EPISODE #162

Are these 3 fears keeping you from achieving your vision for your school this year? 

You're listening to School Leadership Reimagined episode number 162 Summer Rewind.

How do builders like us make a dramatic difference in the lives of our students in spite of all the obstacles we face? How do you keep your vision for your school from being held hostage by resistant teachers, uncooperative parents, ridiculous district policies or lack of time, money or resources. If you're facing those challenges right now, here's where you'll find the answers, strategies, and actionable tips you need to overcome any obstacle you face. You don't have to wait to make a difference in the lives of the people you serve. You can turn your school into a success story right now with the people and resources you already have. Let's get started.

Hey, builders, welcome to another episode of the school leadership reimagined podcast. I'm your host, Robyn Jackson. And this week, we are continuing our summer rewind series. Now this week, I wanted to rewind all the way back to Episode 42. And episode 42 is about three big fears that are holding you back from achieving your vision right now. And the reason that I wanted to rewind back to this episode is because lately, we've been doing a lot of free workshops inside of builder ship University, we did a Free Vision workshop last week, and we have another one coming up.

So you know, just a little note to you, if you really want to get help on your vision this summer, you can get it for absolutely free just join builder ship University free just go to build a ship university.com and select the free tier and you'll get all the invites to our upcoming free vision workshops. But one of the things that bothers me, as I'm helping people kind of think through their visions is that a lot of times people know what they really want. They know that they want 100% of their students at our above grade level, or 100% of their students graduating enlisted, enrolled and employed or 100% of their students, you know, being proficient or above or whatever their vision is, they know in their hearts, that's what they want. But they're too afraid to say it aloud. And a lot of times and that that vision workshop, I find myself giving people permission to do what they really want to do, which is to serve every child. And so if that's you, then today's episode is really going to be powerful for you. And if you want some help with that, I've already told you that you can join bill to ship University, we have a free version, a bill to ship University and you get that free vision workshop. And we're actually because they're in such great demand, we're adding more of those vision workshops over the summer. So normally we do it once a month. But there's so many people who want help that we are going to be adding more so you get the all of the updates and and the links to those workshops absolutely free by going to build a ship university.com and signing up.

But there's something else happening too, because we're opening up our last beta cohort for builders ship University, as you know, we've been building it over the last 18 months, it is 90% there. And we want to take one more cohort through just test everything out make sure everything's working before we open it up to the larger public. The nice thing about being in that beta cohort is when you come in now, because we're still testing a few things, you lock in at the unheard of rate of only $97 a month. And as an exchange for that low rate, you get to give us feedback, you get to say hey, I really could use a resource that does this. I like this part. I don't like that part. And you get to be a part of shaping builder ship university, to your liking to make it serve you. One of the reasons why I think builders ship universities so powerful is because builder ship University was built by builders for builders. And so if you want to be a part of that, that the doors are open for that next cohort right now and let me tell you what happens once you join. So the moment you join a builder ship University cohort, we immediately start to work on your vision. So what happens is, as a cohort, you we take you step by step through the process now build ship University is vast, we have so many resources inside of there, that people often find it overwhelming. You have access to everything there. So if you're like me and you just want to gobble up all the resources, you can do that. But if you want someone to kind of take you step by step through the process, the cohort process does that for you as well.

So every single week, you take another step towards building buildership in your school or in your district. 

And the first 90 days you walk out of builder ship University with a vision clear clean, we've given you feedback, we shaped it, it works It is your it is your vision. And then the next thing we do is that we help you facilitate the mission and core values process with your staff, we walk you through that entire thing, we show you how to craft your vision story so that you can begin sharing your vision with people in a way that that secures their buy in from the very beginning. And all of that happens in the first 90 days. And then we show you how to take everything that you're doing in your school, and align it to your vision. So this helps you see what should we be working on right now, what shouldn't we be working on right now, again, that's in the first 90 days, then in the second 90 days, we help you put in place for systems that move your people's will and skill so that they're ready and willing to achieve your vision. So we help you set up your entire feedback system from when you're going to get into classrooms to to what you're going to say to teachers to understanding the kinds of feedback they need. Right now, we help you set up your entire support architecture, we help you build a teacher dashboard and use it to be able to determine what supports teachers needs, so that they can grow at least one level in one domain in one year or less. We also help you set up your accountability architecture, so that you make sure that the systems in your school are working and moving you towards your vision. And if you don't have systems, we'll show you how to set them up. We have tons of templates and tools to help you do that.

And then the final thing we do is help you set up your culture architecture, we show you how to deliberately engineer a healthy school culture and how to audit the culture to look for early warning signs of toxicity. Some of you are like I don't need early warning signs wherever you have toxicity, but we help you find it get to the root cause of it so that you can eliminate that toxicity from your school. And I can go on and on and on. So every 90 days, you have these huge accomplishments where you've implemented some aspect of building up in your school and your school is thriving as a result of it. Anyway, I think I've gone on and on about that. And that it's just because I'm so excited about builder ship University, I think this is the best thing that we have ever built. And it just keeps getting better and better and better. And it's just, it's my favorite thing to do, it's probably where I'm going to spend the rest of my time working because I believe in it so strongly. And the whole outcome, you know, my vision for for builder ship University, is that we help you achieve your vision for your school in three years or less. And so that's what I'm going to spend my time working on. And I would love it if you joined me. So again, build a ship university.com You need to hurry because you only have until Friday to be able to join the beta cohort. And then we'll get started the very next week, we start at the beginning of July. And so summer is a great time to join you have a little more time and get some things in place and really get things established before your teachers come back so that you can have an incredible year, I'd love for you to join me build a ship university.com.

In the meantime, let's talk about your vision today, let's talk about three fears that that you may not even realize you're feeling that are holding you back from achieving your vision for your school. And then once you finish listening to the episode, go ahead and to go to build USHIP university.com. And if even if you're not ready for the cohort right now, go ahead and join the free version of Bill to ship university.com and come to one of our upcoming vision workshops. So that we can help you talk through your vision, it's a safe space. And I'm there I'm giving you you know, individual coaching and help you craft a vision that that you can that you that you're so passionate about that that that you are willing to do anything to achieve it. That vision that gets you up in the morning and lights you up when you talk about it. That's what I want for you. So after you listen to this episode, go ahead and join bill to ship University either the free or come on and join the one of the cohorts. And let's get started building your vision for your school.

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. 

Hey, if you're ready to get started being a builder right away, then I want to invite you to join us at builder ship University. It's our exclusive online community for builders just like you where you'll be able to get the exact training that you need to turn your school into a success story right now with the people and resources you already have. Inside you'll find our best online courses, live trainings with me tons of resources, templates and exemplars and monthly live office hours with me where you can ask me anything and get my help on whatever challenge you're facing right now. If you're tired of hitting obstacle after obstacle and you're sick of tiny little incremental gains each year, if you're ready to make a dramatic difference in your school right now, then you need to join buildership University. Just go to buildership university.com and get started writing your school success story today.

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.