3 Ways to Become a More Confident Instructional Leader
By Jorge Valenzuela
This Post serves as:
- An opinion piece that recommends actions and critical skills for effective leadership in various school district and division roles.
- A practical evergreen resource that provides research-backed strategies for building optimal confidence.
Confidence (or certainty in oneself) is ‘earned over time’ when we learn to accept ourselves, develop emotional intelligence (EQ), and make the right strides to improve in the areas we feel need our attention most. Those areas will be different for everyone, but if you’re reading this article, that area is most likely educational leadership.
My Challenges with Confidence
Tracing my journey backward, I realized that my struggle to be confident began well before I landed my instructional leadership role in 2007. I grew up in a household that didn’t model or nurture self-love and confidence. Consequently, achieving what I didn’t fully understand felt impossible even in adulthood and being highly educated.
For years I struggled to ‘find’ confidence in job titles, degrees, material possessions, relationships, or my physical appearance. In 2011, I experienced a major loss that caused me immense emotional pain and distress. During the grieving process, I came across the work of Eckert Tollee and learned that true confidence doesn’t come through material assets or high-profile associations.
Initially, lacking confidence in my district leadership role really took a personal toll on me as I struggled immensely to assertively present information during district faculty meetings, workshops for adult learners, and job interviews. Don’t get me wrong, I always did a good job, but internally I would suffer from anxiety and self-doubt. Feeling this way was extremely traumatizing, and I decided to change it. Improving my EQ helped tremendously.
By paying close attention to my work’s details and what I’m experiencing internally (emotionally), I have learned how to make all the butterflies fly in the same direction. If I can do it, you can do it too.
Confidence is Earned and can Fluctuate
Accept that confidence is not a permanent attribute. It is an amalgam of our ever-changing thoughts and the actions we take and therefore needs to be consistently nurtured. Moreover, confidence is not based on our ability to succeed but on the belief that we can be successful.
Studies by Stanford University psychologist Carol Dweck have suggested the power of belief and a growth mindset in relation to increasing confidence and thereby boosting the academic performance of learners.
Dweck writes, “True self-confidence is “the courage to be open — to welcome change and new ideas regardless of their source.” Real self-confidence is not reflected in a title, an expensive suit, a fancy car, or a series of acquisitions. It is reflected in your mindset: your readiness to grow.”
This knowledge is essential for all educators in leadership roles, and with attention to a few critical practices, we can become more confident in our work and better models for the people we serve. Here are three things instruction leaders can do to become more confident in their position.
1. Boost Your EQ: Understand, Label and Regulate Emotions
Emotions are involved in many aspects of our professional lives — including relationships, communication, and decision-making. EQ must be the foundation for building the other skills contributing to confidence.
Moreover, effective leaders have high EQ — meaning that they are in tune with their own emotions and those around them. Having high EQ improves your confidence because you trust your intuition and don’t let your feelings rule you because your emotions are in check.
If this is new information, the three-step framework outlined below is quite simple to use and understand for helping you boost your own EQ over time:
Step 1: Understand what emotions are and how they work. Psychology tells us that emotion is a complex state of feeling that impacts people physically and psychologically. It’s essential to know the way emotions affect the mind, body, and behavior by learning how to recognize and accurately label what we’re experiencing at any given moment.
Step 2: Accurately label the emotions you experience in real-time and know your emotional triggers. Leveraging a tool like Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotions can give us a good starting point for recognizing the wide range of emotions that cause us to feel fear, anxiety, anger, sadness, joy, and love (among other things).
To start labeling accurately on your own, use Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotions to recognize your emotions in different situations. The wheel simplifies emotions by causing us to focus on eight primary ones: anger, anticipation, joy, trust, fear, surprise, sadness, and disgust.
This helps categorize emotions and responses to them. Additionally, over time and with practice, one can recognize that other emotions we experience daily are an amalgam of the eight basic emotions and can stem from others as well. This is critical understanding, as it can help us identify emotional triggers required for planning to respond with good self-regulation tactics.
Moreover, this insight is beneficial for understanding the impact of emotions on our own overall well-being and social interactions. For example, in the office, someone’s anxiety may result from the buildup of stressful situations like a passive-aggressive boss or a toxic work environment.
Other helpful tidbits for demystifying emotions are that our brain creates emotions by assigning meaning to bodily sensations from our lived experiences, and although they are highly related, we experience emotions and feelings in sequential order — emotions precede feelings, and feelings precede our moods and behavior.
Step 3: Use an Emotions Planner to regulate your emotions. Now that you’ve developed a better understanding of emotions and have Plutchik’s tool for labeling and recognizing them, you can begin gauging where your emotions reside and identify strategies for regulating them effectively by using this Emotions Planner purposefully. This simple check-in can be in response to feeling off or having trouble restoring your inner peace after a difficult social interaction or an intense day at work.
Step 1: Describe the situation or the event that triggered your emotion(s).
Step 2: Label the emotion(s) you are currently experiencing. I recommend using Plutchik’s wheel as a reference, beginning with the eight primary emotions and then elaborating on other emotions.
Step 3: Identify possible emotion regulation strategies. You may also identify which of the five social and emotional learning (SEL) competencies your strategies pertain to from the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) framework. Categorizing strategies in these domains is helpful as we build our EQ.
2. Develop the Skills and Competence that Lead to Successful Moments
Practice builds competence, and competence builds confidence is a statement that can generally be true and presents a logical sequence for developing confidence as a byproduct of developing one’s abilities. Let’s unpack it by making it linear:
- Practice builds competence because when you consistently practice a skill or work on developing expertise, you gradually improve your abilities and become more competent at it. You learn to do it well.
- Competence builds confidence because the mastery you develop leads to your experiencing successful moments. This process ultimately increases your belief in your abilities, which serves as the foundation of confidence. When you know you can excel in something due to the competence earned through practice and repetition, along with the experience of successful moments, you are more likely to approach that task confidently. You also learn how to build confidence in newer tasks.
I must point out that the relationship between practice, competence, and confidence isn’t always linear for everyone. Some people require more practice to build competence in a skill or task, and the level of confidence they gain may vary based on their unique experiences, mindset, emotional intelligence, the need for external validation, and other factors. I advise leaders to always depend on themselves for self-assurance. For many, it isn’t easy in the beginning, but it will eventually become easier by sticking to the key points uplifted in this section.
In the realm of educational leadership, developing skills, competence, and confidence lead to successful moments. For example, a school principal or district leader can initiate a new initiative to enhance student engagement and academic achievement by collaborating with teachers to model and implement high-yielding strategies. This can foster belief in their ability to activate change. They may now begin to confidently tackle bigger challenges like curriculum revamps or technology integration.
Likewise, a district superintendent’s commitment to employee retention and engagement cultivates an open-door policy that yields positive outcomes of trust and collegiality. As victories like these accumulate, confidence increases, giving the superintendent the assurance to embark on more ambitious endeavors like addressing learning disparities among students. I want you to realize that the process of building competence, experiencing little success, and fostering confidence isn’t confined to specific tasks — it’s a transferrable cycle applicable to a spectrum of leadership responsibilities.
3. Embrace Lifelong Learning
As the educational landscape in the United States continues to change rapidly, developing confidence as an instructional leader is a challenging and emotional expedition. This journey necessitates your unwavering commitment to improving your confidence. As previously mentioned, confidence is earned and can fluctuate. Furthermore, your confidence level is impacted by how well you embrace lifelong learning — a necessary course of action for staying ahead of your educational leadership role. Here are four items of consideration that may be of help along the way. Feel free to adapt these to best suit your needs accordingly.
- Set Specific Learning Goals: Identify areas within educational leadership, such as leadership theories, educational technology, pedagogical practices, or new district-mandated initiatives, where you want to deepen your efficacy. Setting and adhering to clear learning goals keep you engaged and on a focused trajectory.
- Engage with Experts: Seek mentors, thought leaders, and experts in educational leadership. While you probably won’t find the perfect role model, learning from diverse individuals can offer a range of much-needed insights and solutions to what you encounter. Learning from those who have “successfully” walked the path before you can provide tailored guidance while shortening your learning curve.
- Practice the 10,000-Hour Rule: The concept of the 10,000-hour rule by author Malcolm Gladwell underscores deliberate practice in achieving mastery. Although success often varies, a manageable estimate is 3 hours a day, 20 hours a week, and for ten years. I’ve even heard recently that 100 hours of dedication to a specific task can improve abilities drastically. The bottom line is to dedicate focused hours to honing your leadership skills; over time, you’ll witness undeniable improvements, thus boosting your confidence.
- Monitor your Energy: While you work to achieve your leadership goals, monitoring your internal positive and negative energy is critical based on the emotions you experience (remember to refer to #1 as needed). For instance, actively pursuing goals and embracing failures as learning opportunities often result in positive states. Conversely, experiencing bad days or feeling off will most likely lead to negative states. Never allow yourself to remain in negative energy for too long — actively find ways to quickly shift to a positive state.
Final Reflection
Remember, your role as an education leader and journey towards increased confidence is a personal endeavor and an opportunity to inspire others. As you progress, never underestimate the potential for growth, either in yourself or in the staff and students you serve. Let the insights and practices shared within this article guide you through the complex emotional chaos of educational leadership. Embrace lifelong learning, nurture emotional intelligence, and commit to deliberate practice with dedication and resilience. You’ll create a confident leadership path paved brighter than you ever imagined.
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Jorge Valenzuela is the lead education coach at Lifelong Learning Defined.
You can connect with Jorge @JorgeDoesPBL via Twitter and Instagram to continue the conversation.
