The Principal's Handbook

Who Are You as a Principal? Redefining Your Identity with the 1.0 vs. 2.0 Tool
[00:00:00] In this episode, we're going to be talking about your identity as a leader. That's all coming up next, right here on the Principal's Handbook. Stay tuned.
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.
Welcome back to the podcast. Today we're talking about identity, what that means, and your identity as a school leader. So I first wanna start by talking [00:01:00] about what identity is, and identity is the story you tell yourself about who you are.
So it's really a collection of beliefs, roles, and traits that you've adopted about yourself, whether it's a conscious thing or an unconscious thing, but it shapes how you think you feel and act. So for example, you might have the identity, I'm a people pleaser. I'm always busy. , I'm a leader who has to keep the peace.
I'm not good with conflict, right? , these aren't just descriptions that I'm saying. They're decisions that guide your daily choices, probably unconsciously. They're in your subconscious. But the good news is you can rewrite them. And this is part of coaching that I love and that's why I wanted to do this podcast episode is I'm going to share one of my favorite things to do with clients about helping you have a better identity.
And , when you think about identity. Think about how you portray identity on other people even, and on kids. I had a school psychologist who [00:02:00] pointed this out to me that you, the more we say things to kids, we're really giving them this identity. We're helping them shape their thoughts about who they are.
So we're saying. To our kids, you're very shy or you don't like to talk to people. We're giving them this identity, and so we can actually help kids with this. We can help our teachers with this, but really we can help ourselves have the identity that we wanna have. It's a decision, and so we're gonna talk about that today.
But as a principal, your identity might be something like, I'm the one who has to do everything. I'm the one who fixes everything. I always say yes because I don't wanna disappoint people. I thrive under pressure. I thrive under being busy, right? I have some of these that I think about myself. , but really if your identity is leading you to burnout or resentment towards your job,
or you might be not doing as good of a job as you want, or as effective as you want. It might be time to ask yourself, is this who I wanna be moving forward? And I'm [00:03:00] gonna give one example is that, a lot of principals say to me, I'm not good at tough conversations. I'm not good at difficult conversations.
And I'll coach them and talk through a topic and I'll be like, you actually handled that conversation very well. We need to get rid of this story, this identity. That you're not good at difficult conversations and start telling yourself you're very good at difficult conversations because then you go into that situation with confidence that you're going to handle the conversation well.
The more you tell yourself, I'm bad at difficult conversations, the more you're subconsciously going to be thinking you're bad about it. So , your identity isn't so much about who you actually are, but it's who you practice being and what your thoughts are about yourself, your self concept.
And so one thing I like to help people do is create their 2.0 version of themselves, and it's, so we think about who our 1.0 version and our 2.0 version is. And it's simply a choice to practice being a 2.0 version of ourself. Because [00:04:00] identity, at the end of the day, it's a choice, not a label. So you're not.
Stuck in whatever identity you are defaulted to, you get to decide who you wanna be as a leader, as a parent, as a friend, as a daughter, a son, a professional. And I think about this all the time because I think about, the family I grew up in, I was a middle child, but just given identities like so many different identities, right?
Like I've been given the identity in my personal life of not being athletic. I've been given the identity of. , being hardworking, right? Some are good identities, but for example, the one about me not being athletic, then I just never tried sports because I'm like, I'm not athletic. That was just always the story I told myself because my brother and sister were more athletic, but then as an adult I ran six marathons,
so it's like you get to decide if that story is really for you. , I've had the identity before of, I'm not good around people. Well, I've had to shape and change that identity. [00:05:00] As a school principal, I had to talk to so many parents and.
So many staff members and kids, and I realized I'm actually really good at talking to people. I'm good at building relationships, right? It was just an identity I had and I gave myself. It's not necessarily what's true about me. And so your identity drives your habits, so how you see yourself determines what actions you take.
Like I said, I had the identity of not being athletic, so for a long time I didn't do anything sports related because I'm not athletic. I laugh because now my kids are. Into baseball and softball. So they're teaching me sports, they're teaching me how to throw, they're teaching me all these things that probably a lot of people learned as kids, because I always took on this identity.
I'm not athletic. , if you see yourself as the overwhelmed principal, that's how you're gonna behave. If you're the stressed out principal, the dramatic principle, the mean principle, whatever these things are that people say about you, and then you take on that identity. That's how you're gonna behave.
That's who you're gonna [00:06:00] become. Where if you see yourself as someone who's calm, strategic, an instructional leader, those are the habits that are gonna begin to align with who you wanna be. And so you can't become this 2.0 version of yourself without having a clear vision of who you wanna be.
And when I got into life coaching as a client, I really had to start thinking about who am I as a person. And, , the coach that I work with is a confidence coach, and that was the certification I took. And one of the things that she talks about in her confidence steps is knowing what you want. You have to know who you are and what you want as a person.
And until I got into coaching, I never thought about that, right? Like I just did things because it's what I thought I was supposed to do. And so when I started questioning who I was, who I wanted to be, what kind of life I wanted to have, I. It was really interesting because I started to create a life and become the person that I actually wanted to be.
It's a decision. It's not that I have to be [00:07:00] what everybody else says I am okay, and you don't need permission to evolve as a leader. You don't need to wait for a crisis to peer or a new school year to change your identity. You can decide right away. I talk to my clients about that. All the time. If they don't like something, you can decide to change it right now.
And so that's what I wanna talk about today. And I'm gonna give you my favorite 1.0 2.0 exercise to do this. So what you're going to do is you're gonna take a piece of paper, make a T chart, , make a T where on the left you're gonna put your past version of yourself, your 1.0 self
on the right, you're going to list your upgraded version of who you're becoming, your 2.0 self. And when you write your 1.0 self that's in the past, when you're writing about your 2.0 self, that's in your present because that's who you're becoming right now. So for example, 1.0 me is I was constantly putting out fires and never had time for instructional leadership 2.0 [00:08:00] me.
I protect time for classroom walkthroughs and teacher coaching. 1.0 me. I was reactive and let my schedule control me, but 2.0 me. I own my calendar and time block my priorities. 1.0 me. I avoided hard conversations because I didn't want to upset people 2.0 me. I lead with courage and have the conversations that matter.
1.0 me. I was burned out and took work Stress home. 2.0 me. I have healthy boundaries and leave school stress at work. Okay, so this is the important thing here is that it's how you're talking to yourself. Because our thoughts create our emotions and actions. So if we're having positive thoughts about who we are as a person, it's going to change our emotions.
It's going to change our actions. And that's why in my course, the eight to four principle blueprint. I actually talk about this and there's an eight to four mindset that I talk about because if we tell [00:09:00] ourselves things like, I have to be at school every day, tell six or seven, I'm the principal, I should be the last car in the parking lot.
The more you tell yourself these stories, that becomes your identity who you are. But if you tell yourself, I'm someone who is really effective when I'm here and I leave at four o'clock. That can become your identity. So you get to decide, and so you don't have to fall into this default of your identity of what other people put you in or what people just expect with the title of principal, right?
A lot of times people have bias thoughts of what a principal even means. Principals, they think of old school principles when they were kids, you know, they were scary, they were mean. They, . Weren't somebody that you wanted to talk to, right. But you get to decide what you want your role to look like.
, so I really want you to think about your 1.0 2.0 self. You know your past self. What habits or behaviors kept you stuck? What do people say about you that you don't want to be part of your identity. You don't want it [00:10:00] to be part of your self concept and how you think about yourself. Now, what does the best version of you, the leader you want to be, look like day to day?
What are you doing? What are your habits? What are your actions? What are your routines? How do you think. Okay, so this should prompt you into thinking about what your 2.0 self looks like, and if you're driving or walking, please go back and write these down because actually what I do is I have it in a spreadsheet and I bookmark it on my computer, and then I can actually click on it and go back and look, am I acting like my 1.0 self or my 2.0 self?
We constantly have to revisit it. And what's really fun is after time when you've done this for a while, you go back and you look at your 1.0 self and you think. That was me. And eventually your current 2.0 self becomes your new 1.0 self, and you're always striving for a new 2.0 self, if that makes sense, because you're always learning and growing.
Okay? So it's really fun to see yourself evolve. But by having that, [00:11:00] like I said, I do it in a spreadsheet and then I just bookmark it. I can go back and constantly check in on myself, am I acting like my 1.0 self or my 2.0 self? Then I wanted to share how you could also use this with teachers. So I did a lot of personal development with my teachers because you know, when I talk to principals, teachers', emotions are really high. There's a lot of emotions in education. And so we have to work with teachers personally, work on their emotional intelligence and some of that is their identity.
Teachers have identity issues of making, teaching their whole job or making it be that they can't leave at four o'clock or. , they take work home, they're not good enough. There's all these stories that teachers tell themselves. So you could use this activity during coaching conversations. You could do a summer PD activity around it.
Or during a mid-year check-in. But, you know, , think of , a teacher, a teacher's 1.0 self , I avoid calling parents 2.0 self. I build strong partnerships with families. , teacher 1.0 self. This takes a lot of reflection for a teacher to think this, but [00:12:00] I do similar lesson plans every year. 2.0,
I try new strategies and reflect regularly. Okay, so you can model this with your staff on some of the things that you're working on. Make it optional. , don't make this an evaluative thing, but it's a really good way for teachers to set goals. And have conversations of how they wanna grow, how they want to see themselves.
And this is so effective because it taps into your self-awareness and your future focus. , there's a book by Ben Hardy called Be Your Future Self Now. So amazing. I really highly recommend you doing this. He talks about writing a letter to your future self about what you wanna see, happening, and then seeing what actually happens with that letter.
But that's what this is. You're deciding who your future self is and you're becoming it now, it really is shifting you in this coaching world. The great thing is from this victim mindset of, I have no control. This is just who I am. This is just my personality. This is how I've always been.
To [00:13:00] empowerment of here's who I'm choosing to be. I get to decide I'm not stuck in this. Okay. And it builds a culture where change and growth is just normalized and supported. I like to share all the time with my teachers how I was growing and the personal development I was doing as a principal, because it just shared that, I have the control to change who I am.
Here's how I used to be, but here's how I'm choosing to be now. Okay. So I want you to really think what is the 1.0 habit you're ready to release this summer? What's the 1.0 version of you that you wanna change? And think about who you want to become. Who is that 2.0 self? And I would love if you would share with me if you do this activity, either email me at barb@barbflowerscoaching.com, , share with me some of your 1.0 and 2.0 statements or share with me on social media. Find me on Instagram, Dr. Barb Flowers, or on TikTok, the eight to four principle. I would love to hear from you about what you are doing and how [00:14:00] you are using this 1.0 versus 2.0 tool. And if you love this show, if you're listing on Apple, scroll down in your app, leave a review.
Share this with a friend. Maybe you have a friend who needs to work on their own identity. But keep in mind, you have the power to shape your life according to the mindset you choose, because you get to decide. I hope you have a great week, and I'll see you back here next time.