The Assistant Principal Podcast

Hello colleagues and welcome to the Assistant Principal Podcast. I’m your host this week, Mara Buskey and if you don’t already know me, I am the Inclusion Strategist with Strategic Leadership Consulting, as well as Frederick’s daughter. The goal of this podcast is to help improve the life and leadership of assistant principals. Today’s episode of Five for Friday recaps the strategic leadership emails for the week of October 24th-28th, 2022. If you already get our daily leadership emails, then I hope you’ll find some added value here and if you don’t already subscribe you can find a link on our homepage at frederickbuskey.com. Many readers like to begin their mornings by reading the email and setting a leadership intention for the day, but please don’t feel any pressure to subscribe. You are already doing more to grow yourself than many others out there, simply by listening to the podcast.

So let’s recap. As you may know, Frederick (or my dad) has been with my mom in Kenya for the last two weeks so I had the opportunity to fill in for a week and write all the daily emails. I started off every email this week reminding our readers that these come from the perspective of me, a 23-year-old who is still very much working on her own leadership. I also ask them: What can you learn about empowering young people after reading this week’s messages? 

Monday: 

On Monday I wrote about my experience with Julia Cameron’s 12-week course, The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity. The MVP to this was “Five minutes can alter the direction of your day.” The book really changed the ways in which I talk to myself and helped engrain some positive habits. One of those habits is morning pages. 

Essentially, before doing anything else after waking up (except making coffee of course) you write three pages. You can write whatever you want, but the idea is to get all of your thoughts and worries out of your head so you can be less disrupted by them later. 

I challenged our readers for the remainder of the week to try writing morning pages. If 3 pages sounds scary, set your timer for five minutes. Write what you are feeling, what you’re dreading, or maybe what you need to do that day. Get out all your worries or thoughts that take up your space and energy. 

And after you do it, ask yourself if you feel any different? Is your mind quieter? Is your jaw less clenched or your breathing a little deeper?

Though I know writing down your stressors or spiraling thoughts first thing in the morning won’t make them disappear, spending any amount of time with them means they exist somewhere other than inside your mind. Maybe they are a little less powerful now. 

Tuesday

Tuesday was all about saying “yes” to what’s right inside you. Have you ever recognized how you were feeling and intellectualized it or explained away the emotions? Have you ever said to yourself, “I shouldn’t feel this way because …”?

When we dismiss our feelings, we invalidate ourselves. We lie to ourselves and we send the message that our emotions aren’t important. 

Rather than dismissing or making excuses, just say “yes.” Say yes to the anger, the sadness, the overwhelm, guilt and grief, to fatigue, to resentment… Say yes to joy, to love, to gratitude and pride. Say yes to not wanting to feel it. Say yes to feeling uncomfortable.

Acceptance is harder than we give credit for. Accepting your feelings is accepting yourself. Accepting yourself leads to a better and truer you. And a better you means you can support and lead your people with empathy and honesty. 

Wednesday

Okay, to slightly lighten things up, Wednesday I wrote about a joke I initially made.  I was having a hard time and I said to my partner, “nothing’s wrong but it sure ain’t right.” I laughed and then sat for a second and realized how true that statement felt. 

Startup company:

Thursday I talk about the stories we tell ourselves. Oftentimes, the stories are how we think things “should be.”

For example: The last few months I’ve been talking quite negatively to myself because I didn’t go to grad school right away. My thought process is that Because I haven't gone to graduate school yet, I’m lazy. Laziness is wrong. I’m wrong. 

The truth is, going to grad school doesn't dictate if I’m wrong, lazy, or ultimately worthy. 

But the other truth to this is if I didn’t address these stories or take time to notice they are even there, how will I know they aren’t true?

What are the stories you tell yourself? Do they actually help you? Just because you think or feel something doesn't mean it’s true. 

Friday I discussed my desire for 6 months now to bake a cake after moving to Greensboro, NC in May. But until last week, I still had yet to bake anything. 

Long story short, I was telling myself there wasn’t enough time, and that baking a cake wasn’t as important as all the other things on my to do list. When I dug a little deeper, I realized that it wasn’t necessarily the baking that I was so caught up on, it was what it represented: time, balance, abundance, success.

I decided enough was enough. I was going to bake something. I made some pumpkin spice muffins and I shared them with my friends. It made me so happy that I did it again the next day. I realized it really didn't take that much time and it brought me so much joy. It turned my week around.  

This weekend, I urge you to forget the to-do list for just a moment. Think about something small that you’ve been wanting to do but convinced yourself there is not enough time. Go do it. 

Takeaway

I think the big takeaway to all of these is to listen to yourself and trust yourself. There is so much happening in the world, and I think my generation, or at least a lot of the young people I talk to, are questioning the world, themselves, and our priorities. We aren’t finding value and purpose in living that “American dream” that we have been fed our whole lives. I think we’ve also realized over the last few years that if we aren’t taking care of ourselves, we can’t take care of others. I don’t know. Maybe all generations have thought this way. Let me know how you feel, you can find my email in the show notes. 

This wraps up this week’s Five for Friday rendition of The Assistant Principal Podcast. If you enjoyed today’s show, please subscribe and rate this podcast. Rating the podcast really does help other people to find it.

I’m always trying to improve the show, so if you have feedback please email me at frederick@frederickbuskey.com. If you’d like to find out more about what we’re doing to support assistant principals, you can head over to the website at frederickbuskey.com/theassistantprincipal.

I’m Mara Buskey, thanks for trusting me to lead you through some of my thoughts this week, and I hope you’ll join us next time for the Assistant Principal Podcast. 

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mara-buskey-98321218b/

Email: mara@frederickbuskey.com