won the best story at dinnertime, right? But that’s where it stops. My husband didn’t understand, and my son could laugh about the stories. But at the end of the day, the struggles, the fatigue, the frustration, the conflicting priorities, the pressure to perform that kind of stuff, they couldn’t relate nor should they have been able to.

Which is why I started my company, the Empowered Principal® Collaborative because people need a place to go. If you don’t feel safe, and I think this is what happens with school leaders is that when you are a principal, you want to be connected with your peers, your fellow principals, but everybody’s busy principaling, right? Like, so you might do a quick phone call, but it’s rare to actually get together unless it’s like this very contrived PLC type of a thing.

But you’re so busy running your school, living your life that you don’t really get those connections. sometimes it doesn’t feel safe. Like there are times at work, and I think this is why people are like I’m just going to put my head to the grindstone, do my job, and get the heck out of here. But that isn’t fulfillment, right? It doesn’t make life fun at work. It’s like it’s something to check the box and do, put your hours in and get done, but it doesn’t fill the soul, right?

Shelly: Yes. Yeah. Mattering is about feeling valued. Like if I’m gone, someone’s going to miss me. Not because oh now I don’t, as a principal, I don’t have anybody to send this unruly kid to, or oh, I have to cover this teacher’s class because they’re gone and we don’t have a sub. It’s not missing them because of that. It’s missing them because they miss the person. Like gosh, I wonder why she’s not here today.

Angela: Yes.

Shelly: I hope she’s doing okay. Knowing that people miss you, and they see when you’re gone, and there’s a void when you’re gone. Oftentimes in education, we just we go about our day and oh yeah, such and such is gone or such, but we have to really feel like we matter to one another.

Angela: Yes. You want to care when your teachers are out. You want to care about why they’re out, understanding like are they ill? Or do they have a sick parent, a sick child? Not that you need to know all the details, but that you care that person’s going through something, or your teammate is going through something, or simply like it’s just a bummer when your bestie at work is out and you can’t go and talk all the talk to, right? You just like you miss them.

I know as a principal, I found this balance of, it took me a while to figure it out because first I was told like do not mingle with your staff, right? Like you were an administrator. I was like it just didn’t land with me. It didn’t feel right. So I started like okay, I’m going to mingle with all of them. It felt like an all or none. Like I had to do all or none. But what ended up happening was just we actually just got to know each other and care about one another. I started having barbecues at my house to celebrate staff. We had holiday parties and whatnot.

That made my job desirable to me. It made it more fun. I cared about people. I knew about their lives. Not the details. No, I didn’t go to the teacher’s happy hours. But I would have them over so that everybody felt welcomed. It was just it made my job. It just added a layer of delight and joy that I don’t think I would have experienced had I not been courageous enough to be authentic and vulnerable with them and have them do the same with me.

Take the time to go and check in on them. What’s going on? How’s it going? Anything I can do to support you? How is your day? Just simple little check-ins that really, I think for teachers, they felt like they had a principal who cared.

Ryan: Angela, you were doing something there that empowering principals do better than anyone else is you were investing self-fully in your own energy, in your own self. You were filling your tank so that you had the capability to fill others.

While Shelly’s research, it’s research on teachers, but it’s something that we all can learn from because we don’t have to stop teaching because principaling begins, right? I mean, we are forever teachers. I’ve now been a teacher for 40 something years, right? Because I didn’t stop teaching when assistant principaling or superintending or professoring, right?

Angela: Yeah.

Ryan: So what is just amazing about Shelly’s discovery is that okay, so we’re investing in ourselves as empowered principals. We’re doing so by allowing teachers and encouraging teachers and leveraging teachers investing in other teachers the same way self-fully and almost selflessly at the same time.

But when we see things like Shelly’s eight foundational elements, we know as principals that okay, we got a dog in this hunt. We’ve got to do something here to facilitate these eight foundational elements of mattering so that we take care of our people. But then on our drive home, we could go wait a second, I’ll bet because I haven’t stopped teaching either then I need to intentionally find ways to get these eight foundational elements of mattering at work for me too.

You did it through the barbecues, through hanging out with everybody. I mean, those connections just began for you like they do with your listening audience because of this stuff. So Shelly, could potentially one of your future research endeavors be doing this with principals?

Shelly: Absolutely. Absolutely.

Ryan: Before the end of this podcast that we can just run with today.

Shelly: Yeah, I think is the next step in this is to take a look at how building leaders fit in with mattering. I think there is a balance that a building leader has to have with their staff because they are supervising their staff. They are, there is a power differential there. So how do you balance being that friendship and that congenial aspect of it and still have like this is the decision we’re making.

So I think that some people do this immaculately and others really struggle with it. So, like you said, they just put their head to the ground. They just do their job, and it really isolates them even further from the staff.

Angela: Yeah.

Shelly: So yeah. I mean, there’s definitely an element of teacher, or excuse me, of principals that are missing this element of mattering as well for certain.

Angela: Yeah, I know this book is about teachers, but I couldn’t help as I was reading through it like people are people. So regardless of your seat on the bus, like you want to matter. You want to feel like you matter, and you want to feel like your contributions matter, your existence matters, your energy matters. I had a question pop up as you were speaking.

First of all, I really hope you do that research on principals. I cannot wait. You’re coming back on. That book, I’m going to like give out as free gifts. But they can read this book. This is what I want to say to all of you listeners right now. Here’s what I want you to hear from me. I’m not saying go and read this book and then now you have eight more foundations to consider and check more to do and more to do and more to do.

I want you to read it and think about yourself, how you feel in the community, authenticity, flow, purpose, assimilation, compensation, stability, job crafting, and then putting it all together in the last chapter. Those components, I want you to think about where you fit in on a scale of one to 10, where you’re feeling maybe like some of this is an eight or a nine and other maybe it’s a two or a three. Check in with yourself first and then think about where your teachers might be.

So my question to you, Shelly, is as you’re going into districts and you’re teaching this from the perspective of the teacher, what would you say is the percentage of where am I taking ownership for my part in these versus I’m expecting my district admin or my district staff or my site principal or other people around me to connect with me and help me feel the certain way. Do you know what I’m saying?

Shelly: Yes, absolutely. The answer to that is it depends on which element you’re talking about. So some of them are very, very personal. They can only be done by that individual. Like, for example, assimilation is this idea that you take something, a task or something that you have to do, a duty that you don’t really like, and you have to change your mindset that okay, the purpose for me doing this thing I don’t like is going to ultimately help the school goal or my goal to get here. So that’s really something that is internal.

Now, principals can help teachers by helping the teachers connect the dots. I know you don’t like this job, this task, this duty, this responsibility, but here’s why it is so important for us in our school building to do this particular thing. Here’s how it connects to our mission. This is how it connects to helping students. Sometimes we have to be very explicit with teachers and explicit with ourselves and making sure that what we are doing is purposeful and student-centered.

Sometimes it could be that, well, we’ve done this thing, this duty, we’ve always done it, and we have a hard time connecting it to the purpose and the mission, and it maybe isn’t student-centered. So then the question becomes why are we doing it? So there is some of that.

Then there are other pieces that school administrators can have a huge amount of help with, help teachers with. Like, for example, job crafting, where they’re able to take a task, modify it, change it to fit their needs. For example, agendas. Some principals love having the same agenda format for all of the teacher groups, for PLC teams, or grade level teams. They want that for consistency to make sure that everything’s checked off.

But the reality is some teacher groups may like to do an agenda a little differently. So instead of saying okay, everybody has to do the agenda in this particular format, instead say these are the things that I need you to make sure that you tell me about. You need to make sure that these are on your agenda.

Now, how you keep your agenda and the format you put it in, as long as I can understand where all the required pieces are that I want, do it the way you want to do it. I’m not going to pigeonhole you into one particular format. So those are the types of things where sometimes the principal has a heavy lift, but oftentimes it’s a real balance between the two.

Angela: Yeah, I agree with you. I see it as you want to take ownership, definitely of your part. Like your feelings are yours. So you have to take ownership of how you’re feeling emotionally and then how you’re responding to those emotions, right? How you’re reacting to them. But it’s also valuable to consider how we communicate with one another, our needs, our boundaries, our standards, our expectations so that we can feel connected with somebody and so that we can mutually meet each other’s expectations in a way that supports one another.

But again, I’m thinking about, it’s funny when you were talking about the yard duty. We talk about this a lot in EPC. Duties, nobody wants to go do extra duty. Nobody really loves them. But you’ve got, I always say, you’ve got to sell yourself, your brain. You’ve got to sell your brain on why it’s easier. I always say like how is this making life better, easier, or faster for you in the long run?

When your colleague goes out and does recess duty in the morning and you do recess duty in the afternoon, one, students are getting supervised. We know that’s the why, but we need to know what’s in it for us. At the end of the day, to get our brain on board and our brain’s like a little toddler. Like what’s in it for me?

Okay, what is in it for you? Well, if colleagues going to take over in the morning, you’re going to take over for them in the afternoon. Luckily, you’re not doing all the duties because you’re doing teamwork and tag team here. So you get a prep, they get a prep, that kind of a thing. Getting them on board.

But it’s true. Like there’s just things you got to do in the job that nobody wants to do, but we’ve got to get on board. But this idea of like where is my ownership here? Then I’m thinking about that poor teacher whose head is down to the grindstone doing the work, kind of self-isolating. Because as a principal, my very first thought that comes up is what’s coming up for them that doesn’t feel safe. Because if you’re not connecting, there’s a reason behind that behavior, right?

So what would you say, either Ryan or Shelly, what would you say to somebody who’s concerned about a colleague, but the colleague has created a barrier around themselves? What are some ways that we might be able to communicate with them and approach them in a way that invites them into like creating a safe environment to connect and speak? Even if it’s, you don’t have to be best friends and go to the movies, like you said, but how can we develop that connection with people who are struggling?

Ryan: Well, I think Angela, you ask an apt question there because while we are sometimes considering ourselves armchair philosophers as principals, it gets a little bit dicier when we consider ourselves armchair psychologists, right? Because we don’t have the clinical wherewithal to be able to do it safely and carefully in situations where there are unknowns. But there are things that we can do in leadership, and Shelly’s book can help.

Like for instance, you hung out with all your teachers, okay? All the teachers had some sort of a positive relationship with you. We have a good friend. In fact, he was our guru in factor analysis, Dr. Steve Gruenert, who teaches how to build a school improvement team by way of network analysis.

What Dr. Gruenert will share is that okay, you have folks on staff, some who are more isolated, some who are more deeply connected, but you have some with many loose ties to other people who are both respected and connected. Those more informal relationships, those ties, those folks who if this person were to walk into a teacher’s lounge, the conversation wouldn’t stop. It would keep going. Well, those opportunities are there for connections and for even interventions because people have trust.

So quite possibly a principal’s, one of the better approaches might be to know their staff and faculty to know who’s respected and connected and to know who might be able to innocuously connect with that person who’s sheltering in place, so to speak.

Angela: Yeah.

Ryan: To get the real story about what’s going on so that you know is this a matter of are they worried about job stability? Are they worried about an impending layoff, downsizing? Are they struggling working two to three jobs with compensation so that they’re just buried when they’re here? Do they not feel that they can job craft like Shelly discovered is really necessary? Are they in trouble because the principal hasn’t connected the dots or offered them that with assimilation?

So it’s almost like get the connection, do the indirect thing, find out what’s probably going on here, and then tap into one of Shelly’s eight to see if that’s going to make a difference. Because the small investment in your eight, Shelly, it’s not going to do any harm. But in a sense, a leader, an empowered leader can then stay in their lane and leverage your great book to help that person. I don’t know, Shelly, what do you think?

Shelly: Yeah, I agree. I think that it’s really important to have someone make those connections, whether that be the principal or another teacher. First of all, as far as mattering is concerned, it’s not something that is highly understood or talked about in the school setting. So even talking about these different things, as Ryan says, these eight elements, it’s really important to figure out where a person is really struggling.

One of the elements is purpose, finding your purpose. Some people, and as principals, we have to understand that some people get into education thinking that teaching is something that it’s not. They get into this job and they realize this isn’t what I thought teaching was going to be. So it may not be their purpose. So one of the eight elements is that purpose.

So you may have someone, as Ryan says, sheltering in place, but because they went to school all of these years, they did their student teaching, now they have a job. They see everybody else doing their job. It’s like oh, gosh now I’m stuck. So sometimes it’s you’re just not in the right place. It could be as easy as changing a grade level, changing from elementary to secondary. Sometimes I’ve seen some of those changes.

Sometimes it’s, you know what? Teaching wasn’t what I thought it was going to be. Or maybe they taught for 20 years, and their purpose in life has changed. So now it’s, again, like I don’t have that purpose that I had 20 years ago. So having those kinds of conversations and awareness of that is really important as well.

Angela: I love that you guys shared this because one of the things that I teach my principals to do is to connect with your teachers from the beginning. I feel like at the core of this, all of it comes down to how we feel. Like how the principal feels, how teachers feel impacts how kids feel, the experience they end up having at school, right? It really comes down to emotion.

So what we have to be courageous leaders in doing is asking people about how they feel. So in the beginning of the year, however you’re connecting. Like some of my teachers, like my fifth grade team, I always went out on the playground because that was, for some reason, that is how they would share.

Like I had one teacher, and he didn’t talk to me at all. Then I just kept going out during fifth grade recess, hanging out, just hanging with the kids. Eventually he came up and put his arm around me one day, and he said I’m really glad you’re here. I was like I’m in.

But then from that point, I was able to tap into his genius. We ended up departmentalizing fourth and fifth grade because of him. Like we just like we exploded our fourth and fifth grade up in a really good way because I was willing to go to him and be in his element then he started talking, right? So we started kind of chatting at fifth grade recess.

But in the beginning, like however you can make those connections, whether it’s indirectly or directly, eventually directly. But when you’re sitting down to have pre-observation meetings or your goal setting, all that stuff you got to do, ask people how they’re feeling about their job. Like how do you feel about teaching fifth grade? How do you feel about whatever?

Like maybe they have a student with an IEP, and they’re trying to figure out how to implement that. How are you feeling? Don’t be afraid to ask the question about emotions because that’s the drive. It’s the fuel that drive all of our actions. It impacts our decisions, our actions, how we engage with one another, how we engage with students. We, as the leaders, need to ask people how they’re feeling.

The most loving thing you can do, I think, as a principal is ask somebody how they feel about their job. What about it’s working for them? What about it’s not working? If they could wave a magic wand, what would be better? What would make it easier, better, faster? What would delight them?

And sometimes what might come up is I think I need to try another seat on the bus, or I need to get on another bus. Or like I need to retire. I need to get off the bus. Or I need to do something else, something. But if we don’t ask, how do we expect them to know? How can we lead? How can we guide when we don’t know how people are feeling? We have to ask the question.

Ryan: Angela, that is powerful. I mean, I live life navigating mixed metaphors, right? Sometimes they make sense, and sometimes they don’t. But you’re helping me with my next one here because I’m thinking of a piggy bank. You talked about those pre-evaluation conference sessions and things like that. All this feeling stuff, this emotional stuff.

Well, it’s almost like you have a piggy bank, and every penny drop is an emotional investment. Then when you pull the stopper and you get some coin out of there, that’s almost like an intellectual or an occupational withdrawal. So in order to ask anybody for an intellectual or occupational withdrawal, you have to make a hundred emotional investments to even build the reservoir so they have the capability to do that. That just popped into my head. So thank you for my next metaphor.

Angela: There you go. I love it. Yeah, I’m always like for some reason, I’m always on a bus. I’m on a train or a bus.

Ryan: A bus and a train.

Angela: Because I just remember thinking, like you can, it doesn’t matter what seat you’re on. We’re all in the same bus, right? Sometimes we’re changing seats, but the driver needs you in your seat on the bus to get to drive. That driver is just as important, if not the most important person driving, as everybody else on the bus. I’ll tell you the principal does not drive the bus. Secretaries, custodians, and bus drivers run our schools, okay, everybody?

Ryan: There you go.

Angela: Shout out to them. We love them. Our paras, our support staff, our office staff, they’re really running the dailies of this organization. We want to love on them. But we want to remember are teachers are working their tails off in their own individual way and finding a way to acknowledge the strength, no matter what. My fifth grade teacher, he was really brilliant at accelerating kids.

So when we got this idea of departmentalizing some of our instruction, he was taking these kids. Their math, there were kids in the fifth grade doing 10th, 11th, 12th grade level math. I was blown away that the team was able to do that. Then we also had kids struggling. So we had kids coming up to grade level, kids on grade level, kids above grade level. Because I was willing to seek out and ask those questions, plant those seeds, and tell him, I think you’re brilliant.

Then it came up that some former leaders hadn’t felt that way or hadn’t tried or had maybe like had a different opinion about this person’s work. I thought to myself, if you’re here on this campus, you have something to offer. There’s something brilliant that you know how to do. If I don’t see it, I’m going to find it. But I had to look for it in some of those people.

Shelly: I think what you’re really talking about is psychological safety. You know, teachers have to feel psychologically safe and to be able to say something to a leader, say something like hey, how about if we would do this or that? Like are they going to get reprimanded, or are they going to be looked down on? So I think all of this is really talking about making sure that you have an environment where you have that psychological safety for your teachers so they can express that information and express their ideas.

Angela: Yes. I’m wondering, how do you teach that? You called it job crafting. I love this because I teach principals to do that in their own jobs, but I hadn’t thought about bringing it up to open the door for teachers to come to them with the same concept. So I love this. So how do you teach teachers to get creative and to approach their administrators?

Shelly: Yeah. So that’s the difficult part because every teacher has a different context that they’re coming from. If I’m in a room with 20 different teachers and they come from 20 different buildings, they have 20 different principals. Not all of those environments are psychologically safe.

So, to me, the whole idea of mattering, when we wrote this book, we were trying to decide do we write this for principals? Do we write this for teachers? What lens are we focusing on? Or even district leaders for that matter. Who needs to know about this? The reality is everybody does because you have to understand the importance of job crafting.

That if I go to my principal, I’m a teacher. I go to my principal. I’m not trying to be annoying. I’m not trying to be a pain in the butt. I’m trying to do my job as effectively and efficiently as possible and still get the same outcome. So there’s a purpose for it other than I just want to complain about something.

So the more people can understand these concepts, they can understand like okay, I have this idea for job crafting the way we do our agendas. Now that’s not saying hey, I think the way we do our agendas is a waste of time and it’s not helpful for us at all.

Angela: Right.

Shelly: You know you go and say if we can job craft this a little bit, I think we can make it more valuable for our team and to make it faster and more efficient and stay just as effective as before. So can you let us try it?

Angela: Yeah.

Shelly: So administrators have to be open to that, and they need to tell their teachers. If you’re a building principal and you say yeah, I don’t care. Teachers need to know that you don’t care about trying something different. Now I said, just ask me first. Ask me because I can’t come up with all of the different ways of doing something. I do something the way I think it makes sense to me, which to other people can be tremendously different.

I have a secondary background. So I have that kind of mindset. So sometimes when I come up with something for elementary teachers, kindergarten, first grade teachers, I think it’s a great idea. Then when I tell them about it, it’s like what on earth are you doing?

Angela: That’s funny.

Shelly: Then we talk. It took them a while to understand like no, that’s not really going to be the best thing for us. How about if we do this? We get to the same place just we take a little bit different path, and it works for them. So that’s what I tell people.

Ryan: Can I extend on that a little bit?

Angela: Yes, please.

Ryan: Shelly and I just love our publisher because one of the many gifts that they give us is an opportunity to be relevant. So I still remember hearing for the first time for every why and what, we want three hows because that’s what Solution Tree is. They want to give people tools, give folks tools.

Well, Shelly’s eight elements here each have at least one or two tools that you can find in the book that says okay, if you’re going to try to leverage this. An idea, and Shelly I’ve had discussions since the book. So let me just give you one that we’ve been percolating on with job crafting.

So I talked to you about those folks who are respected and connected in those sorts of things. Well, we don’t know if there’s psychological safety in every school. In fact, we figure that there’s probably not psychological safety in every school, right?

Angela: Right.

Ryan: There is probably something that I’m going to mention next that is in just about every school. That is a teacher leader who is respected and connected, not only with the teaching ranks, but also with the administration in place.

Angela: Yep.

Ryan: No matter how dysfunctional everybody is there’s probably somebody who can walk into both rooms and the conversation will keep going. Probably one archetype across the nation, no matter the context. So that person is the job crafting gatekeeper. That’s your interpreter between teachers who are hesitant on going to the principal and the principal who is really uncomfortable about how much autonomy teachers get.

Shelly, I don’t know how you feel about autonomy. Actually, I do. Maybe you can mention that next. But how about a job crafting interpreter who can put a foot in both worlds and negotiate how much latitude is comfortable on both sides? Could help with the job crafting issue. Wouldn’t you think, Shelly?

Shelly: Yeah, definitely. Yeah, Ryan’s always teasing me about the word autonomy because I hate the word autonomy. Autonomy, to me, means like it’s a free for all, right? Everybody can do whatever they want. So I always like to talk about guardrails. Like you’re going down a road, and you have guardrails.

So I like that image of looking at you’re going down a highway. There are multiple lanes. It doesn’t matter which lane you’re in as long as you stay within those guardrails of, and when we talk about instruction, it’s the guardrails of best practice instruction. So I want you to stay within those guardrails.

How you do the instruction is up to you because the way you teach is going to be different from another person. The way they teach is going to be different from another person that teaches. But you’re all staying in the same direction. You’re going the same route. You’re just, you might be in different lanes within that guardrail.

So that’s the way I always like to look at it because autonomy doesn’t mean I’m going, I was a former social studies teacher. So way back when I first started teaching, we would show the entire series of Gettysburg, Ken Burns Gettysburg during Civil War. So, oh we have a week of showing videos. That’s what we’re going to do. That’s not really best practice instruction, right? So creating those guardrails.

When we talk about job crafting, it’s this is the purpose behind why we do what we’re doing. Those agendas, for example. Here are the guardrails. Here’s what I need in those agendas. How you do that is completely up to you, but you’ve got to stay within the guardrail. Then have at it. Some teachers struggle with that. They really do because they well, how do you want me to do it? I don’t care.

Angela: Just tell me what to do, they’ll say. Just tell me what you want. Just tell me what to do.

Shelly: Just like the high school students. They say just no, no. I want you to do it with how you want to do it. So that, it seems like a very simple concept, but it can be very difficult to actually pull off.

Angela: It is difficult. So principals listening, here’s how I help school leaders do this. Focus more on the outcome. Here is the outcome. This is the result that I want. So like I’m thinking about those agendas. As a principal, I just need your questions.

Like if there’s a to do for me, put that in a box or on the top, make it highlight. So that’s what I need. The only outcome I need for your PLC is like yes, cover these things. But like I need to know what you need for me, or I can’t do my job for you. So focus on the outcome, not the how, not the approach.

You’re not controlling the how. You’re setting the standard for the outcome or the result that you desire to create. That is how I ask principals to set, instead of setting goals. These are the results we’re creating. These are the outcomes that we need, want, desire. Then you get to like yeah, here’s your lane. Dance around however you wish. But we’re going in this direction, right? Yeah.

Ryan: That’s beautiful.

Shelly: I didn’t realize we were going to talk about agendas so much. But the other, I think, really important piece to that is that principals need to explain to teachers why is having an agenda so important? Why is having these elements in the agenda important versus just getting together for your morning meeting to talk?

So knowing the purpose behind the reason why we have agendas and how that can help you as a group perform better and more efficiently is incredibly important. Just like establishing norms. Okay, you have to establish norms. You don’t just say hey, you guys need to establish norm. What is the rules of your group? You talk about why that’s important and what happens if you don’t have them. So you have to continually revisit that.

Then to your point about focusing on the outcome. It’s like some principals, they might be a little nervous giving up some of that control. Well, well, well, what if it’s not as effective? All right well, then it’s the outcome. Is this group, is this grade level team being as effective as what they could be? Is it because they have unorganized meetings? So maybe you need to talk to that group about shoring up the agenda a little bit more or shoring up something. But if the grade level over here is doing a fantastic job with the way they’re doing it, let them do it.

So if you focus on the outcome and the outcome isn’t what you want, then you can take a step back and say hey, guys, this isn’t quite where we need to be. How about if we do this or this? Just keep adding things back into that so that they get to where they need to be.

Angela: Yeah. I mean, it’s personalized leadership at that point where you’re not just sending out a blanket email. Everybody get this to me by this time, or you’re like scolding one person, but it goes out a blast to the entire staff. That is where, again, we have to tap into our courage as leaders. It’s our responsibility to customize and personalize our leadership. It’s just like teaching. It’s like your staff is your classroom. Some people are on IEPs. Some people they have their what is it called? The growth plan or whatever. Other people are they can do their own thing.

You have to personalize your leadership just like you would personalize instruction in a classroom. But everybody needs to know the why. Everybody needs to understand. Some people are big picture people. Some people need the details. You can give it to them. Like I’m a big picture person. If I just know like what’s the end here? I go. I don’t need the details. I will weed those out. So you can give them to me. I will take what I need and run with it. Other people need the details. Just give it to them. Who cares?

But at the end of the day, it sounds like what you’re saying is let’s have conversations with the people who need we need to be having the conversation with, right. Again, that’s just about getting focused and understanding what is the outcome? What’s the theory as to why the desired outcome’s not being met.

Because it might not have anything to do with the agenda or the notes that come in. There might be a conflict between two people, or maybe something’s going on in that grade level. We don’t know. We’re testing a theory. But let’s go in and talk with them about it. What’s working? What’s not? Why? They’ll tell you if there’s psychological safety, as you said, right?

Okay, I feel like I could pick your brain for the next five hours, but I have keeping in my lanes here. I got to reign this in. So I want to ask each of you like if there’s one thing you could share with school leaders out there, I know this is going to drop in the summer. So this is a juicy time for them because they have some space and some energy in their brain to start planning for the upcoming school year.

What would you like to share with these? There’s a lot of aspiring leaders, new principals, veteran principals out there and district leaders listening to this podcast. So what is it that you’d like to share with them as they’re entering into a new school year?

Shelly: For me, it’s making sure that people are aware and understand the concept of mattering and what that means. I think that it is long overdue in our profession to take a look at this. Research shows that people with a stronger sense of mattering have less symptoms of depression. They show less signs of stress or they handle stress better. They have higher career longevity and higher career satisfaction. These are all things that we struggle with right now in education.

While we can look at school culture, we can look at collective efficacy, we can look at organizational health, these are big mountains for a leadership to climb. Changing a culture takes years. Growing teachers’ collective efficacy takes a lot of time and a lot of heavy lifting. In mattering, there are little things that you can do to help open the door to those much bigger topics.

Angela: Yes. I think that the little things that you do actually expedite the big picture progress. You actually get there faster when you’re focusing on the what you can do, the easy to do, the everyday little things that matter. Again, I think as a leader, you have to tune in with you. Where am I? Do I feel like I matter? Am I feeling like I’m making an impact, a difference?

Because people who hire me as their coach often come and say I got into leadership thinking I was going to create a bigger impact, I feel less empowered, less impactful than I ever did in a classroom. That’s because they made this big leap, and that ripple effect takes a little bit longer, right? So we have to grow into our new self-identity, right, and to the impact we’re looking to make.

But the little impacts, you get to feel those today, right now. You go out on your campus, and you apply these eight foundations, you can feel that today, right now. Then you’re going to plant that seed so somebody else, a teacher, a support staff, a substitute teacher, don’t forget your subs, your office staff, all of them, everybody. You can plant these little seeds, and then they get to feel it today. That’s what starts to generate mattering, feeling good today.

You don’t have to wait till tomorrow or next year. You can do it now. That’s what I love about this book and the strategies that you’re teaching. They’re very tangible. They’re just, it’s a way of being. You can do that with any level of experience at any school, at any time. Love it.

Ryan: I’ve got a couple of things here real quick.

Angela: Let’s go, Ryan.

Ryan: Dr. Wilfong, you had mentioned things like collective efficacy and school culture and change and things like that. But that was your follow-up research. Through thousands and thousands of teachers, you found eye-popping relationships with those things. So mattering really is the doorway to the big stuff that meta-analyses are showing makes an impact on student learning. That’s number one.

But the three I’d like to wrap up with is they’re pretty straightforward. I mean, number one, through people, all things are accomplished in schools. That’s number one, period, paragraph. Number two, as we remember from network TV or television years and years ago, we all want to be where everybody knows our name. That has to do with mattering too.

Number three, as I travel the nation working with leaders and groups and educators and boards of ed and superintendents and building principals, we have a gift in education, in the profession of education. That is the gift that every year at certain intervals, we have an opportunity to start undefeated.

Principals across the nation, empowered principals, can start undefeated for the next school year by getting in touch with mattering, looking at it scientifically. Shelly, by accessing your website, that’s matteringk12.com, isn’t it? Something real close to that.

Shelly: Yeah.

Angela: We’ll put it in the show notes for people. We’ll make sure we drop all the links in the show notes.

Ryan: That’s beautiful. So, again, Angela, Shelly, thanks so much for having me on board. Again, to our publisher Solution Tree and more importantly, or as importantly, the entire Empowered Principal® audience because these are some great folks making huge differences on kids. We can continue doing that by putting the teachers first so that we can be about the students most.

Angela: Absolutely. It has been such a pleasure to meet you both and to get to know you and your work. I adore you. I can’t wait to learn more, hear more. I hope to someday write for Solution Tree and meet you guys in person. Yeah, catch up and have a coffee.

Shelly: Yeah.

Ryan: Sounds great.

Angela: Yes. But thank you for your time. I know this is a big chunk of time. I appreciate it. The audience will really be profoundly changed by this. We’ll put in the links to the book and any other resources you want me to share with the audience. We’ll drop those in the show notes for y’all, okay? I hope you’ve enjoyed this show, you guys. Thank you so much. Have a wonderful week. We’ll talk to you guys all next week. Take good care. Bye.

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

Look, you don’t have to overwork and overexert to be a successful school leader. You’ll be mentored weekly and surrounded by supportive likeminded colleagues who truly understand what it means to be a school leader. So join us today and become a member of the only certified life and leadership coaching program for school leaders in the country. Just head on over to angelakellycoaching.com/work-with-me to learn more and join. I’ll see you inside of the Empowered Principal® Collaborative.

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.

 

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The Empowered Principal® Podcast Angela Kelly | Letting Go

Most of you are either done or almost finished with the school year. I hope you’re out enjoying your well-deserved summer break, but I know that certain things about the school year tend to linger in our minds and bodies.

There’s no school leader on the planet who doesn’t ever get it wrong, misspeak, or make a decision they later regret. We’re all human, and spinning in guilt, avoiding your negative thoughts and feelings, or criticizing yourself endlessly doesn’t help. If you want to go into the new school year feeling fresh and ready to go, you must let go of any past thoughts, memories, or decisions that are weighing you down.

If you’re ready to create a self-concept that empowers you in the new school year, join me this week to learn the power of letting go. I’m showing you what happens when you don’t reconcile any negative thoughts or feelings you’re experiencing about the past school year, the simplest way to let go, and prompts that will help you see where you might need to practice letting go.

 

The doors to the next cohort of The Empowered Principal® Collaborative are open! This is the time to decide: do you want to lead your school for the rest of the year as you are right now, or take your leadership skills to the next level? Join us today to become a member of the only certified life and leadership coaching program for school leaders in the country by clicking here.

 

What You’ll Learn From this Episode:

  • How to let go of negative feelings or energies that you might be processing. 
  • What happens when you don’t reconcile negative thoughts, memories, or decisions.
  • The power of leaning into your negative thoughts and feelings.
  • Questions to ask yourself about what you’re holding on to that you would benefit from letting go.

 

Listen to the Full Episode:

 

Featured on the Show:

Full Episode Transcript:

Hello empowered principals. Welcome to episode 338. 

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

Well hello, my empowered leaders. Happy Tuesday, and welcome to the podcast. I hope you are enjoying a fabulous summer. I hope you are enjoying your June. I hope you have planned out your summer of fun, and I hope that you are in The Empowered Principal Facebook group celebrating Summer of Fun, posting about Summer of Fun, and getting your name in the hat for the $50 Amazon gift cards and 90% off the price of one year of The Empowered Principal® Collaborative. 

Come on, let’s go. I need you guys in there. There is no shame in your game. There’s no reason why you can’t be in here having fun this summer, winning prizes, and getting a 90% discount on the registration price for EPC. We want as many people in EPC as possible, the more the merrier. The more people we serve in EPC, the more empowered you will all feel. It’s going to be an amazing school year. I am so looking forward. I have so much content to share with you guys. I cannot wait. 

So let’s dive in. I want to talk with you today about letting go. So many of you are in your summer zone. You are thinking about last year, or maybe you’re not. Maybe you’re out having so much fun. I hope you are. But most of you are finished or almost finished by now, and there are things about the school year that tend to linger in our minds. They linger in our bodies. 

Things that went really well, of course, right? I invite everybody to look at what went well during the year, celebrate your successes, focus on what went well, what were the wins, what was accomplished, and what went smoothly. Really embracing all of the things that actually did work. I know our brains do not tend to think about what worked. So we have to direct it over intentionally and say hey, look at all the things we did do this year, all the things we did accomplish, the wins, the things that went smoothly, the systems that did work. We want to take those with us for next year. 

But if your brain is every other human brain, it tends to be that we have certain memories, certain situations, certain conversations, certain circumstances that occurred during the past year that our brain and our body want to hold onto. 

So I want you to take a moment and think about what didn’t work well. It’s okay to go there. You’re not going to drum up bad vibes for next year if you stop and look at what didn’t go well. I want you to actually bring them up to the surface and think about what are those circumstances or conversations or situations that you felt you didn’t handle well or turned into a great big nightmare or just something seemed a little but it ended up big or somebody had an intense reaction you weren’t anticipating. Think about those times. 

Now as you’re thinking about them, you get that pit of the stomach feeling, the butterflies come back, the angst, the anxiety, the worry, the guilt, the shame, the embarrassment. All of the yucky feelings that we never enjoy feeling. We don’t desire to feel them. They come to the surface.

We typically, what we try to do, we either try to avoid thinking about it. We try to push those feelings away, and we resist it, and we avoid it, and we push it away and we’re like I don’t even want to think about that ever again. But the problem is it’s still inside of us internally. It’s still in our mind unprocessed. It’s still in our emotional energy, our body. We feel it physically because it’s still unprocessed. 

So in order to be able to let go of those negative, icky energies, those negative, icky feelings, you need to actually lean into them. I know it sounds counterproductive and it doesn’t sound fun, and here’s why, it’s not fun. 

But I really want you to be able to go into the new school year clean, fresh, ready to go and really having reconciled and let go of any past thoughts and memories and decisions and things that didn’t go well. If you bring those into the new school year, what you’re doing is you’re weighing down your self-efficacy and your self-concept and your identity as a principal. 

You’re bringing those with you saying oh, I’m a principal who screws up. I’m a principal who doubts herself. I’m a principal who doesn’t really know how to do this job. Clearly, I’m a principal that upsets people, or I’m a principal that doesn’t know how to communicate effectively, or I’m a principal that doesn’t work well with parents. You are going to bring some kind of identity with you if you do not process the experience all the way through.

So lean in to what did not feel good and notice how heavy that feels, how painful it can feel when you think back to those conversations, those situations, those interactions, those decisions that had a backlash. 

What we want to do in order to let them go is to learn from them. There’s no school leader on the planet that doesn’t get it wrong, misspeak, say the wrong thing, do the wrong thing, make the wrong decision according to whatever is considered right or wrong.

People will be unhappy. There will be times that you overthink things and you procrastinate and people needed information sooner than you gave it to them. Other times you won’t have thought it through, and you were rushed and you made a decision and you didn’t weigh out all of the impact of that decision and then you had negative feedback from that.

So you’re a human running a school, doing the best job that you can and there are hiccups. We trip, we fall, we make mistakes, we misspeak, we miss communicate, we misunderstand. That’s all a part of it. Guilting yourself, avoiding it, pretending you didn’t do it, or over criticizing yourself, spinning out in it. 

Because the opposite of trying to avoid it all is just perseverating on it. I know I tend to be on the perseveration side of things. I will lean into it deep, and I will feel it so deeply, but I have a hard time letting it go. So I’ve been studying myself, I’ve been watching myself in my entire life, personally and professionally, looking at how does one, how does a person let go?

The way I have found that it’s easiest for me to let go is to lean in, acknowledge the feelings, and then ask them what I’m here to learn. I made this mistake. It happened for me. I want to understand what I think went well, what I think didn’t go well, and why I think it happened this way and what I’ve learned and see the benefit in the mistake. 

See how the misstep invited you into knowing yourself better as a leader, deepening your skills, deepening your knowledge, having to hold space for your emotions, for other people’s emotions. Understanding how to make a decision or how to communicate a decision or how to pull out an initiative or to hold professional development meetings or how to better facilitate a meeting or how to better hold people accountable or how to better, I don’t know, anything, anything. Answer emails on time. Your job is so vast. There will be things that you naturally excel at and things that you feel aren’t as skillful in your identity.

Now, think of those things, let yourself feel them, and then ask yourself, what is still lingering for me from last year? Is there anything I’m holding onto that I’m bringing into my summer that’s weighing down the fun I’m going to have or the fun I want to have? What am I bringing into the new school year? Getting really honest with yourself.

Do I want to bring these feelings, this energy, this identity, this self-concept of me as a leader, do I want to bring this into next year? Or can I write my identity? Can I create a self-concept that empowers me because of the mistakes or because of my past experiences? Is there a way I can write the script of last year into a way that allows me to see it as empowerment? 

I learned this when I went through this hard thing. I really learned how to do this. I learned to think this way. I learned to make decisions this way. I learned how to communicate that way. I learned more about laws, policies, procedures, standards, special education, whatever it is you were dealing with. 

I learned more about XYZ, and now I can bring that to learning with me. I can bring the growth with me. I can bring the progress with me. I can bring the improved identity. My self-efficacy actually has gone up because last year was hard, and I know I can handle hard things. I know without a doubt I can handle what comes my way. How do we know? I did it. The hard times are what allow you to know that you’re capable. 

So letting go really is just a shift in how you see the hard things. When you perseverate on something that happened last year, and you can’t let it go. Have you ever had that thought I can’t let this go? It just it bothers me. It just, I keep spinning on it. I don’t know why. I just can’t let it go. 

Ask yourself, why am I not letting this go? Why am I choosing to hold on to this story and this thought and this memory and tell it in the way over and over and over again, the way that I’m choosing to tell it? 

Another way to ask yourself is how does not letting go of this story benefit me? Why am I holding on? Is there something that’s protecting me? Something that’s making me feel safe? Something that makes me feel better by telling this story? Is it protecting me in some way? How is it helping? 

If you think about it, sometimes you’re like yeah, I can see why I’m holding onto this because it feels better to think it’s that person’s fault than my fault. It’s easier on my heart to think that they did that and not me. Or it’s even though I can’t let it go, they said this. They did that. It’s better for me to blame them than to take ownership of my part. It’s really hard to take ownership.

But in order to let go and to be free from somebody’s unkind words or negative feedback or a verbal kind of slap down when you get verbally chewed out, right? Someone comes at you sideways, and you have to look at those experiences and say hey, what part of this is my ownership, and what part of it isn’t? 

Let them own their part, put their part back in their lane. You’ve got to take your part and you’ve got to own your part. But once you separate out the two, you don’t have to take identity from another person. If they say you’re not a good principal or you’re never this or you don’t communicate or you’re blah, blah, blah. All that feedback, you take the feedback, and you look at it, and you’re like okay. What of this is true? What do I want to own? Where do I want to improve and grow? Then what do I want to let go of? What doesn’t ring true for me? 

See how every single experience that you had last year, it really happened for you. It happened to teach you a lesson, to test your strength, to condition you and build you up and make you stronger, or to provide some wisdom or guidance or skill set or something. It didn’t happen for zero reason. It didn’t happen just to be mean or just to make you doubt yourself or just to make you feel bad. 

It’s very interesting to watch yourself make up what that circumstance means about you, about them, about the whole situation overall. Notice what part of the story is your brain creating and making up and what part feels fact. 

It’s easier to separate when you can separate fact from opinion. Fact will feel much more neutral. Opinion feels very emotionally charged. So if you’re having trouble letting go of something emotionally or mentally, most often what’s happening is you’re not looking at the facts as much as you’re focused on the opinions. What you made it mean when they said that, what you think they made it mean when you did something. We interpret and we create perspectives and we create stories around uncomfortable situations. 

So if you want to be free and clear going into your summer, going into next school year, instead of avoiding the negative things that happened last year, I invite you to lean into them and to study them. Why do they feel bad? Is it fact or is it opinion? What about this feels bad? Why am I holding on to it? Is it serving me to hold on to this?

If not, am I willing to let it go? Am I willing to reconcile it? Am I willing to see the growth, the wisdom, the skills, the expansion that happened as a school leader? There will always be something new that you’re learning, a new experience, a new conversation, a new set of parents, a new set of staff members, kids, all of it. There’s never a dull moment, right? 

But you can choose to write the past as an opportunity that you grew and learned and evolved your skills, or you can write it as you did something wrong. You’re inherently not a good leader. Or somebody else did you wrong. They’re inherently a bad person. Notice the stories. 

I invite you in to The Empowered Principal® Collaborative where we learn how to let go. Part of this job is heartbreaking. It’s hard. It’s crushing sometimes, right? Mentally, physically, psychologically, emotionally, socially. We want to be able to learn from our mistakes or learn from mishaps or misspeaks or miscommunications or misunderstandings. Then we want to let it go and write the memory of that experience in the most positive, empowering way possible. 

Try it out. Let me know how it goes. Join EPC. Come on in to Summer of Fun. Would love to have you there. Have an amazing rest of your week. Take great care of yourselves, and I’ll talk to you next week. Take good care. Bye. 

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

Look, you don’t have to overwork and overexert to be a successful school leader. You’ll be mentored weekly and surrounded by supportive likeminded colleagues who truly understand what it means to be a school leader. So join us today and become a member of the only certified life and leadership coaching program for school leaders in the country. Just head on over to angelakellycoaching.com/work-with-me to learn more and join. I’ll see you inside of The Empowered Principal® Collaborative. 

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.

 

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The Empowered Principal® Podcast Angela Kelly | From Chaos to Calm: Practical Tips for Overwhelmed School Leaders

Today, I’d like to share a story from a recent coaching session with one of my clients. Usually, she’s the epitome of composure, having worked with me for two years and diligently applying all the tools we discuss. But this time, she came to our call feeling completely overwhelmed. As a school leader, she’s juggling an endless list of tasks, from projects and events to instructional coaching, and it’s all hitting her at once.

The reality of school leadership is that there’s always too much to do and never enough time to do it. With countless projects, events, and instructional coaching sessions vying for attention, it’s easy to get lost in the chaos. As summer approaches and exhaustion sets in, it’s crucial to find ways to navigate through the overwhelm and come out on the other side.

Tune in this week to learn practical strategies for tackling overwhelming situations head-on. From accepting your state of overwhelm to breaking down tasks and prioritizing effectively, I’ll guide you through a system that turns chaos into calm. Discover how to give yourself permission to stretch your boundaries when needed and how to plan your workload to alleviate stress. Don’t miss out on these valuable insights that will help you lead with intention and reclaim your sense of control.

 

The doors to the next cohort of The Empowered Principal® Collaborative are open! This is the time to decide: do you want to lead your school for the rest of the year as you are right now, or take your leadership skills to the next level? Join us today to become a member of the only certified life and leadership coaching program for school leaders in the country by clicking here.

 

What You’ll Learn From this Episode:

  • How to recognize and accept when you’re in a cycle of overwhelm as a school leader.
  • Practical steps to manage and prioritize your overwhelming tasks and deadlines.
  • Techniques for setting flexible boundaries to balance work demands and personal time.
  • Strategies for breaking down tasks into manageable chunks and organizing them effectively.
  • Methods to shift from a state of stress to a more tactical and productive mindset.

 

Listen to the Full Episode:

 

Featured on the Show:

Full Episode Transcript:

Hello empowered principals. Welcome to episode 337. 

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

Hello, my empowered principals. Happy Tuesday. Welcome to the podcast. Welcome to June. Some of you are near the end, some of you are past the finish line, and some of you are still sprinting. My heart goes out to all of you. Whether you’re done and you’re in reflection mode, whether you are almost there and celebrating the growth and all of the excitement and the wins that you’ve accomplished and your team has accomplished this year, or if you’re still sprinting towards that finish line.

I know, especially in the East Coast, I know New York goes a little bit later towards the end of June. So this podcast is exceptionally appropriate if you are still in the sprint, or if you’re in planning mode and feeling overwhelmed. 

So I had a client today who’s normally pretty composed. She has worked with me for over a year. She’s in her second year coaching with me one on one, and she applies the tools to her day, to her week, to her year, to her empowerment, to her profession, to her personal life. This is a coaching student who takes coaching seriously. She understands the value of it. She applies it. She leverages it and really does the work.

Still, and even so, she’s a human on the planet and came to her call feeling really overwhelmed. Because here’s the truth about school leadership. You can coach on this thought, and I know it’s a thought that I’m offering you, but I like to say let’s just call it true. Let’s call it a fact of life. 

There is always too much to do and not enough time in school leadership. What I mean by that is there is always a task on the menu, on the to-do list. There’s always a project, an event, a conversation, paperwork, emails, meetings, IEPs, hiring, firing, events on your campus. There’s always instructional coaching, grades, testing. There’s never a dull moment on a campus. There’s always more that can be done than there is time and energy to do them.  

So instead of trying to coach your brain into there’s plenty of time. I don’t have anything to do. Things are great. If you cannot get yourself into a place of ease and contentment with feeling sufficient with time, this podcast is for you. I’m going to talk about what to do when there’s simply a lot of demands happening at once, a lot of deadlines all coming at you. People are in high need. 

There’s needy times of the year. This is one of them, the end of the year. People are worn thin. Kids’ behaviors are maybe spiking a little bit. Teachers are worn out. Everybody’s just a little bit on edge, a little bit tired, ready for the summer, but not quite yet there. They’re coming to you to hold all of the emotional space for them, for you to solve the problems, for you to get things done ASAP. The district’s asking you we need this plan and that plan and these observations and all of this stuff needs to be done all at this one time. 

I’m going to tell you how I walked my client through this to show you the power of weekly coaching calls. That is why I’ve set this up this way. There is no human, to my knowledge, on the planet who at some point doesn’t hit the wall of overwhelm and get sucked into the overwhelm cycle. 

It’s going to happen. Falling into a cycle of overwhelm is supposed to happen. It’s a part of the experience. So when you fall into one, thinking that you shouldn’t, first of all, creates a lot of pain and suffering. If you are in an overwhelm cycle and you’re like I know I should be in control or on top of this, but I’m in an overwhelm cycle. I can see that I’m in overwhelm. I don’t know how to get out. It just feels like too much. That’s normal. Normalize that. Just say, oh, I’m in a chapter of imbalance. I’m in a chapter of overwhelm. This happens. 

Here’s how you get out of the overwhelm cycle. First of all, you acknowledge that you’re in one. Don’t fight it. Don’t shame yourself for it. Don’t judge yourself for having fallen into an overwhelm cycle. Don’t think that it shouldn’t be happening. All of those thoughts create more pain than necessary. Just acknowledge it. Allow yourself to be in the overwhelm cycle. It’s a part of the school leadership experience. It’s a part of the human experience on this planet, guys. That’s just the way it goes. 

If we allow it, it actually feels less intense than if we’re mad that we’re in it or resistant that we’re in it or we’re trying to rush out of it or we’re judging ourselves for it or shaming ourselves for being in it. Okay. So the first step towards all of this is acknowledging, you know what? I’m just feeling overwhelmed. I’m going to acknowledge my feelings. I’m going to allow them to be here. No judgment. We’re going to let it be present. 

I’ve said in prior podcasts, all emotions are valid. All emotions have a purpose. All emotions are here for a reason. They don’t just show up randomly. When overwhelm shows up in your body, in your job, in your life, and you’re feeling overwhelmed, there is a message that’s coming from your body, your compass, up to your brain. 

Because the brain is trying to run the show with the to-do list and the task mastering and the scheduling and the bossing, all of that stuff when we’re trying to be in energy boss mode, we’re trying to be productive. Getting those to-do lists, getting the three month plan underway, feeling productive, being on schedule, all of that stuff, that’s boss energy. 

Then there’s times where the body comes up and says I just want to feel. I need to feel the overwhelm. I need you to know I can only sustain this amount of productivity and this amount of speed in work and the tasking that you’re asking me to do for so long. Acknowledge the feelings, let them be there. 

When you take a moment to take a breath and sit down with the overwhelm, you and overwhelm are going to have a little conversation.

You’re going to talk to the overwhelm. What’s coming up? Why are you feeling this way? Is there anything I need to know? Any wisdom, any insight, any information? 

Usually, if you give it enough time and space, it will have insight for you. There will be some wisdom it shares. There will be a reason you’re feeling overwhelmed. Not that you can change the reason, we’re just acknowledging and validating the reason. 

So in this case, my client just had a ton of deadlines that were kind of piling up on one another, a lot of meetings that were pulling her away from time that she could be spending getting her work done, tasks that were on top of the above and beyond normal day, week of the school year. Behaviors are ramping up a little bit. It’s spring and spring fever hits. Full moons are around. This week that I’m recording this is the pink moon. The pink full moon is out. So you never know what’s getting the kids riled up, but we want to keep all of that in mind.

We want to notice that we’re just a human on the planet doing the best job we can. We’re feeling a little overwhelmed because there are a lot of deadlines. There are a lot of behaviors. There’s so many angry parents. There’s conversations to be had with staffing for this year into next year. There’s a lot. It’s a lot. We’re not going to say that there isn’t, okay? We’re not going to fight the brain on arguing that there’s not a lot going on. We’re just going to acknowledge it and be in the overwhelm.

Once we acknowledge it, then we can get ourselves into a space of permission, into allowing ourselves to experience the overwhelm, to acknowledge the overwhelm, and to ask ourselves why. Because the detail of the overwhelm comes down into why am I so overwhelmed? What’s all that I need? 

Once we realize why we’re stressed, and I’m going to share specifically why this client was stressed because there’s a message in it for her, for you, for all. This client has in particular been working on setting work boundaries and having a set of standards around the amount of hours that she works during the week, as all of you should. When you join EPC, I teach you how. 

Now, I teach you a process for creating boundaries around your work hours so that you have energy and a life outside of work because you’re a human that deserves that. When you’re feeling super overwhelmed, and there’s a lot of deadlines that are stacking on top of one another, perhaps the most loving thing you can do for yourself is to give yourself permission to stretch your boundaries around your work hours.

It might feel better to say I’m going to work late, or I’m going to work in the evening this week, or I’m going to come in early and just get a few hours knocked out on Saturday morning, bright and early, and then have the rest of the weekend to myself because that’s what feels best for me right now. 

Your boundaries that you create for yourself, the standards upon which you live your life, they’re yours, which means you can create flexibility. I consider boundaries that we create, especially for ourselves, like work boundaries, time around how much time we’re going to work. 

It’s like a rubber band. We can flex them when we need to. When it feels best to flex your hours and to say you know what? I’m going to give myself permission to work in the evenings or to work on the weekend because it feels better to me to hammer this stuff out and just knock it out and get it done than to think about and try to cram it into my eight to five day. It might not work that well. Or your seven to five day, however long you’re working. 

Now, if it doesn’t feel better, if it feels worse for you to work nights or weekends, then you can work with yourself on combining, batching, delegating, being more efficient within the eight to ten hours you’re at work.

But for this client, it was about giving herself permission to expand and stretch those work boundaries for a limited amount of time. Just for this little round, we’re not always giving permission and where work takes over the schedule. We’re saying what feels best for me, what feels like self-love for me this week is to stretch those boundaries, okay? Those boundaries can always go back, but you may find that you need to stretch them. 

So, once you’ve given yourself permission like ah, this is why I’m so overwhelmed. Here are all the reasons, here are all the thoughts, here’s how I’m feeling, I’m acknowledging it, I’m allowing it, I’m validating it. The overwhelms coming in. She gets to have a voice, or he gets to have a voice, or they get to have a voice about what’s going on here and what they think is best, okay? 

Now, emotionally, energetically, you’re calmer. Then what you can do is go into a brain drain. Now, we get into the tactical part where we write everything down. Your brain has your to-do list on loop. It’s one list that repeats itself on repeat over and over and over. So, when it stays in the brain, or in the mind, in the body. It feels like it’s ten miles long because it’s looping. The same tasks are looping over and over and over, creating the overwhelm, building up steam, creating that negative intensity, that negative energy that’s inside of you that feels like it’s going to burst because you’re so overwhelmed.

Once you acknowledge it and just say yes, I’m overwhelmed, I’m going to give myself permission to feel it, but I’m also going to give myself permission to tackle it. Now we do a brain drain, and you write down. You just go back to the three-month plan, you write it all down, you batch it, you put it into buckets. 

So, in this case, we had some teacher observations to complete. We had some staffing conversations to be had. We had some investigations to wrap up and communicate with students, staff, and parents. We had some makeup testing to-do, behavior management, and then summer school. Once we batched it, I think we got it down to five buckets. 

Then we broke it up and we said okay, what are things that have to be done within the school day? You know conversations when you’re interacting with people, things that can’t be done outside of the school day. Write all those down. Then we wrote down what are all the things to do that can be done outside of school? Emails, paperwork, right, calendaring, planning, scheduling. There’s a lot you can do outside of the work hours that don’t require you to be in a meeting or in a conversation or directly on your campus to complete, okay? 

Then, once we have that figured all out then you can start to break it down and prioritize what absolutely needs to be done today, what absolutely needs to be done by tomorrow, what needs to be done by the end of the week, and what needs to be prepared for next week. You break it down, and you prioritize it. You triage it. Then once it’s triaged, it just goes on the calendar. 

Now that big overwhelming to-do list doesn’t feel so overwhelming. It’s gone outside of the brain and the body onto paper and then eventually onto your calendar. When each task has an assigned date, time, and duration, your brain can go to ease. It doesn’t have to hold on to that to-do list anymore because it’s been given an assignment. There has been time and energy allocated to that task. So your brain’s like oh, I know exactly what I’m doing when I’m doing it. 

This process sounds very simple, but it is what helps you shift from feeling overwhelmed to the point of not being able to function, not being able to get yourself to slow down and schedule into acknowledging the feelings, letting it be there, asking it what it needs to share with you, why are you overwhelmed? Of course you’re overwhelmed. We validate it. 

Then that gives us enough space to then go tactical and get into, let’s do a brain drain, let’s get it all out, let’s prioritize it, let’s batch it, separate it into buckets, decide what can be done here, what can be done outside of the day, give ourselves permission to do that work outside of the day, and look at the benefit of this planning. 

Because how you’re going to feel at the end of the week when you’ve knocked this stuff out, your weekend is going to feel so much better, even if you have to sneak in. Once in a while, I would go in from 7 a.m. to 11 a.m. Not much was happening at the house. Everybody was lounging or having fun on Saturday mornings. I usually got up and worked out or tried to get my home tasks done so that I can enjoy my afternoon and all of Sunday. 

But sometimes it felt better to go knock that work out at work and that I felt so free, so light, so delighted, so accomplished, so proud of myself that I didn’t have to make it mean I wasn’t good enough or that I didn’t uphold my standards or boundaries around my time. 

We don’t need to hold ourselves hostage when we have work boundaries and the time in which we work. I don’t work nights. I don’t work weekends. That’s a beautiful boundary and standard to create for yourself, and it’s also okay to allow it to be flexible when it serves you, when it feels good, when it feels like the best decision or the best use of your time.

So there are times and chapters and seasons throughout the school year where it feels like too much to do within the school day, and that’s because it’s true. There is too much to do within the school day. You don’t have to make that mean anything has gone wrong or that anything is wrong with you. It’s just the job. 

Now we get to decide how we want to handle that and how much time we’re willing to allot and allocate outside of those boundaries for a limited time, for a specific week or a specific month even, knowing that you will also be cognizant about when it’s time to honor those boundaries. When you need to work and you choose to work and you decide to work with intention versus when you feel like you’re out of control working all of the time, there’s no boundaries around work. You can’t seem to get a handle on overworking, overscheduling, over-exerting, over-delivering, right? 

I mean over-delivering in a negative way where you’re just doing what everybody else needs you to do without taking into consideration what you need from yourself to sustain yourself physically, mentally, and emotionally, okay? 

I hope this has been helpful. Apply this immediately anytime the emotion of overwhelm consumes you. When it takes over, and it goes into the driver’s seat, that’s not a problem. We’re going to work with it instead of resisting it or working against it. All right, my friends, have a beautiful week, and I will talk to you all next week. Take good care of yourselves. Bye. 

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

Look, you don’t have to overwork and overexert to be a successful school leader. You’ll be mentored weekly and surrounded by supportive likeminded colleagues who truly understand what it means to be a school leader. So join us today and become a member of the only certified life and leadership coaching program for school leaders in the country. Just head on over to angelakellycoaching.com/work-with-me to learn more and join. I’ll see you inside of The Empowered Principal® Collaborative. 

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.

 

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The Empowered Principal® Podcast Angela Kelly | The Significance of FUN in School Leadership

The Summer of Fun 2024 is kicking off in the Empowered Principal Facebook group right now! If you want to have fun at work and enjoy your life outside of it, but having fun feels unsafe, irresponsible, or unacceptable, this is a must-listen episode.

Teachers, educators, and principals have a reputation for crushing fun, but learning and leading don’t have to be boring. In fact, I believe that having fun is an essential element of your life. There are so many unspoken rules in education that speak to the idea that we’re not supposed to engage in fun when, in reality, the significance of fun in school leadership is huge.

Join me today to learn what happens when you embrace having fun as a leader, and why sacrificing fun isn’t helping you become the leader you want to be. You’ll also hear how participating in the Summer of Fun 2024 will help you cultivate a new relationship with fun, see it as a value-add to your life, and honor your fun in ways that will pay dividends. 

 

The doors to the next cohort of The Empowered Principal® Collaborative are open! This is the time to decide: do you want to lead your school for the rest of the year as you are right now, or take your leadership skills to the next level? Join us today to become a member of the only certified life and leadership coaching program for school leaders in the country by clicking here.

 

What You’ll Learn From this Episode:

  • What you can expect from the Summer of Fun 2024.
  • Why it’s so much easier to lead people from the energy of fun.
  • What happens when you embrace having fun as a leader.
  • Why we, as adults, think having fun is a problem.
  • How sacrificing fun, play, and rest doesn’t help you become a better leader.
  • Why you don’t know what delights you without indulging in fabricated pleasure.

 

Listen to the Full Episode:

 

Featured on the Show:

Full Episode Transcript:

Hello empowered principals. Welcome to episode 336. 

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

Well, hello, my empowered principals. Happy Tuesday. I’m so happy you’re here. Welcome to the podcast. I am thrilled that you’re here and I have some exciting announcements that I’m going to share with you today before I get into today’s content.

First of all, I want to tell you all about the Empowered Principal® Collaborative. We just finished our first full year of EPC, and it was a huge success. I’m so proud of the principals who participated in the Empowered Principal® Collaborative. I had fun. They had fun. We grew. We learned. We laughed. We cried. 

We really supported one another throughout the entire year, whether we were able to join live or watch the replays. People showed up, supported one another, cheered each other on, gave great strategies, tips, and advice. Along with the content and the coaching, so we did some teaching, we did some learning, we did some coaching, and it was the best experience. I am so proud of it. I’m so honored to be hosting it.

What’s coming up this coming school year is going to be phenomenal. I’m adding so much more content and services for the upcoming school year in EPC. So I’m going to give you a sneak peek. I’m still in the process of developing it, so there’s going to be a little bit of surprise and anticipation because it’s not all complete, but here’s what we have so far. 

I’ve decided to make EPC a year-round program. That’s number one. This first year, I held the program from August through May thinking that this is when school leaders need support, from the beginning of the school to the end of the school year. But I realized something. I don’t know why I didn’t think about this the first year, but I realized hey, principals, most of them work year-round. So they need support year-round. I am happy to offer EPC year-round. So, we’re going to make it a year-round program. 

This summer, I’m going to take a break. I’m going to take June and July off because we did decide to end the season at the end of May. So I’m taking this month and next month off to prepare for EPC. We’re going to launch it in August instead of September. I was planning to do September this year, but I’m going to launch it, and here’s why. 

One of the other things I’m going to be adding to EPC this coming year is bonus courses, bonus sessions, and workshops throughout the year that are based on the relevance of what you’re working on during the school year. 

So in August, when you join EPC, I’m going to be having additional bonus planning workshops, vision workshops, preparing to hire an onboard and get everybody on the right seat on the bus, prepared and ready to go, kicking off the school year with success, without overworking, without all of the chaos and the stress. 

We’re going to be doing bonus workshops. In addition to our weekly coaching sessions, I’m going to be teaching bonus content, holding workshops where you come and actually get work done so you can feel like you were productive during the workshop. And then the weekly calls are going to be for questions and coaching, new content that I’m going to be teaching and sharing. 

So I’m adding these bonus workshops throughout the year. Things on time management, prioritization, how to plan, how to create balance, your leadership identity, building up your efficacy as a leader, how to create inspiration and motivation, and how to create impact so you feel empowered, because ultimately this is about empowering you so that you can empower staff and students. 

We’re going to talk about relationships, how to build them, how to maintain them, how to nurture them. And communication, how to be articulate, how to be specific, how to create communication that is effective and efficient, consistent, and allows you to receive communication and express communication in a way that feels good for you and that is coming from a place of love and service. 

We’re going to talk about culture and mindset and teamwork. I definitely want to cover HR topics such as hiring, how to fire people, which is really uncomfortable. It’s really hard. All of the evaluation process, observations, how to get them scheduled, how not to have them eat up all of your time, onboarding people for the beginning of the year, or if you have to hire mid-year, how to onboard them, the systems to have in place.

I’m going to talk about aspiring administrators. I’m going to do a very specific series. If you’re an aspiring leader, come on into EPC. Be in a room with principals. You’re listening to them. You’re getting their mindset. You’re understanding strategies and skills. You are learning how to become a principal before you’re even a principal. Get in the room. I will have an aspiring administrator series for you that’s going to teach you what to do, how to get hired, how to land your ideal job, and then what to do those first steps when you very first walk into your administrative role. 

As I continue to develop my own skills as a coach, as a business owner, as a leader, and in my own quest for personal development, professional development. As I evolve myself in my ability to lead you, I will create additional content to help you be the best version of you as a leader. So this is a continual process. There are always new strategies, new ways of approaching this job to make it a little bit easier, a little bit more fun, a little bit lighter, a little bit more successful. 

So if you have ever, at all, been intrigued or interested in experiencing leadership coaching and finding out what leadership coaching feels like, this is the year to join EPC. I’m going to make joining EPC more fun than ever by kicking off the Summer of Fun 2024. 

So my intention with the Summer of Fun this year, I have really thought about the Summer of Fun and its impact and its significance. So the title of this episode is the significance of fun because it has a value. It has a purpose, and it is significant. It really matters. 

So what we’re going to be talking about in the Summer of Fun, which we just started. This is the beginning of June. We’re going Summer of Fun last from the beginning of June to the end of July. It’s an eight week program. It’s free. It’s fun. You get in the Facebook group, and you participate. This is what we’re going to be talking about. 

We’re going to talk about building safety around planning and having fun. A lot of times fun does not feel safe. It doesn’t feel like it’s okay. It doesn’t feel acceptable. It feels irresponsible. We’re going to talk about how to change the way we think and feel about fun. We’re going to talk about what the value of fun is, the significance of fun, why it’s so important.

I want to debunk the negative stigma that we have as adults particularly about having fun, around the idea of taking some time off and having some fun or having fun at work. Everything doesn’t have to be so serious, so dry, so intense all of the time. 

I am going to teach you how to calendar and honor your fun because it is as equally important as every other meeting, every other appointment, every other task on your calendar. I want you to identify as a school leader that your wellness, your happiness, and your playfulness matters. It is significant. It is important.

Because here’s the deal. It is so much easier to lead people from the energy of fun. People are attracted to people who are fun. People want to work for and be around leaders who understand the value of fun and who integrate fun into the work that they do. 

So leaders, you principals out there or district leaders who are listening, those of you who embrace having fun, you give staff and students permission to have fun. You are the role model. You’re the one who has the authority, the position of authority to say, hey, it’s okay to have some fun. It’s okay to be lighthearted and to make learning fun and to make teaching fun and to make coming to work fun.

This is about retention. This is about sustainability. No one wants to be in a job where there’s zero fun. It’s always serious. It’s always heavy. It’s always intense. There’s always a problem. There’s always something to fix or change or solve. It’s always based out of lack, insufficiency, and this idea that we’re not doing enough. Okay. 

I want you to consider that the goal, the outcome you’re looking for is to have fun, to enjoy learning, to enjoy leading. So not only is the goal to have fun at work, you also want to enjoy your life outside of work. You want to have a life outside of the workday and you need to model that for your staff and students. No teacher should be working around the clock. No principal should be working around the clock. No district administrator should be working around the clock. 

Martyrdom is not the goal. Sacrificing your physical wellness, mental wellness, emotional wellness, psychological wellness. Sacrificing time with your family, time with friends, time for fun, time for play, time for rest. Sacrificing all of that does not make you a better leader. Okay.

So some of the key concepts through the Summer of Fun that we’re going to talk about is that it’s safe to have fun. You have permission to have fun. You are allowed to have fun, and you get to decide what fun feels like for you. I’m going to take you on a journey. The first four weeks where you’re going to have these little mini homework sessions, which basically they’re just prompts for you to think about during the week, and then we’re going to come back and coach on it every single week and talk about what about fun is so difficult, what makes fun so hard. Okay. 

So I want you to think about this. I looked up the word fun in the dictionary, and it became very clear to me why we as adults think fun is a problem. So fun is something that provides amusement and or enjoyment, playfulness, entertaining, pleasant, engaging, energizing, laughter, celebration, relaxation. Those are amazing, right? We all want to feel, those are kind of feeling words, most of them, emotional words. We want to feel entertained, pleasant, engaged, energized, laughter, happy. We want to celebrate. We want to relax. Okay. 

But there were also, like when I went and looked at the synonyms, it was distraction, absurdity, buffoonery. What word is that? Buffoonery? Clowning, diversion, foolery, nonsense. I thought ah, this is why we are cautious about having fun. Words like distraction, absurdity, buffoonery. That word makes me laugh every time. Clowning, diversion, foolery, nonsense. The language we use to describe ourselves, our decisions, our use of time and energy, it matters. 

When fun is essential, like we’re worthy of fun. We deserve fun. Fun is an essential part of being a human on the planet. When we look at fun as an essential element, as a benefit, as a value add, then we embrace its value. We embrace the significance. But if you’ve been taught to think of fun as a distraction or unproductive or foolish or silly or immature, unfocused or irresponsible, you’re going to have a pretty hard time giving yourself permission and being truly comfortable with scheduling in fun into your life, into your workday, into time outside of school.

Another reason that fun feels like such a challenge. We teach this in school, by the way, it drives me crazy. But when you think about it, we all do it. Work before play. Get your work done first, and then you can have fun. Work is always the priority. That mindset, work before play, get your work done first, and then you can go have fun, then you can go to recess.

Here’s the problem with this. There’s always more work that can be done. The list never ends. The tasks never end. So fun keeps getting pushed to the back of the line, and it never makes it to the front. 

Because fun never gets to be first in line, fun before work, then fun just gives up trying to be included in your life, or fun will sabotage you. It’s going to get your attention. It’s going to be like you’re going to start having some fun by overeating or drinking or scrolling on your phone or playing games on your phone or just zoning out to Netflix or shopping. Your desire for fun will either be extinguished or it will sabotage you, and it will creep in. It will find a way.

Think about this, play is how children learn. It is the work. Play is actually how we learn as adults. It doesn’t change because of our age. We just made it change. We decided that it changed. When people grow up and they become adults, then you are no longer time to play. It’s time to adult. It’s time to get serious. It’s time to grow up. 

What does that even mean? Do we stop enjoying our life because we’re an adult? Stop having fun, stop scheduling fun in, stop playing and engaging just for the pure enjoyment of it? What does that even mean? Why would we do that? That makes no sense to me. 

But yet I see it as some unspoken rule, especially in education, because we’re here for the kids, but we’re also supposed to be having fun. We live by this unspoken rule without even questioning it. This makes no sense, yet it seems to be the unspoken rule that many of us live by without even questioning it. 

I’ve also noticed this about fun. We’ve indulged in fabricated pleasure as adults to the point that we don’t even know or remember what actually delights us without the indulgence. Here’s what I mean by this. I’ve been studying myself. 

As kids, we used to have authentic fun. We knew what felt fun to us. We were attracted to fun. The default was to seek pleasure, to have fun. So we interacted with ourselves and the world in a way that felt fun and light and playful and easy and fully engaged in the pleasure of fun. We also enjoyed some of the fabricated pleasures, such as video games, right? 

But our bodies and our minds and our hearts and souls were motivated by physical movements, social interactions, being outside, being mentally and emotionally engaged, laughter, music, reading books, playing games, kinesthetic experiences, authentic experiences of fun, and kids don’t apologize for wanting to have fun. That is the way of the world for them. They want to make everything fun. 

But the adults come into the room and infer and teach that having fun isn’t productive. It’s silly, and silly’s not good. Silly’s naughty. Silly’s out of line. Silly’s embarrassing. Don’t be like that. Don’t have fun. Don’t be silly. That’s not appropriate, right? 

So as we grow up, the definition of fun changes, and we’re left wondering what there is to do for fun that’s not going to be judged or criticized as adults. If you think about it, teachers, educators, principals, we’re often portrayed out in society as adults who crush the fun. Let’s be honest. Some of us are out there playing that role pretty well. We are prioritizing the work, and we’re prioritizing following the rules over a little bit of fun and a little bit of lightness. 

I have a story about my dad. I just got off the phone with him actually, and he always makes me laugh because my dad was always playful. He always has been, and his dad was the same way. He always tells me, “Angela, the best diffusion is humor.” He used humor to lighten up any situation, to diffuse an intense moment. 

All the kids gravitated to him because of this playfulness and this lightheartedness and his ability to see the silver lining or tell the funny joke or make light of something that was really serious, right? He could turn a very serious situation into a moment of laughter and fun. 

Here’s a quick story that highlights his humor, his silliness. We were kids, my grandfather had a stroke. My dad’s dad, okay, had a stroke. He was at the Veterans Hospital down in Des Moines, Iowa. I grew up in Iowa, and we had to drive. So for a kid to be in the car for two hours, that just felt like a year long. 

We went and then to sit in a hospital where your grandfather is not well, and he can’t communicate. He’s had a massive stroke. So he’s non-communicative, and half of his body wasn’t working properly. So my parents, of course, like a lot of stress. It was an intense situation. He had also broken some ribs. It was just a really intense situation. 

The entire family gathered to visit with him, and the adults in the room had to make some really difficult decisions about what they were going to do moving forward with his life. After all of that, they take us out for like a late lunch, early dinner or something. I was pretty young. I don’t really remember the details, but I do remember this. 

We were at the restaurant, and the kids were kind of all sitting at a table. My cousins and I and the close family friends. All the kids were kind of at a booth table thing, and the adults were sitting. So they were kind of talking all serious and tears and all of that. 

Then my dad came over to the kids table and sat down. Well, this particular restaurant, instead of serving like chips or bread as like a free appetizer snack when you walked in, they served popcorn. Well, the kids, we were all starving. They brought all of these bowls of popcorn, and we were just eating and talking and laughing and drinking lemonades and sodas or whatever.

My dad came over, and he walked up and sat at the table, but he had two kernels of popcorn in each of his nostrils. He just sat there and acted as though nothing had happened. We were like yeah, that’s so funny. We were laughing. He’s like oh, that’s so gross. That’s so funny. He’s like, what? I don’t know what you’re talking about. He got all of the kids just in hysterics and then we were all doing it. 

My mom was giving him kind of the stink eye like be quiet. It’s a restaurant. It was like three in the afternoon. So it wasn’t a busy time at the restaurant. So we were one of the only parties in there, and we were a large party. 

But we had so much fun. I remember that as an adult to this day. I remember that moment. My dad did this all the time. He could take any type of situation and bring humor to it, bring the playfulness and the fun. I remember my mom, like my dad always got like a little gently scolded or like playfully scolded for being too playful, too silly. 

I just notice how interesting it is to see how adults approach fun versus how kids approach fun. I noticed like mom was always the bad cop. Dad was always the good cop because he was the one having fun. He’s like oh, mom, just let them have fun. Mom was like time to clean up, time to eat dinner, time to do this. Time to do that. Right. 

So if you join the Facebook group, the Empowered Principal® Facebook group, we are right now, we’re kicking off Summer of Fun. We’re going to talk about Summer of Fun. We’re going to define it. We’re going to untangle it from the idea of it being irresponsible. We’re going to talk about what you do want your relationship with fun to be. We’re going to rewrite your story around fun so that you can feel safe and comfortable and delighted and honor your fun and make it valuable, see the significance in it. Then we’re going to create a calendar. We’re going to cheer each other on.

This whole group. Like weeks five through eight is going to be implementing our plan. Having an implementation week of fun and then coaching each week on the obstacles. Like what’s coming up for you? Are you struggling to have fun? Are you struggling to schedule it? Are you struggling to honor it? Are you struggling with having fun while you are having fun? 

You know that feeling when you take time off, but you’re feeling guilty that you took time off. So you’re really not enjoying yourself. You’re telling yourself the whole time you should be working, or you’re not being productive or you’re wasting your time, all of that. We’re going to coach on that. Okay. 

So come on into Summer of Fun, and I’m going to teach you some really powerful thoughts and mindset shifts that are simple. They’re going to blow your mind. I’ve been doing this work myself, and it has blown my mind. So come on in.

And here’s the best part. For those of you who participate in the Summer of Fun challenge, which is starting right now. So dive on in, jump on into Facebook and find the Empowered Principal®. It’s an open group. You have to just answer a couple of questions. I just want to filter out, make sure we’re school leaders in here. It’s not robots, or it’s not people trying to scam us or sell us crap. 

But every week in the Summer of Fun challenge, I draw names. So for people who participate, who they post pictures, where they cheer other people on, every time you make a comment, a post, and you engage in the Facebook group in the Summer of Fun challenge. If you raise your hand for coaching, if you show up to the live calls. If you participate 20 times in one week, your name goes in 20 times. So the more you participate, the more chances you have of winning.

I’m going to draw one winner per week for the eight weeks of the Summer of Fun challenge. You’re each going to get a $50 Amazon card as a gift. I used to do this big gift package, but this year I’m keeping it simple because I know what you guys all like. Everybody loves an Amazon card. You’re going to get $50 worth of Amazon card. 

This is the best one. You’re going to get a year of EPC. You get to register for the Empowered Principal® Collaborative for the entire year for only $199. Yes, you heard me right. Registration in EPC as a client of mine for only $199. That is 90% off the full price of the $1,997 price. I feel like this is insane, but I’m so excited. It just delights me to say yeah, you’re going to get 90% off. You can join EPC for $199 for 12 months of coaching. 

Here’s why I decided to do this insane offer, to give this as the gift for those who participate. I work with school principals from all across the country, and they share a very similar story. They all want to feel empowered, but they actually feel a lack of agency and authority. They feel disempowered. They want to create an impact. They want to be influential. They want to make a difference. But what they really feel is that they’re spinning their wheels, working their tails off for very small amounts of progress or stagnation.

They want to love their job. They want to enjoy school leadership. They want to feel good about themselves. They want to have a very strong self-efficacy in who they are. They want to create inspiration and motivation and a positive culture. They want their teachers to feel good about themselves. They want to raise teacher efficacy so they can raise student efficacy so that we can create progress. 

But what they really feel is very weighed down by the demands, the pressures, and the responsibility of the job, which leaves people overwhelmed, exhausted, and unsure if what they’re doing even matters. This is true across the board, from all the states. I coach people from coast to coast, top to bottom, north to south, east to west. People who are in pre-K all the way through 12th. I have district leaders. I have site leaders, private schools, public schools, charter schools. 

The overall energetic state for administrators tends to be overwhelm and frustration because they feel stagnant. They feel like they’re putting in time, effort, energy. They’re committed, they’re dedicated, but they have a sense that they’re not able to move the needle and create the level of influence and impact that they want to see. 

If this is you, you want to join us because here’s what’s happening. The Empowered Principal® program has changed the trajectory for dozens and dozens of school leaders. Every single one of my clients for the past seven years has indicated growth impact. They’ve built a legacy. They have better time management, better balance, better planning skills, better relationships, better communication skills, better onboarding skills, better hiring skills. 

They get bonuses, raises, promotions faster than ever before. They get their coaching paid for through their district. They change the way they think about themselves, the way they feel about themselves. Their entire perspective of education, of their job. They change the perspective of what they think about their teachers, the goals that they have for their school. They change the understanding of what to focus on and why and what matters most.

These clients of mine, they come back year after year, round after round, because the impact of coaching, the impact of the Empowered Principal® programming that I have created continues over and over, year after year, to expand their capacity to lead. It’s not just a one year thing. 

This type of development, professional and personal development, it’s an evolution. It’s a lifelong learning process. They come back because it works. It gives them the tools to create the impact they want and to enjoy themselves in the process so much more.

So I’m inviting you into this experience. Join the Facebook group, participate in the Summer of Fun, try to win EPC. Gut either way, make the decision to sign up and join EPC. I will tell you this, I’ve also added an additional feature that makes it even more accessible. There is now a monthly payment option. 

If you don’t want to pay in full, the $1,997 price, what you can do is sign up for 10 monthly installments of $199.70 for 10 months. That equates to $1,997. You’re not even getting charged anymore for the monthly payment option because I want it to be equal and accessible. I want you to pay the same price. 

So if you would prefer monthly payments, you could do 10 monthly installments of $199.70 and that will get you 12 months of EPC access. Come on in. You know you want to come. We’re having fun over here.

We are changing the way we approach school leadership, one thought at a time, one belief system at a time, one dismantling at a time. Come on in. I can’t wait to meet you. Have a great week, and let’s go have some fun. Talk to you guys 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. 

 

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The Empowered Principal® Podcast Angela Kelly | Why Are You in a Rush?

I love when my clients come to me with an energy of deep desire and compelling urgency around their goals. While this lights me up, there’s a dark side to our urge to rush, and it’s causing you unnecessary pain and suffering.

Whether you’re in a rush to get to the end of the school year, to make more money, or to have your kids grow up, my question to you this week is, what’s the rush? You might think the aching, pining, and longing for the future will make you feel better, but in reality, you’re just missing out on the current chapter of your life right now.

Tune in this week to learn why we often have the urge to rush and how to stop so you can truly embrace the present moment. You’ll hear why there is absolutely no need to rush, and what happens when you learn to love where you are right now. 

 

The doors to the next cohort of The Empowered Principal® Collaborative are open! This is the time to decide: do you want to lead your school for the rest of the year as you are right now, or take your leadership skills to the next level? Join us today to become a member of the only certified life and leadership coaching program for school leaders in the country by clicking here.

 

What You’ll Learn From this Episode:

  • Why we rush.
  • The two sides of the coin when it comes to compelling urgency.
  • How rushing to get a certain result can cause pain and suffering.
  • What happens when you embrace the present.

 

Listen to the Full Episode:

 

Featured on the Show:

Full Episode Transcript:

Hello empowered principals. Welcome to episode 335. 

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

Hello my empowered leaders, happy Tuesday. Hey, if you just found out about The Empowered Principal® Podcast, so happy you are here. Welcome to the club. We are having a great time. Hey, I just want to point out, I know it’s getting towards the end of May as this episode is dropping. 

I want to invite you in to the Empowered Principal® Facebook group. If you’re not in there, get in because Summer Fun Challenge is coming, and you guys know this is the third or fourth year I’ve done this. We have a fun challenge every week. Everybody posts all the fun they’re having over the summer, whether that’s professional or personal, it doesn’t matter. As long as you’re having fun and you’re posting it and sharing it and cheering people on and uplifting people and having the most amazing exceptional life yourself. 

You get eligible for prizes. I send out amazing prizes every single year. They get better and better every year. I’m so excited. Join us in the Facebook group. Join the Summer Fun Challenge. Post in there. Get engaged. Get busy living your life, having fun, sharing it with others in the Facebook group, commenting. Every time you post or comment, your name goes into the drawing. We get one prize per week, and we do this for eight weeks during the summer, and it’s a blast. I’m telling you. Let’s go.

All right. This is a quickie, but it’s important. I want to talk about the urge to rush to better. This sounds like a convoluted topic, but it’s not. We all are in a rush. We’re in a rush to get it done. We’re in a rush to the end of the year. We’re in a rush to get better grades. We’re in a rush to make more money. We’re in a rush to have our kids grow up. We’re in a rush for something better. We think that something better is coming, and it is, but we’re in a rush to get it.

I was just coaching a client on this and she’s like, “Yeah, I know. Life is really good. I know that. We’ve been coaching forever.” This client of mine has been coaching with me for years. She’s like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know that, but I really want now. I want this now. I want that now.” I said, what’s the rush? Why the rush? 

She’s like, “Well, I want to feel more certain. I want to feel more settled. I want to have this experience, and I want to make more progress. I want to make a bigger impact. I want to serve more. I want, want, want, right?” Which is amazing. I love, love when clients come to me with desire, with compelling urgency to live an exceptional life. It lights me up to see them lit up.

It is not wrong to want and to desire. Where the pain comes in, where the suffering comes in, where the focus on the lack of not having it comes in is when we want it right now and we think we need to rush to get there. 

Here’s why we rush. We rush because we think that being there is going to feel better than where you’re at right now. We think that when we’re an aspiring principal, we’re going to feel so much better when we land the job. When we’re in the job we have now, we think it’s going to feel so much better when we make more money or when we’re better at our job, when we know what we’re talking about finally once and for all. When we get that promotion, we think we’re going to feel better. 

But what do you notice? When you were an aspiring principal and you were daydreaming about how amazing school leadership was going to be, and you had those rose colored glasses on, and you were just dying to get that job, and you interviewed three, four, five, 10, 20 times before you landed that job. You were aching for it. You were in a rush.

Yes, it felt so good to get the offer. You felt so accomplished, so proud.  Then what happened? You got into the job and you got a whole ‘nother set of oh, this doesn’t feel good. I want to rush through what doesn’t feel good to get to the part where it feels good. 

I want you to see that no matter where you’re at on your career journey right now or in your personal journey right now, there’s always a moment where we think it’s going to feel better in the future and we are aching, pining, longing, wanting, desiring the future. 

But in the midst of doing that, we’re focusing on the lack of what we have in our life right now. I want to make this much money, but now I only make this much money. Instead of saying like I’m so grateful that I make this much, and I look forward to making this much.

So if you’re making $80,000 right now and you want to make six figures, you want to make 100K as a school leader, you can be grateful that you’re making $80,000 because a lot of people are not in this world. Be so grateful for all the things that that $80,000 affords you and how proud you are that you’ve accomplished this amount of money and be delighted in wanting to hit that 100K mark.

Not because you’re going to be better. It doesn’t make you a better principal to make six figures. It doesn’t mean you’re better, smarter, a better person, better leader. It doesn’t make you better necessarily. It doesn’t even feel better because once you’re making a 100K, guess what? Now you want 120 and then you want 140 and then you want 160. There will always be a desire. 

So when I hear clients in a rush to get somewhere, I know that there’s a  thought error, a thought obstacle I call them, that’s happening. There’s a block that’s saying like oh, there is better than here. Anytime I hear that in a client, I know that it’s my job to help them see that where they’re at right now is just as good as where you’re headed.

It’s still a 50/50 experience. There are good days. There are hard days. You have wins, you have losses. You get it right. You get it wrong. You say it beautifully. You mess it up. You make the meeting. You forget the meeting. You pay the bill on time. You forgot to pay the bill on time, right? You get your kids on time to soccer or you don’t. It still all happens. Life still happens. 

Now, what I have found to be true is that when I’m open to not rushing to living and embracing this little mini-chapter that’s today or this week or this school year, when I embrace this and look for what’s happening that’s so amazing here, what happens is my future feels even better because I’m always focusing on how good my life is. There never ends up being a bad chapter, right? 

It’s like when Alex was born, I just wanted him to stay newborn because I loved it so much. But then he became like three months old, and he started smiling and like responding and I was like oh my God, I love this the best.  Then he was six months old, and he was crawling and he was chubby and his little teeth then I love that the best. Then nine months and then a year.  Then I loved every chapter, every season, every moment of his life the best. 

Then the best just kept getting better. Now my son, oh, it makes me cry to say it. He just turned 25 in April. We did a big quarter of a century birthday party for him. I had all of his friends and family from birth to 25 shower him with love, birthday cards, birthday gifts, messages, texts, letters, whatever, however they wanted to shower him for his 25th. It was just incredible. I love this the best. I love my adult relationship with my son the best. As much as I loved him as a newborn, I love this the best. So life keeps getting better with him and better with him and better with him. 

You can apply this to anything. Your job, you can love this chapter the best and the next one’s going to be oh, I love this even better. You can do it in your job, in your career. You can do it with your own kids. You can do it with your relationships, with your friendships, with your own life, this house, the next house, this car, the next car. You don’t have to rush to get into the dream home. You can love the mini apartment you’re in right now.

I had a client, she’s worked with me for gosh, four years now. When she started, she was the youngest little principal. She wasn’t even 30 years old yet. She was in her late twenties. She was a principal during COVID, no less. She was living in a small apartment. She lived in New York city by the way. So literally living in New York city in a small apartment. She was daydreaming about someday getting a big beautiful house out in the suburbs, I guess of, of New York.

But I told her but look at you now. You’re a school leader, and you’re not even 30 years old. Look at you go girl. Yes, you have a small apartment, but you’re living urban life. Love the urban life. Love your little place. It’s so cute. You were going to have the fondest memories of that place. They’re going to be the best memories ever. 

When you get to your big, beautiful suburban home, you’re going to love that the best. Then you’re going to have children. Then you’re going to love that the best, but love being single now. Love being married without children now. Love the car you have now, and you’ll love the next one even better. 

There is no rush. There’s no need for the rush because you can love where you’re at right now in order to expand and love what’s coming even better, even bigger. So I invite you, there’s no need to rush. Slow down, take a breath, enjoy spring, enjoy the end of the year. Embrace it now, love it for what it is now, and you’ll love the future even bigger and even more. Have an amazing day. I love you all. Talk to you guys next week. Take good care. Bye. 

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

Look, you don’t have to overwork and overexert to be a successful school leader. You’ll be mentored weekly and surrounded by supportive like minded colleagues who truly understand what it means to be a school leader. So join us today and become a member of the only certified life and leadership coaching program for school leaders in the country. Just head on over to angelakellycoaching.com/work-with-me to learn more and join. I’ll see you inside of The Empowered Principal® Collaborative. 

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.

 

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The Empowered Principal® Podcast Angela Kelly | How to Turn Meetings into Actionable Outcomes

As we inch closer to the end of the school year, many of you are going through various meetings, whether it’s IEP, 504s, team, or retention meetings. 

In most cases, you’re in meetings where everyone will likely have different opinions. There might be people who are for a decision while some are against it, and maybe there are lots of options or theories presented at the table. Your job, as a school leader, is to look at the common goal and come up with a decision-making protocol that leads to a productive solution.

If you find yourself in meetings where conversations get sidetracked or derailed, you worry about people feeling heard, or otherwise find decision-making getting delayed or sabotaged, listen in. You’ll learn why you must identify a decision-making protocol ahead of time for your meetings, and questions that will help you lead with confidence when it comes to decision-making.

 

The doors to the next cohort of The Empowered Principal® Collaborative are open! This is the time to decide: do you want to lead your school for the rest of the year as you are right now, or take your leadership skills to the next level? Join us today to become a member of the only certified life and leadership coaching program for school leaders in the country by clicking here.

 

What You’ll Learn From this Episode:

  • The one thing that often gets overlooked in meetings.
  • What delays decisions and makes meetings ineffective.
  • Why you must identify a decision-making protocol ahead of time.
  • How to come up with a decision-making protocol for meetings.

 

Listen to the Full Episode:

 

Featured on the Show:

Full Episode Transcript:

Hello empowered principals. Welcome to episode 334. 

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

Hello, my empowered leaders. Happy Tuesday. It’s May. I hope spring fever is not kicking your buns. I hope it’s lifting you up. You are near the finish line, my friends. You’re getting close. Hopefully the weather is beautiful in your neck of the woods. You are thriving off of spring. Entering into the end of the year and the summer. It’s such a fun time. I know it can be exhausting. So give yourself a little space and grace if you’re running 100 miles an hour. I know you out there probably are. 

I want you to just take a step back, take a deep breath, relax for one minute, and just acknowledge everything around you, the beauty of the springtime, the beauty of the joy in the students that school is near the end of the school year, summer’s coming. Everyone’s in that good vibe, even though you might be a little tired. Just breathe it in and relax for just a minute to take it all in.

Testing’s over, hopefully for most of you by now. It’s just the end of the year celebrations. Letting kids embrace the joy of school, the pleasure of their friends and their classmates and their teachers and all of the fun, open houses, end of the year recognitions, all of the fun stuff is happening now. So don’t forget to see it as that. It’s fun. It’s light. It’s beautiful out. I hope you are taking moments in to breathe in all of that. 

Okay, now we’re going to shift gears. I’m going to talk just a short and sweet episode about decision making in meetings. I was just coaching a client, and I wanted to jump on and do a podcast on this because I think this gets missed when we’re planning and preparing for a meeting. A lot of you now are going through IEP meetings. You’re having conversations around IEP or 504s or student success team meetings, or you’re talking about retention for kids.

This came up in a conversation with a one on one client of mine. She was a little nervous because there was a conversation that was going to be around retention. We coached on this, but I said look, for every adult in that meeting room, there’s going to be a different opinion. Everyone has an opinion about retention. There are people who are for it. There are people who are against it. There are different camps. There are different theories. There are different opinions about the impact of retention. 

So she knew it was a charged topic. In this case, it was not an IEP meeting. But there was kind of this discussion around should it be a retention, or is this a language issue? This child is also learning a second language. Or is it developmental, like we need to look at assessment kind of a conversation you’ve all been in these conversations. Is this retention issue? Is it a language issue? Is it a developmental issue? Is it a cognitive issue? Do we need to assess what’s going on here, right? 

Here’s the coaching that I gave, and here’s what I want to offer to all of you. When you’re in a conversation about something like this, something similar to this, or this exact topic, I want you to think in advance about what’s really happening here. Okay. 

Even though you know people have different opinions and different data points they’re using and different theories and different ideas about what’s best for this child, your job as the facilitator, or as one member of this meeting if you’re not the facilitator, is to look at the common goal is to focus on where are we all on the same page. We’re going to be on different pages about the how but what are we on the same page about. What you’re on the same page about is everybody wants what’s best for the child. Everybody wants this child to be successful. 

Then you take that one step further. What do we want out of this particular meeting that we’re in right now? When people leave that meeting and they’re walking out, what is it you want to have accomplished? So I was talking this through with my client. She’s like, “Well, I want everyone to be on board.” 

I said what you want is for them to feel good about the decision. That’s what we want. It doesn’t mean everyone agrees with the decision or got their way, but they are in alignment with it. They feel good about it at the end, as best as possible. That’s an ideal outcome, right? That’s what we want. We want to have a conversation. We want people to express their thoughts and their opinions and their theories and their data points and their feelings, get that out, and bring everybody back together. We are on the same team. We all want the same thing. We want to serve this student as best we can. 

So we made that agreement, we decided what that might look like, and we came up with some language around how to get people back on track with the idea that we all want the same thing. We are on the same team. We can have different opinions, and we can have debate and discourse. But at the end of the day, we all want to walk away still feeling that we’re on the same team and that this was a team decision.

Which brought us to the point of I asked this client, this principal, how are you making the decision? What is the decision making protocol that you’re going to implement in this meeting? Is this a top down decision? Is it truly a consensus? There are many types of protocols. You can google search them, find different protocols for decision making. 

I used to have a list in my office. I had it pinned up on my board that went from like it’s an executive top down decision completely, like one person, and down. There were like five different kinds of protocols all the way down to full consensus, right? There was like stakeholder input but executive make decisions. It was like stakeholder input then a group makes a decision. There were different layers. Look them up, find the protocols. I can probably look some up and put them in the show notes for you. 

But what’s important about this conversation is you want to articulate and communicate very clearly beforehand, before everybody’s sitting in a meeting, you want them to understand how the decision is going to be made. If you think about this, this is the one thing that gets overlooked when we gather a meeting, we gather people together in a meeting to hold a conversation about making a decision but we haven’t identified the protocol we’re going to use to make that decision. 

I have found that is what makes meetings blow up. It’s what makes decisions get delayed or get circumvented, or they get sabotaged. Because when people don’t understand what process you’re using to make the decision and then a decision process is implemented that they weren’t aware of, that will upset them more than the actual decision. They’ll be more upset about the process that was used. Especially if you fake a process, but then you just revert back to executive decision making. 

People don’t like that. That’s why a lot of teachers don’t want to take the time to give input because they’re like they’ve already decided at the top anyway. What doesn’t matter? You’ve heard this I’m sure. You’ve probably felt that before where they ask for principal input, but the decision was already made. You know what I’m talking about? 

Okay. You want to be the exceptional leader who identifies what’s the process for decision making? Do I make the decision? Is this a team decision? Does somebody at the district level make this decision? Are the parents ultimately, do they have the ultimate voice because it is their child in this decision? What are we going with here? We need to know that ahead of time. 

So if you’re not sure the decision making protocols in your district, ask somebody who knows, get that information or have a discussion around it before the meeting, and then articulate that at the very beginning of the meeting. Look, we’re here to ultimately do what’s best for the student. Everyone’s going to share their thoughts and ideas about what they think is best. We’re going to share those data points. Here’s the decision making protocol that we’re going to use and have that ahead of time. Okay? 

Because you don’t want people getting sidetracked and having the conversation derailed because nobody knows how the decision is going to be made. Or they feel like their voice doesn’t matter because there hasn’t been a decision protocol decided or articulated or even considered ahead of time. 

It’s like oh, we haven’t even thought about who makes this decision or how it’s going to be implemented or what’s going to happen. We’re just all here to powwow our two cents out, right? To like I want to say what I want to say, and I want to be right. I want my way, and I want it to be this. I’m pro-retention, or I’m anti-retention, or I’m this kid needs more time with language development, or this kid needs to be assessed immediately, or this kid needs an extra year developmentally. They’ve had these delays in their experience. 

There’s so many approaches and ideas. There’s no one wrong way to serve the child. The thing to keep in mind is what is the one next best step for the student and for the family? By the way, one of the questions I loved to ask my team when we were having these discussions, I would say to the team, okay. What we do know is that we want to pick the next best step for this child. So let’s lay out all the options. Let’s ask ourselves what would that approach look like for the student. 

So if we were to retain a student, the idea is that if we’re going to retain we have to indicate how the programming will look different and be different for that child if we retain. We don’t just retain to give them exactly another year of the exact same programming and instruction. It has to look and feel different. It has to be different to qualify for retention. What does that look and feel like?

If we were to retain, what is the service we’re going to provide that student? What is the instructional strategy? What’s the approach? If we were to not retain and have this child go to the next grade level, what would that look like for the student? If we were to focus on language development and keep this kid in retention, what would it look like? If we were not to retain the child but focus on language development, what would that look like? What would it look like if we were to assess and retain? Or if we were not going to retain but we were going to move forward and assess? 

We just lay out all of the options. We ask ourselves as a team what would it look like? What would it actually look like? What are we going to do as an approach? This is one other thing. This may be controversial, but I’m going to say it because it’s my podcast. I get to say it. When people are so in a rush to assess a student my question to them was what do you think the assessment will change? 

How will this benefit the child by being assessed and getting a label or not getting a label or receiving special ed services or not? What about the services would look different? What do you think will be different for the student if they are assessed? Is there anything about that that we can implement right now as a tier one or tier two strategy prior to assessment? Because we don’t always need the assessment before we provide the strategy, right? 

If this kid needs additional reading instruction or they need a slower pace, can we not give that to them in some fashion in our Gen Ed classroom? Maybe yes, maybe no. It’s worth exploring. I’m not saying all of the strategies that are accessible in special education are applicable to Gen Ed. I’m simply saying of the strategies we want to see for this student, is there anything available that we can try now while we’re assessing or before we assess? 

We just want to focus on what does the program look like for the student? What is the decision making process? What might it look like with any of the decisions we make? We want to map out what’s the plan for this, for A, B, C, D, E, and look at that. Then we talk about that. We get on board. Then because we’ve decided how we’re going to make decisions within a meeting, everybody in that meeting knows exactly who’s ultimately responsible for the final decision. 

So it’s just something that gets overlooked because we’re busy, and we’re not thinking about how the decision is going to be made. We’re thinking about getting these people together and just getting this decision made and getting it over with so we can move on to the next thing. But what I’ve noticed is that the obstacles come in not as much with holding the meeting or having the conversation. It comes up when we get to the decision making process and when we don’t map out what all of the options that people have suggested, what they look like rolling out, and what that means to the child. 

Once we do that, sometimes it makes it very clear the next best step for the student and then everybody can see it. You get on board with it easier. It’s easier to make that decision and have people come to terms and be on board and be at peace with that decision. So try that process. Let me know how it goes for you. 

If you have any questions, join EPC, my friends. We’re talking about this stuff over in EPC. We’d love to have you. Have an amazing week. Talk to you next week. Love you, take good care. Bye.

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

Look, you don’t have to overwork and overexert to be a successful school leader. You’ll be mentored weekly and surrounded by supportive likeminded colleagues who truly understand what it means to be a school leader. So join us today and become a member of the only certified life and leadership coaching program for school leaders in the country. Just head on over to angelakellycoaching.com/work-with-me to learn more and join. I’ll see you inside of the Empowered Principal® Collaborative. 

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. 

 

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The Empowered Principal® Podcast Angela Kelly | Embrace Your Exceptionalism as a Leader

For those of you who see meaning in repeated numbers, this episode is going to speak directly to your heart. The number 333 in angel numbers represents expansion, and as we approach the end of the school year, this is the perfect time to reflect on and celebrate the expansion you’ve experienced this year. 

One of the ways you might want to create expansion as a school leader is by embracing exceptionalism. Becoming exceptional is a topic I coach on with all of my clients because it’s what will help you enjoy your life to the fullest and lead your school in the way you truly want, and I’m showing you how to begin identifying yourself as exceptional today.

Join me this week to learn what’s required of you to live an exceptional life, why what you focus on expands, two reasons embracing your exceptionalism might feel challenging, and questions to answer for yourself that will help you see how your life and career are already exceptional right now.

 

The doors to the next cohort of The Empowered Principal® Collaborative are open! This is the time to decide: do you want to lead your school for the rest of the year as you are right now, or take your leadership skills to the next level? Join us today to become a member of the only certified life and leadership coaching program for school leaders in the country by clicking here.

 

What You’ll Learn From this Episode:

  • Why you don’t have to overwork or hustle to experience an exceptional life.
  • How being exceptional isn’t about what you do or say. 
  • What’s required of you to live an exceptional life.
  • Why exceptionalism isn’t a birthright, but rather a choice you have to keep making.
  • 2 reasons why focusing on what is exceptional in your life feels challenging. 
  • How to begin embracing exceptionalism, and what happens when you do.
  • Questions to ask yourself about how your life is exceptional right now.

 

Listen to the Full Episode:

 

Featured on the Show:

Full Episode Transcript:

Hey empowered principals. Welcome to episode 333.

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

Well, hello, my empowered principals. Happy Tuesday, and welcome to episode 333. I can’t believe this marks the episode of the 333rd episode of The Empowered Principle podcast. This is amazing. And as you know, I try to seek out meaning in everything. And I create meaning. That means the most to me, I make sense of the world and I make sense of everything around me to the best of my ability. And the meaning that I like to create for myself is meaning that feels good, meaning that feels empowered to me, meaning that uplifts me.

So on this 333 episode, I want to invite you into the meaning that I’ve created for myself, my coaching business, my clients, and really for my entire life. So for those of you who see repeated numbers as meaning like 333, this is going to speak directly to your heart. But even if you don’t think of anything about numeric repetition, this episode is still going to ring true for you.

This is an invitation to living an exceptional life. Right here right now today, not in some future moment in time where you think life will look and feel perfect one day out there in the future. I’m talking about living an exceptional life being an exceptional principal right here, right now, on this Tuesday of your life, where you are today, where you live today, who you’re with today. The school you lead today, the teachers that you currently have, the students who currently have the test scores that they end up scoring for the school year, right here right now.

So the number 333 in Angel numbers for any of those of you who follow that the number 333 represents expansion. And I believe that as we are approaching the end of the school year, it is the perfect time for reflection and expansion to celebrate the expansion of growth that you and your staff and your students have been through this current school year. And the expansion that you look forward to in leading your school in the upcoming year.

A concept that I often teach and one that we talk about in EPC all of the time, and I even do this with my one on one clients, is about becoming exceptional being an exceptional principal or district leader, living as an exceptional person, experiencing an exceptional life. Loving your job, loving your school, loving your family, loving you. Loving what you do, how you spend your time where your energy goes, loving your life being exceptional, celebrating your life, enjoying it. And the best part of experiencing an exceptional life is that it isn’t about always working hard and hustling. Trust me. I’ve tried that theory. I have tested it for decades.

Overworking, over exerting and overscheduling pushing yourself into exhaustion and depletion in the name of servant leadership is not what creates an exceptional result. It’s not an exceptional life. If you’re always tired, or you’re always feeling stressed out or you’re always anxious or you’re always waking up worried or you’re always a little bit nervous or you’re always feeling unsafe. If you’re always in chronic fight or flight your body’s just a little bit on edge. If you’re always feeling that way, that is not an exceptional life. 

What I’m talking about is enjoying your life to its fullest, like you lived the life you wanted to live, you led the school you wanted to lead. You enjoy the people you worked with you loved the students that you served. You enjoyed the community that you served, you were able to work with bosses, whether or not you agree with them, are aligned to their values are appreciate their approach. You had the skills to work with them, and you’re proud of yourself, proud of who you are, how you lived, that you lived an exceptional life.

Now look, I know that you can create amazing results with overworking, over exerting overscheduling, that hustle grind. I know you can do that. How do I know? I’ve done it. That’s why it’s so addicting. I lived that way for years. And still, I get tempted to get sucked back in from time to time, because there is a thrill to working and grinding and then earning that and like putting in all those hours and all that effort and energy and being able to hammer out a result. I get it. It feels good. It works. There’s a dopamine hit associated to it. And there’s nothing wrong with living your life. If you love the hustle, and you love the grind, and you love your life and you feel exceptional, because that approach works for you. Then go for it, keep going, keep running my sister, my friend I’m cheering you on.

However, for many of us, at least for me, there were areas of my life that that worked. Like I was a long distance runner for decades. I loved it, it felt great. I pushed myself physically really hard. I loved it. When I was a teacher, I put in lots of hours, I loved it. When I became a school principal, there seemed to be no amount of working or scheduling or being time efficient or effective. There seemed to be nothing. That felt good enough, that felt accomplished enough. That felt fast enough. That felt big enough, that felt in service enough, I just never felt like I was enough. 

And I realized there was a moment I’m like, I’m gonna live a very unacceptable life. If I keep hammering with this approach, I have to seek out a new approach. There is a huge rush that comes with that lifestyle. As long as it works for you. That’s amazing. And it does work to an extent. But it also only works if it feels good. That’s how you know it’s working. If it feels good to you the approach you’re taking in leadership and in life, if it’s working for you, that’s amazing.

But if it doesn’t feel exceptional, if you’re not waking up happy to be alive, ready to jump out of bed excited to get up for the day, whether that’s a Monday or a Saturday, there is room for expansion to live a more exceptional life to be a more exceptional leader to live a more exceptional experience. Because being exceptional isn’t as much about what you do or say. It’s more about how you feel, and how those around you feel about themselves while they’re following your lead. 

Your feelings are your compass to being exceptional, living exceptional, and feeling exceptional. Being exceptional living an Exceptional Life is all about the emotion driving it, the fuel fueling it, how you feel about yourself. And that’s determined by how you think about yourself, embracing the concept of exceptionalism, you need to embrace that you right here right now have the capacity to identify as exceptional, not by somebody else’s definition or standards by your own standards.

This means allowing yourself to identify as exceptional. Do you even feel qualified to call yourself exceptional? Or do you dismiss yourself? Do you dismiss your efforts, your accomplishments? Or do you say no, I’m pretty exceptional the fact that you’re in school leadership? I think point blank makes you exceptional. Do you know how many millions of people on the planet would never be able to handle the job you’re handling? You already are exceptional. You have to allow it. You have to identify as exceptional before being exceptional, feels good and comes into your life.

Now I’ve heard people say that not everyone is destined for greatness. Some are granted an exceptional life. They’re the lucky ones. They were gifted, they were blessed. And then others just simply aren’t. I challenged that belief. I disagree with it. I don’t believe that it’s true. Because the thought doesn’t feel good to think that some people get it and some people don’t. It pains me to have the thought like some babies are born into the world and they never stand a chance from birth. 

I don’t think that’s how the world was designed. I believe I choose to believe because it feels good for me that all lives are exceptional, that we already come with being exceptional, we have the capacity and the potential to expand our ability to feel exceptional and to live exceptional lives, and to take action from the fuel of feeling exceptional in our lives. Because in my definition, in my book, my Webster’s Dictionary, exceptional lives come in limitless forms. Exceptional is not one way of living, just because if you’re here, and you’re a white male, and you live in the United States, and you’re very wealthy, and you have a lot of power, that might be identified as being an exceptional human, that does not make you an exceptional human, FYI.

Now, if you are one of those humans, and you happen to be exceptional, we love you. We love all the humans, but title, status, are not definitions of exceptional, it’s not defined by the awards you are granted, or the length of your resume, or the size of your home, or the number of cars you drive. It’s not the test scores that your district receives or your school receives. It’s not your students, it’s not your staff. It’s not the accolades you get from your boss. It is not your title. It’s not your status. It’s not your location. It’s not a position of authority. It’s none of those things.

We identify people who are exceptional, because they’re wealthy, or because they’re rich and famous, or because they’ve contributed to the world in some massive way. But think about your own family. Think about your great grandparents, who did exceptional things, who went through exceptional times, who created the life that you have now, who laid the foundation that paved the road for you to have this life that you have. 

They are exceptional, whether they’re in the history books or not, they were exceptional, your parents who did the best they could. Regardless of the relationship you have with your parents, they did an exceptional job, how do we know you are here on the planet today, serving in the capacity that you want to. Exceptionalism isn’t a birthright that you either are chosen or not chosen. You choose you, you choose to be exceptional. Being exceptional is really about embracing exceptional thoughts about yourself, about the work you do, about your accomplishments. Being proud of them, calling them exceptional, having exceptional thoughts about other people, your teachers, your staff, your students, your own children, your partner, your spouse, your family, the community you live in, the community you serve your school, your campus, the culture, your test scores. 

Exceptional thoughts about your life, your body, your friends, everything about you, your home, your being, your existence. It’s about cultivating exceptional thoughts about you, looking for what is already exceptional about you and your life is the key. You’re living in gratitude in the current present moment. You’re grateful for the things that you want, that you already have in your life.

One of the activities I have my clients do is I say, tell me everything that you want, the list I want want, want want want. And I’ll say of the items you listed, how many of them do you already have, and that stops them in their tracks because one of two things happen. The list either is a list of things that they actually already have in their life and they just forgot to acknowledge that and be appreciative and grateful, or they listed everything they don’t have, which means they’re focusing on what they don’t have versus all that they do.

So try that. Notice. You have an exceptional life. You have electricity and running water, you have heated running water that comes right to your faucet into your shower. You have clean drinking water, you have a very comfortable bed to sleep in. You have heat, you have shelter, you have clothing, you have food available, so much food available in the United States. We have so much that we want someone takes your internet away for an hour, someone takes your phone away for five minutes. You’re grateful to have that phone back. You live in exceptional life. See it, acknowledge it, embrace it, live it, be it. You want to notice what is going so well, what makes life so easy right now, internet is one of my favorites.

When I moved very recently, and I’ll share that story at another time, I’ve had a huge chapter shift in my life that I’ll share with you guys at a later time. But when we moved into our new place, we didn’t have internet for almost a week. And I was like, wow, you know, I had my phone 5g on my phone, but I cannot run my business without internet. I need Internet access, it became highly appreciative when they came in installed the internet. I loved it. And I’m so grateful for it. And I don’t want to forget that I have it. And that it’s an exceptional part of my life. 

That is the power of being exceptional living an exceptional life. When you live and breathe exceptionalism into your life right now, your brain is going to start to redirect itself to collecting more and more evidence of all the things that feel as though in fact, you are an exceptional human, an exceptional being an exceptional leader.

And here’s why this works. What you focus on expands in both directions. So if you focus on if you wake up, and you’re like, oh, it’s raining. Oh, I’m tired. Oh, I have to deal with this parent today. Oh, I don’t want to have to do testing. You’re focusing on what isn’t working, what you don’t like about the day what you don’t like about yourself, what you don’t like about how your clothing fits what you don’t like about your car, what you don’t like about the commute and you get to work and you’re kind of disgruntled about the day ahead of you. 

And then you’re thinking about that parent you got to talk to and that teacher you have to let go and you’re feeling very unaccomplished. It’s the end of the year, what did we even get done? Nothing seems to be working, I’m scared about the test scores. And then my boss gave me some negative feedback. What you focus on expands in your life, both positive and negative. You know how when you wake up, and you’re in a bad mood, like the rest of the day, it’s almost like, your brain just decides, Okay, we decided to have a bad day. Let’s focus on everything that went wrong today. And then we go home, and we tell this horrible day like we had such a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day. Right?

That’s what also works in the exceptional direction. What is exceptional in my life? How am I exceptional? What is working? What’s going well, what do I love about my life? What do I love about my job? What do I love about today? What am I so grateful for that I have, I don’t even haven’t even taken a moment to realize it. Wow, clean sheets, fresh bed, having, you know, laundry facilities in my home, where I can launder my clothing at any time. Some people have to truck their laundry to a laundromat or to the river. Think about this, we have exceptional lives. 

But I know the human brain. I’ve been studying it for decades. And here’s what I have found to be so challenging, about focusing on what’s already exceptional. There’s two things that I’ve noticed, one, the brain is wired to problem solve, it kind of goes to the next problem, it just jumps from one problem, it solves it, then it jumps to another problem. And then it solves it. It loves to solve problems because we get the dopamine hit. It’s such a pleasurable feeling to have solved a problem, right? It’s like a to do list when we get to check the boxes, it feels really good. When we solve a problem, we get to put closure on it that feels really good. 

But guess what? Once that feeling dies down of satisfaction, we got to find another problem. So then we live a life stringing problem to problem to problem to try and solve them. If we can’t we feel disappointed and disgruntled and discouraged. And we jump onto the next thing, right? So the brain is wired for that. So we have to be aware of that we have to create awareness around that and be intentional about what we’re focusing on giving at least equal airtime to what is working and being in the gratitude of that along with problem solving. Okay, so that’s problem number one. That’s challenge number one.

Challenge number two is that we have been conditioned that it is not socially acceptable to focus on being exceptional, especially women are told to be humble, to be graceful not to seek the spotlight. We should be a servant leader. We should eat last we should take care of others. We should put ourselves at the very end of the line. Men have less problem shining the spotlight on themselves owning their exceptionalist feeling exceptional. They love it.

Not all of you men I know I’m not. I’m not picking on you. But there is a mindset, particularly with women, that we should not so dare to say how exceptional we are. And actually when we do. You’ve seen it on social media. Women who are confident women who believe that out, they are exceptional women who are successful, living, abundant, successful, innovative, really engaged, rich, delicious, expansive lives when they’re online, people hate on them, they have to tear them down. 

And then those women have to go through the process of coaching or therapy or whatever level of support, they need to be reminded of their exceptionalism. The more exceptional you get, the more people that hate on you. And the only people who are hating are people who aren’t focusing on their own exceptional lives, and creating their own exceptional lives. So the fact that you’re a school leader, out there being exceptional, you’re going to have teachers and parents who want to cut you down, not because you’re not exceptional, but because they’re not focused on their own exceptionalism. Do you see the difference?

But I want to say something, when you think about these two obstacles, where the brain likes to solve problems, that’s amazing. I mean, we’re innovative creatures designed to evolve and expand and grow and learn and develop. That’s working on point. So when our brain is focusing on problems, that isn’t a problem. We just also want to be grateful and aware and create this balance as equal airtime of problem solving, with also focusing on the amazingness of what’s already been solved for us.

Electricity has been solved for, amen, we don’t have to solve that problem. Right technology, there’s so much with technology that has been solved by somebody else. Thank you, thank you. There are have been roads, airplanes, cars, trains. Our lives have been made exceptional. They have been so enhanced by other people problem solving our ancestors before us the Industrial Revolution, all of those chapters have been created so that we can live exceptional lives, we want to honor that. Honor, the ingenuity and the innovation that occurred decades and centuries ago, to allow us the privilege of living in this exceptional life, this exceptional time, right here right now.

And equally. So it’s also fun and our choice if we want to, to contribute to the exceptional lives we want our children to lead and their children to lead. So we’re paving the way for the future, as the past paved the way for us. But we don’t want to deny and dismiss and not celebrate the exceptional, that is in you, in the people you lead, in your students in your school, in your bosses in the community in your life. It doesn’t make sense to focus on and to believe that we should not focus on exceptionalism.

So if you’ve been taught, and I’m sure if I were to do a poll, you mostly all raise your hand, who has been told right to be humbled to be grateful to be small, to not over shine to not make someone feel bad, to not brag to not boast to not be your biggest, boldest, brightest self. If you’ve ever been taught to kind of shine, turn down the light, turn down the volume, play small, talk small, think small, be small, don’t be seen. Don’t be heard. If you were ever conditioned around that. I thought to myself, why? Why on earth would we tell the little humans to not be exceptional to not embrace their exceptionalism, their exceptional selves, and the gifts they were given to be exceptional.

And the reason that exceptionalism has no limit is because we need all of the different kinds of talents and skills and exceptional beings on the planet to make the full planet work for the humans. It’s the universal balance that we’re creating. So that is why there are people who were born to teach kindergarten and who love it. That was me. I loved the littles. I loved kindergarten so much, you guys. I literally was born to teach kindergarten.

And there are other people who were born to teach fifth grade, or seventh grade or 12th grade. I have one of my friends who was a fifth grade teacher, she moved down to second grade for one year just to try it out. And she was like, nope, not for me, going back to the big kids, which is funny because now when I think about big kids, I don’t think of fifth graders, the big kids but they are older, a little more mature than definitely K through two. But we’re all born with exceptional talents. And it’s our job to get on the right seat on the bus to feel exceptional. To be exceptional to live that exceptional life. 

You know how good it feels when you feel good about your life. You’re like, I was born for this. I was born to be a kindergarten teacher. I am a kindergarten teacher. I’m an exceptional teacher. The parents love me, the kids love me. My classroom is amazing, like that flow, that is exceptionalism. You don’t have to be a bazillionaire to be exceptional. You don’t have to fix planet Earth, you don’t have to have invented the light bulb. You don’t have to have made plastic, invented something crazy or invented flight to be exceptional. You’re exceptional when you’re in your zone, when you’re just doing you, when you’re doing your thing, when you’re in flow.

So when I say that focusing on what’s already exceptional in your life, my clients will say, hey, like, I wonder if I’m even supposed to want more if I’m already exceptional. Now, what’s the point of development, growth? Evolution? Evolvement? Like, why do I continue to desire things? Or want things that I don’t yet have? Is that wrong? And here’s what I love about this question. The answer is, you were born, to create, to grow, to develop, to evolve, you were born to have desires, you will have desires and wants that are unmet all the way up until your last day on earth. Because that’s how we evolve. 

That’s how we grow. That’s how we continue to experience an exceptional life. Because once we’ve achieved this, we want something more. And that’s not a problem. That’s the sign that you’re on the path to more exceptionalness. It’s why we were drawn to education, right? Everybody was drawn to create the exceptionalism on this planet that they were born to create. And for us, it’s education. It’s why we were drawn into education. It’s literally one of the initial core founding institutions that humans developed to evolve humankind. That’s why we’re in schools, right?

So I invite you to live an exceptional life, to identify as an exceptional leader, to identify your life as exceptional. And to focus on all that is amazing in your life. You are an exceptional leader, you are leading your school to exceptional results. It’s all about grounding yourself in the belief that you’re already exceptional. And at the same time, you also have the capacity and potential to continue expanding. The experience of being exceptional, becoming exceptional. And living as though you are already exceptional is about your willingness to embrace it as it is to see it for what it is now and also be willing to explore and expand and evolve. 

Go beyond your years in school, learn more than just what is right in front of you. Question, challenge thoughts and beliefs that people told you to think way back when you are children or young adults. Are they true? Here’s how you know. If the thought feels good, it’s working for you. It’s true. If a thought doesn’t feel good, if it brings up negative energy, negative emotion, it’s not true for you. You get to learn and explore and innovate and create and have fun and be happy. Be curious, be joyful. 

There is no bonus prize for suffering your way through school leadership. You are not going to get a pin for 25 years of suffering in education. You’re not going to win an award for burnout and exhaustion. There’s no payout at the end for overworking, you don’t get a bonus at the end of your career, because you overworked. I really want you to let that sink in. Think about that.

Also think about this. People want to be led by someone who not only sees the amazingness within themselves, but who also sees the amazingness within them. Think about it. Think about how good it feels for you to have a leader who sees your empowerment and your potential, who believes that you’re capable, that you’re smart, that you’re worthy that you’re skilled, somebody who trust in you to do your job, who loves their job, and they’re happy to be around, they’re fun to be around. They are fulfilled. They don’t need you to be some version of you that you’re not for them to feel like they’re a good leader. 

They already feel exceptional as a leader, and they see the exceptionalism in you. They see your greatness, they believe in your greatness, they trust it, they let you go be great. That’s the kind of leader who uplifts who inspires people invites them into the best version of them. And if you want to be that leader, all you need to do is simply embrace your exceptionalism, your greatness, your potential. Delight in who you are as a leader, the skills that you have, be joyful, be curious, be lighthearted, be fun, be funny. 

Don’t take everything so seriously. Yes, you’re gonna have bad days. That doesn’t have to define or take away your identity as an exceptional leader. Exceptional leaders have exceptionally hard days, but they also have exceptionally good days.

So if your mind tends to focus on the negative, like it wakes up and you’re like, why am I always so negative, like mine, then your brain is totally normal, you are right on track, because everybody out there, all those principals who are happy, they also have negative thoughts. So your brain is right on track, it’s doing its normal thing. That is why I created EPC, the Empowered Principle Collaborative. I created it because our brains default to the negative because our brain offers us grumpy thoughts, because we’re looking at what’s not working, it’s default. And we’ve been conditioned. So we’ve got double layers, working against our exceptionalism. 

So EPC is a space that I created, where we can all redirect our brains together, making it easier to refocus on being exceptional. You know, when you’re around people that feel good, you just feel so much better about yourself. That’s what EPC is, we all just feel better. Because we’re together, and we’re talking about this. We’re like, I had a really tough day. But I want to end my day focusing on what’s exceptional about my life, and what I did, right, and what’s going well at my school, it’s so much easier to do that when you’re surrounded by other people who are doing it as well, and who lift you up, to feel good about yourself in the work that you’re doing.

So, as you go off into the week, I invite you to reflect on this past year. How was it exceptional? How were you exceptional, and I’m going to invite you to join EPC this coming school year to plan out and create an even more exceptional year this coming fall. Are you ready? Let’s go. Let’s go be exceptional. Have an amazing week. You guys. I will talk to you all next week. take really good care. Talk to you soon. Bye.

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

Look, you don’t have to overwork and overexert to be a successful school leader. You’ll be mentored weekly and surrounded by supportive likeminded colleagues who truly understand what it means to be a school leader. So join us today and become a member of the only certified life and leadership coaching program for school leaders in the country. Just head on over to angelakellycoaching.com/work-with-me to learn more and join. I’ll see you inside of the Empowered Principal® Collaborative. 

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. 

 

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The Empowered Principal® Podcast Angela Kelly | Regulating Your Nervous System in Stressful Moments with Jess Johnson

As a school leader, it can feel like you’re supposed to have everything together. However, we all have stressful moments where maybe a parent comes at you, a teacher gets upset, or a student is struggling, and your nervous system kicks into gear. So, how do you regulate your nervous system during stressful moments during the school day?

For today’s episode, I interviewed my friend and fellow coach, Jess Johnson. Jess has been working with me to help me regulate my nervous system. When we go into freak-out mode, we don’t have to stay there. There are tools and strategies we can use to relieve our stress and reregulate ourselves, and Jess is here to share them.

Tune in this week to discover simple stress-relieving techniques you can start using right now to regulate your nervous system when you start to freak out. Jess shares ways to proactively take care of your emotional well-being and nervous system’s needs, so you can stay focused and present when you’re feeling unsafe or uncertain in your day-to-day work as a school leader.

 

The doors to the next cohort of The Empowered Principal® Collaborative are open! This is the time to decide: do you want to lead your school for the rest of the year as you are right now, or take your leadership skills to the next level? Join us today to become a member of the only certified life and leadership coaching program for school leaders in the country by clicking here.

 

What You’ll Learn From this Episode:

  • How Jess became interested in helping people regulate their nervous systems.
  • Why the work we do as school leaders leads to emotional dysregulation.
  • How EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique) Tapping serves as an amazing tool for emotional regulation.
  • What you can do to bring awareness to your nervous system in your day-to-day.
  • How to use EFT in the moments when your nervous system is dysregulated.
  • The work you can do in advance to prepare for those moments you become emotionally dysregulated.
  • How EFT serves leaders, teachers, and children alike.

 

Listen to the Full Episode:

 

Featured on the Show:

Full Episode Transcript:

Hello empowered principals. Welcome to episode 332. 

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

Well, hello my empowered leaders. I am so excited to share this podcast episode with you. I interviewed my friend and fellow coach Jess Johnson. She has such insight for all of you. The reason I love Jess is because she has been working with me to help me regulate my nervous system.

So when I go into freakout mode, which is more than I would like to share, I need some kind of thoughts and tools and strategies to reregulate myself so that I can stay present when I feel like I’m in fight or flight. Jess has been able to teach me some very simple techniques that I can use right in the moment when I’m actually in the moment of freaking out. 

She also, on this podcast episode, will share with you some ways to proactively take care of your emotional and your nervous system needs so that you can stay present and focused when you are in a situation where you are feeling unsafe, uncertain, a little bit of a threat that’s coming up for you in a moment at school. Those moments happen.

Parents come at you sideways, a teacher gets upset, a student’s really dysregulated, your boss yells at you. Those are moments where we can feel very unsafe and uncertain. Jess is going to share with you some great tips and strategies. So enjoy the show. 

Angela: Hello empowered principals. Welcome to today’s episode. I have a very special guest with me here. Her name is Jess Johnson. Jess and I met through our 200k Mastermind, our business mastermind. We are both coaches. I have really been drawn to Jess’s work. She’s actually done some peer coaching with me and worked with me to help regulate my nervous system when it has been intensely activated. 

So I love her work. I love her energy. I wanted to bring her on the podcast to help you all learn a little bit more about the kind of work she does to help you be able to regulate yourself in real time. So Jess, welcome to the podcast.

Jess: Hey, Angela, thank you so much for having me. I cannot wait to talk about all things emotions and courage and compassion because I think that it takes courage to be able to extend ourselves compassion and really emotional work is compassionate work. So that I’m a life coach. I call myself a courage and compassion coach because those are really the qualities that I help my clients build. So they have a level of self-awareness to know what their triggers are, how to talk to themselves in the moment, and how to cultivate the courage to keep getting up and trying again, even when you feel like you’re discouraged or you’ve been knocked down. 

Angela: Yes, yes, I love this. Can you just start by giving a little bit of your background and the areas that you study, and some of the tools that you use with your clients?

Jess: Totally. So I am a former licensed clinical social worker. I was a therapist. I started working out with kids actually like way, way back when. I also have a background in working with sexual assault and domestic violence survivors. During my course of working with kids, I worked in residential treatment, and this is actually before I went back to undergrad.  

I was working with kids in residential treatment. I just found myself getting discouraged because you would do all of this work with the kids and then they would do what they needed to do to earn passes to go home on the weekends or whatever. Then pretty frequently, one of two things would happen. Either one, the kid was left waiting on Friday for their parents to show up, and they never did, or they would go home and kind of something, again, traumatic or emotional would happen over the weekend, and then they would come back to us pretty dysregulated. 

So I started looking like after I went to grad school like, what can I do that would have like a bigger impact on these kids? Okay, that’s working with adults. Then I started working in corrections, mental health corrections. For seven years, I did that. Until, once again, I started seeing something that I was identifying as something I wanted to do something to make a bigger impact. I’m a pretty proactive person. 

So I was seeing an uptick of veterans on my caseload. I had grown up in the military. Both of my parents served. My dad did 30 years. My mom actually got out when she was pregnant with me. So when I kind of saw this and was just like thinking about this community that I had grown up in, and I started looking into well what can I do to help not let this happen anymore? I was like oh, they take LCSWs in the army. Super. 

So then I commissioned into the army, and I was an active duty therapist for five years in the Army. Served, I was stationed at both a hospital here in Hawaii, where I live now, and I also was a behavioral health officer for the Combat Aviation Brigade in Watertown, New York, 10th Mountain. I did a combat deployment right in the middle of my time in Afghanistan and got out of the military to pivot to coaching. 

Initially, I did start working with veterans before the pandemic hit because I had been running retreats for veterans in their own transition, helping them in their own transition from the military. Then the pandemic happened. I was like all right, it’s time for me to start my own business. 

While I was working with veterans actually is when I found EFT, or Emotional Freedom Techniques, which is one of the major modalities that I use in my coaching practice and that I am so passionate about. It’s frequently known as EFT or tapping. It involves tapping on what’s known as energy meridian points around the body, which is the same points if you’ve ever done acupuncture, acupressure, these are very similar points. 

When you tap on them while combining putting your attention on whatever like thought or feeling you wish you weren’t having and like combining that with an affirmation acceptance, we’re actually calming the central nervous system. That’s what allows us to feel what we need to feel safely because we’re regulating ourselves while putting our attention on that kind of unwanted or uncomfortable thing. That’s what allows for a shift in perspective or a shift in how we are thinking or feeling.

Angela: I feel better just listening to you tell. It regulates me just to hear your voice. So as I was telling you guys, Jess did a session with me. I’ve been going through some personal things, and she was able to really help me regulate myself. In my work with school leaders, they come to the call most often dysregulated. 

There’s something that about the work that we do as school leaders, we are in the business of people. We are managing adults. We are managing children. We’re coaching up to the our district officials and leaders, and we’re also coaching out into our community with families, and parents, families, extended care providers for our children. 

That’s a lot of space to hold the energy for the emotions that children’s feel, the emotions that teachers are going through and support staff, the emotions that parents come into the day with, and then the emotions of our bosses coming in or out of our school. 

So the school leaders often come to me and they’re kind of one or two ways. They’re aware that they’re dysregulated, but they’re not sure what to do with the energy. Or the only coping mechanism that they are aware of is to stuff the feeling down or to avoid it to push through it, push it away I should say. Not push through it, but really put it at bay at the side because they have to keep going to lead their school. 

So principals are busy. Their schedules are really impacted. They’re having this emotional experience while they’re so busy. So when you think about the life of a school leader, what are some ways that they can, first of all, create awareness? Then second of all, what are those tools that you would recommend that they could use kind of in real time?

Jess: Totally. So I think this is such a multi-layered answer. 

Angela: Yes. It was big question. Sorry. How do we solve the world’s problems?

Jess: Totally, right. Actually what we were having a discussion, and that’s what led to you asking me to be on the podcast. Because I was kind of equating what I’m hearing you talk about and what my perception is from talking to my friends, particularly friends who are teachers, and my experience as a therapist. 

Angela: Yes.

Jess: You get into this line of work, right, that helping profession, which I would teaching argue is the type of helping profession, right? 

Angela: Yes, yes. 

Jess: Principaling, all of that.

Angela: Yes. 

Jess: You get into it, I imagine, because you want to mold the minds of young people and make an impact there and help these kids, help shape them and then their futures? Right. What the job becomes a lot more about though is like managing parents, right and expectations and then throw a pandemic into the mix and test scores and like things that have less to do with what is the actual interaction and shaping of these minds? Versus here’s all these check the box things that I have? 

So, my first part of answering this is being able to like step into the possibility that there is another way of doing things. Maybe we don’t know it, what it looks like yet, but we do know that what is happening now isn’t working. Of the amount of burnout that exists in the teaching industry. So it is, first, being able to make that decision. Am I here to like shake things up? Or am I here to do things the same old way? 

Because that is what this takes. It is a practice. Learning how to become aware, self-aware, especially of your emotions and learning where they came from and choosing to motivate with space and grace, which I think is like the compassion thing versus constantly going to this place that I often see people go in types of these helping professions where it’s like it’s always to put everybody else first. Of making that decision of taking a step back and really examining where do I need to reprioritize my time so I can put more into me right now? 

Angela: Yes, yeah, one of the things that I tell my clients is I know that intellectually, you understand the need to, and when I say self-care, I’m not talking about a spa day or getting your nails done. Those are lovely, and you should do those to your liking. But I’m talking about like, authentic self-care, which is taking care of yourself mentally, physically, and emotionally and spiritually, however that lands for you. 

But truly taking care of yourself, so that you feel rested, you feel fed. Your body is like physically regulated. You’re mentally regulated. You’re emotionally regulated. Because you need that. I call that clean space, you need that space to be able to lead other people. 

Because if your bucket is full up, full to the brim of fatigue, mental fatigue, emotional fatigue, psychological fatigue, emotional, just all of that, and you’re full, and you’re holding on to all this emotion and all of this energy, and then you go into a school day. There is nowhere for other people’s energy, which that’s the first thing that hits you when you walk in the door. There’s no more for that to go.

Jess: Yeah, I think too like leading, nowhere does leading imply you have to do things perfectly. Or you even have to have everything figured out, right? Leaders don’t because they’re doing something typically that hasn’t been done before. Right? They’re going first, and they are letting that inspire other people. 

I think that is where the compassion piece comes in so strongly here because you can’t be scared of failure. You need to know that you’re going to have your own back and that you’re going to be able to talk to yourself from a place of love to recover from whatever happens. I think also like one of the things that you said I think right before we got on the call, like Jess,  sometimes like these school leaders are in these like public positions, right. 

I think number one is like letting it be okay that you might not have all the answers in certain moments or that you are feeling emotional versus feeling like leading and leading in a public arena means I have to be stoic. I am not allowed to show any anything other than staunch. 

Angela: Yeah, I totally know. Yeah, because I did the same thing. I was a kindergarten teacher for 15 years. Then I became, I was a reading specialist instructional coach before I was hired to lead. When I stepped into that role, the sentence I told myself was like I’m in the big leagues now. I need to like step up. But what I thought stepping up meant, as I leveled up my career, was having a thicker skin, like a thicker armor. I had to be professional and polished. I dressed the part, and I spoke the part, and my energy was very bold in the sense that I thought that’s what a leader was.

Until I realized I was still a human being. There were things going on at school that I didn’t know what I was doing. My self-concept actually dropped, like your self-identity was just all over the map. You were a mess, and you’re still a human with all of these emotions coming up. But you’re telling yourself I shouldn’t be having this emotional experience because now I’m a leader. 

I think our brain assumes that being a leader means not having to process a motion. That’s not true. Just say it that way. Like, it’s farther from the truth because you have up leveled. You are taking the first step. You’re leading people, which means you’re being innovative. You’re trying things. You’re doing things you don’t know, you’ve never done before, and you’re the one going first. So you’re putting yourself in a position to not know, in a position to be thrown off, in a position to have things fail and not work. 

We need to, as leaders, understand what that looks like in terms of emotional regulation and also becoming okay or more comfortable or more intimate with the emotions that are going to rise to the surface. I felt like I was going to die, to be honest. Like the emotions were so intense, but I didn’t, at the time, have any tools. 

So it was like, let me do this. Let me put an armor around me and bubble wrap and pretend I’m okay. Look good on the surface to everybody else, and then go home and be a mess.

Jess: Yeah. That’s what I think. So EFT stands for Emotional Freedom Techniques. I think of emotional freedom is like the ability, the freedom to feel your emotions and knowing you’re not going to die. That is what it feels like. 

I have heard a couple of times people saying things like oh, nobody ever died from an emotion. I get my ire goes up around that because that’s simply not true. That is why we have such rising rates of suicide right now. That is exactly it. 

But it is our emotions can be just as painful, if not more than an open wound, because of all that layer of judgment that we put on ourselves from having this. That nobody else can see and that we can’t see and that we don’t understand. 

I think having tools, this is something like if everybody just hears me say this one thing, here’s what I want people to understand about tools. Because I am frequently asked how do I use EFT when I’m dysregulated? How do I use, what tools do I need when I’m upset? When honestly when we are upset, when we are in those modes, like it is survival. It is like getting ourselves out of that, right? 

Our tools come in, they’re the most important using them before and after. Right? Because when we are using those tools to regulate our central nervous system just because, not because we’re dysregulated but just because you’re humans with a central nervous system with an amygdala and taking in information all the time. 

The more we are doing things to let our bodies feel productive and rest instead of like we’re doing something wrong or like simply learning how to relax and giving ourselves permission to do that, then we’re slowing down. We’re able to think about what we actually want to put off in the world. We’re able to daydream about what that might look like. So that way when we’re in those situations that feel very scary or hard, like we’ve got kind of a plan in place because our bodies aren’t already taxed. Our brains aren’t like grasping at something that we don’t have any idea what it looks like.

Angela: Actually, that’s so good because people, we wait to regulate until we’re dysregulated. I had never thought about it in terms of almost like getting your oil changed on schedule because it’s a proactive move that you make to keep your car running. You don’t want to get to the point where you desperately, your burn your engine out and need oil or whatever. But this is what you’re saying. It’s part of the tools that we use can be to just like keep, it’s like maintenance on the proactive end.

Jess: Totally. I would say most of your tools are that because I think about these names in terms of pain too. So last year, I had pneumonia, and I developed something, might have been coincidental, but whatever. It was called an occipital neuralgia, and it was horrific headache that was caused by like nerve impingement. 

I remember the night before my third trip to the ER in five days, I was in the middle of the night, and I was up. I was trying to wait for it to be a little earlier in the morning. It was the middle of the night from me to wake my husband up. I was like on the couch like rocking in pain and just knowing that like. There’s the awareness that we have I am in the midst of this right now. That is like how do I take a step back from this right? Again, I just want to emphasize that the more that you are using your tools before you’re dysregulated, the easier that is going to be. 

Angela: That is actually a great example because it’s once you break your arm, you can’t go in and be proactive about not breaking the arm. It’s broken, right? Once you’re in an emotional dysregulate, especially if it’s really intense. When you’re in that, and then you’re like feeling like well, I shouldn’t be in this. First of all, you’re kind of judging it. Then you’re like how do I get out of this as soon as possible. 

The amygdala has taken over. Your nervous system has taken over. You’re in fight or flight. At that point, any kind of like intellectual or rational tools, they don’t feel applicable in the moment. They don’t have the impact that they might have when you’re not in that state of mind.

Jess: One of the things that I always like kind of start with my own clients is like learning how to make decisions ahead of time so far away. I’m not saying yes, some of those decisions are definitely like tangible like what happens like pertaining to my job. But a lot of those are I don’t want to think about myself. Right? I know you’ve talked about like having like that your self-identity, right? You get to think about that before anything happens.

The more that you are reinforcing and telling yourself like I’m choosing to pay attention to what my body is telling me and take three deep breaths every hour or practice EFT for five minutes every morning. Here’s the thought that I am going to reinforce every day. I’m a big believer in like not leaving those things to chance. Writing out like several things that make you feel amazing when you think them about yourself. Then like literally like picking one every morning and being like this is what I’m tapping into today. 

You can do that while driving your car. When I think this about myself when I think I’m an inspiring leader in the industry, how do I carry myself? What would I say to somebody? You can use tapping to help you regulate your central nervous system and create psychological safety while you imagine those things. 

So this is, I’m using this as an example of like before you’re dysregulated, right? Because as kind of crazy as it sounds if you’re not in like Angela and my’s industry where we talk about like these things all day long like they’re mainstream. Our bodies can really freak out, even when things, like specially when things are going well. Like that’s where self-sabotage comes in. When we are like relaxing. 

We live in a world right now where productivity in forms of lists and tangibles and things that everybody else can see is prioritized over how do I feel? How am I talking about myself? That’s why it is so important to be able to also build that skill of self-recognition and being proud of oneself and celebrating oneself. Because the more that you are allowing yourself to do that, you’re feeling great about yourself. Then when somebody else comes up and tells you like they think you’re doing terrible. You don’t have to believe them. 

Angela: Right? Yeah, yes. We do a lot on the coaching, and we do a lot on the proactive and building of self-identity, especially with brand new leaders who are just like deer in the headlights. They don’t know what they don’t know. They’re eager and excited, but they’re also terrified. It’s kind of all the same emotion. It feels similar in the body. So we do some of these techniques to get the visualization going. 

I do know the reality of the job is you can be pumped up for the day. You’ve done your thought work in the morning, and you’re feeling great. In an instant, you get an angry parent phone call, or a teacher comes in hot, or a kid is really dysregulated. 

For the audience listening, I want you to think about this conversation in terms of student behavior as well. I get a lot of clients who want me to help them manage student behavior. The way we manage student behavior is to start with our own behavior. 

But when we look at a student’s behavior, we look at it’s the ABC, right. We look at the antecedent, we look at the behavior, and then we look for like the causes, what’s going on behind the scenes for them, and how that behavior is displayed and why it might be displayed. So we want to do the same thing. Proactively understanding what triggers us ahead of time, understanding why we behave the way we do, and then looking for the root cause of all of that, and giving ourselves like some space, again, to be human. 

But there are things that you can come in feeling pretty good about yourself, and something I’ll swoop in and just take over without. You can be as proactive as you want, but at the end of the day, there are moments. So what would you say to a principal who like they’re feeling pretty good about themselves most of the time, but they’re not sure how to handle that like unanticipated whammy that hits them during the course of a day?

Jess: For me, like there is a tapping point, it’s called the well, it’s called the collarbone point, but it’s actually just underneath your collarbone. If you trace your finger all the way over to the end of your collarbone like around your throat, and you go about an inch down and about an inch or two over to the side. That is my favorite point. 

Because it is one I can tap, and you can tap it or you can rub it. It’s kind of subtle. People can’t really notice that you’re doing it. It is a great way to kind of regulate when you feel like something is coming up like right then and you want to slow yourself down. I have ADHD. I use this one all of the time. When I am in meetings, and my brain is going all over the place. 

There’s also points in your fingernails there in your nail beds on the outer edge of your fingernails that you can tap and just keep going through your fingernail points.

Angela: When you say, just to clarify for people brand new to tapping, it’s you’re really just touching. Like you’re touching those points with your fingertips. I just wanted to clarify that for people who keep,  because this isn’t visual. But yeah. So when she says tapping, you’re literally just like touching these different parts of your body. 

Jess: Either or.

Angela: And putting a little bit of pressure, yeah. You can tap like in multiple times. Yeah. 

Jess: Yeah, you’re either literally tapping on it, or you can rub and put your attention on that. But I think that also like knowing. I would imagine a kid comes in and is like completely dysregulated A, tapping is incredible for children. Because where’s the, like EFT there’s what’s called feel good right now EFT. That is tapping through the points, talking, and kind of doing something really quickly just to regulate you. 

When people work with me, we are using tapping at the root issue. A lot of times like I’m helping my clients answer the question why am I like this? Why is happening to me? It’s because like most of our decisions about who we are and our place in the world, we made between the ages of zero and six years old and made them from places of either stress that a three year old is going through and didn’t know how to resource themselves differently at the time or things that we were taught by parents or other like kind of authority figures in our lives. 

So when we are noticing certain patterns coming up for us all the time is usually related to something that goes back in childhood with us. When we work to find out what those, remember what those experiences are and give ourselves have a chance to make a new decision, that’s what kind of strengthens the ability to be able to have a kid fly at you off the handle or a parent come at you, and you’d be all right, I’ve got this. 

Angela: Yeah. 

Jess: But in that moment too, maybe even just saying if we’re talking about leadership is being trying something new, and I don’t have to have everything figured out right now, hey, let’s do this together. Let’s take a couple of deep breaths together right now. I can sense you’re upset. I’m a little upset too about what’s happening. Versus feeling oh, I have to have everything all together. This parent feel. I’ve got to tell them what to do. 

Think of a world where we give ourselves and thus the people around us permission to be like oh, no, what is to say in this moment or do in this moment, but I do know I could use the second to maybe take a couple deep breaths. Can you help me do that? Let’s do this together and make it this like cocreation? 

Because I think that, a tangent’s coming. I can tell. When I think about how we humans are wired for connection, and now we’re living in this world. we’re putting the stress on ourselves like oh, I have to do this all by myself. We’re severing that ability to feel connected right then. Yeah, it might feel real weird. Maybe some people will be what does that person want me to do? They’re principal? Why am I? Why are they?

Angela: Why are we breathing? 

Jess: But okay, we can all extend that a little more honesty of where we’re coming from and what we’re feeling without judgment. I mean, almost every time that we’re catching ourselves in that strong judgment of somebody else, it’s really like judgment that we’re passing on ourselves. We’re either scared of what somebody, when we see somebody do something, and our first thought is oh, what are they doing? That’s weird. It’s really oh, I can’t do that, even if it works. What if people think I’m weird?

It all comes back to that connection piece. That connection piece and that feeling of support is in the 2020s of where we are right now, like that’s sorely lacking. I just feel really passionate. That’s what we all need to come back to. 

Angela: Yes. I love this because we, I think for the I don’t know, the last since ever, the beginning of time, we’ve been told fake it until we make it. When you get into a leadership role, fake it until you make it. I disagree with that so wholeheartedly. I think the solution is authenticity and honesty and openness and transparency. So I’m just thinking of my audience. 

Here’s the thing. You might want to try this, I call it the HOW method. Honest, open, and willing where you’re willing to be honest, you’re willing to be open, and willing to be transparent about how you’re feeling in a moment. So you might want to start with kids. 

If it feels too unsafe to say it to an adult, try it with a kid. If you just said hey, let’s you’re really upset. Something just happened on the playground. They get sent to the office. Something just happened in the playground. We’re going to just take a couple of deep breaths. I’m feeling upset for you. Let’s do that. You can start that conversation with kids first. 

Kids, I’ve done this, and kids pick up way easier. They’re just okay. They’ll do it. You can get them to breathe with you, and start talking about feelings. Kids will talk about feelings so much easier than adults. Because over time, adults have been told not to talk about feelings. It’s soft, it’s weak. It’s not important, whatever. So we have opinions about feelings. 

But I remember doing this with my staff. When I became a life coach, I was still a school leader. I would go into a staff meeting. I had a dad come at me sideways right before the meeting, and I was so dysregulated. I’m walking down the hall. I’m fighting tears. I thought I’ve got to get through this staff meeting. 

There was a moment where I thought I don’t need to get through this staff meeting. I’m going to share this. As I walked in the door, I was a couple of minutes late. People were just standing around. I walked in, and I said can I just take a moment to share something with you all? They were like vroom. I will tell you this. 

Adults respect that, I call it the HOW method right where you’re honest, open, and willing with them. When you are authentic and transparent. with adults, the compassion and like the human to human connection. They would much rather you come in and say can I share something with you? This just happened to me, and I’m feeling this way. Let the tears. They saw the tears roll down my face as I was sharing this. I had to be somewhat cryptic about it, but I just said, this is my experience. I just wanted to let you know that’s why I was late. I apologize, but thank you for letting me share.

That changed the dynamic of that staff meeting. People were tuned in. They were listening. They shared more. I had a teacher, she was a fourth grade teacher. She didn’t love me as her boss. She walked up to me, and she said, “That just was a game changer for me.” I realized I was onto something. I’m going to actually just be authentically me, which is the emotional part of me as well as the other parts of me. I started doing that with kids and teachers. 

The last, as you’re getting out to more of the community people, it feels a little less safe. But I could see things in special education meetings, like in IEP meetings, where I was okay, guys, everybody, let’s just take a deep breath. Everybody take five. We’re going to come back. I didn’t say anything about emotion, but I knew how to facilitate an emotional reset without anybody feeling awkward about it. 

I agree with you. I think that as leaders, the new innovative thing to embrace is actually, it’s not some new curriculum. It’s not some new technology platform. It’s the little old computer that’s already been wired inside of us, which is our emotional intellect and it’s wisdom that emotions have to share with us. Whether you’re in a meeting, like I’ve tapped too in meetings where you’re under the table, right, and you’re just is it right here?

Jess: Yep. Side of the hand. The one I, that is where we usually start with tapping, but my go to is, particularly in meetings, is the those fingernail points because yeah, I can do it under the table.

Angela: You can do it under the table. Yeah. 

Jess: Like you can’t tell I’m doing it. I do it while I’m walking in the morning. I’m walking to the gym, and I’m thinking about my day hitting on those fingernail points. I’m just like all right, what do I have got going today? Where do I feel stuck? What? What do I need to believe about myself to ensure that this happens the way I want it to? How do I even want it to? Because oftentimes we’re so scared of exploring our wants that we don’t know the answer that question. We don’t know the answer that question, of course, we don’t know how. We don’t know what we want the end game. 

Angela: Yes. Yes, I definitely talk about this in the coaching program. Because most of us are thinking. We spend our energy thinking about how bad the meeting might go and preparing for all the worst case scenarios. Then I’ll say to my clients but how do you want it to go? It’s almost as though they’re I had never thought about that. We don’t think about the best case scenario or how we want it to go and direct our energy that way. 

Then who would we be if the meeting were going really smoothly, or this conversation with our boss, we’re going as best as we can imagine it going, what would that feel like? What would that energy be like? Then spending our, putting our attention to that, at least giving it equal airtime, right? If you want to plan for the worst, go ahead and do that first because the brain is going to offer that but also what if this meeting just went really well?

Jess: Yeah. Being able to acknowledge like the worst, right? Like okay, I see that could happen. Also, yes, let me redirect my brain to the best possible scenario. I actually really love taking it both places. What’s the worst case scenario? I always start with what’s the best case scenario because that’s going to put you in a different feeling and mindset to then explore okay, what’s the worst case scenario? 

Then okay between these two, knowing what I know about this person or this audience, right now what’s the most realistic? Somewhere right there, right? We get trapped in this black and white either or thinking, and really it’s just about being able to embrace the and in everything. Being able to just know the nuances. Everything is not all terrible or all good most of the time. How would we know what was good or bad? Right? If something was just fantastic all of the time, and we’d stop learning because we’re not challenged anymore. 

So, also being able to look at those what we see as setbacks aren’t actually setbacks. They’re just an opportunity for reminding yourself of what’s important or like reminding ourselves or sitting down and doing an evaluation and being oh, that was going really well. These things worked amazing. Here’s where some things can change. 

Angela: Yeah, I want to also explicitly say to people, and I have learned this myself as I have been more and more open to having emotional experiences. I will say when you feel like you’re, when something feels so painful or scary, you feel like you’re going to die. I want to validate that because I don’t think there’s anything worse. I don’t think there’s anything worse as a human than going through that level of emotion. 

It’s on a scale of plus 10, minus 10. When you’re in the plus minus nine, minus 10, like when you’re really in it, and it does feel like. Your brain is like, it’s almost like it can’t differentiate between I’m physically dying, or I’m emotionally in so much pain it feels like I’m dying. Even though you might not be physically dying at all, you could be in excellent physical health, but having this emotional experience that is so painful that you can lead yourself to like taking physical action, like you had said earlier. 

As I do this work, and I’m really studying myself, my emotions, my capacity to feel an emotion, and process it through to see that it is actually always temporary. It does pass, and it tends to pass more fluidly, I would say, not quickly, but it does have a completion cycle to it. Almost like I think of it like a wave. 

Before you’ve acknowledged it, it’s like momentum under the ocean. Then it starts to build up, and you feel it. It’s at the surface, and it’s peaking, and then it kind of like crashes. Then it releases and then you have a little moment of peace there before another round of momentum builds up. 

But what I have found is that we think we either can’t handle the emotion, or we feel like if we do acknowledge it and process it and bring it up, that it’s somehow tied to our self-identity. Right? I must not be a great leader because I seem to be so emotional. Leadership is a masculine experience, and I’m over here feeling my feelings. We start to judge the experience of emotion. I actually think the opposite. I think feeling your emotions is the strongest, most courageous, most leadership thing that you can do.

Jess: Yeah, I absolutely agree. That’s why I call myself that. That’s where the courage piece of courage and compassion comes in. Because I think that building that skill, that tolerance, that understanding. I don’t think of emotions is something that needs to be managed. I think that there’s something to be understood. I do think that is the most courageous work that anybody can do because that is going to allow you to go out and do all of the other courageous stuff.

Angela: Yes, yes. So for you leaders out there, so we’ve kind of jumped all over the place and talked about a lot of things. So I want to just like start to bring it home for you. Number one, the work that we’re talking about is just being proactive in one, your self-identity. 

Two, I just think we can make the school leadership so much more simple by asking ourselves two questions. What am I feeling? Labeling that emotion if you can. If not, identifying where it’s residing in your body. What am I feeling? Two, why? That’s, I call that the brain drain. The brain is going to tell you here’s all the reasons I feel this way today. Or I’ve got this upcoming meeting with this parent. This parent is always goes off the rails, and they’re just emotionally dysregulated, which just regulates. The brain is going to chatter, right.

You let it do that. But what really matters the most is the feeling, the emotion, the energy in your body. You want to be aware and understand what that is. When you’re feeling it in real time, you can generate positive emotion. You’re driving to work, like Jess said, and you are thinking about the best case scenario, the intentions you want to set for that day, how you want to feel as you walk into your campus and manage your day. 

Those moments when school is going off the rails. Kids’ behavior is off the chain. Parents are, everybody’s misbehaving right now. Spring fever is hitting. You want to also be proactive in that moment. Like what do I want to think and feel? When I feel like chaos is all around me? What is it I want to think and feel? 

One, you have to be aware that the chaos is happening, and that you’re feeling chaotic internally, so that you can just say oh, wait a moment, please. Then it’s simple as like tapping, finding. You can look this up online. I’m sorry you can’t see us, but there are points on your body. I think Jess the fingernails. 

If you’re not driving, you can tap your fingernails. If you are driving, you can tap that little spot just under your collarbone and over to your left or your right. You can tap on your top of your head. I know I’ve tapped on my temples. I think by the eyes, above my lip, kind of on my chin. There’s lots of points.

Jess: Yes, you can look me up, I’ve got a model of all of this. So then you can — 

Angela: Okay, perfect. 

Jess: One of the things that I am launching this year too is a YouTube channel where people can tap along with all of this and see this. Because  a lot of times people don’t realize, they call it emotional freedom technique. It’s actually emotional freedom techniques is there’s 40 different ways to apply the techniques. 

So I teach a little bit of that in all of these videos, but it’s just easiest to be like okay, I’m just going to go pull it up, and let’s tap along with this. Then you will see and feel what that feels like with you. I’m a big believer in being authentic. So there’s some videos on there where I am tapping on myself in real time. 

Most notably, the weekend Afghanistan fell, that was a very devastating weekend. I did a live tap on that. You can see me in 20 minutes go from completely dysregulated, unable to talk because I am all in my emotions to damn all right, I’m fine now. As I’m tapping, I’m actually explaining what’s going on in my body. 

That’s something that you can tap along with and feel a reduction in whatever it is for you. Because it’s something called borrowed benefits when you’re tapping along with somebody else’s issue. I was thinking about that story you told when you said you went into the meeting, and you were like I just need to explain how I feel right now. You said I didn’t tell them the actual details. I just told them how I felt. I think that’s so important to know.

Oftentimes, when we’re telling our stories to people or even to ourselves again, we’re once again getting caught up in all of those details instead of just being how do I feel right now? I would just add like a third question to list you just added, and that’s how can I give myself compassion in this moment? Sometimes we can’t answer why because it feels like there’s so much in there. 

I think about it going back to what I said about most of the lessons that we, or the decisions that we made about ourselves happen between the ages of zero and six. That we’re not even conscious of them. When we know that, it’s like you can’t answer that question to why am I actually feeling this way? 

The simplest answer to give yourself is a there is a part of me that is reliving a painful and a young moment from my past. My only job is to, I love to put a hand on my heart and just say I’m listening. I love you. That’s it. Frequently, we go immediately into reassuring, but that actually doesn’t help us out. Because if you think about ever being like venting to a friend or a partner, and they immediately start telling you like all the reasons why you shouldn’t be feeling the way you feel. 

Angela: We’re trying to help you feel better. Yeah. You’re like I don’t want to feel better.

Jess: We don’t. We feel dismissed. We feel invalidated. Most of the time we know what we want. We just need to get it out. We do that to ourselves all of the time. 

Angela: Yes, it’s true. 

Jess: Knowing when you can’t answer why just say all right, I don’t need to know the why right now. How do I give that part of me? 

Angela: Yes, I so agree with that. I have noticed that with myself. Just even this weekend, I wasn’t, I couldn’t put my finger on exactly the emotion. I couldn’t even articulate why. I was really, and I thought to myself you know what I can do right now? I can breathe. I can slow my breathing down. I can like touch my heart. I can just sit here with it. 

I think of it like a best friend. Like when a friend calls me on the phone, and I’m listening. It’s not about me. They’re not calling to hear me talk at them or to like try and fix it for them. They’re just wanting to express it to somebody who’s safe. You can be that person for you. 

Like when you feel distressed, and I can think of so many moments in my school leadership experience where something just catches you off guard, and your heart starts racing. You have that like panic feeling. Is it adrenaline? I don’t even know what it is takes over your body, like that feeling. It’s like when you’ve almost, you had a very near car accident, and your body just like reacts in that motion. That’s the same feeling I would get sometimes with at school where I felt unsafe, or I felt like it was a near hit. 

In those moments, I couldn’t articulate what was going on. I just knew that I needed to like calm myself through breathing or like through touch points. You can do that so subtly. You can be anywhere at any time. Jess, we’ll put the links to your, how people can reach you, put the links to those videos and to your website and all of that because I want them to be able to see. 

I watch your videos because it regulates me, and I know you and I have done it live. But also like the tapping one on your medical experience, you had an unknown for a while. That really taught me that I can do this work on my own when I’m in a pinch, right? Like I would prefer to have you as the coach doing it with me. But in in that moment, when I’m at school, there are some things you can do. 

Jess: The more that you’re like doing, you’re using those tools in like that maintenance period we talked about, the more like they’re going to come to you like naturally in those moments that you need them. So I think it it just becomes second nature, right? Because we’ve spent all this time kind of getting our body used to like those techniques, it happens much more quickly.

Angela: Yes, one last question. I hope I’m not opening a can of worms because I know we’ve been on a while. But principals will want to know what they can do, how they can help regulate students or other adults. What is something simple that they can apply when a kid comes in dysregulated or maybe another adult that they’re working with? 

Jess: Literally what we just talked about before. Taking a breath and just saying hey, I’m in here with you right now. Just take some breaths together. You can teach tapping. You’re watching my videos on online. I think we even talked about this before. I could even like create one for people to go and watch specifically on this. Hey, just let’s tap through these points with me. Let’s breathe together. Really like so you’re showing them, you’re calming yourself while you’re having this.

Angela: You’re double dipping. 

Jess: You’re not only like helping somebody else, but you’re also helping yourself in those moments. You’re giving both of you or all of you that time that is so necessary and needed to just think about that. When you’re tapping on the points, regardless of saying anything, you are lowering cortisol. You are calming the central nervous system. You are tapping in literally to more of a sense of peace. 

So just by doing that, you’re also regulating to the here and now as well because that’s like tapping to those points. So like that would be the best thing. And you’re just like hey, let’s do this together. Not making it to them versus you thing. 

Angela: We’re both doing this. Yeah, I think, again, if it feels uncomfortable to ask an adult to do that, you can ask an adult just to take a deep breath. Take a couple of deep breaths. So wow, I can feel, I can see this emotion. I can feel this emotion. But when you’re breathing, when you’re asking them to take a couple of breaths, you’re also doing it. So it’s a win. 

But with kids, like I think you can really dive into this. I’ve sat on the floor with kids. I meet them where they’re at. You can get them to start breathing. Now, for most of the time, but they do, I have noticed in my own experience that kids pick up on this really quickly because they’re so tuned in to how they feel. Yeah.

Jess: They don’t have all the baggage that we do.

Angela: Yeah. They don’t have the judgment. The external judgment, the internal judgment, it’s just not as developed. The judgment isn’t as developed. Like they’re very quick to okay. So when I started teaching life coaching tools to kids to help them see and intellectually understand their feelings and their actions, they loved it. They were like oh, this makes total sense where the adults we’re like what? 

Yeah, so try it with kids. But I want to thank you for being on the podcast. Here’s something I want to offer to the audience. This podcast is different in education because I’m bringing alternate techniques. They’re tried, they’re true, they work in all these other industries. I can’t remember it. Maybe it was you and I talking about how similar the nursing industry is to education industry. There was somebody I was talking to about that. Were we talking about that? 

Jess: Yeah, we were talking about healthcare.

Angela: Yes, health care and just service providers, which we are as educators. I know the medical field is embracing all of this. There are studies out there. They are doing life coaching tools studies in medical settings and publishing them in journals because the body and our emotions are all in one the same, and they do impact one another. 

So if you’re a leader who finds this intriguing but feels like it’s a little new age or it’s like feels a little too innovative, I want to remind you other industries are doing this. Education just kind of takes a little bit longer. So I would explore, be brave try these things, you’ll see how well they work. Imagine a school that has the tools to be able to self-regulate themselves, and help others self-regulate when they can’t self-regulate. Imagine a school culture like that.

That is my mission and my goal to bring people like Jess into our world who are experts at this and to have these conversations in a safe space where it might not feel safe to talk to your superintendent about it, but it can feel safe here on this podcast and in Jess’s world and in my world. So Jess, if people want to reach out, if they want to learn more about how to work with you, or to watch your videos and get a sense of what tapping looks, where can they reach out?

Jess: Yeah, absolutely. Last thing I’ll say just to tag on what you said is peer reviewed, evidence base, there’s a lot of research. It is being worked with with the American Psychological Society to be able to help people start billing for this. So there is a, I can give you all research and studies if anybody ever.

Angela: Yeah. It’s scientifically proven. It’s not just somebody out there rubbing their fingers all over their face or something. 

Jess: You can email me at jessjohnsoncoaching@gmail.com, traditional selling. J-E-S-S-J-O-H-N-S-O-N coaching. My website is www.jessjohnsoncoaching.com, and Instagram at Jess.JohnsonCoaching.

Angela: Yeah, we’ll put all the links in the show notes. All of her stuff will be there in one place ready for you. But I highly invite you to click on her work, follow her, check her out. Because this I think is going to be a true game changer in the field of education. When we start embracing this as regular practice, it will become a best practice. I mean, that’s the lingo we use in education. This is an emotional best practice, which is why I wanted to bring Jess on as an expert on tapping and emotional regulation. So thank you so much for being here. I really appreciate your time. 

Jess: Yeah, thank you. 

Angela: All right. Have a good one. We’ll talk to you guys all next week. Take good care. Bye.

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

Look, you don’t have to overwork and overexert to be a successful school leader. You’ll be mentored weekly and surrounded by supportive likeminded colleagues who truly understand what it means to be a school leader. So join us today and become a member of the only certified life and leadership coaching program for school leaders in the country. Just head on over to angelakellycoaching.com/work-with-me to learn more and join. I’ll see you inside of the Empowered Principal® Collaborative. 

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. 

 

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The Empowered Principal® Podcast Angela Kelly | Time to Ditch Letter Grades? Alternative Grading Systems with John Camp

As teachers and school leaders, we collectively adhere to the letter grade system in education. It’s a structure we’re all locked into, and one could argue that this is the way it’s always been, so why fight the system? However, my guest this week believes that we are in the business of evolution and that it can be incredibly empowering and refreshing to think about how we can do things better.

John Camp has spent 29 years in education and is currently the Head of Teaching and Learning at New England Innovation Academy. He has an innovative approach to grades where he’s shifting away from more traditional grading and assessment formats in the name of focusing on competency and real-world application of skills, and he’s telling us all about it this week.

Listen in this week as I quiz John on why it’s worth re-evaluating our relationship with grades and how he’s experimenting with alternative assessment systems that don’t simply rely on letter grades. He’s sharing the benefits of focusing on a competency-based framework, what happens when we de-emphasize grades, and how you can begin moving the needle in this direction too if you feel inspired by his initiatives.

 

The doors to the next cohort of The Empowered Principal® Collaborative are open! This is the time to decide: do you want to lead your school for the rest of the year as you are right now, or take your leadership skills to the next level? Join us today to become a member of the only certified life and leadership coaching program for school leaders in the country by clicking here.

 

What You’ll Learn From this Episode:

  • How our self-identity is impacted by grades from an early age.
  • The competency-based system used by John’s school.
  • John’s thoughts on how we can use grades more effectively.
  • Why standardizing the grades teachers use matters.
  • The importance of examining your mindset around grades.
  • John’s experience of using a competency framework rather than grades as a teacher.
  • The feedback he’s heard from parents about their competency system.
  • How John’s school assesses their students without using grades.

 

Listen to the Full Episode:

 

Featured on the Show:

Full Episode Transcript:

Hello empowered principals. Welcome to episode 331. 

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

Angela: Well, hello empowered principals. Happy Tuesday. Welcome to today’s podcast. I have a very special guest here with me today. His name is John Camp, and we met online. What I love about John’s work is that we’re going to have a conversation today about the relationship that we as educators have and students have with grades. 

Camp is doing really an innovative approach to this work with kids in shifting away from more traditional gradings and assessment formats and moving into a little more what I would call just like authentic way of practicing and studying and tracking our progress and our growth as students, as adult students and as children students. He’s doing some phenomenal things. So I’m going to let him introduce himself, his work. We’re going to dive into a conversation on the relationship we have with grading. So Camp, welcome to the podcast. 

John: Thanks so much. Thanks for having me. I’m pumped to be here and have this conversation. So I’m year 29 of being an education. Although I went to public school as a student, my entire professional career has been in independent schools. So I do have that, coming at you from that angle

So right now I’m the head of teaching and learning at New England Innovation Academy, which is a startup school. We’re in your three, which is super exciting. Really a caveat to your listeners is that I’m going to say a lot of things today where your listeners might feel like oh, we can’t do that because of our structures or our systems. But what I’m hoping to convey is how we are the type of school where we are able to try a lot of things. Then hopefully there are threads or cool things that you can pull from this that you can impart around the really important concept and reality of quote grades in the educational system. 

Angela: Yes. Here’s the thing that I love that you said that because what I want to highlight here is that there are two camps, if I can say that. There are two components of this to me. There’s the mindset piece and the belief systems around the purpose, the value, the reason we grade, the meaning behind those grades. There’s the mindset around it. Then there’s the actions, the actual set of systems or processes or approach that we take. 

So there’s the mindset piece, and then the doing. I think like believing and doing. We’re going to talk about maybe some things that you are doing and actually implementing, but it’s coming from a mindset. That’s mindset is what we want to share with the listeners because you can be thinking in this progressive like innovative way and then looking for little ways to start to take action towards shifting the actual approach. Right.

John: Yeah, I totally agree with that. I would say most people have, if not all people, have a mindset about grades. That’s what we want to talk about a little bit to start off, about the relationship that they have with grades. Some people use it as that extrinsic or intrinsic motivation. That’s both of those things. But it’s all about a certain mindset. We’re just sort of collectively we follow this one concept in education of a letter grade is the grade system. But like how we all enter that on a daily basis is pretty complicated and complex. So exactly. That mindset is really important. 

Angela: Yeah, because one of the things I notice is I coach school leaders. Obviously people listening to the podcast know that. But what I have found is there is an intensity around how we feel about ourselves when it comes to grades. 

We have that as a student that we learn from a very young age about how we feel about ourselves and our capacity to learn and our self-identity as it relates to grades. I’m an A student. We actually say things like she’s in A student. He’s a D student. They’re above the line, below the line. They’re making. Our self-identity from a very young age has been crafted around our relationship with our grades, the grades that we earn and what we make that mean about ourselves.

Then you transfer that into teaching and leading schools. We have that same attachment to that identity where teachers are freaked out if their kids aren’t making a certain kind of progress. They’re scared for themselves, for their students. They’re worried like the world’s going to fall apart, or they’re going to lose their job

Then you go to the principal level, and they’re doing the same thing at the admin level, right? That’s the state’s going to come in and take over my school, or I’m going to have to fire people, or I’m going to get fired. Like, there’s a lot of fear. There’s a lot of almost identity crisis around what the weight that we put on the value of the meaning behind the grades.

John: Yeah, that’s so true. I think that there’s so much weight about the grades. That’s what we want to think about. What’s our relationship with grades? What’s our feeling about it? I think as like a teacher, you may have a relationship with grades that you had as a student, and however you felt about it. But then as a teacher, it gets even more complicated because sometimes like oh, the student tried really hard, but they only got a B or something like that. When, again, like you’re not assessing their effort. You’re assessing their actual product and those types of things.

So it’s really complicated for the system that we have that is grade based that transcripts for college admission, all those types of things are all based on these letter grades. Yet, down here on the ground level, it’s very complicated relationship that we all have at it coming at it from different angles.

Angela: Yeah. So tell the listeners about what you’re doing. Like, just tell them your background, tell them what you’re doing because I find it so intriguing and so interesting. I think that what you are doing out in the world is going to inspire people to think differently, just to have conversations about eventually how to do it differently. So tell us more about that.

John: Yeah. So the system that we have at my school NEIA that we call it a competency based system, but it’s not like true to the word competency based system. I call it a mash up. That’s how I describe it when I talk to groups of people about it. It’s got elements of traditional standards based, competency based, mastery based, and no grades based. So we sort of built it around that

So just briefly how it works is we have 14 competencies, which is just a fancy word for skills. They’re verbs. Our competencies are verbs. I connect, that verb. I connect new ideas to previous learning. So there are 14 of those that any teacher can use. We’re a six through 12 school that any teacher can use in their subject area. Because what we’re trying to focus on is it’s about the skill that a student isn’t just playing school. That it’s a skill is something that they should be able to apply to their eventual work life, their relationship with their friends, how they are as a family member, those types of things that are really important.

So we are really trying to make like, quote, real world converge into their academic world as much as we can. So there’s 14 competencies that a math teacher could tag one the same competency that a humanities teacher does that a science teacher does

Then underneath that, each subject area has three subject specific competencies. The reason those are important is so that if we only had like across the board, across the school competencies, then somebody could likely say like oh well, how do I know how this student is performing in say math or something like that? 

So we’re able to look at both the competencies that go across the school and also the ones within a subject area for a student who may, for a summer program or college or something, really want to articulate how they are in a certain subject area. So it’s like, again, a blending of both of those situations. So that’s how we assess

So here’s probably the one of the things that’s very different for how we do it. So when a student gets an assessment back, it will have three to four, usually, it’s a ballpark, three or four tagged competencies, and they don’t get an 87 at the top or B at the top. Instead, they get a measure of what we call surface immersion deep on each competency with feedback. So a student doesn’t get an assessment back and be like oh, I got to an 82. Instead, they’re like oh. They can see how they did on each one of the skills that’s being assessed in that assessment. 

So that’s really important from my standpoint because I call it the single data point. If you get a B plus, that’s just a single data point for how a student get on an assessment. That data point actually doesn’t, it doesn’t tie to any skill other than what’s been correct or incorrect.

Whereas the competency system is we’re actually identifying the specific skills performed in that assessment and giving feedback towards them. So you may have done something really poorly. Like I’m a humanities teacher. So maybe you really struggled on comma usage or something like that. That doesn’t affect your whole assessment. It affects one part of the assessment where maybe you did something else like really well

So from a relationship with grades standpoint, that student doesn’t come away necessarily feeling badly about oh, I got this one data point. Instead, they have these multiple data points to really balance out that feeling towards their grades.

Angela: That is so important because I think the way we’re grading traditionally, it’s a very all or none. Like you passed, or you didn’t. You got an A or a C. It doesn’t give any specific feedback. It actually is leaving them in the dark and trying to figure out what did I do right and what did I do wrong?

This, what I hear you saying, is the competency thing. It’s very specific so that a teacher can articulate that here’s where you’ve got it. This is amazing. Like, let’s celebrate that. Then this is the next step. This is what we’re going to work on. We’re going to work on these comments and not, whatever. 

But I like that because it actually neutralizes the grade. It doesn’t make it mean something about the student. It just makes it mean like here’s what’s working. Here’s the next thing that we want to tweak, which it takes like making the grade mean something about you as a human. You’re either capable or you’re not into like you’re on this progression of learning. It actually becomes a lifelong journey of learning. Of course, there’s always something new to learn. So it’s not that we’re incapable. It’s just that we’re learning the one next step.

John: Yeah, that’s so accurate. Just to clarify a couple of things. One, I totally agree with you. It’s like all or nothing. It always amazed me when a student would be like oh, I got this grade, but I don’t know how I got that grade. That infuriates me as a teacher being like no, you should definitely know why you got that grade. If you don’t know, you should go talk to your teacher. 

So whenever anybody says data, it really makes me worried because then it is all about like you described. Like I’m a B plus student, or I got a B plus in this assessment without anything attached to it. 

I do want to clarify how our system is traditional in that although on an assessment, a student doesn’t get a letter grade or a number grade at the top, each one of those competencies does funnel into a course grade. So rather than have a grade for each assessment, they do get a quote, traditional grade that is funneled from every single competency that’s assessed during the year actually all funnels into it. That’s how they end up with a letter grade for a course. 

So they’re always, every time they have a competency assessed, that’s funneling into a course grade. But it’s not like the traditional system where each assessment they’re getting a grade on that then they have that feeling of worth or not worth or complexity and just the relationship with it. So I think that’s another way that we are trying to work on like the traditional element of them needing a grade but at the same time, definitely deemphasizing that aspect of the single data point.

Angela: Yes, yeah, that is so good. So obviously the work that you’re doing now in this, is it like — What year is this of the school? 

John: Third. We’re in the third year.

Angela: Third year, okay. So it started from somewhere. It started from mindset, right? It started from a thought. It started from like something doesn’t feel like it’s working for staff and students. So can you tell us a little bit about the journey that you have been on? Then how, I think what I think listeners are going to wonder is like okay, this sounds amazing, but how do I move from it being like an inspiration myself into like how do I start those conversations and collectively create a mindset where we’re engaging in conversation about how to use grades more effectively?

John: Yeah, so in my career, I’ve pretty much been one of the most progressive students at every school, students. One of the most progressive teachers at every school I’ve been to. I’ve always been obsessed with assessment, probably because of my own relationship with grades as a student, right? Like how I felt about that and how that affected me emotionally like internally, intellectually, etc. 

So as I progressed through my career, I’ve been experimenting a lot with assessment, studying, reading. Most of where we are, as a school right now is a lot of it’s rooted in a ton of research I’ve done in my life and conferences and everything about all different types of assessment systems. 

So given the opportunity to be starting a new school, we had the opportunity to put what we, not just me, but all of our founding team put together our mindsets around what’s the best way to create an equity system and a fairness system for students in assessment. So that’s really where that grew from

The other thing that we’re very fortunate is that every teacher in the school uses the system. So one thing that that I was alerted to very early in my career that I was cognizant of is that you could walk down the hall and one teacher is using a 10 point scale, one person’s using 100 point scale, one person is using a letter grade scale. So for the student experience, that’s super confusing. We have to acknowledge that. 

We have to acknowledge that in the United States how any one person gets a B is very different from one classroom to another, one school to another, etc. Like, yes, we all understand generally what a B means. But how, in any system, that’s arrived at is very different. So we’ve been lucky to sort of standardize how we do that. 

So a student at our school who goes from humanities to math to science to Innovation Studio, they know they’re being assessed the same way. The conversations, the vernacular is how did you do on these competencies? Those sorts of things. So that’s one thing I think like at a school, you could operate at a department level or grade level. Hey, let’s work and make sure we’re all on the same page and see how that benefits the students’ relationship with grades

It goes back to that I think in elementary school, you always get these wonderful report cards with breakdown of several different skills or content areas. The report cards are three or four pages long. Then for some reason when you get to middle and high school, it becomes one letter grade. 

That doesn’t, how did we go from that stark transition where you are given so much information in elementary school about different things that you could really feel like oh, your ability to take notes was a little bit lower, but your ability to lead in group settings was like that. So that’s cool. So you could see variation in somebody’s learning style and their experience. Where then you get to high school is just you get to B in English. Like, what? That doesn’t make any sense. 

So I really think that what our system does by focusing on the competencies, it brings us back a little bit more to that like elementary school model where you’re getting feedback on many different parts of your academic experience rather than just one letter grade for being in a class.

Angela: Yeah, I really agree with that. Something that I love that you said was it can start with as simple as a grade level conversation or department conversation. That’s free. It doesn’t cost anything. You don’t have to get approval. You can have these conversations in your grade level meetings where we’re looking at not just like this child, like I think I taught kindergarten, right. 

So we gave a lot of detail with parents, but not just did your child pass the writing assessment or not. But what components? What were we looking for? What areas of that writing assessment? We’re looking for punctuation. We’re looking for space between words. We’re looking for phonetic spelling. We’re looking does the picture match what the child is trying to articulate in his or her writing? 

So when you think about it that way, it’s like if we could just do that throughout, and give the child very specific feedback and then we as a teacher, actually, I think the competencies are better for teaching, it sounds like, because then you know exactly where to teach. Like, if you go in and see traditional grades, and you’re like B’s, C’s, or even like percentages, or however people score or rubrics even, it’s like okay, but where do I take this teaching to the next level to get this student to the proficiency that they want? 

John: Yeah, I love your kindergarten example because I literally, like that’s how I, let’s just say on a writing assignment that I’m doing with 12th graders, right? Like, there are all these different components. You’re not just a single entity. I always think about it in terms of like parenting, to be honest.

I don’t think I deserve a B for making breakfast, right? There are all these different components that go into it. Wow, I was up late doing my work last night or whatever. I’m not a bad parent, because I gave you Eggos this morning instead of like doing the whole batter and making cool waffles or whatever

So unfortunately, though, in school, you are branded that way, right? You have just one assessment. Boom, that’s it. Then it’s part of the record, things like that. So it really just is, I think, if we could blow up the whole system and rethink it, it’d be great. We can’t do that, right? Because it’s really this inertia of the system that we’re all locked into. But we can definitely chip away at it without a doubt

However, we can do that. Like you said, it’s free. I failed many attempts of trying, like pitching different ideas to different, to administrators in my own career about hey, I want to do standards based or whatever. You can do a lot of experimental things. Like I ran a no grades program for an entire year where I kept like parallel system where I was doing it as if it was no grades but also doing like how my school wanted grades to be done. So I can analyze that too.

Again, like it wasn’t me going no grades. It was me like experimenting and being like okay, I see how this works. Oh, that really could work. Then I could take it to the next level of having a conversation with the administrator and be like, let’s look at the benefits of this and those types of things. 

So yeah, I think it comes back to the mindset. It’s super easy in our educational systems to be like that’s the way it’s always been. It’s too difficult to fight the system. But I think it’s invigorating. I think it feels empowering and awesome to think about how to do things better, improve to innovate. In there’s like if you can get caught up in that aspect of it, it’s like so energizing and refreshing, I think.

Angela: Yeah, and it’s fun. Like when you said, I was doing what I was asked to do. I wasn’t being noncompliant as an employee. I was just experimenting and kind of playing around with what would this look like? So one mindset would be like oh, that’s just double the work. But the other mindset is I am a lifelong learner. This is fun. It is invigorating. It’s interesting. We are in the business of evolution. I mean, that is what education is

We have stagnated, I would say the system, has stagnated because it’s so slow. It’s like a glacier moving through, right. So it’s like we’re not going to stop the glacier from moving, but we’re also like, it’s not going to melt away tomorrow. So what we can do is that gives us time and space to play within the system, whether you’re in a classroom or you’re a principal or you’re at district level listening to this. 

There are things that you can do right here, right now within your system or your current little cosmos of where your seat on the bus. To just to think about it differently and to play with it and make it playful. So let me ask you this. You mentioned in our conversation before that you are also teaching. You’re admin-ing, but you’re also teaching to keep boots on the ground. So tell me about the mindset. How does it feel from the teacher perspective to be working with grades in this capacity and competency basis?

John: Yeah, I love it. I think one thing about the competency system is it makes me as a teacher, you have to think. You can’t just roll out the same quiz or test or project or whatever. You have to see it through the actual skills, the actual competencies you want the students to perform. 

So it puts the onus on me to defend, okay, did I prepare the kids well enough to do this assessment that I’m going to measure them on? So I love that. I love that it forces me as a teacher to be attentive to what I’m teaching and to what I’m asking students to do. That, to me, again, like sort of like a lifelong learner, lifelong. 

Like I said, I’ve been teaching for 29 years. I love that it makes my job fresh. It makes me really think about oh, I really, we’ve been stressing this skill. I’m going to tweak the assessment so that we’re emphasizing that so I can see the students performing that way. So that’s one

Then the other thing is definitely as deemphasize grades. Like I said, when you return something, a student isn’t saying how do I get more points back? It’s not about points in that way. Instead, it’s about their skill set and their competency and what they did. Again, back to so they know how they get assessed. There’s feedback there. 

So they can, and I say to any student. If I assess you, and I gave you a quote and immersed on something, come talk to me. Because if I didn’t explain myself clearly enough or you think you did something differently that I wasn’t fully aware of, let’s have that conversation. You might change my assessment of it, or you might not. But either way, like that conversation, I think is really empowering to give students like ownership of their system. Whereas I think that’s a part of the educational system that’s sort of missing. 

I know that like yeah, we don’t want every teacher, every student coming to us and like questioning everything we assess them on. That’s not what I’m proclaiming right now. But we do want them to care. We do want them to care about what they’re learning and why rather than like why didn’t I get two points for this? So it’s definitely more of that type of a mindset shift for students, and I definitely have seen that. Definitely the deemphasis of a grade on a daily basis has definitely been refreshing. 

Angela: Yes. You work with sixth through 12th graders. So they’re at an age where you really want them to understand that they’re not coming to school for performative measures, for you to do a song and dance, for us to do a song and dance so that you can get the grades that we feel good as teachers because the state requires it. 

It’s not a compliance issue the older that they get. We want them to see that this is actually impacting real life. This is impacting you in a way that you do want ownership of your life, and you want power and agency and control in your life. This is one way that you do that

We can teach them advocacy skills and when to bring something up and when to be like I’m going to self-assess on this for a minute. I don’t need to go argue every point because I can see where this might be true. But I think that, the decision a child makes to come and discuss it with you or not, we have to teach them that discernment, that skill of are you, do you get why you got this? Or why we’re at this level or not? I mean.

If there’s a real question there, that is the learning right there. Why did you assess this when I thought I was here? Or like I did better than I thought, and I want to understand. I want to see that. I want. That conversation is also the learning. 

John: Definitely, I completely agree with you. There are all these elements of education that go beyond like that simple grade, like how you are as a student, how you are as a learner. One thing I wanted to bring up because, as he’s talked about like on the district level, and having certain state requirements and things like that, like I do think obviously we’re an independent school. So I don’t have those pressures. So I’m sure many people are like oh, it’s different for us. We’re also not an AP school.

But I do seriously believe that the system, like using a competency based system or a version of standards based system, you can still do everything you need to do for your state. In my humanities classes, all my — We’re in Massachusetts. So all of my skills are tagged to Massachusetts standards. You can still do all that. You can still assess an AP class the same way because either way the student’s still performing the skills and about the content that you want. You’re just assessing them a little bit differently than the traditional mode. 

So I do think even if you’re like oh, we could never go away from having a letter grade or a number grade on each assessment, you could still do this type of system where you still achieve that. It’s very doable either way. So that’s one thing I think is really important. Like how you actually arrive at that letter grade for an individual assessment, if that’s how you need to be doing it. It’s doable definitely to problem solve that out into use a system where you’re able to articulate better how a student’s learning on whatever that assessment is that they’re doing. 

Angela: Yeah. Oh, I love that so much. So I think one of the questions that are going to come up in people’s mind, I think it’s just a default like objection that our brain offers us. But it’s like, this sounds like a lot of work. This sounds like a lot of effort. This sounds really hard. It sounds like putting more on the plate. Can you just speak to that? Like, where is that true? Then where is it maybe it’s a little easier than we anticipate?

John: Yeah, I don’t think it’s necessarily more work. I think you’re making an assessment anyway. So just thinking about like how you’re going to assess that assessment actually, like what particular skills you’re going to assess on. It allows you definitely to target your feedback. So as a traditional English teacher, if I was reading an essay, I’d be doing like marking up all this type of stuff. 

But now I know that like okay, I’m assessing these three competencies. So my focus in that essay is really targeting those competencies because that’s where I’m giving the feedback on. It doesn’t mean that I’m not doing margin comments. I still am, but they’re more targeted. That’s empowering. 

Because sometimes I think in any assessment of any kind, if you’re doing a math assessment, and you’re marking things wrong or adding comments and things like that, that feedback that you’re doing in the margins or on the actual artifact, can then inform much more specifically that feedback you do give. Because I think traditionally it’s like oh, here’s an assessment. Then a teacher will write a little narrative at the end of some way. 

But those narratives aren’t attached necessarily. They’re talking about the thing in totality. So this way, it actually lets you narrow in more specifically on targeted skills to give feedback on. So one, I think it’s more liberating than you think. Also, in terms of the aspect of like what’s good about it, I think it definitely.

So, we primarily use a single panel rubric here. So with a single panel rubric, you have the competency in the middle, the very important explanation by the teacher of how that competency looks on that assessment, and then you have exemplary on the right hand side and developing on the left hand side. So that’s the concept of the single panel rubric

Then you just, you give a little targeted feedback in those boxes. It helps you assess because you’re like oh, I see comments in the developing and comments on the exemplary. That’s probably immersed. That’s like clearly there’s things on either side, but it definitely makes it better for a teacher because you’re able to really focus on these particular things for your feedback and then move on.

Angela: Yeah. Just for my information. When you’re doing, first of all, how often do you guys assess it? I hear a lot from principals it feels like we’re always testing, or teachers will say I feel like we’re always assessing or pre-assessing, post-assessing, district assessment, state assessments,. How does testing, like the schedule of testing, look like in your school?

John: I would say there’s no definite way. Like another thing that’s innovative about us is we don’t have quarters or semesters. 

Angela: Oh, cool.

John: So our school goes through the whole year because one of the things that we, again, with our mindset of how we go about these things, like having a first quarter grade that then that counts is 25% of a grade. For us that doesn’t make any logic into how our system works. So I would say what we say to teachers is you assess when you’re ready to assess rather than on any type of school schedule

Again, because of the how it works, you could be like I’m going to give a very small assessment today on one competency, right. So it doesn’t need to be a whole class. It doesn’t need to be whole fully, like full time commitment. You can manage a system so that it’s not based on needing an entire class period and things like that. 

I mean, that’s something else I should say about our system is it’s about the skills, not about the assessment method. So you can give a quiz, a test, multiple choice, an essay, a project, a speech, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter what your assessment method is. It’s about the skills that you’re articulating that the skills of the students will be working on

So obviously, we don’t weight a test is worth two times as much as a quiz or anything like that. It’s not about that. It’s about the skill. So really, assessment you build should be based on what skills the students are going to show. Could it be something that would take an entire class period? Sure. Could it be something that’d take five minutes? Sure. 

Angela: Nice. Oh, gosh, the freedom that teachers, I mean, I just feel excited thinking about it. I love that we’re planting the seeds of just thinking about grades in a totally different way that’s actually liberating for everybody, teachers and students. That sounds so wonderful. I mean, I would love to experience it in real time. 

But so what I hear you saying is that teachers are designing like lessons and assessments, probably integrating lessons and assessments a little more fluidly. They’re not, I think, about back when, again, when I was teaching elementary school. There was a time period like. The assessment starts here. It ends here. It’s this exact assessment. This is how you have to administer it by this date and time, whatever. This is how you have to grade it. It was very like rigid

What I hear you saying is like teachers can kind of go in. They don’t have to assess everything all at once. They can be looking for individual competencies and looking for the growth or like areas for growth. So it’s a much more fluid process. So how does you’re, just now I’m getting like in the weeds here. But how does like if there aren’t semesters and like a schedule, like that structure, what is the structure? How do you communicate to parents and to students? What does that look like at your school?

John: Yeah, great question. So we have a, we use Google Classroom as our LMS, like our day to day LMS. So anything that’s assessed or assigned or whatever all goes to Google Classroom, but Google Classroom cannot operate on our competency system. It can’t, doesn’t know how to compute like the way we do it. So we have an entire separate gradebook, and it’s from a company called Otus. Otus has completely personalized our gradebook with all of our competencies and how they go into the assignments and things like that, how they get computed, all that. So it’s awesome. 

So we tell families you can go to Otus at any time and see a very live updated grade. That’s never going to change. That’s not going to be oh, here’s a stopping point. Then you have to calculate oh, this is 30% of the grade or whatever. Like, it’s always there. So, that will go through the end of the year

Then we report out. Like most schools, we’ll do teacher reports a couple of times a year where we’re giving narrative feedback. We emphasize in that narrative feedback like certain competencies about how a student is performing. 

So the one way we do have semesters, we do have some semester classes. So when those semester classes ended, they got a final grade. So we produced a, quote, report card for those classes because that was their final grade. Some parents reached out and were like how come I don’t see the other classes on there? I had to explain like don’t forget. You can go to Otus right now and see any of the year-long grades at any time. You don’t — 

Once we made a report card, if that was the case with our system, that report card would be obsolete the next day. So final grades all appear report card at the very end of the year. For families to be involved, they can sign up for Google Classroom weekly summaries. They get the reports from us two or three times a year. We have an advocate system, which is like an advisor system where we communicate.

We are very open. I know a lot of your listeners will be like oh, I’m not sure we want that. But we let parents contact us at any time with questions about their child’s learning and what’s going on. We’re big believers that parents are partners in learning journey for students. So that can be, obviously, as we know there are some parents who might be a little bit more intense than others. But, again, but we always say like oh, but look. Here are your resources. Are you worried about grade? Just go to Otus. It’s there all the time.

Angela: Yeah. Oh no, that’s, again, I think that is more liberating because it almost sets a sense of like trust and safety and foundation because parents do. The nervous ones, they have access at all times. They can look as often as they want. If they have questions, they can ask. 

But because they have access and because there is an invitation to have a conversation, for the parents who just need to know, that have a pulse on what’s going on, the majority of parents in my experience as a principal and as a teacher, the majority of parents just want a pulse. They want to know their kid’s doing well. Their kid’s happy. Their kid’s safe. Their kid’s progressing, and that they’re having the best student experience that the can. That’s what most parents want.

80% of your parents are going to be okay with that as long as they have that pulse. Then you can deal with individuals as need be. But I’m curious to know what’s the feedback from parents on the system? Then I’m curious to hear what the feedback from students is around this system that you guys have innovated?

John: Yeah, I think that parents are they’re still trying to understand it. Because one thing that’s really interesting is how the grade system that’s always been in existence is what they know, right? They’re like well, what do you mean? I know A, B, C, D. We’ll say like go to Otus, and you can see that, but that’s not how the individual assessments come out. So you just need to educate parents about that a little bit. 

So what I do as the head of teaching and learning, I’ll do a webinar at the beginning of the year and be available for any questions at any time that anybody wants to ask about those things. So what we don’t have is anybody really complaining about the system. Sometimes I think it’s a parent who’s confused and just needs it explained to them a little bit more definitely

Then students, same thing. If a student comes to NEIA, so we’re a six through 12 school. Say a student comes in ninth grade who wasn’t here in seventh or eighth grade. It’s a whole new system to them, right? So they have to unlearn the traditional mode of what they’re used to. But how we do it is, it’s really important for a teacher to explain like every time is an assessment what the competencies are and how they’ll be assessed. So that that part is important for the students to understand. 

I think largely, the students, because they are getting a course grade, they know where they’re at. Actually, like they know their pulse, definitely. Then you’re just you’re missing that daily fret over the relationship with a grade that they get. So you don’t hear students complaining at all. As a matter of fact, it’s great when a student is like will ask about a certain competency or be like oh. 

I had a great student send me an assignment the other day and was like I don’t want you to look at the I write competency on this. I’m just looking for like this part of thing. I was like, thank you so much. It’s awesome. Like the I write competency is all about like their grammar and things like that. They were like don’t look at that right now. But she articulated the competency. Like, you don’t have to worry about that right now. I’m good with that. Can you look at this? So the goal, right, we’re in year three. The goal is that that vernacular is part of our entire fabric of our school within a few years. 

Angela: Yeah. Have you heard from, so I was just thinking it’s three years in. So you’ve had students that were in 12th grade, 11th grade, and 10th grade who have now promoted out, right, that graduated out?

John: No, we have our first 12th grade class this year.

Angela: Oh, I see they’re coming up.

John: Yeah, because they’re coming up. So we have our first 12th grade class right now. 

Angela: Okay

John: Obviously that group, right, those families had some anxiety about quote their grades, but they didn’t really because they still get course grades. So our transcript looks the same as any school ever. It’s got courses and letter grades

The students are doing great in that our first ever graduating class, we have 15 students. Their college acceptances so far are going great. Like we have really good college counselor who hit the, she was hired last year at the beginning of the year. She hit the ground reaching out to colleges explaining our system, what our profile is, how all these things work. But obviously, that was important for us to know that we needed to do that as a new school anyway. So yes.

So yeah, so we feel like the external reporting of our program is the same as any school, to be honest. If I can just tell a quick story. We originally started as a no grade school. So we used our competency system without grades attached to it. In year one, there was definitely some people weren’t cool with that

So we actually, we changed, without changing at all the integrity of the competency system. It’s the same as it is now. We did adjust it so that it could compute to that course grade that I’ve talked about. One thing we said was we don’t want to hurt a student’s chances after being at our school externally because we do things differently. 

So the biggest thing was if we were no grades and there was just all of our competencies, like a page of our competencies on a college admission person’s desk, they would be like I don’t have the time to like understand all this, right. So we said as an innovative school, let’s have the one traditional thing we do be these letter grades so that our transcript looks the same

Then I call it turning the page. We just want the college admission person to look at the transcript and be like okay, great. Then turn the page and see all the cool things they do at the school. Or hear a student in their materials talk about how they really grew in the I construct competency or something like that. 

Angela: Yeah, that is pretty cool. Because we want to be innovative, but people are afraid or they think they can’t. They think there’s too big of an obstacle in the way from doing that. So like the bridge, how you close that gap was like okay, we’re going to function this way. But we’re going to translate. It’s almost like another language, right? We’re going to translate our language into a language that the colleges understand so that the student has equal advantage when it comes to the admissions process.

John: Yeah, that’s what I would say too about like even from an admin level or a teacher level. I personally can’t, from the I perspective, I would love to be a no grade school. I would love it. Our system would work totally. But I understand that for the external world that isn’t like NEIA right now, like we have to do this. That’s okay. We still are able to do both, right? 

So like, what are the compromises you need to make to be able to move the needle of the academic system, the educational system the best you can. So, I would say from an admin perspective, the one thing that’s really important is if a teacher has an idea about innovating assessment in some way, I would encourage it.

As long as they’re communicating about it, maybe they’re doing like I described. I’m going to do the innovative way, but also the traditional way. Keep them side by side so that I have data to give feedback on, but I think one thing that’s rough is sometimes when like oh, this is the way it’s always been. We’re just going to keep doing it that way. If you have a way that can potentially do better, I think you could have the courage to do it, to try it. 

Angela: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I know for the go getter listeners that are out there, they’re going to be like oh, I love this. This is vibing with me. This is what I where I want to go. They’re going to want to know how did you get started? What were some of the first initial steps you did to get started? 

This is a little bit separate question, but how did students, did they opt into this program? What was the, they’re going to want to understand what the structure and the framework? How did this originate? How did you get to be where you’re at right now? Then how do students have access to this program? 

John: Yeah, I would say first of all, you can share my contact information because I could talk to people about this for days about all that process. But I think, again, having something that most listeners out there can’t understand is we literally started a school, right? So we were able to all start with the system. So anybody who came to the school, they were buying into the system. We’re like this is our assessment system. Okay. 

But I was able to get to this point professionally by exactly what you described, what was the process. So, for example, when I started experimenting with standards based, I was upfront with my classes being like this is what we’re doing. This is how we’re doing it. This is why we’re doing it, those types of things. 

So it’s just all that communication is the biggest tool you have to be able to do the innovative things while also being cognizant of like all the constituents around you so that you’re not creating crazy waves or you’re not getting hauled in from an admin or something like that for being a renegade or something like that. I think you’ve got to be thoughtful, very thoughtful, about the things that you want to do and go about it from a communicative standpoint. 

I’m a big believer in like a positive standpoint too. I wouldn’t be like oh my God, the educational system sucks. We need to burn it down, right? Instead it’s like no, listen. I think this is might be a way for students to understand and learn better. I’m going to try this. So we should try this, that sort of thing.

Angela: Yeah, I love that. Oh, my gosh. This has been so insightful. So do you have any last words of wisdom, or is there anything that you really want? There’s traditional educators out there. They feel this in their bones and in their hearts. They know that this system isn’t working for all kids and all staff members and students, but they’re like oh, but what? How? Can you just give them some guidance on the next steps?

John: I would say, Angela, like we talked about what’s your relationship with grades? Realize that every student in your room, if you put the student at the center, they all have different relationships with grades. So is the same system that everybody’s ever for all time is used, is that really the best system? 

If you don’t think it is, be courageous. What are some ways you can start taking to address that, to experiment, to see how that lands with students, to see how they feel about it, those types of things. I really think that is the thing. If you have that feeling inside you, look around, be aware. How can I experiment? How can I do this and think about this differently? 

Then to back to your point originally about the mindset and the action, like what are the action steps I can take that fit within my current system, whatever that system is? 

Angela: Yes, yes. Your actions are going to be driven by the belief system and the mindset. So taking some time to contemplate this with yourself, whether you’re a school leader or a teacher or district level, you don’t have to run out and start an initiative and try to force something forward just because you’re excited about it. 

You want to actually slow your brain down and be thoughtful about why would we go to the effort of making changes like this and even holding these conversations. Because we want to understand the purpose. When we’re in a system that already has such rigid systems and processes, it’s easy just to acclimate to those processes without questioning them. We’re not questioning them from the place that that we’re criticizing them. We’re questioning them on their effectiveness for all students. 

I just, I have one more question that I think is going to pop up for people. They’re going to want to know the demographics of the school that you serve because a lot of people will come to me, and they’re like yes, but I’m a Title I school, or I am in an urban environment, or I am a low income socioeconomic status, disadvantaged school setting. So would something like this work for kids that typically have disadvantages in their way?

John: So I think yes because it’s like we talked about before. If you think of elementary school report cards, right, it’s like that system works. That system is effective for all students. That this is really just sort of like an adaptation of that, on some level. Our school, we’re an independent school so where tuition driven, but I would say that we, our current year three student body is diverse. It’s neurodiverse. We opened in 2021 so post-COVID. So you had students from all different levels and abilities coming in. Actually, I think it really having this type of system is helpful for that. 

Because there might be times where you’re adjusting something for where students are at. I think that’s something post COVID we’ve definitely seen as, as educators that you might have the greatest plan ever, but where the students are at post COVID, it’s going to need some adjustment. This system allows you to adjust. Let’s look at these skills that we want to hone in on. 

If I can just, I want to really thank you for your you extrapolated really well about the patience that’s needed if you’re going to try something. I teach a 12th grade class on TV script writing. One of the main components of that is I say that you’ve got to have patience. Like in the beginning, like you’re just forming a TV series. You might have this amazing idea, but it’s not going to come into place until like episode eight or episode 10. You’ve got to have the patience to keep doing all the things you need to be doing to get to that point. 

So when you said that, that’s what I thought of. That you’re exactly right. Like, you don’t have to come through and like change the whole system. Be patient. You have this idea about how this can be better and just start planting the seeds for it. I think that’s like a really awesome point you made.

Angela: Yeah. Oh, thank you. I just know I’ve worked in this system. This is actually my 29th year too. I was calculating that when you said that. I’m like wow. So yeah, we’ve been doing this for a while. We know that I think when you’re planting seeds, there are seeds that grow quickly, and they will mature and pop. Then there’s things that take 12 months, 18 months, two years, maybe five years. So we’re planting all different kinds of seeds.

Mindset seeds can kind of evolve more quickly because you can have different thoughts in an instant. You can have different feelings about something, and you can see new perspective. Then you start to have conversations, which plant seeds that might take a little bit longer as you’re starting to grow a culture around these conversations. Then you’re starting to plant seeds around like the actions and the processes which might take a little bit longer. 

So there’s layers to this. But I think the takeaway here is that this one podcast can spark a seed that you can plant in terms of your thoughts around it and your mindset around it and your excitement and energy around really giving kids the information that they need to take ownership of their learning, to be authentically engaged, to have teachers feel a little more autonomy and authenticity around teaching, and bringing back the purpose of the humanity of instruction and the humaneness that comes with that

Then the system will follow that like, eventually. But that we have to be patient for the system. Because we can make instant change internally, but it’s going to take more time to have that show itself in the system. Yeah. 

John: Even just our conversations you and me. You’re inspiring me. I love bouncing ideas off you. So one of my other recommendations would be if you’re an educator and you have an idea, like find some other people that you can vibe with. Because then it’s just not you like oh my God. Get some other people who get excited about it and exchange those ideas. That’s where so much richness comes out of that.

Angela: Yes. So if people are super interested to learn more about you, the school that you’re working with, the initiatives that you guys have been able to create into the school setting, where can they contact you?

John: So anybody can contact me anytime at my email. It’s real simple. It’s camp@neiaacademy.org. Or you can just go to neiaacademy.org and find me there. But maybe on your when you post the podcast, you can put my email there. 

Angela: Yes, I’ll put it in the show notes. 

John: I’m really happy to really happy to talk to anybody about any of these things. Like I said, we definitely don’t think we have all the answers. There are a lot of things were figuring out. It’s always iterating. So I’m happy to talk about any aspect. As much as I could help somebody, they’ll be helping me as well.

Angela: Yeah, no, this is definitely a collaboration. I’m excited that this conversation’s coming out into the world and into the hands of the Empowered Principal® audience because I can feel with my clients and my audience that they’re hungry for this conversation. But they might be a little bit afraid to have it because they don’t think that there is a possibility for change. You are living breathing proof, your school is the example of that this is possible. 

So thank you for sharing your time, your insight with us today, Camp. I love your energy. I love the mission and the values and the vision that you have. I can hope one day that like our traditional schools will be able to embrace some of these components.

John: Thank you so much. Again, I just appreciate you having me on and vibing with our conversation. Thank you so much. 

Angela: Yeah, so good. All right. Have an amazing rest of your week empowered principals. We’ll talk to you all next week. Take good care. Bye.

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

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The Empowered Principal® Podcast Angela Kelly | The Power of Play for YOU

As a school leader, you spend a lot of time working because you love what you do. Even when you’re exhausted, you put in the hours because of the deep passion you have for your school community and the outcomes you want to achieve.

While you might derive a lot of pleasure from your work, it is critical that your sense of fun and play come from other sources as well. Being able to check tasks off your to-do list, help a student, or mentor a teacher all feel amazing, but they cannot be the only things in your life that bring you joy and delight.

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