Ep. 85 – Educating from the Inside Out: Leadership, Self-Worth, and Compassion with Deidre Harris

TRANSCRIPT

Gissele: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the Love and Compassion Podcast with Gissele. We believe that love and compassion have the power to heal our lives and our world. Don’t forget to like and subscribe for more amazing content.

Gissele: Today we’ll be chatting with Deidre Harris, who is a national leadership in highly effective teams development trainer and coach. She supports educational programs looking to enhance their administrative staff’s leadership skills and their teaching teams levels of effectiveness.

Gissele: Please join me in welcoming Deidre.

Deidre: Hi.

Gissele: Hi. Hello. Welcome to the show. Oh,

Deidre: thank you for inviting me.

Gissele: Oh, thank you so much for being here. This is definitely a topic of interest for me. I was wondering if you could tell the audience a little bit about how you got into this work.

Deidre: Oh my gosh. To make a long story, very short that I’ve just been working in the education field for over 35 years [00:01:00] and through all of my very.

Deidre: Various different positions. You know, leadership has just been coming up over and over and over again. And, and what does that look like? As a teacher working with children or as an assistant supporting that teacher or as a director or principal supporting staff. And so no matter what position I was in or what I was doing, leadership was just always, at the foundation of everything we did. So as I stepped out to do my own work, it just kept coming up more and more, and so I said, okay, there’s a need. Let me get out there and help to address it.

Gissele: Wonderful. Wonderful. And what were some of the biggest leadership challenges you saw in the education system?

Deidre: Well, gosh, I have to start with myself, Gissele right? So how did leadership show up in me? And a lot of times we kind of think about it and put it under the category of professionalism, but leadership. Actually goes [00:02:00] beyond professionalism to to be professional, to to show up with that hat, to do the work that you are hired to do in a manner that you know, that gives great outcomes for everybody.

Deidre: That’s just one piece of it. When I go in and I talk about leadership, it’s really about mindset. And so I actually had to work on my own set. Who am I as a leader? And how do I get to show up in that leadership to, you know, to actually, again, get those outcomes that I’m looking for. And so, as I was, you know, as I started doing this work among myself, like I mentioned earlier, I started seeing it.

Deidre: Elsewhere. And what I notice is that again, well, the biggest challenge, or the thing that I notice the most is everybody attributes leadership to a title.

Gissele: Mm. Right? Mm-hmm. So yeah, you’re

Deidre: either your administrator or like I said before. You’re a director or a principal or, you know, sit [00:03:00] somewhere where leadership is part of your, your title in the sense of authority.

Deidre: And so that’s, I would say one of my, my biggest challenges and, and what I noticed and again, what’s, you know, motivated me to do this work because leadership, we’re all leaders. You know, regardless of our title, regardless of what we do, and because I have that belief, then going out there and helping people to see their leadership and then to start standing in their leadership, that’s, that’s been my ongoing challenge in work.

Gissele: Hmm.

Deidre: Yeah.

Gissele: Thank you for that. Thank you