The Principal's Handbook

building-confidence-as-a-principal
[00:00:00] This BE Podcast Network show is presented by IXL. IXL's all inclusive online teaching and learning platform simplifies EdTech needs and accelerates achievement in 95 of the top 100 U. S. school districts. IXL delivers personalized learning across a comprehensive pre K 12 curriculum, including math, language arts, science, and social studies, and helps you assess student performance through actionable, real time insights at every level of your school or district.
This one solution performs work that typically requires dozens of different tools. I have personally used IXL with students to support them in math, and I love that it focused on the skills that students needed and could help differentiate learning for them. I was also able to look at the data and use that to inform instruction.
Do you want to find out why so many leading districts trust IXL? Visit ixl. com forward slash be. That's IXL. com forward slash B E. Welcome to the principal's handbook, your go to [00:01:00] 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. Hey everyone. Welcome to the podcast. I am so excited to have you here for episode one. In this episode, we're going to be talking about how to be more confident. And I'm going to be talking about what confidence is and habits you can start doing right now to build your confidence.
But before we get into that, I want to start talking about my own journey to confidence. And I remember being a brand new principal and not being [00:02:00] confident in what I was doing day to day, especially when I started as an assistant principal. I had no idea what I was supposed to be doing or what the job even looked like.
Um, I had worked in a building that we didn't have an assistant principal, so I wasn't quite sure what I should be doing. I just, you know, went with the direction from my principal and hope that I was doing everything right. But even as a brand new principal, when I took over the building, I just remember Being overbooked constantly and wanting to change so many things at once.
And I wasn't good at prioritizing what needed to get done. And I also questioned myself a lot. I had a lot of negative thoughts and was really hard on myself. And I wouldn't have thought that I was a negative person. I wouldn't describe myself that way. But just the negative thoughts were about the decisions I was making or what I did.
I just beat myself up a lot. I was really hard on myself and I no longer feel that way, but it took a lot of work on myself to figure out who I was as a leader and just become more confident [00:03:00] overall. Not just in my, um, Professional life, but in my personal life as, as well. And to do this, I had the opportunity to work with different coaches.
I invested in myself, um, because I knew it was important for me to grow as a leader. So I started as a new principal. I had a principal coach early in my career. He was amazing. He helped me to reflect a lot of my experiences. We would talk through situations. Um, I was even in a mastermind. And so we would, you know, work as a group with that.
And just having people to talk to is so helpful for me. I also worked with a leadership coach as part of an organization I was in called Heart to Heart Leadership, which was, this is in Ohio, but we focused on improving ourselves to become better leaders. And so there were leaders from all different, um, types of work sectors, and we just focused on improving ourselves as leaders.
And I also currently work with a life coach and she just helps me through situations and work on my thoughts and [00:04:00] Um, you know how I think about situations to continue to grow in that area So I just want to say that this is what i'm here for I want to help you grow in both your personal and professional life and being able to invest in yourself whether it's time or in coaching.
It is so helpful and I cannot stress enough that taking the time to work on your personal development is going to change your career so much. So I'm so glad you're here and listening to this episode, but I just want to, and I want to remind you that successful CEOs and entrepreneurs, they prioritize their personal development.
If you ever, look up successful people and leaders and different businesses. That's what they do. They, they prioritize their personal development, their health, all those things. And I think in education, um, it doesn't always, we don't always prioritize that personal development because we're so focused on the professional development because there's always so many things, um, either coming from the state or just new things that we need to learn.
But as [00:05:00] leaders, it's so crucial that we're focusing on our personal development and. Working on our personal growth and prioritizing that because that's how we get better as not only Principles and leaders but as people and so that's really important. And that's what this podcast is about So I want to start with talking about confidence.
What is confidence? It's having belief in your abilities to do something and I like thinking about that definition because it's about belief and belief Impacts your life so much if you believe you can do something you can If you believe you can't do something, you can't, and that is a famous quote we hear all the time.
And so, you know, that's just something I always tell myself with my beliefs is that if I believe I can do it, I absolutely can. And I think as educators, that's something we teach our students, right? We want to have, and we tell our teachers, we want to have belief in our students and, and know that they have the ability to do something, and we want them to learn to have belief in themselves.
So I wanted to give you a couple of quotes about belief just [00:06:00] because I thought they were really important and really good to think about, um, how we think about it and its importance. So your success is directly proportional to your belief in yourself. That is an unknown source, but your success is directly proportional to your belief in yourself.
Belief in yourself, believe in yourself, and there will come a day when others will have no choice but to believe with you. And that is Cynthia Kersey. So believe in yourself, and there will come a day when others will have no choice but to believe with you. Believe you can, and you're halfway there.
That's Theodore Roosevelt. And doubt kills more dreams than failure ever will. That Susie chasm. So having belief in yourself and your leadership abilities and having that confidence is so important for knowing that you can do something and just feeling confident in your ability to successfully accomplish whatever you want to accomplish.
It's the only way having confidence is the only way that you can truly be [00:07:00] successful. So I want you to think about how much confidence you have as a principal right now. Just reflect on some of these questions. Do you have belief in your leadership abilities? Are you confident in how you lead others? Do you have belief in your abilities to make decisions?
And make decisions quick because that's what we do all the time as a principal. Do you focus on everything going wrong in your building? Or do you focus on what's working? Do you have a vision and goals for your building that you follow through with? Because remember, typically confidence comes with time, but putting in the work to be more confident will change how you think about your job completely.
If you're not confident in your job and you're always Second guessing yourself, you're questioning yourself. You are not going to enjoy it. But once you gain confidence, you realize that being a principal, as hard as it is, is such a fun and rewarding job. And at first, you know, as a new principal, I knew that, but it was also so hard for me to focus on what an [00:08:00] amazing job it was when I was starting out.
You know, focusing on am I doing everything right? What else do I need to be doing? And I'm constantly questioning myself, but now that I'm in a state of being more confident and just enjoying the actual job, it's such an amazing job. And when I talk to principals, this is what they say, because, you know, we get to serve students.
We get to serve parents, teachers. There's so many groups that we're working with. And it's just amazing to build those relationships and I love watching kids grow over the years and being part of that. But it's hard to enjoy that if you're not confident in your job and enjoying what you do. It's just building that confidence is such a crucial piece.
And also when you're not confident as a leader, you can't take everything, you know, as a leader and truly apply it. I remember early in my career, focusing on reading all of the leadership books. But until I learned to be a better leader and, you know, myself, learn more about myself as a leader, the leadership books didn't help me improve my leadership skills because I didn't know how to properly [00:09:00] apply those.
So again, I'm just stressing the importance of putting in the time for personal development and not just professional development and growth. So today, what I want to talk about are five confidence habits that I use every day. They help build confidence and just help you be happier overall. So these are five important habits to build confidence.
And the first habit is journaling. And this sounds so simple or so small, but every morning I start my day by journaling and since I have started this, it has totally changed my mindset because I do quick journaling. So if I don't have a lot of time, I set a timer for three minutes, but. I journal about what's on my mind and I use a journal prompt.
So I journal five things I'm grateful for. I journal a negative thought I'm having. So what, what's negative going through my mind. And then I take that negative thought and I reframe it and I turn it into a positive thought. And then I write an affirmation for the day and this just gets my brain prepped [00:10:00] in a positive manner.
And I can start thinking about. a more positive way, especially taking that negative thought and reframing it into a positive thought. It's such a great way to just start thinking from a positive mindset. Another journaling technique I use is called a brain dump, and this can be, I use this sometimes in the morning if I have a lot on my mind for that day.
But I also will use this midday, even at work. If I'm super like stressed about something that happened, or I wasn't sure if I handled it right, I just brain dump and I, I let my brain think of what, what thoughts am I having? And I write it out and then that just gets it out and I can kind of reflect on it and move on.
And again, journaling just helps you to be reflective. It gives you that time to think and just know what thoughts are going on in your head. So journaling is. Tip number one for confidence. The second habit is having gratitude and having a heart of gratitude can change everything for you because It's so hard to be negative when you're focusing on [00:11:00] the positive and all the things you have to be grateful for I start my day with gratitude like I talked about with the journaling But I also try to think about this all day when i'm at work when i'm walking through the halls I try to think about things i'm grateful for, you know, when i'm looking at student work or i'm seeing students or Um getting in classrooms and seeing great things happening.
I try to point those out in my brain of this is such a good thing and focusing on the gratitude of that. I even end my day with three things I'm grateful for, um, when I'm at school so that, you know, if it was a really hard day and not every day is, but if it was a hard day, then I'm, I'm focusing on what that positive is.
And when my assistants in the building, we try to do this together. Some days it is harder than others to find things we're grateful for. If it was a really crazy day, But once we get started in our conversation, you know, about what was good, we usually can come up with a lot, whether it was just a simple, like we had a good conversation with a teacher.
We had a great observation. It was a [00:12:00] productive day. There's always many things we can be grateful for. And also using a strategy I call five finger gratitude. So just when you're waking up or you're walking to your car, you just on each finger, think of something you're grateful for. My third confidence habit is to use affirmations.
Affirmations are encouragement for our future self. So the goal is to tap into your conscious and unconscious mind to motivate you. And it's often, the intention is we're reinforcing a particular belief, a mindset, or a desired outcome. I love to use this because it's great for describing who you want to be.
And when you put that into your brain enough, that helps you become that person. So examples of this are, I'm a person who eats healthy and exercises. I'm a person who doesn't get overwhelmed during challenging times. I'm a person who never gives up. I'm a person who says, does what she says she'll do. Um, you could even use, I'm a principal.
I'm a [00:13:00] principal who focuses on what's going well throughout the day. I'm a principal who collaborates with staff and considers their idea. So you use whatever behavior you want to have, whoever the person is you want to be, and you say those affirmations over and over. And so when I'm feeling overwhelmed, I use the one I'm a person who doesn't get overwhelmed during challenging times.
And when I tell myself that it does help relieve that feeling of overwhelm. So affirmations are very helpful for becoming the person you want to become. The fourth habit for confidence is celebrations and celebrating small things. So Acknowledging even the small things that go right, because remember, small celebrations add up to big wins.
So making sure to track just those small wins that you have is so important. It's helping you, just like gratitude, always look for things that have gone right, even if it's super small. Like maybe a teacher used one strategy that, you know, you talked about at PD, or a teacher [00:14:00] used a strategy you gave in feedback during an observation.
Those are small wins and be excited for those and, and note them and celebrate them. Um, I love to start my staff meetings with celebrations. It starts us off on a positive note. I remember one time I didn't do it. I just thought, oh, we don't really have time for that. A teacher called me out and was like, we need to do our celebrations.
I've been thinking all night about what my celebration is. So, and I just thought that was great because they look forward to saying what that positive thing is. So even helping others find celebrations, whether it's a personal celebration or a professional celebration, it doesn't matter. We always want to be cheering each other on.
So sharing with those, those with your staff are important as well. And the fifth confidence habit is prioritizing. So this is so important for organizing, arranging your tasks, your goals, your activities based on their importance. urgency of when it needs to get done and their significance. So I do this by scheduling everything.
If it's a [00:15:00] priority, I schedule it. I set boundaries on my time during this school day and I do this by making sure that I'm not over scheduling myself so that I'm able to be visible in the building. That's a priority for me. So, you know, I'll schedule time to go in classrooms or to lunch. wherever I want to be visible, but scheduling is huge.
Also having routines. I love having routines in my personal life. So I do it at school as well. You know, I have routines that help me be better at school by waking up, prioritizing my health, my fitness, and getting work done in the morning. But I also have routines at school where I like to come in and do the same thing every day.
And it helps me get into a routine. It helps me, you know, we do better. We thrive off of routines. So know what's happening. And just making sure that I get the things done that I want to get done. And then with prioritizing, I think it's so important to really evaluate what is the most important thing, because everybody will tell you what they need is the most important thing and it's not.
So I like to just, [00:16:00] my priorities have changed a lot over the years. You know, I would prioritize things that weren't really the most important things. And so just as you grow, you realize what is the most important things for the building. And that actually need to get done right away. So I just want to review those five confidence habits.
So the first habit is journaling. The second habit is gratitude. The third habit is affirmations. The fourth habit is celebrations. And the fifth habit is prioritizing. So these habits are huge in changing your confidence and the way you feel and just the thoughts that you're having throughout the day.
So taking the time to implement these can be really helpful. If you're interested in one on one coaching, I can help, you know, implement these habits with you, or you can get tips throughout the week on my Instagram at barbflowerscoaching or my website barbflowerscoaching. com. I also provide a complimentary confidence strategy planning session.
So what we do during this session is I have a tool. I help evaluate your [00:17:00] confidence, utilizing the five pillars of confidence that I coach on. And I help develop personalized goals tailored to the areas that you need to improve. So we'll go through this, um, survey and, and figure out what areas of confidence you need specifically, and we'll create an action plan and that's completely free.
So reach out to me if you're interested in that. I hope that you found this episode helpful. Thanks for listening. If you do find this podcast helpful, please leave a review so others are able to find it. Have a great week and stay tuned for next week's episode.
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