Hello, empowered principals. Welcome to episode 400. 

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.

Hello, my empowered principals. Welcome to the podcast. Happy Tuesday and welcome to episode 400. 400 episodes. What an accomplishment and celebration. That is literally over 7.5 years of weekly episodes of The Empowered Principal® Podcast.

What this podcast has taught me is that you truly cannot fail if you simply don’t give up. Keep going. Keep recording. Keep learning. Keep growing. Keep coaching. Keep diving in. Keep expanding yourself. Keep celebrating. Keep in gratitude. Just keep on. Just keep on.

And I want to invite each and every one of you to take this on as well. Keep going. Keep showing up. Keep planning. Keep failing. Keep trying. Keep playing. Keep resting. Keep taking action. Keep on, my friends, keep on. You’re on the right path. You are doing amazing things. You are being enough. Just keep on.

So cheers to 400 episodes. I want to take a moment to shout out to all of my clients, my past clients, my current clients, and hey, my future clients out there. And to all of those who have ever been a guest on the podcast, thank you so much for your brilliance and your wisdom and the opportunity to get to know you and speak with you and have you on the show. Thank you to all who’ve had me on their podcast. I really enjoy and appreciate expanding this work out into the world.

To my amazing team at Digital Freedom Productions, they are incredible. Pavel, Angela, Devon, Megan, and the rest of the team at DFP, I want to thank you from the very bottom of my heart. You’ve allowed me to produce this podcast during the highs and the lows of my business, and I am eternally grateful for the honor of working with you. Genuinely, truly, I thank you from the bottom of my heart.

And so as it is, this podcast, the 400th episode of The Empowered Principal® Podcast, I am taking a risk. I am taking a bold move. I am sharing something very raw, very vulnerable. And we’re going to dive in to relentless responsibility. Last week I mentioned this on the podcast and this week we’re going to dive deeper into it.

So I’m going to share with you a very personal story that feels very scary and vulnerable to share in such a public space, but it is an authentic demonstration of what relentless responsibility looks and feels like.

So for those of you who don’t know, I am very recently divorced. And while many of the details of this last three years of my life are very sensitive in nature, what I feel I can share is that the moment of separation for me came out of the blue.

In that moment, I was unaware and it caught me by surprise. I was in complete shock and devastation. And in that moment, I was left with nothing to comfort me. There was no escaping the shock, the pain, the emotional experience of the decisions and actions that somebody else in my life took, somebody I love, somebody I trusted, somebody I believed in, somebody I thought I was going to spend the rest of my life with, somebody that I felt so safe, so comfortable with.

And I had to face the reality of what had unfolded in my life, in my home, in my family, in my marriage. My brain wanted so badly to blame. My heart wanted to push away the pain. I wanted to be a victim of the circumstances. I wanted to blame. I wanted to abdicate. I wanted to accuse other people of their wrongdoings, of their faults, of their humanness. I was in so much pain.

But I also knew because I’m a coach, that I had the strength to feel and process any emotions that come up for me, just as I talk about on this podcast. I had the tools, I had the skills, and I had the capacity to acknowledge and process emotions head on. I knew the difference between clean pain and dirty pain, and that while I was experiencing clean pain, I was also furthering my suffering with thoughts, by perseverating on situations, by looking backwards, by re-imagining, by thinking back, trying to figure out what happened and when it happened and why, and getting caught up in the details and in the behaviors and the actions, and why didn’t I see this and how come this and how come that? It was relentless. My desire for blame and abdication and victimness, that urge was so strong.

But because I was intellectually aware that it was possible to navigate through this, because I’ve seen people navigate through grief in many forms, I knew that I could work through this. The hardest part of this work over the last few years of my life was that I knew through Byron Katie that there is truth in everything.

Was I right? Yes. Was I wrong? Yes. Was I good? Yes. Was I bad? Yes. Did I do good things? Yes. Did I do bad things? Yes. It’s all yes. There is truth in everything. Was I a great partner? Yes. Was I a terrible partner? Yes.

My perspective and his perspective were both true. So instead of leaning into the story of blame and victimhood, I decided that through this pain, through this experience, I was going to take relentless responsibility for myself, for my emotions, for my emotional experience, for my actions, for my words, for my behavior in past, present, and future.

I was going to take responsibility for the outcome of this marriage, its impact on my family, my son, myself, my in-laws, my own family, the friend group we had, the life we had, everything. The financial situation that ended up occurring, it just was a moment of pure truth to lean into taking responsibility for all of the things that impacted my life, my business, and the outcomes that came from this very unfortunate situation.

I’ll tell you this, you guys, I’m not even clearly on the other side of it. I’m towards the other side of it. I’m more than halfway through, but I am so freaking proud of myself for choosing the path of empowerment and alignment to sit here with you today, to coach my clients, to record this podcast in integrity, in alignment with what I teach and what I practice in my life, and to be put to the ultimate test. To have to stand in that empowerment and stand in the truth of what I teach and how I practice coaching and practice living my life and using these tools and strategies, I had to be relentless in my practice, in my belief in myself, in my trust.

I had to choose to be relentless in my response to this situation, to look and listen for all the perspectives, to acknowledge and own my part, even though it hurt like hell. I had to take a moment to separate my actions from his actions, my words from his interpretation of my words, his actions from my interpretation of his actions. I had to take ownership of all of that, of the past situation, the current situation, and a decision to take ownership of my future situation.

And this did not come with ease. It did not come with grace. I have experienced the most alignment of my life and I still have days of victimness and blame and abdication and anger.

Now, some of you may be saying, some of you who are listening might be thinking, wow, especially of those of you who may know more details of my situation than I feel that I’m allowed to share or comfortable with sharing. People might hear this story in its detailed form and think, “But you were the victim. It wasn’t you. He chose this. He did those things. He did his part. It wasn’t you. You are the victim in this. How are you to take responsibility for something that someone else did, especially relentless responsibility?”

And here’s the answer. You can’t. You can’t take responsibility for his thoughts, his feelings, his behaviors, his decisions, his actions. I couldn’t do that. I wanted to do that. If I had a magic wand and I could have controlled his thoughts and feelings and behaviors and actions, oh boy, would I have.

I can only take responsibility for my part, my thoughts, my feelings, my actions, my behaviors, my decisions. And doing that is so hard. It’s emotionally so painful. We want to self-protect. We want to justify ourselves. We want to be the good guy. We want to be the victim because it abdicates us from the responsibility of relentless responsibility. We get to avoid ownership and the feelings that come with responsibility and ownership. It’s tough. Emotional maturity, maturity at all levels is tough. Taking responsibility and ownership and stepping into maturity, not easy.

Our brain says, “Why do I always have to be the most responsible one? Why do I have to take responsibility? Why not them? Why do the teachers get to blame and complain and I have to be the one who’s always the most responsible person in the room? Why me?” You hear the voice. It’s the little kid in us. “Why me? Why do I have to take the blame? Why do I have to take ownership? Why do I have to take responsibility? I want to be the victim. I want to get the love. I want to get the TLC. I want to get the coddling.”

I’m going to talk more about this next week on the podcast, the difference between responsibility and ownership. I do see a difference between the two, but I will say that when you are experiencing an outcome in your life that you do not want, you do not anticipate, or you didn’t wish for. So maybe you got fired, or maybe you got a sanction on your credentials or your administrative license. Maybe somebody blasted you on social media or in the local newspaper in the commentary section, or maybe something has happened in your personal life, or maybe the test scores tanked.

And you’re like, “Well, I didn’t take the test. The kids took the test. I didn’t teach. The teachers taught.” It’s very, very easy when a situation occurs that is external to believe that our experience of the situation can be blamed on somebody else or something else. It was the curriculum, it was the pacing guides, it was the district office, it was the test, it was the kids, it was the families, it was the weather. Everything else happened. We just had the worst technology those days.

It’s very easy to believe that all of those external things are true. And here’s the truth. Both are true. We have ownership and other people have ownership. There are things outside of our ownership and things within. It is so hard not to get sucked into victimhood, especially when the aftermath of the initial situation continues to present aftershock after aftershock, and there’s so much more cleanup that needs to happen. It’s like when a natural disaster occurs, there’s the moment of crisis where there’s a flood or there’s a fire or there’s a tornado or there’s an earthquake, something catastrophic is happening in real time. And we’re watching it in real time, and we feel so helpless. And the people get out or the people don’t get out. It’s just horrible. 

And there’s the initial incident, and then there’s the aftershocks, there’s the aftermath, and you learn more and you learn more after the fact, and it goes deeper into, “Whoa, I had no idea this,” or “I had no idea this was coming that,” or, “We should have been informed this,” or, “I should have known this,” or, “I should have been more aware.”

And then all of the mind drama pops up after the fact. And what I have observed in myself, that blaming and feeling victim to a situation is a phase of growth and of healing and of expansion. It’s not that we want to eradicate it. It’s just a phase of it. And the key is how quickly do we lean into that phase and to feel it and to experience it and to move on from it.

Just as grief has been explained in stages, expansion, your evolution goes through stages. When an identity quake occurs and something rattles you to your bones, and what you thought life was going to be, or you thought your career was going to be, or you thought the experiences that you were going to have been rattled, you go through shock, denial, anger, blame, frustration, depression, oh my gosh, sadness, all of the feels before you get to any form of acceptance.

And just as with a loss from death, when you go through a divorce or you go through something so painful, it is socially acceptable for you to feel all the feels and to take time and space for healing. Now, people have kind of a limit on what they tolerate. It’s like, “Gosh, your mom died three months ago, aren’t you over it?” or, “Man, that divorce was like, wasn’t that a while ago? I mean, I know you had a long separation before you actually got the divorce finalized, but gee, aren’t you moving on?” Like, people will say that because they can’t handle it. They can’t tolerate your process, your feelings.

So it is acceptable to have a period of grief and loss and healing. And this understanding from other people, that understanding, that compassion, that coddling, that loving, that acceptance of where we are can provide us so much relief. And it is so needed, particularly in the clean pain when it initially happens. But it can also become a crutch if we begin to rely on it, and we begin to want it and crave it. And that’s how we get attention and affection and love.

I found myself stronger in the beginning when the initial quake happened because I had to show up for myself and my clients and my family. I had to just go through the motions of survival during the moments of what I felt was thrust upon me. And I was in that survival mode for around two years, just trying to keep up, just trying to show up, putting a happy smile on in the surface, right, in the public, and then feeling all the feels behind the scenes.

And as more and more information was revealed to me, I saw the depth of the impact on every aspect of my life and how far back this situation was brewing. I never saw it coming. That was on me, not him. I felt so defeated, so betrayed, so lost, so, so very sad.

And as I leaned into that and people were like, “Oh, you need time and you space and you poor thing,” hopelessness started to creep in. I started to wonder, how was I ever going to recover? How would I ever rebuild? How was I ever going to heal? How was I ever going to bounce back from the damage that was created in my life, the pain that I felt? How would I ever trust again?

I went down these rabbit holes of the worst-case scenarios, starting to believe I was never going to recover. I was never going to rebuild. I was never going to come back from this. That this moment of my life, the lowest moment, was it. That’s all the possibility. That’s all of my potential tapped out.

And then I realized through my coach, I am a coach. I am a life coach, and I have a life coach. I have a business coach. I have a life coach. I have all the coaches. I believe in the power of coaching and in personal empowerment. I knew there had to be a way to recover from this. I’ve witnessed it in other people, other things that feel more devastating than what I’ve been through. The loss of a child, the tragic moments that have happened in recent times in people’s families being torn apart in your children being swept away in monumental floods. There’s tragedy out there, and we do this. We kind of compare tragedies. “Oh, mine wasn’t as bad as theirs, so I shouldn’t feel bad,” or, “Oh, mine was way worse. Look at me. Look how bad I have it,” or, “Look how bad they have it.” We get caught up in the pain and the stories and the drama around tragedy. We’re drawn to it like a moth to a flame. But if we’re not careful, we get sucked in, and boom, we get burned. We’re in it.

I was also very aware that for every day I sat in disbelief and discontent and depression and sadness and blame and abdicating was a day that I was giving away to the possibility and the ability to rebuild myself, to rebuild my belief in me, to build up my trust again, to strengthen myself, to empower myself again.

Setbacks are not what prevent us from succeeding. They are the opportunity to build strength to succeed. What prevents us from succeeding at any level, at school, at home, in life, is our ability to experience a setback and to recover from it, to lean into the emotional experience of a setback and to feel all of it, and to take relentless responsibility of the situation, of our actions, of our emotions, of our thoughts, of where we are spinning as soon as we possibly can to take responsibility back.

There is a moment of grief, a moment of shock. You will go through the process of shock and surprise and pain and anger and for all of those frustration feelings, the helplessness, the depression, the sadness, the grieving, all of it. But how quickly can we experience that and bounce back and return and take ownership once again? People who are wildly successful, they don’t feel any less. They don’t avoid pain or feel any less pain. They’re just not afraid to feel more, to lean more into the experience, to learn more from it, to allow their emotional muscles to grow. They go to the gym, they feel the burn, and they get back at it. They don’t stop going to the emotional boot camp class. They might rest for a day or a two or a week, and they go back again and again for the rest of their lives.

It is a lifestyle to be emotionally mature, to take relentless responsibility. It is a lifestyle choice. Some choose it, some don’t.

Everyone goes through very difficult challenges, the things that bring you to your knees and make you question your capacity to recover and rebuild your life. There are things that are going to make you doubt yourself and others that test your faith and your patience, my friends. Things that will test your ability to trust yourself, to trust others again, and to keep going.

The way to align back to your empowerment when you’ve taken a hit, when you’ve had a setback is to take relentless responsibility for your experience of it, to take responsibility for recovering and rebuilding, to take responsibility for loving yourself through the hard stuff, to be gentle and to hold yourself responsible, to take responsibility for your part in having created it and in your part of rebuilding from it.

I promise you guys, this is one of the toughest things that we do as humans. But it is the true path to empowerment. It’s the most empowering thing I’ve been through. And I can say at this point, at this stage of the game here, I am grateful it happened. I can’t believe it happened sometimes, but I’m grateful for it. I have never been in more pain. I have never also been in more empowerment.

I feel this is truly the perfect episode to celebrate the 400th show of The Empowered Principal® Podcast, the empowered school leader. Embracing this practice, it literally has set me free.

And if you are wondering how you do this, “But how do I do this? What action do I take to embody this? How do I stand in relentless responsibility?” Join EPC. Do it right now. Decide. Join. Let’s go. You sign up for coaching and you give yourself the gift of mentorship. Life is not easy. School leadership, it’s not easy. And I don’t know a person who does life or who does leadership completely alone. There’s no way.

You’re not a leader by yourself. You’ve got so many levels of support. You’ve even got this podcast. I can’t imagine not having a coach in my life. And I invite you into the experience and the power of coaching, and you can experience this through EPC, the Empowered Principal Collaborative. We are evolving schools, evolving school leaders, one thought at a time, one week at a time, one thing at a time.

Next week, I’ll dive into the difference between ownership and responsibility and how you can leverage your empowerment in these two ways. But there is a difference between listening to the podcast and implementing the content, the concepts, and the work of this podcast. I could not sit here today and record this podcast if I hadn’t been through what I’d been through and if I hadn’t shown up for myself and my clients and my life and my son and my business and my family the way that I did.

I was tested as a leader. “Oh, you want to teach leadership? Let’s lead your life. Oh, you need a little bit more? Here you go. Oh, you think you’re that? Try this.” I got tested and tested and tested, and my bridge is strong, and I’m ready to go. Are you?

Join EPC. Let’s go. Have an amazing week. I love you all fiercely. Go be empowered. Go be relentless in your responsibilities this school year. I love you. Take good care. Bye.

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

Hello, empowered principals. Welcome to episode 398. 

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

Well, hello my empowered principals. Happy Tuesday. Happy new school year. Welcome to the 2025-2026 school year. I am delighted to be here with you today. And hey, if you are new to the podcast, if you’re a brand new principal and you just found The Empowered Principal Podcast, we’re so happy you’re here. Welcome.

I adore each and every one of you. I love my listeners, love my clients, love my audience. And this podcast is so special and near and dear to my heart because it provides a space for you to think differently and expand differently and to problem solve differently and to feel differently. So, welcome to this podcast. And if you enjoy this podcast, please share it with your colleagues. We really want as many people as possible to feel their empowerment, to step into the identity of an empowered principal. And this podcast, we bring it. We bring it. We bring it.

So, a short and sweet episode on a little story I have from a client of EPC last spring. I’ve been thinking about this conversation we had and I realized I haven’t shared it on the podcast. So I wanted to briefly share this with you. I think it will be highly valuable for you to implement as you’re entering into the new year.

This past spring, during one of our EPC sessions, it was towards the end of the school year, was one of our last few sessions. One of our clients was sharing a story about an ongoing conflict that she was having with a teacher, and the teacher was stating to the principal, “I don’t trust you. I don’t trust this process.” She was blaming the process. She was blaming the principal.

And the principal came into EPC and said, “Hey, I’m doubting myself. I’m fearing that I’m making a mistake. Maybe I misspoke, misstepped. Maybe I didn’t follow a process. Maybe something I did was wrong.” So immediately as soon as the teacher was deflecting and redirecting and attempting to project her own thoughts and feelings onto the principal, the principal received that. So something I want to say right here is that when we’re engaging with other people, we are bodies of energy. We energetically feel other people’s emotions. Emotions are energy, and we can transfer that energy. That energy can transfer to us or we can transfer energy to somebody else.

If you’ve ever been kind of super excited, and you’re super really in a good mood, everything’s going great, and then you get around a womp person, their womp energy, you can be like, “Oh, bummer. Like, that’s bringing me down, man. Don’t bring down the vibe.” But it can change your energy or vice versa. Maybe you’ve been kind of having a rough day and then somebody comes in, their energy is so happy, so excited, and they cheer you right up and your energy transfers from like being down to being up. Energy is transferable.

And we want to be intentional about understanding our energy and also protecting our energy so that we are in charge of our energy and we are not victim to the whim of other people’s emotional energy, okay? So I want you to notice that this teacher was coming in with very negative energy, you could call it. She was blaming, deflecting, redirecting, projecting, and the principal was saying, “Hey, this is putting me into question mode, into contemplation mode,” which is perfect. That’s perfectly fine. That is the place to go to say, “Hey, wait a minute. What is happening here?”

So I want you to think about when people are blaming, deflecting, redirecting conversations, and projecting their energy onto you, what the intention is behind that. People deflect in an attempt to delay conversation. They’re going to say, “Hey, wait a minute. It’s you.” They’re blaming. They’re deflecting the blame back onto you and you’re like, “Whoa.” Now you have to stop, delay conversation. It’s a tactic. It’s a strategy. Now, it’s typically subconscious. They didn’t go into your office with the intention of deflecting the blame, but they might feel very defensive and in response to that defensiveness, they deflect. But they want to delay the conversation because they don’t want the experience, the emotional experience of taking ownership of that conversation that you’re going to have with them.

People will redirect to another topic or to refocus the energy to distract from the original topic. So when there’s a redirection, you’ll see this all the time where, you know, somebody’s trying to have a conversation and then it jumps topics. Why? Trying to distract from the original topic, trying to avoid the discomfort of the conversation at hand.

People will project their feelings and their own actions back onto you. “Well, you’re the one who started it.” “Oh no, you’re the one.” If you’ve ever felt like you’ve tried to bring something up with a teacher, staff member, or even a personal friend or a partner or spouse, and they say, “Well, you did this. Well, you did that.” They’re projecting back onto you, trying to redirect the conversation, trying to deflect what they’ve done, trying to go around the original conversation and start up something else. They want you to doubt yourself, question yourself so that you slow down the energy of the original conversation.

So this was happening with one of the clients in EPC, and here is what I recommended. It will feel uncomfortable to hear this recommendation, but I want you to contemplate it. Here’s what I said to her. Drop the rope. Imagine the analogy of a game of tug of war. In the game of tug of war, it takes two people to pull at the rope. For there to be tension between two people, if the rope is energy and it’s connecting you to that other person, both people on both ends must be pulling at the rope for there to be tension in the rope. If one person or the other drops the end of the rope, the tension drops. The tension in the rope lags and it goes falls to the ground.

There is a disconnect. When one person disconnects, detaches from that attachment, there is no longer energy being transferred back and forth. So when you’re in a game of tug and war, for example, when we feel we are right, we feel very justified, very self-righteous that we are right. We have facts, we have data, we have information. We have proof. We pull at the rope to prove we are accurate. We’re tugging to prove we are accurate.

When we feel we’ve been wrongly accused, when we’ve been blamed, when we feel that blame is inaccurate, we will tug with defensiveness. We will do anything to try and prove ourselves not wrong. We will tug, we will engage, we will attach to defensiveness, we will pull with defensiveness, and we will engage in a tug of war.

When we feel that somebody’s lying to us or we feel they are withholding information or there’s something we feel energetically that they’re doing that’s an omission or they’re lying to us or they’re hiding something from us, we get engaged. We pick up the rope and we pull. We tug to try and corner them. We try to catch them in their lie.

Instead of picking up the rope and pulling and engaging in a tug of war, drop the rope. Know your truth without them needing to validate it. Know your truth without them needing to validate your truth. Know your truth without you needing to defend it. Know your truth without needing them to agree with you. Know your truth without needing to attack back. Know your truth without them not dropping the rope. They’re still pulling on one end, but you’ve dropped it. What happens? If they pull hard enough, they fall on their backside. They go boom, boom on their bum, right?

Drop the rope. Dropping the rope means aligning to what feels true for you. Squeaky clean truth, taking a peek at yourself. What about what the person is saying is true? Yep, that’s true. And you know what? You can agree with them and still be in agreement with your truth. There is no one universal truth when it comes to humans. There’s perspectives. That’s it. Perspectives. You have a perspective, they have a perspective. Get clean, squeaky clean with your truth, with your perspective. Be in agreement with your perspective and be open to hearing their perspective.

You can drop the rope by saying, “Yes, I’m human. Yes, it could be true that I misspoke. It could be true that I missed.” Your perspective is valid and mine is as well. Looking for the truth in their words and looking for the truth in your words. Dropping the rope means that you have the capacity to hold space for both perspectives to be present. It doesn’t mean you back off. It means they can be upset and you can move forward. It means you may have made a mistake in the process and you need to rectify that and reconcile it, repair it, whatever, and move on.

It may mean that nothing’s gone wrong on your end and they are just in a great amount of fear, a great amount of disbelief, or rejecting the truth or a lack of any ownership of their actions and behavior. And we can understand that people are afraid, afraid of ownership, afraid of consequences, so they abdicate that responsibility by blaming, redirecting, trying to project it onto you.

If you are squeaky clean, you don’t need a tug of war game. You simply drop the rope, allow them to feel their feelings, conduct yourself in a way that feels in alignment and true for you, and allow them to have their feelings without engaging in a tug of war. So practice dropping the rope this year.

It will feel like an ego death. It will feel like you are not honoring yourself, but the truth is that you are honoring exactly yourself. When you know you are truthful, when you know you are in alignment, you do not need to pull at the rope. You’ve decided my perspective is solid. It’s on the foundation upon which I choose to believe. This is my version of my understanding of my perspective of my truth. Or maybe there is some insight from that person. Maybe there is something from their perspective you can glean to clean up your perspective.

If your perspective perhaps is clouded with a little bit of blame and abdication and projection, clean that up first. Allow yourself to hear. It goes both ways. But if you can drop the rope and just listen to the perspective, check in with your own perspective, align it to what you believe is the truth to the best of your ability for you, it will feel squeaky clean. It will feel aligned. It might not feel good, but it feels truthful. It feels aligned. You know what it’s like to be locked into your alignment. Dropping the rope is what allows you to lock into your alignment.

Give that a try this year and let us know how it goes. Come on into EPC. I will teach you how to drop the rope. Have a beautiful week. Talk to you next week. Take care. Bye.

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

Hello, empowered principals. Welcome to episode 396. 

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

Well, hello my empowered principals. Happy Tuesday. Welcome to the podcast. So happy to be here with you today. It is the end of July. We are gearing up for the upcoming school year. I am so excited for 25/26. EPC is launching next week. You still have time to join us. Come on in. We would love to support you throughout the year.

The content I have created for this program this year, I’m so proud of it and I’m so excited to share it with you. It is the best of the best of my work. I have done some deep, deep work personally, professionally, and I really feel like I’m aligned. I’m really engaged. I’m really on track and really tuned in to the needs and the support and the conversations that principals who really want to take themselves and their schools to the next level are having.

So if you are interested, if you’re eager, if you’re excited, if you want to be the best version of you as a principal, EPC is your place. Come on in.

All right. This is the time of year when you are planning. You are mapping out your school year. This is the perfect time to have this conversation because you’ve probably been sitting in district-level meetings or all-hands meetings, or you are about to. Perhaps your district goes on a retreat. Maybe you have an admin retreat or you have these long planning meetings, conversations about the year. And the district will tend to roll out their initiatives.

So this message is actually for district leaders and site leaders, but site leaders, I know sometimes you can feel very disempowered or you feel a lack of control or agency over the initiatives. Perhaps the district rolls them out and says, “These are your marching orders. You need to implement these seven initiatives, and we’re doing this, and we’re doing fidelity checks, and we’re doing walkthroughs, and we’re going to do all the things.”

I’m going to cover that in depth in EPC, but this is an overview of the approach that we take to planning, the approach that we take to goal setting, the approach that we take to problem-solving and creating a road map, a year-long plan, a three-month plan. I want to talk about this because we aren’t generally tuned in to what’s driving our approach to planning.

So we’re going to dive into that, just introductory level today here on the podcast, and we take it to the next level. We go really deep into this in EPC. So, I want to highlight the difference between everything planning and anything planning. Most of us look at our school, our district, the needs of our community, our staff, our students, our families, and we see need. We see lack, we see need, we see the need for improvements, the need for change, the need for adjustments, and as people with big hearts who are here to serve and here to help and here to improve the experience for our students and our staff, we want it all to happen right here, right now. We want to fix all of the problems this year.

And we know, mathematically speaking, we could not have enough time, resources, energy to fix all of the problems. And in reality, there is no fixing everything. There is no perfection here. So we know that. If you were to sit down with me and have a conversation or you were in EPC, you would say, “Yes, I get that it’s not supposed to be perfect, but I kind of want it to be, right?” So here’s the truth. We feel an urgency, we feel the desire, we feel that urge to fix and change and improve.

And we want it all to look smooth. We want it to feel smooth. We want everything to just function without a lot of distress, without a lot of conflict, without a lot of hiccups or problems. It would be lovely to walk into school where there’s a day where everything just hums. And you have those days, especially if you’ve put good systems in place, you have strong relationships, you are consistent in your communication and in your protocols. When you have those things in place, you can experience days where everything is blissful. The kids are on track, everything is functioning as you would desire it to be, okay?

And because we are in the business of humans and developing humans, the truth is that most days involve interruptions and hiccups and disturbances and behavior issues and emotional and mental regulation issues and behavior issues. So the truth is that there are several things that come up during the school year. And at the beginning of the year, this time of year, we have a lot of excitement, enthusiasm, energy around, we’re coming in, we’re going to make this year better. The experience, I want it to be better than it was last year because, good Lord, we know last year was rough. And this year, we want it to feel better.

Or the district will say, “Okay, we’ve looked at the data, we’ve done the research, we’ve analyzed this, and here are our theories and conclusions about the initiatives we are going to roll out for the year.” So some of the typical goals: student attendance, student engagement, behavior management systems, tiered interventions or extensions, like STEAM, STEM, reading intervention, math interventions, special education processes, protocols, test scores, of course. Test scores are a big one. Instructional leadership approach, what we’re going to do as instructional leaders. Are we going to do walkthroughs, observations, learning walks, pacing guide expectations, lesson plan expectations? You know the drill. Sometimes we’ll have parent engagement or communication goals.

The district will determine initiatives based on their interpretation of the data or what the school board wants to see, what parent input, maybe staff input, if you’re lucky enough to be included in the initiative building process. But typically, it falls into these data points: student attendance, student engagement, test scores, special education results and, you know, data, that kind of thing, intervention data. And they will create theories around that data and then develop an approach to that. That’s what an initiative is, right?

So, in the beginning of the year, we have all of this excitement and energy and we believe we can tackle it all. But the truth is that you can. You literally can improve anything you want this year, but not everything you want. With the everything planning approach, we try to tackle all of the problems in all of the areas. We want to increase student attendance, we want to increase student engagement, we want to increase test scores, we want to increase teacher fidelity on whatever it is we’re doing instructionally. We want to increase our special education results. We want to increase our intervention results.

And what happens is year after year after year, what we notice is that teachers feel burned out and discouraged and they feel defeated. Same with our principals, same with our support staff and students. Our expectation is we want you to learn it, learn it well, learn it fast, learn it perfectly, do really well on a test so we can feel good about ourselves as educators, so that you can look good as students and we can celebrate and everybody can be happy.

But trying to sell the idea that people must improve in all of the areas is setting yourself up and others for failure, frustration, disappointment, but worst of all, discouragement and resentment. Because when students feel discouraged and defeated, they don’t want to engage in learning. When teachers feel chronically criticized or judged or they feel discouraged at their test scores and they have resentment and they feel defeat, people’s will to teach goes down. Principals, same with you. We have all these initiatives and you need to check all these boxes and do all these things and get your school up and running. You need to fix all of this year. They are setting you up for failure.

So district leaders, if you’re out there listening to this, be mindful. Your district really can accomplish anything it wants this year, anything, but not everything. Because if you think about achievement, achievement occurs based on how a person feels. When they’re setting the goal, how does it feel? Does it feel attainable or not? Are they genuinely interested in accomplishing this goal or not? Has it been bestowed upon them or do they have skin in the game? Are they invested in the goal?

So how the goal feels as it’s being set matters. And then while you are in the work of accomplishing the goal during the school year, the day-to-day work that’s required to accomplish the goal, how does it feel? Does it feel on track? Are we still invested? Or are we just doing it for the sake of compliance? What is the intention and what is the feeling around the goal while we’re doing the work of it?

The most tangible example I can offer you is I used to be a long-distance runner back in my 20s, 30s, and 40s, and I would set a goal for a race. I had to feel that goal. I had to want it from the very outset. Why did I want to set that goal? What did I want out of it? And then I noticed how I felt in the training for the goal, the training of that race.

So if I signed up for a race and I wanted to get a PR, you know, my personal best, right, and I wanted to experience a pain-free run, let’s say, depending on what the goal was, why I set the goal, what the intention was. Sometimes having a race, it just kept me motivated enough to maintain training. Sometimes that was the only reason I signed up for a race. It’s like, “Oh, it’s a little 5K. It’s going to make sure that I get up and run every morning.” If I was doing a 10K, I was like, “Oh, I think I want to try for my PR, my personal best.” And if I was running a half marathon or a marathon, that was like an extension goal, like testing my limits, testing my boundaries, and ensuring that I was balancing training with safety and pain-free running, okay?

So when you’re thinking about a goal, think about what it feels like before, during, and then what do you think you’re going to feel at the end? So when you’re goal setting, when you’re having these conversations in July and August of this year, be thinking about how a goal feels before, during, and after. Because what we do, and the reason we feel urgency, is we want people, we want things to change. We want test scores to change. We want data to reflect change, improvement change, in all of the areas because we think that once the test scores are up, once attendance is up, once behavior referrals are down, when all of those data points are where we want them to be, we think that education’s going to feel better. Like life’s going to be a little easier, it’s going to be a little better, we’re going to be a little happier.

However, this is founded upon the false premise that perfection will eliminate pain, that if things are better in our schools, if the scores are better, if the data reflects better, that we’ll feel better, that life will be better, that we will eliminate pain from our experience, which is why we feel the urgency. We think that life will feel better, school will feel better, our career will feel better when these data points reflect back to us what we want them to. So is it actually true that if we improve everything, that we will not experience discomfort, pain, disappointment, guilt, shame, embarrassment, failure? Is that true?

Or is it true that we come in and do this work to connect, to support, to develop, to collaborate, to engage in life, to be alive as an educator, to engage with students, engage with teachers for the process of developing humans, for educating humans, and for the experience of connecting and collaborating and learning together? Knowing that there will always be hiccups, there will always be bumps, there will always be problems that come up. No matter what we fix, there will be another one. And in knowing that, we can explore how to get out of that loop of urgency that we feel chronically trying to fix everything.

So the district is going to determine their initiatives, and then as district leaders and site leaders, we want to explore the feelings that come with these goals and plans, trying to plan for everything versus saying, “What’s one thing we really want to tackle this year?” And in EPC, I’m teaching a course on this. And in fact, I am teaching planning mastery next week, actually.

So if you are interested in signing up for Time Mastery for the Empowered Principal, we are meeting next week. That is an a la carte option if you aren’t ready to join EPC. You can participate in this program separately for the cost of $111. It is a three-part class. It will be held on August 1st, August 5th, and August 7th. So I think that’s a Friday, a Tuesday, and a Thursday. And I’m going to walk you through the planning mastery process, how to plan your next 90 days, how to plan out your year without it feeling overwhelming, without it being as stressful, so that you can feel empowered as a leader, so that you can feel confident that you are getting to the priorities, that you’re getting everything done, okay?

We’re going to talk about that in Time Mastery. If you want to sign up for that, the link will be in the show notes. And we’ll talk about how to get out of that loop of urgency. When you feel this chronic urgency to get this done right now and get this figured out and tackle this and this is where we overwork, overexert, overschedule, we exhaust ourselves and we feel burned out. And then we go into the underwhelm cycle where we’re just, “What does this matter anyway, right?” We go from overwhelm to underwhelm, overwhelm to underwhelm. It’s like we’re bouncing between all and none. We want to live in the land of and.

So planning your year focused on the one thing. If there’s one thing that you could accomplish this year and feel good about it, what would that be? What’s the one priority? It’s not to say you’re not going to have other smaller goals or other tasks. You’re still going to have deadlines and things you need to complete and observations and you’re still going to do all of the things. But this guilt trip that we give ourselves all year long, we have this laundry list of things we want to get done. We don’t get to them. “Oh, I should do that. Oh, I didn’t do that. Oh, I should do that. I didn’t get to that. Oh, I feel so bad. Oh, I should work late. Oh, I should go in this weekend.” That kind of thing, we want to reduce that stress for you, okay?

So come on in to EPC. You’ll get everything in EPC. Or if you want to taste, if you’re brand new to the world of the Empowered Principal and you want to just check out Time Mastery, you can purchase Time Mastery for $111. It’s a three-part course. I will walk you through the pre-planning and then the planning and then overcoming obstacles, okay?

Have a beautiful school year. Welcome back. Congratulations to all of the brand new school leaders out there. Remember, you guys, you are going to be able to join the Essentials for School Leaders. I will be running that program again this fall. I will list the dates as soon as we have those secured, but I will be running Essentials for School Leaders in later September, early October. 

So get you through the kickoff of the year, join EPC to help you with the kickoff of the year, or you can take Time Mastery just to get yourself situated, ready to go. And then Essentials for School Leaders will happen towards the end of September and into October, okay?

So with that, I bid you a wonderful, beautiful week. Enjoy the school year. I can’t wait to hear all about it. It’s going to be extraordinary. Have a beautiful week, and I will talk to you guys next week. Take great care. Bye-bye.

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

Hello, empowered principals. Welcome to episode 394. 

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

Well, hello my empowered principals. Happy Tuesday. Welcome to the podcast. I hope you’re having a beautiful week. I am so thrilled to be here with you today. I love summer. Can I just do a shout-out to the Summer of Fun Challenge? I love summer. I don’t care where I am in the world. Summer is such a delicious season. And we are also gearing up for the fall.

So, if you are a school administrator, you’re already thinking three months ahead, six months ahead, aren’t you? So here we are in July, you’re thinking about August, September, October, getting ready for staffing, onboarding, professional development, the first week of school, class placements, registrations, systems, school-wide systems, getting kids trained, getting teachers trained, all of that’s happening right now. So, this is the perfect time to join EPC. We are starting in the beginning of August. That’s two weeks away.

I highly, highly recommend that you join EPC for the upcoming school year. We run from August through May. EPC, the Empowered Principal Collaborative, if you’re new to the podcast, welcome. The Empowered Principal Collaborative is a mastermind experience. It’s a group coaching program. The experience that you have in this group is a combination of leadership development, professional development. It is personal development, expanding your capacity to manage your time, balance, planning, emotions, your leadership skills, your communication skills, your development of your vision and implementation of that vision. So we encompass teaching, learning, professional development, personal development, expanding yourself personally, because personal development is professional development.

So EPC is the full package. You get mentorship, you get coaching, you get professional development, personal development. We problem solve, we mastermind, we collaborate. We hold space for one another when somebody is going through a challenging time or a difficult situation. We provide that comfort. We listen. Your voice is heard. You have the bandwidth to share your expertise while also learning from other people’s expertise.

I cultivated EPC so that you finally have a place to land, that school leaders have a place to discuss issues, the real issues that are going on, however you’re feeling, what’s working, what’s not, what we need to adjust, why it’s not working, what is our theory. Let’s test this. Let’s also expand our capacity to be courageous and bold and brave and innovative and hold those difficult conversations and share your ideas to evolve your school, to expand our impact. That’s what EPC is about. So this is the perfect time to join.

Bring your colleagues, bring your friends. The more the merrier in EPC because we are banding together to have the courage to innovate, to create, to evolve, to expand, to adjust, to transform the experience for teachers, for children, for students, staff members, family, and for us, for us, for them, and for the greater good. It’s a triple win.

So come on into EPC. I’ll make sure the link is in the show notes. There are two options. You can pay in full and be done with it, or there is a monthly payment plan. So there’s a 10-month installment plan. So you can do that as well. Anyway, I just wanted to remind you and invite you into EPC. It’s going to be its best year ever. Every year, I do an extensive amount of reflection, contemplation, while I’m also learning and growing and evolving as a coach myself and reading up on and learning about the issues that school leaders face, working with people all across the country to enhance my ability to coach you. So every year gets better and better.

I apply these tools myself, and I have found that the more that I participate in EPC, the more I learn, the more I grow, and I see this synergy of people evolving together, hand in hand, shoulder to shoulder, equal and different, each bringing our own unique talents and experiences and expertise, but also a collaborative and a community win for school leaders at large. So come on into EPC. We would love to meet you, love to support you, and love to hear all that you have to share and all that you have to say.

So today, I want to talk about asking how. So often as humans, we ask, how do we do this? How do we do that? How did you do that? How did you do that? And it’s a question that I have studied in myself and in my clients because I want to identify what’s driving us to ask the how questions and what the how means about us, about the question, about the situation, and how we can adjust it to a more empowered question. So many times, I will get the question, how?

How do I plan? How do I manage my time? How do I prioritize? How do I delegate? How do I build culture? How do I build relationships? How do I communicate this information? How do I communicate in general? How can I possibly communicate this XYZ thing? How do I create balance? How do I trust? How do I deal with feeling disappointment, embarrassed, ashamed, incompetent, insufficient? How do I deal with that? How do I deal with other people? How do I handle X situation?

So I’m going to give you three options to handle the how questions that come up in your brain. Now, don’t shame yourself for asking how, because it’s a normal question. We wouldn’t have the word how in our vocabulary if we didn’t need it. But I want us to identify it and get very specific and clear with ourselves around why we’re asking. So, when your brain offers you a how question, how do I? How did you? How do I?

Option number one is to answer the question for yourself first. So when you ask, well, how do I plan? How do I prioritize? How do I build culture? Answer the question. How would you? How would you answer the question? If I knew the answer to this, my answer would be fill in the blank. And you can’t fill in the blank with, I don’t know. Play the game. It’s just for fun. You don’t have to actually do the thing. You just are playing the game with yourself. You’re pushing your brain to answer itself.

What would I do? If I were the expert and I knew how to plan, how would I plan? If I knew, if I was an expert at building culture, how would I build it? If I was really good at communicating, what do I think would be the best way to communicate? How would I create balance? What does balance even mean for me? How do I trust? How do you trust? When are times that you trust? When do you find it easy to trust? How do I deal with these feelings? How have you been dealing with the feelings?

And here’s the thing, you might write down all that you currently know, you might tap into a source within you that has expertise that you didn’t even think of or that you did not tap into until this moment. So answer the question. Answer it. The wisdom is within you. You will be so surprised at what you come up with. Now, that’s just option number one. Try your ideas out, see if they work. It’s going to build up your confidence because you’ll notice a lot of times the reason you don’t ask yourself is because of your belief. I don’t know. I don’t know how. I’ve never done that before. I’ve never experienced that. How could I possibly know? Notice why you’re asking the how in that scenario and why you’re not answering the question. Okay?

All right. Option number two, shifting from how to what. So when your brain offers how, how do I do this? How do I do that? Shift to what. What outcome do I want to create? What outcome do I want from learning how to plan? What outcome am I creating when I prioritize? Or take any of your how questions and then ask what outcome do I want from this? So if you’re asking the question of, how do I build culture and relationships? What is the outcome regarding culture and relationships that I am trying to achieve?

What do I gain when I trust? What instead of how? Because what this does is it shifts your brain into how is like the actions I take. What actions do I take to create this outcome? The how takes you back to what outcome am I trying to create? Not how do I create it? What is the outcome I want? And then from there, how will I know I’ve achieved it? What will it look and feel like if I’ve accomplished planning, prioritizing, time management, relationships, culture? How will I know I’m a good leader? What will it look and feel like? The answer to how is what. So identify and clarify for yourself what it is you’re trying to create and why you’re asking the how is based on what you want to create, what you want to accomplish, what you want to achieve, what result you want to create for yourself. Okay?

Then, option three. Option three is I invite you to only apply option three if you’ve tried option one and you’ve tried option two, and you’ve done both. So option three works best if you have tried one and you’ve tried two and you’re still not feeling that you’re coming up with the results you want. So you know what you want and you’ve tried some things to maximize your ideas and you’ve actually implemented them to see if they work. Versus, I don’t know how. I just want what you have. What I see you having, I want it. How’d you do that? Okay?

So option number three is if you have clarified the what, the outcome that you want, and you have answered your own hows, you might decide that there’s something outside of you that would help you answer those hows and clarify the whats. So you can research for the fun and sake of learning and expanding yourselves. Like for example, I might go online and observe somebody playing guitar, watching an expert play guitar, mentoring on YouTube, so that I can learn to play guitar, or that I can learn to fix something around the house. There’s many times, I love YouTube. YouTube is a platform for me to know what I want. I want to fix this outlet. How do I do that? I don’t know, and it would be dangerous to tinker around and figure it out. So I’m going to go ask an expert and I’m going to learn from them, but I’m going to learn from them with the intention of expanding my capacity, my skill set, my knowledge base. So it’s still coming back to me being responsible and taking ownership of my transformation, my expansion. Okay?

So you can go out, research, learn, and then carefully give it a try, especially if it comes to anything with electricity was probably a bad example, but it’s true. And you want to give it a try and see what works. Now, when it comes to your physical, mental, or emotional well-being, if there’s something that is actually really dangerous or potentially traumatizing or painful, get an expert. 

That’s when you hire someone and say, I don’t need to know the how. I don’t want to know the how. I want to pay you to do the how and the what. Here’s what I want. I want you to do the how. That’s okay too, guys. But for the sake of this argument, we’re talking about when we’re asking people, how do I do create this result for myself? I see you have the result. How did you do it? Or how do I do it?

Now I want you to think about this. Why are we asking the how? One, it’s we don’t believe we know how, that we don’t know how. Somebody else knows how, but we don’t know how. So option one covers this. We think we don’t know how, but we haven’t dug in deep. Do we actually not know how or are we trying to surpass the exercise of digging in deep and wondering and seeing and exploring what we do know? Okay? So if you think, well, I just don’t know how. I don’t know how. Option one will cover that. Explore what you do know.

The second thing we think is we’re not sure of the outcome we’re trying to create. So option two covers this. You’re like, wait a minute. What am I actually trying to do here? Clarify that first before you ask the how. Sometimes we’re not even sure what we want. So we’ll ask somebody, well, how do you do that? And they’ll say, what is it exactly you’re trying to do? And then we say, uh, I don’t know. I’m not actually sure. Number one, get clarity on what you are trying to create or what outcome you want to accomplish. And then number two, explore how you think that might happen. So options one and two cover the lack of belief in ourselves or the lack of clarity of what we want.

And then option three is when we know what we want, we’ve clarified, and we’ve tried a couple of things here or there, and we say to ourselves, but I’ve already tried everything. Everything that I know, I’ve tried. Well, have we really tried everything we know? Have we given it enough time? You have to discern that for yourself. But option three, when you go out into the world and research, let me learn, let me explore. I want to figure out how, or I decided that I don’t really need to know the how, that I can delegate that to somebody else who does know the how, because I’m very clear on the what I want. So when you delegate or when you hire somebody, you have to know very clearly, here’s what I want.

I’m actually dealing with this right now. I’ve got a couple of contractors like tree trimmers coming out to the acreage where I live, and we have to be able to tell them exactly what we want. There’s hundreds of trees. What do we want? Which trees? Why do we want the those limbs cut? Right? What is our goal? We have to be able to articulate that to get the result we want. So the same is true at school. If you want to delegate something, you have to be crystal clear on the outcome that you want to be able to articulate it and delegate it and then allow that person time to create the result. Okay?

Now, when we’ve decided that we have clarified what we want and we’ve exhausted our capacity of how we might do this, we’ve tried this, tried this, let’s say you’ve tried lots of things, and now you’re looking outside of you, we want to be clear with ourselves and be onto ourselves about why we’re asking how. Now, I looked at myself for these answers. I asked myself, when do I ask how? Why am I asking how? And is there anything I’m avoiding taking ownership or responsibility for when I ask how? Here’s what I found.

I have found that I want to circumvent the discomfort of either, number one, exercising my own mind. Number two, clarifying what I want to do. Like I don’t want to take the time or the effort to clarify what I actually want. Number three, I want to avoid the discomfort of the effort involved in researching and reading and learning, because learning is a form of discomfort. It’s hard. It’s clumsy. It takes time. It takes effort. It takes brain power. And my mind’s like, but I don’t want to do all of that. I just want it done. And I don’t want to have to take time out of my day to learn it. So I have to decide, do I want to pay to have an expert do it and I don’t need to learn or do I actually want to learn to expand my skills?

And then finally, when we ask how, we are trying to circumvent the discomfort of trying and failing, trial and error. We’re afraid to try something new. We’re afraid of trying and failing. We’re worried about what others will think of us if we are clumsy and we try something new and it doesn’t work the first time and we’re failing. We’re worried about what we’re going to make it mean about ourselves if we try and fail. We’re worried about what other people will think. We have an intense desire to get it right the first time we try. So we will go to other people who we believe know how and can articulate how, and we will ask them, how did you do it? How do I do this? What are your ideas? Instead of asking ourselves, what are our ideas?

There is that is the difference from empowerment or disempowerment. Empowerment is I have it within me. And when you feel disempowered, like, I don’t know how. I don’t have the capacity. I don’t have the knowledge, the skills, the bandwidth, or I don’t have the emotional regulation or the emotional bandwidth to sit down and do this. Sometimes, and this is a positive one, sometimes we will ask how as a means of connecting and collaborating with other people.

And I actually love this. There’s nothing wrong with this. If we’re truly connecting and collaborating, which means that we are contributing equally, like we are both participating in give and receive. We’re not simply asking somebody else to do it for us or to tell us how to do it so we don’t have to do the work. That is different. 

When you’re saying, hey, let’s figure this out together. Let’s go on this experiment, this journey, this exploration together. Let’s try and figure this out. This is the goal we want. Here’s what we want, here’s why we want it, and now we’re going to test some theories and we’re going to do it together. What do you think? What do I think? Let’s collaborate in figuring out the how together. That is a form of connection and collaboration and bringing community together in unity towards solving a collective problem or handling a situation collectively. And this is where mentorship and coaching are most effective.

So when a person is being mentored and they connect with their mentor for the purpose of learning and expanding their own skills, while at the same time, they choose to discern for themselves along the way, this is when the learning integrates into that person’s identity. They learn for the sake of learning to expand their skills, their mindset, their ability to handle anything that comes their way, which then expands their identity of who I am and what I’m capable of. My self-concept of who I am, my self-efficacy of what I believe I’m capable of, creates an identity. Those two in combination create your identity. Who am I and what am I capable of? That’s my identity. And I want to continually evolve that identity. I’m now I’m capable of this and this is who I am. I used to be this, but now I’m this. I used to not know how to do this, but now I know. These are people who take ownership for their learning and the expansion of their skill set just for themselves.

And they might study with another person and invite them along the journey or seek out their expertise to expand their own expertise. While conversely, there are people who look for mentorship and they see that mentor as the expert. They put the mentor on a pedestal and they see themselves as a person who’s the student, who’s the neophyte, the person who doesn’t really know anything, and you are just there to guide them. And they look up to the mentor. Tell me what to do. Tell me how to do it. But that person doesn’t expand their identity. They don’t expand their belief in themselves that they now know how to do it and that they can apply decisions and action and skills and self-regulation into their lives and into their careers.

So there are and you’ve probably experienced this with students. There are students who identify as a learner and they use teaching, they use school as mentorship for themselves to expand their identity as a student. You’ve seen teachers. There’s teachers who take it upon themselves to learn. They might ask and collaborate, they might ask how, but they do it from a place of wanting to expand themselves versus being spoonfed, just tell me how. Just tell me how to do it. You tell me how. You solve this for me. That doesn’t give people empowerment. They’re just saying, just tell me what to do and I’ll do it. But it doesn’t expand their skills, their minds, it doesn’t evolve their identity. Can you see the difference?

I see this in coaching all the time. There are clients who hire me to just tell them how to do the job. But then that makes me responsible for their success or their failures. And then I have clients who come to learn and apply the coaching in the way that works for them. They use self-discernment to identify what they want, why they want it, and how they want to evolve themselves and apply their coaching and customize it and customize the concepts that I teach them to fit into who they are and the outcomes they want to create for themselves and their school.

And I’ve seen it as a client in other programs where there’s people who want to be spoonfed the answers and have the mentor or the coach or the expert do the work for them. And in that case, like when you have somebody who’s skilled, like a laborer or a skilled laborer who’s coming in to work on electronics or plumbing or tree trimming or, you know, you might have construction going on at your school. There are people that you just pay to be experts. They’re not mentoring you. You’re not learning how to put in new carpet or to replumb the school or to add whatever, new electronics or put in smart boards. You’re not there for the installation and maintenance. That’s not the skill sets that you’re choosing to evolve yourself in. You could do it if you wanted to, but most likely, you’re trying to expand your leadership capacity.

That’s what EPC does. We expand your leadership capacity, not because you don’t know how, but we help you trust yourself and tap into the part of you that does know how. We empower you. And then I teach you how to empower your staff and empower your students. Because in full transparency, I see aspects of our school system, our current system that hinder empowerment, that actually discourage empowerment. They want teachers to just be told what to do and do it our way. And we want kids to just, we want to be able to just tell them, do it this way. Just do it this way. Don’t question, don’t ask, don’t ask, just do it. Right?

That’s not the kind of adult we want out in the world. We want somebody who’s empowered. And we have to have the courage to take ownership for our own personal and professional development, our own expansion, our own evolution of our identity, so that we can with integrity, invite teachers and students to do the same. Instead of us being up on a pedestal where we are responsible for solving all of the problems, we empower others to take ownership of figuring out the what they want to create and how they want to create it in their own approach, and then letting go of the insistence that they do it our way. It feels very scary to empower people because we’re afraid that they’ll do it their own way. But isn’t what we want the result? Isn’t what we want the outcomes versus the how?

So it’s an area worth exploring and we’re going to be exploring this concept in depth in EPC this coming year. I really want to push the boundaries of our thinking, the boundaries of the limitations and rules and expectations that have been placed upon schools. If we want to evolve student outcomes, if we want to expand and we want to increase student outcomes, we have to understand what we want, why we want them, and explore other hows, because the hows that we’ve been told aren’t working for all kids. It’s not working for us, it’s not working for them, staff or students, and it’s definitely not working for the greater good.

So we are going to push the boundaries and really explore this concept of how. Reflect on the times that you’ve asked how and explore your intentions behind those how questions. See what comes up for you. I invite you into EPC. This is the perfect time to join. Can’t wait to meet you. I will talk to you next week. Take good care of yourselves. 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.