Guest Author: Angela Kelly Robeck, Host of The Empowered Principal Podcast
Hello October – the month of ghosts, goblins, colorful leaves, and pumpkin-spiced lattes – or for school leaders the month of teacher observations, endless meetings, behavior issues, and tired teachers.
We love you and we dread you.
October is one tough month for principals and teachers alike. You’ve been pushing hard to get ready for the new school year for the last 2-3 months. Making sure everything is in place to welcome students and start the year off on the right foot. Teaching school-wide and classroom routines and procedures. Onboarding new staff members and new families. Getting the necessary technology in place. Setting up communication methods and scheduling meetings for the year.
By the time October rolls around, most educators want to either pass out from exhaustion or leave education and work at a quiet little coffee shop. If you’re feeling the burn, you’re not alone. This experience is what I call The Fall Dip. It’s the physical, mental, and emotional fatigue that comes with the start of a new school year.
If you’re heading into the Fall Dip or if you’re already fully in it, here are some things you can do to make your October more enjoyable:
Strategy #1: Focus on your accomplishments.
Instead of only thinking about how much work lies ahead for you, acknowledge the work you’ve already accomplished. Our brains aren’t wired to celebrate what we’ve accomplished; they’re wired to prepare for “what’s next”. It quickly forgets and dismisses the things you’ve completed in the past because it’s already anticipating the next thing it needs to complete. We want to validate the work we’ve done because it generates pride and momentum for the next round of work we want to complete.
Strategy #2: Put your favorite Fall activities on your calendar.
October feels heavy when the only thing to look forward to is work, work, and more work. Most of us use our calendar to schedule in our important work tasks, meetings, and deadlines, yet few of us use our calendar to schedule in FUN. We assume fun will slip in between the cracks of our responsibilities at work and home, so we don’t block out time for it. You know what ends up happening. The fun doesn’t happen. Work and chores fill in the blanks. When you don’t intentionally schedule pleasurable and fun activities into your calendar, what you are saying is that you value fun less than work and that fun doesn’t have a place in your day. This month, decide that fun is as valuable as your other important tasks and put some Fall fun into your calendar. Schedule a night out with friends. Take a walk and enjoy the fall colors. Take a trip to the apple orchard. Go to the local high school football game. Let fun know that it’s welcome in your life and that you cherish it enough to give it time on your calendar.
Strategy #3: Slow down.
When your to-do list is a million miles long, the instinctive urge is to go faster. In response to that urge, you overschedule, overexert, and overwork. Giving into this urge does one thing really well. It compounds your exhaustion and reinforces the belief that hustling 24/7 is the only option. What overworking does is create burned-out educators. We know this intellectually, but we’ve been socially conditioned to believe that doing the opposite is professional death. We think that if we slow our pace down we’ll get further behind and our reputation as an effective school leader will be lost. While this feels completely counterproductive and unsafe, I invite you to try it and notice what happens. (Hint: what happens is that everything still gets done. Nothing goes terribly wrong. You simply get better at constraining and prioritizing your time and focus. Slowing down makes you BETTER at your job – more efficient and more effective.)
Strategy #4: Map out your month.
As a part of slowing down, take 30 minutes and write down everything you want to accomplish in the next 30 days. Then, prioritize this list based on the top three essential tasks or projects you want to complete. Get your calendar out and schedule a date, time, and duration to complete the tasks required to complete this project. Give yourself a limited time to complete them. Not assigning them a duration will make the task take twice as long as it needs. (It’s like a timed test. You get a certain amount of time and then it’s pencils down. No more working.) Make it a fun challenge to see how quickly you can pump out the work. You’ll notice that you stop spinning in confusion and get laser-focused. You’ll also notice that you don’t stall in an effort to perfect it. You become willing to turn in B+ work. This is the master educator at work. Done is always better than perfect because done is real. Perfect is imaginary.
Strategy #5: Give yourself grace and permission.
You are doing enough. You are doing your best. There’s no better way to be doing it than the way you already are doing it. What you get done is what was meant to be done for the day. Do today’s work today and tomorrow’s work tomorrow. Even when you have what I call a Wipe Out Day – a day that takes you off your planned course for the entire day – your decision to pivot and focus on that unanticipated situation is what was meant to be done with your time that day. Allow yourself to flow with the realities that come up in your school. Give yourself grace when you feel off track or need a day to rest and recover. You’re human. Accept and allow for your humanness. Doing so will allow you to give staff and students the grace and permission for them to be human as well.
Get the Support You Deserve
Being a school leader can be an isolating and lonely experience – especially when you’re new. If you are a school leader who wants practical solutions to every aspect of the school leadership journey, I invite you to check out The Empowered Principal® Podcast. As a former teacher, instructional coach, principal, and district administrator, I personally know how challenging school leadership can be and have developed dozens of highly effective tools and strategies to support fellow school leaders. I share my best tips every week on the podcast so that you can create exceptional results and enjoy the school leadership experience.
