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Are you feeling swamped by the demands of being a principal? From juggling emails, calls, and decisions to boosting test scores and wading through endless paperwork, the pressure is real.
But imagine a scenario where you no longer feel this overwhelming stress. Picture yourself as a more resilient leader, concentrating on enhancing your school rather than merely coping with the daily tasks that currently consume your time.
I‘m Barb Flowers. Drawing upon my eight-year experience as an elementary principal, with a Ph.D. in Educational Leadership and certification as a life coach, Along the way, I've mentored and coached school leaders, guiding them to change their mindset, set boundaries and focus on their own well-being while navigating their roles.
Each episode offers practical insights on time management, communication, overcoming overwhelm, boosting confidence, and fostering a positive mindset. We'll also discuss topics like working with stakeholders, implementing new initiatives, and managing discipline. Let's set boundaries, focus on well-being, and reignite your passion for being a principal. Welcome to "The Principal's Handbook."
I firmly believe that to be an impactful educator, you must first become a confident and well-rounded individual. Join us in this journey to empower and enhance your confidence as a school leader.
How to Make This School Year Sustainable (Instead of Just Surviving It)
Speaker 3: [00:00:00] Welcome to The Principal's Handbook, your go-to resource for principals looking to revamp their leadership approach and prioritize self-care. I'm Barb Flowers, a certified life coach with eight years of experience as an elementary principal. Tune in each week as we delve into strategies for boosting mental resilience, managing time effectively, and nurturing overall wellness.
From tackling daily challenges to maintaining a healthy work-life balance, we'll navigate the complexities of school leadership together. Join me in fostering your sense of purpose as a principal and reigniting your passion for the job. Welcome to a podcast where your wellbeing is the top priority
Speaker: welcome to the podcast. Today we're talking about how to make this school year sustainable instead of surviving it. So often I see principals burn out, and it's not because they're not capable of doing the job.
They really burn out because they keep adding more to their plate. They're not making the job of a principal sustainable. [00:01:00] Any initiative I'm trying to do in the building, I always say it's gotta be simple and sustainable, and that's really the key to the job in general is thinking about how can you make the role sustainable.
If you are working every day until 6, 7, 8 o'clock at night, you're not going to be able to sustain that. That's just reality, right? That's not knocking anybody for doing that or working too hard. It's just if you want to continue the role of a principal and you want to do the job for the long term, you have to be able to sustain it.
Because when you add on more meetings, more initiatives, more expectations, more pressure, you're just going to continue to do more, more, more, and you're actually not doing things well. You're just adding things to your plate, adding pressure, and you are making it so that you're not able to sustain the building, and you're not able to s- and you're not able to sustain the role.
And the goal as a principal, if you want to make a big difference, is to be able [00:02:00] to make it in a way that is sustainable for not only you, but the teachers that you lead. Because if you're feeling burnt out, You could be making them feel that same feeling of burnout if you're adding a lot to their plate as well.
Or sometimes what I see with principals is they're doing everything for teachers, and then they burn out because they're trying to support teachers. But then your teachers won't have you as a leader anymore because you can't sustain it. So that really is a problem, and so I always talk about with the role of a principal, it's about how do we make this role sustainable for us and for our life so we're able to continue to do it.
Because if you want to do this job for the long run, you have to find a way to make it sustainable for you. So that's what I'm talking about in this episode, and I'm going to give you four tips for how to make the role more sustainable. So the first tip is to take more off your plate than you put on it.
So every new initiative that you do, every new thing that you wanna do in your building, it comes with a cost. So before saying [00:03:00] yes to something new, you need to ask yourself, "What is something we can stop doing? What can we simplify, and can two initiatives be combined to one initiative?" Sometimes you can simplify systems by combining things to make them a little bit more streamlined.
When I think of being in an elementary school in Ohio, one thing I talk a lot about is we do MTSS. We do, , reading improvement plans in schools. They're talking about having math improvement plans in schools. You have to do interventions, and people feel like it's just one more thing. All of it is one more.
And so I always like to think about how do we streamline it? How do we think about a reading improvement plan with the interventions that we do for the MTSS system, right? , How do we put all of these state initiatives together to streamline it so that it... we actually aren't doing more? It goes with the things that we're already doing.
Because if you're constantly putting another thing on your plate and you're not [00:04:00] even utilizing it and it's not meaningful, then, it just becomes another thing and people become overwhelmed. So take more off your plate than you put on. Think about, how can two initiatives become one? How can I streamline this?
What do I need to do to really simplify this? Some people come up with really complex ideas, and I would work with people who are very creative thinkers, and so they would make an initiative very complex. For example, with PBIS, maybe it was how you collected data or a process for Tier 2 interventions, and it would just be so complex that my thoughts and my feedback to them would be, "It's not sustainable."
If it's not simple, it's not sustainable for when we leave. So remember, schools don't improve because principals are doing more and more and more. They improve because principals are focused on what matters most, and you're making sure that you're constantly taking more off your plate and others' plates when you need to do something rather than putting things on So that's the first thing.
[00:05:00] The second thing that I think is really important that I talk to principals about is deciding your non-negotiable work hours. So if you haven't heard of my program, The 8 to 4 Principal Blueprint, this is basically where I talk about the goal of working eight to four, and that really works as an elementary principal when there's no sports to stay after.
And it's, , not saying that you don't have those times that you do stay after, but it's really about having a non-negotiable time that you get home from work. I always give the example that when my kids were little, I had to pick them up from daycare by a certain amount of time, so I had to leave work by 4:00.
And even now, they get off the bus, and they're home waiting for me home alone, and so I don't really like to be at work late because they're sitting here waiting. And so I think it's really important to have a time that you need to leave work and make that your non-negotiable time. And it doesn't have to be 4:00 for you, it could be whatever time that is.
But you need to protect your time and have that in your mind because it's [00:06:00] so easy to just be doing things, and before you know it, it's 5:00, 6:00 o'clock, and people at home are waiting for you, and you're still just finishing up things at work. So you need to protect your time. You need to have a non-negotiable time that you're leaving.
You need to say no more often so that you are able to leave at that time and stop treating every request that somebody has like it's an emergency and it needs to be put on your plate. So boundaries, it doesn't make you less committed as a principal. It's making the job more sustainable. So having boundaries about your non-negotiable work hours is really helpful.
So that's the second thing The third thing is to build a life you don't need a vacation from. , So I think this is something to think about is your identity cannot only be principal. You have to have other identities of yourself. Hobbies, , what are the things that you like to do?
For me, it's exercise, reading, spending time with my kids. Maybe it's taking vacations. You have to have [00:07:00] things that you look forward to outside of school. , So it's not about working the most hours. Sometimes I think we think the best principals are the ones that work the most or they're the longest, and that's not true at all.
Because if you're there and you're working the longest and you don't have boundaries, then you're not gonna have the energy to lead well because you're not taking care of yourself. I'm really big on our physical health impacts our mental and emotional health, and so you have to take care of yourself physically.
I exercise every day. I make sure that I'm on some sort of eating plan or eating healthy, and I think that it's really important if you're not, that you find ways to take care of yourself, and not just self-care that you're, soaking in a bubble bath. But, , what are the ways that you're focusing on health as a priority?
And it comes with those boundaries, those non-negotiables, because it's actually going to give you energy to lead better. I feel better because I work out in the morning before school, so I [00:08:00] come in feeling good and energetic. When I wake up, I feel like I need to stretch and move, and I just feel like I need to move my body, and so Those things for me, exercise, taking care of myself, those are non-negotiables.
So I don't wait until summer or winter break or any of that time to say I'll exercise or do things because I have more time. So that's something to think about. And then having those hobbies that you do. , As I'm recording this, it's summer break, and I'm thinking about all the people I'm catching up with
because it's summer. But it's important that you keep those connections throughout the school year, too, and you're meeting up with people for dinner and getting together. Because you can't just put everything off until summer, it's really important, 'cause then all you're doing is looking forward to summer.
You have to have things you're looking forward to throughout the school year. Build a life that you don't need a vacation from. All right, and then my fourth tip is to grow your confidence. So leadership becomes exhausting when you [00:09:00] feel very uncertain about the decisions that you make. Confidence can change everything in leadership.
I always say leadership becomes so much more fun when you're confident in what you're doing. The more instructional knowledge you build, the better you get at having difficult conversations, the more systems you put in place, the easier leadership becomes. And it becomes fun because you actually feel confident in what you're doing, and you feel like you know what you're doing.
So it's really going to help you not carry everything home at night. Because one thing I did so often as a new assistant principal was I'd make a discipline decision and then just replay it in my head, and that drained me so much as an assistant principal. I would replay the conversation with the student and think, "I hope I don't get a nasty call from the parent."
Or, I would replay the conversation where the parent pushed back on the discipline. And it was really stressful. And so it's important that you work on building your [00:10:00] confidence, you work on the thoughts that you need to have to become more confident. And some of it comes with time. The longer that you're in the role of being a principal, the more confident you're gonna become, and then it's just gonna be easier for you.
But it helps so much when you start to build that confidence, and you don't have to carry things home with you at night. So focus on growing your confidence. I'm gonna link in the show notes, I have a free workshop that you could take that might be really helpful for you if you need to grow your confidence.
Because we don't always think about this in leadership as an area that we need to grow, but you really have to become good at being decisive and trusting your decisions, because you're always going to have people who push back on your decisions as a leader. So being able to trust the choices that you make and the decisions that you make is going to be really important for feeling more confident in your leadership.
So looking back at those four tips, first, you're gonna take more off your plate than you put on. Second, decide your non-negotiable work hours. Third, build a life you don't need a vacation [00:11:00] from. And fourth, work on growing your confidence. So remember, as you go into this school year, you need to create a plan of how you want the school year to look.
Take time to be intentional. Subtract the things that don't matter. Protect your time. Build a life outside of school that you don't want a vacation from, and continue to grow into the leader that your staff needs to lead them. Because remember that sustainable leadership isn't about doing more.
It's about doing what matters most. And so the key here is to figure out what those things are that matter the most, and then focus on that, , not focus on every little thing that you have to do and constantly beat yourself up about not doing enough. So think about what you need to do as you head into the new school year to make the role more sustainable so that you're able to do this for the long run, so that you're able to do this more than a year or two years without burning out.
So I hope that you [00:12:00] have some tips on here that you can take away with you. I hope you have some things that you can reflect on and implement for the next school year. , And just remember, the best principals aren't the ones who do the most.
They're the ones who know what to subtract. I'll see you on the podcast next time.