In this episode, Jethro Jones interviews Alison Smith, an author, speaker, and coach dedicated to empowering leaders to build unshakeable resilience. Alison shares insights on how to foster deep-rooted confidence and create meaningful impact by aligning actions with core vision and values. The discussion dives into human-centered leadership, building trust, and defining success within schools. Alison also introduces her Thrive Design principles as a framework for building resilient schools.

• Thriving vs. Resilience
• Thrive: to grasp to oneself
• Thriving in the valleys.
• Resilience is thriving in the valleys.
• Centered or grounded.
• You’re in a bubble, and things are happening around you, but you’re doing it from the grounded place.
• Your well being is dependent on your bubble, not the circumstances around you.
• Mission, vision, values help teachers, students, and families connecting to the vision.
• Resilient schools are rooted in their purpose and values
• Clarity of purpose and courage to go forward when we are aligned.
• Burnout is a real barrier to resilience.
• How stress and ineffectiveness contribute to burnout.
• Feelings of “Things we do don’t matter” exist when our actions don’t align to our values.
• It’s the work of all of us to define success’
• We need to be concrete and explicit about what success looks like.
• High Trust - Brene Brown Daring to Lead - The Anatomy of Trust
• Being Reliable.
• Accountability
• Generosity
• THRIVE Design Principles - things that help us move from burnout to resilience.
• Trust
• Human centered
• Responsive (as opposed to reactive, and be curious)
• Incremental - next right action.
• Values driven
• Empowered - what you can control, not what you can’t control; let go of what you can’t control
• Go below the surface when there is friction to help you determine what issues are arising.
• Being clear takes away the judgment and distracting questions and justification.
• How to make staff feel valued.
• Look and watch and see what people are really doing, then give them appropriate praise.
• Part of resilience is awareness.
• Resilience comes back to self-awareness and community-awareness.
• Well-being continuum -10 to +10 how are you doing right now?
• School Leaders that THRIVE Summit

About Allison:
Alison Smith is an author, speaker, and coach dedicated to empowering leaders to build unshakeable resilience, foster deep-rooted confidence, and create meaningful impact by aligning their actions with their core vision and values. She helps her clients to leverage the power of small acts of resilience to design thriving personal and professional lives. Her work has been featured in various publications, and her book, “Drawing Your Line: Setting Boundaries Step by Step”, guides many to healthier living. Outside of work, she enjoys a good book with a glass of wine and spending time with her husband and two kids.

Check out School Leaders that THRIVE Summit

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