Are These 3 Fears Keeping You From Achieving Your Vision For Your School This Year?

You’re listening to School Leadership Reimagined, episode number 42. 

Welcome to the School Leadership Reimagined podcast...

where we rethink what's possible to transform your school. If you're tired of settling for small wins and incremental improvement, then stay tuned to discover powerful and practical strategies for getting every teacher in your school moving towards excellence. Now, here's your host, Robyn Jackson.

Hey Builders!

Welcome to the school leadership reimagined podcast. I'm your host Robyn Jackson and this season of the podcast we are getting back to the basics of builder ship. That means that in every episode this season we're going to be going deep into one aspect of the buildership model so that you can understand why it works and how you can use it to turn your school into a success story. So today we're going to talk about your vision. 

Now I've already talked about how to develop a vision that's worthy of you and your students in episode 28 and I'll link to that in the show notes for you. But today I want to talk about an aspect of your vision we almost never talk about. And it's the main reason that we have such a hard time getting others to buy into our vision, especially when we set a really ambitious vision for our school.

It's one of the main reasons that we get stuck...

and so today I want to talk about how you can take your vision, get everyone to invest in your vision, and then help people develop the will and the skill to actually not only believe in your vision, but get to work making it happen in your school. Now, we'll jump into that in just a moment, but first I want to remind you about two things. Number one, I have started writing my next book and the working title is, are you ready for this?

Turn your school into a success story - how to make a dramatic difference with the teachers and the resources you already have.

 Now, that's a mouthful and it may change, but that's the title I'm working on right now. That's really what the book is about. How do you turn your school into a success story with the teachers and the resources you already have.

And I am so excited about this book. I've been waiting to write this book for years now and now it's time. It's time. I've been testing these ideas out in schools with my clients for the last two years. I've seen some really dramatic success  stories and I just can't wait to share that with you. So how would you like to join me on my book writing journey and get a behind the scenes look at my writing process? If you're interested in that, all you need to do is friend me on Facebook because I'm going to be writing the book and sharing some behind the scenes kind of glimpses of the writing process on Facebook. And you can find me at Robyn Jackson on Facebook and that's where I will share with you my entire process.

So you're going to get a glimpse of how I write.

What I'm thinking about as I'm writing some of the challenges that I'm facing along the way. Because writing a book isn't easy. Plus from time to time, I'll be asking you for your opinions on some of the ideas that I'm toying with as I write. So in a way you could kind of be like my coauthor and while a combination of coauthors / support group as I write this book. So will you help me write this book? If so, please friend me on Facebook and that you know, let's start joining the conversation as I, as I am bark, I just started the first bit of it today and you know, start it with my outline and I kind of talk about why I start with an outline on Facebook and share with you what the outline looks like. So if you're interested in seeing that whole writing process, then go ahead and just friend me on Facebook, send me a friend requests, maybe a little message like if it's not obvious that you're an educator in your Facebook profile, just, you know, just a little message that says, Hey, you know, I want to join you in the writing process.Just that I know that you know, you're, you are like a legitimate person and not a bot. And then let's just go ahead and go through the process together. Okay, so that's number one.

Now number two,

I'm also really excited about because we are having one more builders lab this year and it is coming up October seven through nine 2019 and we're coming to Dallas, Texas. So if you're unfamiliar with builder's lab, builders lab is our three day intensive where you and I get to work together, you know, kind of in a more intimate setting to figure out how to turn your school into a success story. So we keep builders lab really small. We usually have less than a hundred people in builders lab so that you can have a chance to work with me one-on-one directly so that we can focus on your school. So unlike other conferences where you get kind of a generic presentation and you have to try to apply it to your school at Builder's lab, one of our rules is that you must be selfish.

So as I'm presenting upfront, you should be thinking about how is this going to work in my school? And then you can raise hands, you can interrupt, you can ask questions, we'll, there'll be time for you to get individual coaching from me so that when you leave builder's lab you have a personalized success path and a plan for how you are going to start transforming your school in the next 90 days. And unlike other conferences, I don't just send you off and throw you back in the water and say, okay, swim, go towards your success. No builder's lab is not like that at all. And in fact, we've recently started with builders lab instituting a 90 day followup cycle so that way I stay in touch with you after the conference is over. I answer questions, I provide additional masterclasses that are just exclusive to your builder's lab cohort.

I send you additional resources, send you reminders, you get everything you need over the course of the next 90 days when you leave builders lab to make sure that the plan you developed in builder's lab actually happens.

I want you to have everything you need to be able to implement 

and then at that end of that 90 days, I'm going to be checking in with you to hear your success story. So builder's lab is, is very different from what you may have experienced in conferences in the past. And so I encourage you, if you are ready, if you are tired of these little tiny small wins and incremental gains, if you're ready to do something big with your school, if you are frustrated because you are, teachers don't have the will or the skill that they need to be able to move your school forward and you feel frustrated because it seems like you're not getting anywhere, even though you're working really hard, then I encourage you to come to builders lab because when people come to builders lab, they get unstuck, they get clarity about exactly what they need to do and they gain momentum.

We have an implementation lab on day three of builders lab, and so the second half of day three, that time is spent just working on your plan.

So when you get back to your school, you've already gotten stuff done.

It's not like, okay, now I have this big to do list of things I've got to do for the conference, plus all the things that I didn't do because I was away for three days. It doesn't work like that. No. When you go back to your school, you already have accomplished something. You've already gotten the ball rolling and so you can just begin to maintain that throughout the next 90 days and you start to see this really amazing, crazy success. So to register for builder's lab, go to mindsteps INC com slash builders dash lab. That's mindsets inc com slash builders dash lab. And if you have any questions, go ahead and send this.

Send us the questions to Info@mindstepsinc.com and if for some reason you are listening to this sometime in the future in October has passed, just go to that same link so that you can see what is the next upcoming builders lab and you can get your tickets for that there. Okay, so now let's talk about vision. So vision is one of those things where it's kind of a boring topic. People talk about all the time. I remember being in, in, in, in a leadership program and one of the first things they had us in do, what's a sit down and we had to create a vision statement and quite frankly it was a work of fiction. I didn't, I wasn't doing it for a particular school. It was just supposedly my vision as an educator, which seems kind of weird because your vision has to be for something, not just a vision in general, but anyway, we wrote these vision statements and I don't know if you've ever done this where you had to write a vision statement and it just feels like you're just kind of making stuff up where it's pie in the sky or it sounds very aspirational.

And when I read a lot of people's visit, vision statements are read a lot of schools vision statements.

I see the same thing. It's just a lot of blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. 21St century learner, blah, blah, blah. Students reach their maximum potential, blah, blah, blah, lifelong learners and so forth and so on and adjust. You know, the vision doesn't really Kinda, it's it's, it's a lot of fluffy words, but it doesn't really say anything when in fact your vision should give everybody a clear picture about where you are heading as a school. Remember in episode, I think it was episode 28 where I talked about your vision should really talk about what are we building and so if your vision doesn't answer for people clearly what you are building in your school, then your vision is not going to work. But there's another problem with your vision statement other than just there are a lot of blah, blah, blah.

That keeps a lot of people from investing in your vision statement and I want to talk about that today. I want to talk about Why our vision statements, even if we write really lofty, great, beautifully worded vision statements, why we don't often achieve our vision, what is keeping us from achieving that vision for 100% of our students, there is something holding us back. In fact, there are three things holding us back and I want to talk about them today. Some of the first one is that we have a fear that if we say we want a vision for 100% of our kids, that we are never going to reach that vision. So the first thing we always think about is, you know, not every kid is going to get there and, and so we started telling ourselves that I can't get every kid there.

You know, that's a big fear that we have.

If we say 100% then you know, what are we going to do about the kids who come to us? You know, reading so many grade levels below grade level, what are we going to do about the kids who come to us, who barely come to school? If I say 100% what am I going to do about those kids? Plus, I don't know that many of us have ever been in a school where we've ever experienced 100% success rate on a particular metric. So it's really hard for us to believe that this can be true or that anything can be true for 100% of our kids. So we always kind of backpedal against that 100% because we're afraid that if we say 100% then it really is going to mean 100% and a lot of people say, well, you know, our kids can't get there.

I mean we, we tried. Not all of our kids are going to get there. And my answer to that as that's true, not all of your kids are going to get there in your current system. It's you. If you're going to make something happen for 100% of your kids, you are going to have to significantly transform your organization. So we're asking the wrong question. We're asking the question, I don't know how are we ever gonna get 100% of our kids are there? That's the wrong question. The right question we should be asking is, what would it take to get 100% of these kids, the kids that are in front of us, the kids that are right now in our building, what would it take to get 100% of them there? You see? That's a better question because then you unleash your imagination. You really start to think about, okay, what could we do differently?

You see, a lot of us, our visions are limited by the view that we have of our current organization. We think that's the only way we can do things. So people say, well, we can't do that with 100% of our kids.

And I'll say, why?

And they say, well, we've got kids who are behind. I said, what would it take to get those kids who are behind caught up? And they said, well, we would need extra time. I said, so what would the institution look like if there were the kids had extra time? What would that look like? Oh, we don't have the resources. We, they immediately started talking to me about that. You've got to stop limiting yourself that way. It's not about what kind of resources you have and you don't see your resources as your limitations. Every constraint is an opportunity. That's what we talked about.

You know, how do you look at your obstacles and see opportunities in your obstacles? So when you can untether yourself from just seeing your limitations and the limitations of your current institution and instead allow yourself to dream about what would it take, what would our school have to look like in order for this to happen? You began to unleash all kinds of possibilities. I remember talking to a superintendent once and we were talking about this idea of a vision for his school and his school is having a lot of challenges. And so I asked him, okay, stop talking about the challenges. What would your district have to look like in order for this to be to happen for 100% of your students? And he said, kind of jokingly, we'd have to have a boarding school. And I said, why can't you do that?

And all of a sudden all of these ideas start coming like, wow, we could do that.

We have this building over there we're not using. We could turn that into a boarding school. We're already feeding the kids breakfast, lunch, and dinner anyway, so it wouldn't cost more to feed them. And he started really all of a sudden the ideas, the possibilities opened up for him. He would have never done that if he'd continued to just focus on how am I going to get 100% of our kids to really achieve this vision with the current institution that he had. Instead he had to stop thinking about the limitations that were around him and started saying, okay, well what? What did it look like? Those are interesting conversations. There were they conversations to have and we almost never have them. And that's pretty sad, isn't it? Because as visionaries, as innovators, as builders, we should not be thinking about how do we tweak our way to 100% we should be thinking about what do we need to build so that 100% of our students can be successful and that can be possible.

That's the difference between a leader and a builder. A leader is limited by the institution in part because a leader was created by the institution, a builder. It's not limited by the institution because a builder is not created by the institution. A builder goes out and builds the thing that they need. They don't look to the institution to give them the skill that they need, the ideal conditions that need no. They go out and they say, what ideal conditions do I need and let me go out and build that. So that's the first fear that's holding us back. Now, the second fear that holds us back, and this one is really, really dangerous, is really this fear that we have that we often won't articulate. We don't ever say it aloud, but I can see it happening all the time. When I tell people a hundred percent vision and they want to kind of fight me on it, I know that underneath a lot of that is this fear.

You see, we don't actually believe we can do it.

 So people will say things like, well, what if I don't achieve that vision? Or you know what if I put myself out there and say 100% and we never get to 100% and my answer to that, it's always this, what if you don't? What have you continued to be limited by these tiny little incremental gains? Are you going to be satisfied with that? Is that why you came to this profession? You see people think, if I don't achieve this vision in a particular timeline in a year or two years, then I failed. No you haven't because as long as you are making steady and consistent progress to the vision, you keep that vision in front of you until you achieve it. So most of the time people say, well I can ever get to 100% so I'm going to set a vision at 50% or 55% or I'm going to set a vision.

Let me get real ambitious here. I'm going to set a vision for 80% well, if you set a vision for 80% and you achieve 80% you scratched an itch. You've achieved your goal. Yay. Throw a party, but you still have 20% of your kids who are not achieving. The problem is, is that you set, if you set your vision anything lower than 100% if you hit that vision, then you feel cause for celebration. When, how can you celebrate when there's still so many children who are not achieving? This isn't one of the reasons. This is my quarrel with smart goals. Now there is be hear me out here, cause I know there's some people who, you know, I was someplace one time and I said I don't really like smart goals. And there was somebody who was like trying to fight me because she taught smart goals and she talked about how amazing they were.

But here's my quarrel with smart goals.

 I haven't been in too many schools who have been taught to create smart goals and their smart goals say something like this. By 2020 our students will have achieved a 10% increase, improve the number of students who are proficient in math or English or whatever. And you know, so they do, they write the smart goals and they write them and they, you know, get an a for their perfectly worded smart goals. But nobody ever says, yeah, this is a smart goal, but it's too low. I've seen people do smart goals where they're going from 25% achievement to 30% achievement and it's gonna take them two years to do it. I've seen people write smart goals where they're going to go, you know, let's say from 65% achievement to 70 or 80% achievement in three years. And I'm like, oh great.

So here's what happens. Once you write that smart goal, first of all, it's always too low because rarely have I seen a smart goal. This is 100% second of all, what happens when you achieve that smart goal? Let's say you go from 25% proficiency to 30% proficiency, and Y'all think I'm joking with that number. I am not joking. I have seen smart goals written that low and they paid a consultant to come in and teach them how to write a smart goal that low. That made me so angry. But I digress. Anyway, let's say you achieve your goal. What happens? You throw a party, you celebrate. Everybody feels this, you know, relief. Because look at us, we've achieved our goals and everybody relaxes. You can't relax until you have 100% of your students there.

And so what smart goals do is they often set us up to have a false victory.

And after that victory, you lose your sense of urgency because you're like, we've achieved that victory, and people say, wow. Then we'll set the next Mark. How often does that happen? Let's be real. Once you've scratched an itch, people work really hard. They achieve a goal. Once you celebrate it and scratching it, everybody slacks off a little bit. It's just natural. It's a human tendency because on some level, because you set the goal so low, you're telling people, we've hit a goal, we've achieved, we've have victory, and your brain doesn't distinguish between that success for now versus that success forever. So a lot of times we set ourselves up because we set our goals too low, but we set our goals too low because we're often afraid of what will happen if we don't achieve that a hundred percent in some sort of prescribed timeline. But here's the difference. Here's what happens when you set a hundred percent goal.

Let's say you go from 65% to 80% not that you can celebrate because you're making progress, but you maintain the sense of urgency because you're still not at 100% yet, so you keep going past the 80% past the 85% pass, the 90% pass, the 95% pass, the 97% pass, the 99.9999% until you get to 100% and if it doesn't happen this year, you go back and you figure out what's keeping us, how do we achieve some more and then you keep moving until you reach your goal. There's an old saying that says it will all work out in the end and if it hasn't worked out, it's not the end. And I think that's the same thing that's true for your 100% calls. We've got to stop tying our personal self esteem to our goals and think that if we don't get to 100% in a prescribed period of time that we failed.

What's important is that every single day you are pushing for 100%

and if you haven't gotten there yet, you're not finished. And if you have gotten there, you are finished. It's that simple. So stop thinking that you're going to fail. Builders. Don't think about that because builders are constantly iterating. You see when you set a goal for you know 100% from two years from now and you don't have a real solid plan, you're not going to get there. And that's, that's it. The plan that you set now is not going to be the same plan that you're going to have a year from now or 18 months from now because as you move forward, you learn more and your plan changes. So you set the big vision for 100% of your students and then you figure out, okay, if we're moving there, what's the first most important thing that we have to do?

If we're going to make progress towards that goal and you accomplish that or you start thinking, what's the biggest thing that's keeping us from achieving that today? And you identify that and then you get to work removing that constraint. Then you look at where's the next constraint, what's the next thing we need to be doing? And then what's the next thing we need to be doing? And as you do that, you gain momentum. You gain more confidence, you gain more clarity and you gain more progress. So when you limit yourself to a goal that feels comfortable to you, what you're doing is you're, you are talking yourself out of building something bigger. But when you put that goal in front of you, it pulls you towards it.

I remember when I first started at mindsteps, I said, my goal is any teacher we work with to become a master teacher.

Now, every time I say that, any teacher can become a master teacher with the right kind of support and practice, there's somebody ready to fight me. People say, ah, I don't know. Most teachers are, they have to want to or you know, some people will say, you know, Oh, you think that Robyn, I gotta teach her. I'm going to show you. And that will, that teacher's going to change your mind, but here's the thing. Even though when I first set that vision, I had no idea how it's going to achieve it. I felt like if I didn't set that vision and if I didn't make that vision public, then after a while my work was start getting stale. I would start getting stale. I would start resting in my laurels and when I was wasn't successful, I'd just make an excuse for, oh well not every teacher's meant to be a master teacher.

Well, how then could I write a workshop for teachers if I was already planning for a certain number of teachers not to get anything out of the workshop, how could I then work with the leaders and plan training and professional development for leaders when I was already in my head deciding that that there was going to be a certain number of people weren't going to get anything out of it. How could I charge people money for what I do if I wasn't going to have a guarantee or work towards being able to live up to the guarantee that when you purchase this workshop or when you attend our conference or when you buy this workbook, you will get something out of it no matter who you are.

No, I wasn't there yet and I had to work towards it,

but if I didn't have that vision out in front of me, then I would have stopped long before I developed some of the things that have been the most useful, helpful, transformative parts of our practice.

You know, now when I go in and I do teacher workshops because of that vision, because I didn't stop until I knew that what I was teaching could help any teacher become a master teacher. Now, the workshops that I give the teachers love the teachers benefit from you see a difference after the teachers leave that workshop, and I'll have to be honest with you guys. That feels very gratifying to me knowing that when I walk in, no matter what teacher or what administrator I'm going to face, I know I can help them. Knowing that we have tools now that can take you from where ever you are and help you become a master teacher. It helps me when I walk into a workshop, feel confident. It helps me feel like like I can, it helps me feel rewarded for the work that I do. I want that for you.

I want you to be able to walk in every day to your school and know that you've got this bigger vision pulling you forward because that's how you get better. That's how you become a master builder because you don't stop. You don't make excuses when things don't work. Instead you look at those things that don't work and you learn from them. You don't beat yourself up about it either because all you're doing as a builders, you're figuring out how do I make this better? How do I build something better? And You keep going until you build it. When you look back on your career, you're going to see that if you choose builder ship, you will have accomplished way more than you ever thought was possible. And you did it because you had a bigger vision that was pulling you forward. So that's the second fear.

Let's talk about the third fear. 

This one's, this one's an interesting one because this one feels almost like you can't do anything about it. So this third fear is that while I've got these teachers who are resistant and I can't move my vision until I get rid of certain teachers, or here's what I'm seeing a lot of lately, my district won't let me have a vision this big. So sometimes people's fears are legitimate because you're running up against bureaucracy or you're looking at a teacher and saying, there's no way I'm going to achieve my vision as long as that teacher is teaching in my building. I get it. I get it. It's hard to believe in your vision when you look around and you feel like there are these external barriers out there that you can't do anything about, that are keeping you from your vision.

You know, it's one thing if you have to work on your own head and your own belief and all of that. It's quite another thing when you have to work around real, legitimate roadblocks to your vision. I mean, sure, anybody can say 100% of our kids, but if your seems to be undermining you every step of the way or preventing you from moving towards your vision, or if you have saboteurs on your staff who seem to be intentionally sabotaging the work that you're doing, how on earth are you still supposed to achieve your vision in those circumstances? So I get it, but here's the thing. Builders know that transformation takes time. And there's a real process to it. When you set that 100% vision for your school, nobody is ready. Everybody is doing what they've always done and it's gotten you as far as you've gotten.

So nobody's ready.

 So as a builder, part of your job, if you're going to achieve your vision, is that you have to build the will and the skill in yourself and the will and the skill in everybody in your staff in order for you to achieve that vision. That is part of the process. It's not just that we have to do something different for the kids. You have to be different for the adults in your building too. It also means that you have to sell your vision to your district in a lot of times districts don't like it when you set a vision for 100% of your students because if you put that out there to parents, if you put that out there to stakeholders and then you don't reach it, then they're looking at the district and they're complaining to the district. I thought you said you were going to do this.

And so a lot of times the district is risk averse. So now again, I'm going to tell you something and if you tell anybody I said it, I made the night wall. I can't deny it cause I'll be alive. But if you, you know, I'm going to tell you something just between me and you. Can we just keep it between us? Sometimes you have to write the district prescribed vision to turn into the district, but you have to hold on to the real vision and making that come alive in your school. So either you're going to sell your vision to your district and help your district believe in it or you satisfy the paperwork that the district requires. But still your work is focused on your vision and it's up to you. I don't know everybody's circumstance, but either one would you. When you don't do is you don't let go of your vision.

That's what you don't do.

And so you can't let these external barriers keep you from your vision. You can't let them throw water on your vision before. It's had a chance to take hold, to ignite, to start a fire in a movement in your building. You need to make sure that you are protecting your vision from these external sources and you need to understand this as a process. The first time that you proclaim your vision from the mountain top, not everybody's going to be a believer, so what? There's a process for that. We're going to talk about that later on in the season about that transformation process and how you move people through that process, but I think a big mistake that a lot of people make is when they announced their vision for the first time. If they meet pushback than they say, see, I can't ever get my vision down in this place because nobody believes in my vision.

Well, you need to expect pushback. If you're not getting pushback, your vision's probably not big enough. Well, you have to understand is that there is a way to deal with the pushback. There is a way to move your school step by step through a process that helps them embrace your vision, understand your vision, and believe in your vision. One of our our clients at builder's lab, she came to build a slab for the first time. She was a brand new administrator at a school and she had a vision. Her school was at the bottom of her district. Her school was one of the worst performing schools in the district. I think it was number one or number two from the bottom. And what she did was she came with a vision and part of our vision was we're going to be at the top of this district in two years.

And nobody believed her and that's okay.

 She knew it was okay because they had never ever experienced that kind of success before. They couldn't see, it didn't matter. She could see it. She went about building a different school and at first she met with resistance and a lot of people are naysayers, but at the end of the year, they went from one or two from the bottom to midway. They jumped like 20 places in the ranking and they went from being in the bottom to being an a middle in one year. And it wasn't until that happened that people really started believing in our vision and now everybody's on board. They're like, yeah, and you talk to all of our teachers and like, yeah, we're going to be in a top next year, and I believe it too. So sometimes it takes a while before people believe in your vision and if you let go of your vision at the first sign of resistance, you didn't believe in an either.

And if you don't believe in your vision, how do you expect anybody else to believe in your vision? You see, the big thing about vision that we never talk about is this. You have to have unwavering faith in your vision, even if you don't know how you're going to make it happen yet. You see, a lot of people think the first thing they do is they say, well, if I write this vision, how's it going to happen? What are we going to do about this and what are we going to do about that? Wrong question. When you sit down and you establish a vision, you don't have to have it all worked out yet. You just have to have a vision that gets you excited. So one of the things that happens in builder's lab, day one, we sit down and we write a big vision.

You write a big vision for your school and I help you.

And people come to me and they give me their vision and they read it to me and I can tell in their body language and their face, they're not excited about the vision. I say to them, if you're not excited about this, nobody else will be either go back to work and we go back to work until they can get a vision. And when you, when they get it, you can see a difference. There's a smile on their face, their body language is excited. They can not wait to get back to their schools. And I don't stop until everybody at builder's lab is that excited about their vision. And then even, and I tell them, even if you don't know how quite yet, how you're going to have it happen, you have to have a vision that pulls you forward, that makes you excited.

You're not excited about your vision. If you don't believe in your vision, if you are letting fears keep you from feeling, seeing, tasting, touching, feeling that vision in your heart that nobody else is going to believe your vision either. It starts with you, builder, you go first. You have to craft a vision that gets you excited. You have to craft a vision that makes you say, this is why I came into the profession, and then you have to allow yourself to believe in that vision. Even though you don't have all the details worked out. Don't worry. This season of the podcast, we'll be talking about how you can begin to to to breathe life into that vision, to put flesh and bones on that vision, to work it out so that you can start to see a pathway to your vision that feels possible. Don't worry, we're going to get there, but right now I just want to challenge you.

If your vision doesn't excite you, if you feel like you're just paying lip service to a vision but you don't really believe it, start there.

Sit down and ask yourself what I said.

I really came here to accomplish. What would it look like if 100% of my kids were doing something amazing? What would that look like? What is it that I want for every single kid in my building? And then craft that vision and give yourself permission just for a little bit to dream. Just you don't have to tell anybody where your vision is yet, but give yourself permission to just dream it because I promise you, you do that. Something will spark inside of you. You'll start to get a passion for the work that you can't explain and you can't squelch. It's a passion that's going to burn inside of you, that that bet that will start to make you impatient for something bigger and better for your kids.

And for some of us, it's been a long time since we felt that way. So I want to challenge you this week. Set aside some time and dream a bigger dream. And if you want help with that, if you don't feel like that's something that you can do by yourself. If you want to get some coaching around how to set a bigger vision and then some support about how to actually make that happen, then I invite you to come to builders lab because I promise you if you come to builders lab, we won't let you leave until you have a vision that's big enough to make you excited and passionate about it and you'll have a plan that makes you feel like that vision may be possible. I think people will come to builders lab and who create those kinds of visions.

They walk out and a year we hear their success story.

Not all of them have reached 100% yet. Some of them have, but not all of them, but some of them are. They a year later, they are farther than they ever thought was possible and because they've seen some initial momentum, they now believe more strongly in their vision and they're not letting anybody take their vision from them. That's what I want for you today, so you can get your tickets at builders lab at mindsteps inc com slash builders dash lab. That's mindset st coms slash builders. That lab. Now that's it for today's episode, but a couple of reminders. Don't forget, if you want to follow my writing journey, you can join me on Facebook and you can find me on Facebook at Robin Jackson. If you and I are not collect connected on Linkedin, we need to be connected. We, that's a great way for you to ask me questions about the show or make suggestions for shows you'd like to see us do or get me some feedback about the show.

And that's on linkedin. You know, another way you can give me feedback about this show is to go to iTunes and leave a review. And if you don't know how to do that and you, or if you want to see show notes from today's episode, just go to school leadership re-imagined dot com slash episode 42 now with talk about next week, this week we talked about envision, like I'm a little passionate about vision because I think it's so important. It's, it's the, it's, it's the starting point for a builder.

But now we need to talk about your mission statements.

And I can tell you right now, I probably have not read your mission statement, but if I even without having read it, I can take a guess that it's probably pretty useless and there's a reason why you see your mission statement. If it doesn't answer this one question, your mission statement is useless. So next week, and getting back to basics, we're going to talk about how do you create a mission statement that ignites the passion of your teachers? How do you create a mission statement that becomes kind of the guiding light in your school? How do you create a mission statement that helps you help everybody be accountable, including yourself, make it's not possible? We're going to find out exactly how possible it is next time right here, and I hope you'll join me then.

Bye for now. See you next time. 

Thank you for listening to the School Leadership Reimagined podcast for show notes and free downloads visit https://schoolleadershipreimagined.com/

School Leadership Reimagined is brought to you by Mindsteps Inc, where we build master teachers.