Principal's Backpack: The Tips and Tools for Managing Yourself (So You Can Manage Everything Else)

Principals know all too well the complexities of effective school leadership. To successfully navigate the journey’s ups and downs, you’ll need to rely on the appropriate gear. In The Principal’s Backpack, Nancy Karlin Flynn draws on her background as a hiker and her experience leading schools to provide ways to not only survive but thrive as a school leader.

K–12 principals will:

• Create a mental map for health and well-being with tips on getting organized, setting goals, decision making, and finding their purpose
• Focus on psychological safety, know the laws, discover their strengths, create a network, and study their boss
• Benefit from a wide variety of reproducible templates, handouts, models, paradigms, strategies, inventories, activities, and surveys
• Build tactics on self-management and being mindful, staying calm, keeping their balance, using listening skills, expressing themselves, and stretching their limitations
• Understand effective, realistic ways to engage in physical and emotional self-care
• Learn how to unpack the events of the day by giving themselves some grace, having moments of self-reflection, laughing about it, recharging, and celebrating