Episode 50: From Disillusionment to Momentum: What I Know Now, I Wish I Knew Then: Find the Joy, Break the Silos, Build the Network.

A single question changed the way we lead: what do we know now that we wish we knew then? From the emotional roller coaster of a school year to the small habits that keep us grounded, we unpack practical moves that help educators stay energized, avoid the disillusionment dip, and create momentum that lasts.

We start by mapping the phases many teachers and leaders feel from high August anticipation to the late-fall slide into survival mode and share a simple, repeatable antidote: find the joy. Not the fluffy kind, but the deliberate practice of spotting small wins, naming impact, and using those bright spots to fuel honest reflection. Then we dig into reflective routines that actually stick: quick look-backs on what worked, what missed, and one change to try tomorrow, so the post-holiday reset becomes a launchpad, not a scramble.

Isolation is the quiet enemy of growth, so we make a case for getting out of silos. Hear how classroom learning walks, cross-discipline visits, and principal-to-principal exchanges unlock ideas you can use the same week. We widen the lens to building a real professional network; local meetups, state associations, national conferences and stacking free PD through podcasts, newsletters, and webinars. Along the way, we talk about why audio books count, how Atomic Habits powers 1 percent daily gains, and where online communities like Teach Better and coaching groups can extend your practice with feedback you can trust.

If you’re ready to trade burnout for better systems, this conversation gives you a blueprint: joy as fuel, reflection as routine, collaboration as default, and networks as your growth engine. Subscribe to stay energized every week, share this with a colleague who needs a boost, and leave a review to tell us what landed. What’s one habit you’ll improve by 1 percent today?

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Chapters

• 1:56 A Question That Changes Trajectories
• 3:21 Phases Of Educators’ Attitudes
• 5:04 Escaping Disillusionment By Finding Joy
• 7:40 Reflect, Rejuvenate, And Reset
• 9:37 Get Out Of Your Silos
• 11:41 Learn From Walkthroughs And Peers
• 13:17 Build A Broader Professional Network
• 14:41 Free PD, Books, And 1% Better
• 15:51 Online Communities And Ongoing Growth
• 16:39 Final Takeaways And Listener Requests

Transcript

Principal JL: 0:58

You know, every once in a while something makes you stop, slow down, and truly reflect. Not just on where you're going, but how far you've come. That moment hit me this past weekend when I had the opportunity to be a guest speaker for Adam Lane and his Leading Lane Educational Consulting Firm, speaking with an incredible group of educators from Nevada. During that conversation, one question landed and struck with me. What I know now I wish I knew then. It's a simple question, but it carries so much weight. Because as leaders, teachers, and learners, we're constantly evolving. The lessons we've learned through challenge, change, and even a few stumbles often become the very wisdom we wish we had when we started our journey. In today's episode, I want to unpack that question what I know now that I wish I knew then about educational leadership in a lot of different ways. Because if we can pass that insight forward to someone just starting out or even to our future selves, then reflection becomes more than a memory. It becomes momentum. Now let's get to the episode. Welcome back everybody to another exciting episode of the Educational Leadership Podcast. Today I'm really excited to talk to you about some things that I've learned over this past weekend. And this past weekend, I got to be a guest speaker with a bunch of great educators out of Nevada. Adam Lane invited me to be a guest speaker, so I really appreciate the opportunity. But during that prepping, as I was getting ready to speak, the question that I needed to wrap my presentation around was what I know now that I wish I knew then. And so this episode, I'm really gonna dive in to that question in that part of the presentation because I think it's really valuable for educational leaders today to understand, you know, there's some things that would be great to know now that you don't want to learn later. So one of the things I'm gonna go ahead and start off with is there's the thing called phases of educators' attitudes towards educating. Some people might see it as phases of teachers' attitudes towards teaching, but I take it a little bit different spin. And if I have a graphic for you to kind of follow along, I'm actually gonna make this graphic the thumbnail of this episode so you can actually see it. Since I'm doing an audio version of this podcast episode only. With this diagram, the anticipation when we start the school year is really high. We're coming off of the summer break. We're really like excited about the school year, all the great things that are gonna happen. We're just pumped, right? And then if you're starting school in August or September, whenever you are, a lot of people start at different times. That anticipation is super high, and as we get going, we start going, uh-oh, it starts sliding down, like our attitudes start shifting down a little bit because we start going, oh, there's a lot of work to be done. We start feeling like we're down, we're drowning, we're starting to get in survival mode to where we're trying to go, hey, we're just trying to keep our head above water, and then we start hitting disillusionment, which that actually starts like the end of October, end of November, and December, to where we start going, man, this isn't going the way I was hoping. So, and so we take this big dip. And right now I'm feeling that I feel that with my teachers, I feel that with my staff is this this dip down of disillusionment that we're currently sitting in. So, what I want to talk about is how do we get ourselves out of that disillusionment? Because we can get ourselves out of it, and it comes with a positive mindset, and what I'm talking about here is the thing that we don't do enough in education is we don't find the joy in what we're doing sometimes. Sometimes we let all those negative things compound everything and just beat us down and just weigh us down to where we forget the joy that this job can bring to us. And so I want you guys, I'm gonna challenge you guys to find the joy in what you're doing. Every day that you step into that building or in that classroom, in that schoolhouse, I want you to find the joy because all we're doing is trying to survive and putting out fires and trying to be Superman, like Darrin Peppard always talks about. Don't be Superman now. If we're trying to be Superman and putting out all these fires, you need to find the joy in the job because that's what's gonna help us stay out of this disillusionment that we're actually currently going through right now, and hopefully, with finding the joy in your work every day, because there's a lot of great things that happen in your school battle, there's a lot of great things that are happening in the classrooms, there's a lot of great things that we forget about that we need to make sure we go find the joy. So, I'm gonna challenge you guys to find the joy in the work every day you walk in because you find one little thing that's gonna start rejuvenating you. It's gonna start making you go, Wow, I really love what I'm doing. There's impact that we're having, and it gets your spirits up and it keeps you from getting way down into that disillusionment that we so often get stuck into that we gotta get ourselves out of. And so we start finding the joy in what we do every day, then we're gonna stay out of that rut to where we start feeling rejuvenated. And why we start getting feeling rejuvenated, we start reflecting, and that's what the part we're gonna talk about next is reflection on what you do. And so, as leaders, we need to reflect on things to make ourselves better because guess what? We're gonna make mistakes, we're gonna have problems, we're not gonna do things right, but we got to reflect on what went well, what went not so well, how can I make changes so I don't have that happen again. So that's really important to piece to be able to reflect. And a lot of times as we move through the year, we get past Christmas break, we start getting more excited because we had that break, we start getting rejuvenated, we start reflecting about the school year, and then we start having more high hopes and high anticipation when we finish the school year, and that anticipation carries us through the summer into the next year, and really those are the phases of educators and their attitudes towards educating year in and year out. No matter if you're a building principal, a superintendent, a teacher in the classroom, a support staff, it don't matter. That's kind of the phases of education. So, things I want you to do is when you start feeling down and negative, find the joy, find one little thing that's positive about what you're doing that day because that's gonna uplift you, that's gonna give you rejuvenation. Make sure reflect on what you're doing, what went well, what's not going so well. So make sure you're doing those things because that's gonna build anticipation for the great things that you're being ready to do. So that's one thing I wish I would have known then that I know now. Okay. Now, the next thing I want to talk about is getting out of your silos. Yes, getting out of your silos as educational leaders, as teachers and staff. Sometimes we get stuck in our silos. A teacher can get stuck in their classroom and just be so busy about what they're doing in a classroom that they forget there's other people out there that they can collaborate with. Principals, we could get stuck in our office to where we forget about getting out, finding the joy in your in your building, but also finding other principles to connect with, find what other people are doing out there. So, this is my challenge to you. This is something I know now that I wish I would have known then, and this really goes back as a teacher at Ralston High School when I had to do learning walks, and people didn't like doing them when we were there, but I enjoyed it. Some people complained about it, but I found you know what, this is valuable because I was able to get out of my math classroom, go to a science wing, and watch a science teacher do a flip classroom. And with that experience and understanding how they're doing, I just loved learning the different things other teachers are doing in the building because it helped make me a better teacher. Principals, we need to do the same thing educationally. We do the same things. We need to go find other principals, visit with them, learn about what they're doing, what great things they're doing, and try to learn from them. That's one of the things that this podcast for me does is I learn from other leaders through this podcast. My professional development is doing this podcast, learning from other great people out there, and that's really important. Piece is get out of your classrooms, get out. Sometimes you need to get out of your building and go network and go learn from other principals. But when you do this, make sure you give those people gratitude. Thank them for the opportunity to learn from them and let them know some of the great things that they're doing and how you're going to carry that on. Now, coming up, the last thing that I want to talk about that I wish I would have known back then that I know now is building a network of educators. Everybody, this is a very important one because guess what? We have great people in our building that we can learn from. That is awesome. And I want to make sure you guys understand learn from the people around you. You have great people in your building, you have great expertise, lean on that expertise and learn from, but also network outside of that. Network in your region, network in your area, network at the state level, and if you can have the opportunity to go network at the national level that could be workshops, conferences, association meetings, you know, those are things that help you network. And another thing is go find Free PD out there. Josh Tovar always talks about Free PD is podcasts, right? You can listen to podcasts. There's so many different great podcasts out there that you guys can listen to. Not just my podcast, but other ones out there. If you guys look at my website for my podcast, I actually have recommendations of other people's podcasts that you can actually go to and go, you know what, I'm gonna check that podcast out. So I'd recommend you guys to check out the link to where it talks about the different podcasts that I recommend or I've been on, or those people have been on my podcast as well. Another thing to do that I wish I'd know that I know now that I wish I knew back then is reading books. Something I don't really read books, actually. I listen to books, I use Audible to listen to a lot of books, but I don't just read about leadership and education, I read other books that are outside of education because there's things and ideas that I pull from that that I can utilize into my leadership. One of the my favorite books that I have out there that I've read a few times is Atomic Habits, and that's where I understand you know, the little things that you do from day in and day out, stack. You stack these atomic habits. We call it being 1% better every day, and that's something that you can teach your students, you can teach your staff, and as a leader, you need to figure out what is you can do better each day to get better in the field. So I really encourage you guys to listen to books or read books or something out there about leadership, about education of some sort to make you better. But I also want to talk about the social media side, there are other communities out there that you can get involved with. So, one of the things I get involved with as a Teach Better Network, it's not just for teachers, but administrators are involved with that. So, Jeff Gargas is the guy that runs that, and I appreciate being a part of that community. I'm also in a few other communities out there, the Empowered Principal Educational Community that I'm with with Coach Angela Kelly. Uh, there's a lot of different things. I involved with the PGP podcast. I've been on that once. I'm actually going to be ready to do another episode with Josh Tovar coming up. So being a part of those communities, being a part of other educational communities on the social media side is a great way to learn from other people because you can find resources, you can find people to learn from in those situations. So, what I basically want to talk about today was there's a lot of things that I know now that I wish I knew back when I started being a teacher, when I started being a leader. And so I really hope you guys find value in this episode and you find one little thing, one little nugget from this episode. I hope it impacts you so you can become a better teacher, a better educator, a better leader out there for your students, for your community. So, hope you guys liked this episode. If you did, I would love it if you would subscribe to the podcast so you don't miss another episode that drops. Share this podcast episode with someone you know that needs to hear it. But I love it if you guys give me a review. If you give me a review, that'd be awesome. I love to hear from you guys. You can also send me a text uh through the my any podcast platform out there. There's a little text thing, send me a text. I'd love to hear feedback from you, that'd be awesome as well. So hopefully, you guys enjoyed this episode. Until next time, be curious and 1% better.