The Principal's Handbook

The Principal Reset: The Self-Doubting Principal

Speaker: [00:00:00] in today's episode, we're talking about the self-doubting principle. That's all coming uThe Principal Reset: The Self-Doubting Principal
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Speaker: [00:00:00] in today's episode, we're talking about the self-doubting principle. That's all coming up next on The Principal's Handbook.

Speaker 4: 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: Today we are in our Principal Reset series, and we are talking about the self-doubting principal.

So this is our last one that we're doing like this as part of this series, where we're talking about patterns that I see with [00:01:00] clients that I coach. So this client or person, again, it's a combination of people. , It's not just one client, We're gonna give this client the name of Rachel for this podcast, but Rachel is entering into her third year as a principal, so she has some experience as a principal.

She's smart, she works hard, she's willing to learn. The staff like her, they respect her,, her school's making progress. But what she is really lacking is confidence. She has a lot of self-doubt that she doesn't even know exists. And how we know she has that self-doubt is because every decision feels like it's hard to make, right?

, It just feels like she's indecisive. She can't just make a decision. When someone disagrees with her, she assumes she's wrong. She over-explains her why, of why she did something, so that she can get people on her side. , She constantly has thoughts of, "What if I handle this wrong?"

Or, you know, "This person knows something that I don't know," or, "This person's [00:02:00] doing better as a principal than I am." And, , there's, , just this constant comparing other principals to themselves, another aspect of Rachel is that she got feedback, , from a supervisor that just keeps ruminating in her head, and every time she makes a decision, that feedback that, , she's not doing it good enough, that she's just doing things to please her staff, is just ruminating in her head.

And so then she can't make a decision because she's got that thought just going through her head of, "Everything you do is to please staff. It's not in the best interest of kids. You don't have hard conversations", so this is replaying in her head, and it's making her confidence worse. And this is, again, multiple clients combined into one client avatar, when I'm giving you this example.

So if you can relate to this, just know that it is not uncommon. But what happens with Rachel, because of this lack of confidence, she hesitates, she delays things, she overthinks, she seeks approval, she seeks [00:03:00] justification from others, and she just doesn't genuinely trust her own leadership abilities.

So if you can relate to that, that really is an issue with confidence. So that's what we're talking about today with the self-doubting principal, because self-doubt is the opposite of having confidence. And one thing I like to say about confidence is A lot of times, I think with confidence, we think of somebody who's really outgoing, and they have to be outgoing, and everybody likes them, , and that's confidence.

But confidence is a skill. It's really just believing in your abilities and capabilities that you can figure it out. So for example, in leadership, even if you're a first-year leader, you can be pretty confident, and it's just confident that you'll figure it out. It's not confident that everything you do will be right, but confident that you can figure it out, and you'll learn from things as you go.

So some confidence patterns that I wanna talk about that are really coming from self-doubt. So pattern number one is this constant second-guessing. So I talked about this with Rachel, but it's second-guessing. It's [00:04:00] not being able to make decisions, and principals who are self-doubting, they make decisions, and then they question themselves for days.

And I remember doing this with discipline, where I would make a decision, I would call the parent with discipline, the parent would be mad, and then I would go home, and I would ruminate about my decision, thinking that of course I did it wrong if the parent's mad, and I would just overthink, overthink. And the problem was then I had already made the decision, but I just didn't trust that that was the right decision in the moment, even if the parent was upset And so I just spent so much time second-guessing it, and that's exhausting.

So that is a confidence pattern that I see, a lack of confidence. , Pattern number two, looking outside yourself. So constantly asking five different people for advice. It's not that you can't ask people for advice, and it's not that you can't get other people's opinions. I'm all about collaborating, I'm about learning from others.

But it's this idea that you don't trust your judgment with how to handle something or what to do. If you're constantly seeking [00:05:00] reassurance from others or reassurance from your teachers that you made the right decision, if you find yourself comparing yourself to other principals, or you're looking for your teachers to tell you how amazing you are or tell you that they love you or that they like you as their principal, that is really a lack of confidence.

Because advice, talking to others, that's all helpful, but depending on other people, depending on their advice to feel good about yourself, that really is a lack of confidence. That's self-doubting yourself. So be careful when you're looking outside of yourself to get answers or to gain confidence. Pattern three is waiting to feel ready.

The most confident people that I see just do things without feeling ready, ? So if you are a self-doubter,, if you doubt yourself, you think, "I'm not going to do this until I feel ready, until I feel like I'm confident about this." But you have to remember, confidence doesn't come first. You take action, and then the confidence follows.

And the more action that you [00:06:00] take, the more confidence you're gonna find in something. The longer you're a principal, the more confident you're going to be in being a principal. The more positive interactions you have, the more confidence you're going to build. The more things that you try and experiences you have, you're going to build confidence.

I always say every time I have to have a hard conversation or do the hard thing that I don't wanna do, but I push myself to do it, I'm building my confidence that I can do it. I can do hard things as a leader. And so, when you do uncomfortable things, you are building your confidence. When you avoid them, that's when that self-doubt creeps in.

So you wanna make sure that you're not waiting until you feel ready, waiting until you feel ready to have that hard conversation or do the thing that you know you need to do, you just do it anyways, even with that discomfort, and that's going to build your confidence. Pattern four is making mistakes mean something.

So a self-doubting principal makes a mistake and thinks, "I'm not good at this. This job's not for me. Maybe I'm just not a [00:07:00] good leader," you make the mistakes mean something about you as a person, you as your character. Everything becomes personal. Every mistake becomes evidence that you can't do something.

Instead of thinking, "That didn't work. What could I do different?" A confident principal just has to flip their mindset, which we're gonna talk about here soon. So that's another pattern, is making your mistakes mean something about you, taking things super personally, taking feedback really personally, and making it mean something about you.

And pattern five is this comparison game. So it's comparing yourself to everyone else, and I see this a lot with principals. When you compare yourself to other principals, you see their confidence, their accomplishments, their strengths, all the things going well, but you don't see their own doubts. They're probably doubting themselves in some way.

You don't see their fears or their mistakes or where they went wrong. , And this is why I think it's so important to just be real with others and why I love just, being honest and open in my podcast about things that I've [00:08:00] experienced because so often we see people's highlight reels, and we compare ourselves to that.

And then we feel bad about ourselves because we think we should have it together. And really, everybody deals with their own issues of confidence or self-doubt or fears or mistakes that they've made or even times in their career where they haven't been confident. So you have to remember, it's just like this idea of social media is everybody's highlight reel.

When you see principals at conferences or you hear principals present or you read a book or listen to a podcast or see something from other principals and you hear all these amazing ideas and then you start to doubt yourself, just know you're seeing their highlight reel. You're seeing the good things that are happening,

so stop comparing yourself to everyone else. So those are the patterns that I see a lot with self-doubting. So now I wanna go into the T cycle. So this is what I've been talking about through this Summer Reset series. So the T cycle is that your thoughts create your emotions, which create your actions.

So our situation here is that Rachel, the principal I [00:09:00] talked about at the beginning of the podcast, she makes a decision about discipline, and a parent is upset. So she gives the student a lunch detention for hitting another student, and the parent feels that that's harsh, it's an elementary student.

They feel like that's harsh because they were just messing around. So the parent challenges Rachel's discipline decision. So when we think about the T cycle, her thoughts could be, "Well, maybe I made the wrong call. This parent's upset. They're probably right. What if they're right? I don't know enough. I haven't dealt with this enough.

I should have handled this differently." They start questioning themselves, and they start having these thoughts that really has that self-doubt start to creep in, and so when you say things to yourself like, "Maybe I made the wrong call.

What if they're right? , I should have handled that differently," then what you do is you start to create self-doubt and insecurity. You start to become doubtful of the decision you make. Well, when you become doubtful of the decision that you make, the [00:10:00] actions are usually you backtrack and either you say, "Okay, there's not gonna be a consequence," or you overexplain and you just start talking on and on about why you made the decision that you did.

You might seek reassurance, and you go talk to five teachers to justify that your reaction was right, even if deep down you know your reaction was right, and you start to lose confidence, so that's what happens in the T cycle with that thought. But if we were to flip that thought to, " I made a decision that is based on our student handbook, and I feel it was the right decision for that moment," even if the parent's upset, you're gonna have more confidence in your decision.

You're gonna feel, , like you're creating a positive school environment for kids. That emotion is gonna be confidence, or that emotion is gonna be self-assurance that you made the right decision.

And then the action is you're going to stick to that decision, and you're not going to keep talking about it. You're going to move on from it. So if you really focus on shifting your thought, it can help with the outcome and the action that is going to [00:11:00] happen. So our reflection questions I want you to think about for this episode: Where are you waiting to feel confident before you take action?

So is there anywhere in your leadership that you're waiting to feel confidence? And then I also want you to think about what evidence do you have that you're actually doing better than you think you are, so we, I always say we can find evidence for the positive thoughts, and we can find evidence for the negative thoughts.

So find evidence for the positive thoughts of what you're actually doing well. What mistakes are you using against yourself? So if you've ever made a mistake or like I said, you got some negative feedback and you use that feedback instead of using it to grow, you're using it against yourself, that's actually creating more fear, more self-doubt, and just more, and just a lack of confidence.

And then what would you do if you trusted yourself and your decisions more? What would your leadership look like? So these are just some things I want you to reflect on. So now I wanna just jump into the reset section. So it really goes along [00:12:00] with what I was talking about with the patterns, but I wanna talk about how do we really reset that confidence.

So first, stop looking for certainty. Stop looking for this idea of black and white and there being a perfect decision, a perfect right answer. I talked about this a lot in the perfectionist episode, but it's just this idea that in leadership, things aren't always black and white. And so that can erode at your confidence when you make a decision and people question you.

But it's really important that you know that there's not certainty, and you just have to trust in the decisions that you make. The second thing is collect evidence. So look for evidence that's going to help you feel more confident. So think about, what have I already done well?

Train your brain to start seeing proof of the things that are going well. And I'm gonna give an example of this with a principal I was working with who she knows a lot about instruction, teaching good practices for instructional leadership in her building.

And what we talked about is when teachers push back so [00:13:00] much, you actually start to lose your confidence because it's eroding what you think you know because you know you have this knowledge. I'm just gonna give the example about the science of reading. You have this knowledge of the science of reading, for example.

And if teachers are constantly pushing back and it eventually wears you down sometimes to the point that you think, "Maybe they're right. Maybe I don't know what I'm talking about. Maybe this isn't the right thing to do." And once you've done that, then you start to lose that confidence, but how can you collect evidence?

So what is already going well with the science of reading? What do I know about the research? Train your brain to find the proof for what you're, , trying to lead or what you're trying to do. Because a lotta times, like I said, , that confidence can erode when people are questioning us all the time.

So that's something I want you to think about as you collect evidence. Where do you need to find proof or evidence to help build your confidence up? And the third thing is to make smaller decisions faster, so practice making decisions and feeling really [00:14:00] confident in those. So confidence grows through that repetition, so if you can make a disciplined decision quick and stop questioning yourself,

You're going to start feeling more confident. So I really encourage you to make small decisions quick and then, again, find evidence for when you made decisions that you really like those decisions, that you were able to make it quick, on your feet, and keep moving on. The fourth thing I want you to think about for your reset is to keep promises to yourself.

Every promise you keep to yourself builds your self-trust. Self-trust builds confidence, so if you keep the promise that you're going to do something, that's going to help build self-trust. So maybe it's if you're a principal and you keep the promise that you're going to get better at making decisions, and then you practice making those small decisions, you write the evidence for when you make good decisions, you're keeping promises to yourself that you're going to get better at this, so you will get better at it.

Maybe it's just you're keeping the promise that you're going to build better relationships with your staff, so you actually follow [00:15:00] through with finding different ways to build better relationships with the staff that you lead. Whatever it is, when you keep promises to yourself, it builds your self-trust.

I always use the example of diets, exercise, fitness, New Year's resolutions. Every time you don't follow through on a New Year's resolution or on a goal that you create for yourself, like sticking to a diet, think about that. You lose self-trust with yourself, and then you think, "There's no point of even trying because there's no way I'll stick to it."

And it's the same in your leadership. If there's things that you're not committing to or keeping promises to yourself, you're not going to build self-trust. Maybe it's even just reading a book or learning a different topic. You think to yourself, "I never follow through with that. I never really change my practices."

And then you start to lose self-trust with yourself. So that's something I want you to think about is how can you keep promises to yourself. And the last thing is replace that identity. So your old identity is, "I hope people think I'm a good principal," or, , "I hope I'm doing a good job. I hope I made the best decision,"

you're [00:16:00] looking to the outside for everything to be good instead of the new identity of you just knowing that you're doing a good job. "I'm a capable leader who can handle hard things," we're not looking outside of ourselves for people to give us approval. We are giving ourselves that approval, and we are giving ourselves the confidence that we can do this.

So it's all about having that identity where you're giving yourself that positive self-talk for that T cycle so that you can have positive thoughts, positive emotions, and positive actions. So just remember that , confidence isn't something that principals just get after years of success. You could be a principal for twenty years and still be insecure and lack confidence, but it's built every time you make a hard decision Every time you do something that you think you couldn't do or that you knew would push you or grow you, every time you set a boundary, every time you take action before you feel ready, it's going to help build that confidence.

So remember, the most confident principals, [00:17:00] they're not people who don't doubt themselves. They're just the ones who trust themselves enough to keep going and know that you're going to get better, know that you're going to figure it out along the way. So if you want to assess where you are with your confidence, I have a free confidence scorecard that you can get at principalfreebies.com, and I'm also going to link it in the show notes, but you can actually assess where you are.

I have five pillars of confidence that I coach on because I coach on confidence in everything. I coach on confidence when it comes to discipline, when it comes to time management, when it comes to instructional leadership. It's really at the core of everything I teach. My certification was in a confidence coaching certification because , it impacts everything.

I always say when we build our confidence as leaders, leadership becomes more fun. It's not fun when you're doubting yourself all the time. It's really stressful. And so, , I encourage you to go to principalfreebies.com and get that free confidence scorecard.

See where you rate. See where you're at, and then look for areas. I have tips throughout that you can see where you can [00:18:00] improve. So I hope that you found this episode helpful. , Make sure to leave a review if you did because that's how other people find this show.

Keep in mind you have the power to shape your life according to the mindset you choose. I hope you have a great week, and I will see you back here next time