For years, I straightened my hair before every observation, every interview, every moment I needed to look "professional." Nobody told me that had NOTHING to do with leadership. In this episode, I sit down with Casey Watts of Clear is the New Confident to unpack my Let Me Be Clear statement — training builds skills, mindset determines whether it becomes leadership — and why assistant principals carry one of the hardest, least-prepared-for roles in a school building. We get into the fix-it fallacy, unlearning the unwritten rules nobody hands you, the year I almost quit, and the moment curly hair stopped being a mindset problem.

Show notes:

• My Let Me Be Clear statement: "Training builds skills. Mindset determines whether it becomes leadership."
• Why The Unspoken Mindset opens with a mindset inventory instead of a chapter 1 — and how that inventory changes depending on where you are in the school year
• The fix-it fallacy: why solving every problem for your staff isn't leadership, it's a habit I'm still unlearning
• Relationship boundaries — what it takes to lead people you used to teach alongside
• Why assistant principals are one of the most under-supported, under-trained roles in education, and what I wish someone had built for me
• The year I almost quit as a new AP, and what I'd tell myself now
• The story behind going natural — why I stopped straightening my hair before big moments, and the little girl who told me my hair looked like hers

Guest: Casey Watts, Podcast Host of Clear is the New Confident

Find her work at www.catchingupwithcasey.com

Keywords: assistant principal, aspiring administrator, school leadership, educational leadership mindset, The Unspoken Mindset™, women in school leadership, K-12 administration, instructional coach to administrator, leadership training vs mindset, new principal, fix-it fallacy, natural hair professionalism, confidence in leadership, education podcast, school leadership podcast, mentorship for assistant principals

📖 The Unspoken Mindset: What No One Tells You About School Leadership — available on Amazon  https://a.co/d/026ENlpo
Head to 🌐 theunspokenmindset.com for resources and ways to work with me!
💬 Join the Facebook community: https://www.facebook.com/share/g/1DGUebJYmW/

Let's Connect on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joycehemmings/

It's August — new leaders are stepping into new roles and returning leaders are staring down a new year. In this episode, Joyce Conley-Hemmings breaks down what actually keeps leaders growing for the long haul: not a 90-day plan, but a sustainable relationship with your own inner work. Drawing on her own experience in school administration, coaching, and building the Unspoken Mindset Leadership Academy (UMLA), Joyce lays out what "sustainable" really means — and why the leaders who last aren't the ones who had it figured out on day one.

The work is never "done."

Sustainable growth isn't constant intensity.

The inner work is a discipline, not a crisis response.

You need people, not an audience.

Protected practices make sustainability possible.

Early investment compounds.

Interior development is foundational, not optional.

• "The work is not a destination. It is the orientation."
• "The investment you make in your own development right now compounds over the length of your career."
• "That is not time taken from the work. That is the work."
• "The leaders who last are not the ones who had it figured out at the beginning. They are the ones who developed a sustainable relationship with their own growth."

Let's Connect on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joycehemmings/

New and aspiring school administrators starting a role this year, returning leaders resetting for a new school year, and district-level decision-makers (principal supervisors, HR directors, superintendents) evaluating leadership development investment.

In this episode of The Unspoken Mindset, Joyce Conley-Hemmings unpacks the hidden cost of expertise: the moment a leader steps into a new role, a new building, or a new level of responsibility, they're a beginner again — and the ones who fight that reality stall out. Drawing on her own experience of getting defensive around a new principal's different approach, Joyce breaks down why learning agility depends on a secure sense of identity, not on always having the answer, and why "the expert trap" quietly limits leaders who treat their past experience as gospel rather than data. She closes with a direct message to leaders stepping into new roles this August and a concrete practice for listening to someone with less experience without comparison or defense.

Key Topics: Growth mindset, learning agility, humility, the beginner's mind, the expert trap, new leader onboarding

Key Words:

• beginner's mind leadership
• learning agility for leaders
• growth mindset in leadership
• how to be a new leader
• leadership humility
• new school leader mindset
• the expert trap
• first year assistant principal
• back to school leadership motivation

📖 The Unspoken Mindset: What No One Tells You About School Leadership — available on Amazon  https://a.co/d/026ENlpo
Head to 🌐 theunspokenmindset.com for resources and ways to work with me!

Get in The Unspoken Mindset™ Circle before enrollment closes: https://joyceconleyhemmings.kit.com/products/themindsetcircle
💬 Join the Facebook community: https://www.facebook.com/share/g/1DGUebJYmW/

Let's Connect on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joycehemmings/

New leaders are told to build an environment where staff feel safe taking risks, asking questions, and being honest — while privately terrified of making a mistake themselves. Nobody talks about how hard it is to create safety for others before you feel safe yourself. In this episode, Joyce Conley-Hemmings shares the moment her own performed confidence backfired with a leadership team she hadn't built — and how one public mistake, handled honestly instead of smoothed over, changed the room. Drawing on Amy Edmondson's research on psychological safety as the top predictor of team performance, Joyce breaks down what it actually takes to build safety from a still-grounding position, not a fully-arrived one.

What's covered:

• Why performed confidence reads as defensiveness — and why staff mirror it back
• The research behind psychological safety as the strongest predictor of team performance, not talent or resources
• Three practices for building safety as the leader: modeling fallibility, responding to honesty with gratitude before correction, and staying consistent
• Why one bad reaction to honesty can undo months of trust
• A practical exercise: asking a real, unscripted question in your next team meeting — and specific guidance on how to ask it, listen without steering, and follow through visibly within a week

Keywords: psychological safety, team culture, trust in leadership, vulnerability in leadership, Amy Edmondson, new assistant principal, school leadership, UMLA, Unspoken Mindset Circle, groundedness in leadership

📖 The Unspoken Mindset: What No One Tells You About School Leadership — available on Amazon  https://a.co/d/026ENlpo
Head to 🌐 theunspokenmindset.com for resources and ways to work with me!

Get in The Unspoken Mindset™ Circle before enrollment closes on August 21st: https://joyceconleyhemmings.kit.com/products/themindsetcircle
💬 Join the Facebook community: https://www.facebook.com/share/g/1DGUebJYmW/

Let's Connect on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joycehemmings/

The promotion from classroom teacher to school leader is sold as a gain — more influence, more title, more reach. Nobody tells you it's an identity loss first. In this episode, Joyce breaks down the invisible mental rewiring that happens when your value stops being visible (student results, relationships, a great lesson) and becomes invisible (a culture that runs well, problems solved before they escalate, staff who feel supported). She shares her own transition from AP-seat overwhelm to understanding that leadership isn't about being the best person in the building — it's about making everyone else better. Recorded two weeks before the school year starts, this one's for every first-year leader walking in with a new title and an old set of instincts.

• The leadership transition is an identity loss before it's an identity gain — the disorientation new leaders feel isn't weakness, it's a sign the transition is real.
• In the classroom, value is visible (data, relationships, results). In leadership, value is often invisible — a healthy culture, problems solved before they escalate. Learn to be effective without needing it to be seen.
• The core shift is from "I" to "we" — from being the expert who solves problems to being the person who builds other people's capacity to solve them.
• Grief is part of this transition. Naming that you miss being the expert doesn't mean you regret the move — skipping that grief just means carrying it quietly into how you lead.
• Unaddressed, this transition produces one of two failure modes: the micromanager who regresses to teacher behaviors, or the distant administrator who overcorrects and loses relational trust.
• Practical step: identify one problem you're solving that someone on your team should be solving instead — hand it off, let them work through it imperfectly, then debrief.

teacher to leader transition, new school leader, identity transition in leadership, educational leadership, assistant principal mindset, first-year school leader, leadership identity shift, letting go of control, leading through others, school leadership coaching, instructional leadership, new administrator mindset, district leadership pipeline, ego in leadership, leadership grief, distributed leadership, teacher leader mindset, back to school leadership, UMLA, The Unspoken Mindset

📖 The Unspoken Mindset: What No One Tells You About School Leadership — available on Amazon  https://a.co/d/026ENlpo
Head to 🌐 theunspokenmindset.com for resources and ways to work with me!

Get on the waitlist for the Fall Unspoken Mindset Circle: https://joyceconleyhemmings.kit.com/d19a341efa
💬 Join the Facebook community: https://www.facebook.com/share/g/1DGUebJYmW/

Let's Connect on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joycehemmings/

Looking for a district pipeline program to support your new leaders?

www.theunspokenmindset.com/umla

Authentic leadership is everywhere in leadership content right now — be yourself, bring your whole self to work. But almost nobody talks about what happens when who you actually are doesn't fit the culture you're actually in. When your directness is "too much" for the building. When you've learned to soften, code-switch, or over-prepare just to be extended the same benefit of the doubt others get by default. In this episode, Joyce Conley-Hemmings draws on her own experience navigating that tension to offer something most authenticity advice skips: a real framework for telling the difference between strategic adaptation and self-abandonment — and a plan for protecting your non-negotiables before the pressure to be someone else gets loud.

What's covered:

• Why "just be authentic" advice breaks down inside cultures that don't make room for who you are
• The three non-negotiables of authentic leadership — values, judgment, and voice — versus what's actually adaptive (style, delivery, communication strategy)
• How to tell strategic adaptation apart from self-abandonment before it costs you your sense of self
• The "identity anchoring" practice from the Unspoken Mindset Leadership Academy for getting grounded before pressure hits
• A practical exercise: naming your non-negotiables and protecting one, deliberately, this week

Keywords: authentic leadership, leading with authenticity, organizational culture, code-switching in leadership, self-abandonment vs adaptation, identity anchoring, school leadership, assistant principal mindset, UMLA, The Unspoken Mindset

📖 The Unspoken Mindset: What No One Tells You About School Leadership — available on Amazon  https://a.co/d/026ENlpo
Head to 🌐 theunspokenmindset.com for resources and ways to work with me!
💬 Join the Facebook community: https://www.facebook.com/share/g/1DGUebJYmW/

Let's Connect on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joycehemmings/

Looking for a district pipeline program to support your new leaders?

www.theunspokenmindset.com/umla

Episode 7 | The Moment Everything Changed

Six months pregnant. Feet swollen. No access to the platform she needed. Waiting on a ride. And then — a text from her principal: Administrators do not leave in the middle of a crisis. That was Joyce's moment. Not a dramatic public failure. Not a visible breakdown. Just one message that landed in exactly the soft spot she hadn't been protecting — herself. In this episode, Joyce gets honest about the pivotal mindset moment that quietly redirected everything, and makes the case that the experiences most likely to develop you as a leader are the ones you've been trained to push past.

What's covered in this episode:

• Why pivotal leadership moments almost never look the way we expect
• The difference between executing a role and actually leading from within it
• How vulnerability functions as a prerequisite for growth — not a liability
• Why we walk past the exact experiences built to develop us
• What it means when your why changes — and what has to change with it
• The reflection checkpoint practice Joyce built into the UMLA because nobody built it for her
• How to go back to a moment you moved past too quickly and let it finish its work

Keywords: school leadership mindset, assistant principal burnout, leadership pivotal moments, new leader development, educational leadership podcast, leadership identity, self-awareness in leadership, school administrator growth, principal support, UMLA, unspoken mindset

📖 The Unspoken Mindset: What No One Tells You About School Leadership — available on Amazon  https://a.co/d/026ENlpo
Head to 🌐 theunspokenmindset.com for resources and ways to work with me!
💬 Join the Facebook community: https://www.facebook.com/share/g/1DGUebJYmW/

Let's Connect on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joycehemmings/

In this episode, Joyce names the thing most leadership development won't touch: that power in a school system has almost nothing to do with who holds the title, and everything to do with who holds the relationships. Drawing from her own experience of watching a well-researched, data-backed idea go absolutely nowhere because she hadn't done the relational groundwork first, Joyce breaks down how to navigate organizational politics without losing your integrity in the process.

What's covered in this episode:

• Why ideas don't carry themselves — relationships do
• The difference between navigating power and being corrupted by it
• Three principles of ethical influence: relationship before request, consistency as currency, and knowing the difference between a system and a person
• What to do when the informal power structure was already locked in before you arrived
• How to find the side door when the front door isn't open to you yet
• When staying and grinding isn't resilience — it's sunk cost with better branding
• How the UMLA helps districts give new leaders a framework for political and relational intelligence

Keywords: school leadership politics, organizational influence, ethical leadership, new assistant principal, navigating power dynamics, school administrator mindset, leadership development podcast, relational intelligence, district leadership, informal power structure, school culture

📖 The Unspoken Mindset: What No One Tells You About School Leadership — available on Amazon https://a.co/d/026ENlpo
If you're a district leader looking to develop your new leaders head to

🌐 theunspokenmindset.com to get on a call to discuss how Joyce can help!
💬 Join the Facebook community for aspiring and new assistant principals https://www.facebook.com/share/g/1DGUebJYmW/

Let's Connect on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/joycehemmings/

Most leadership development tells you to do more, learn more, consume more. This episode makes the opposite case. In a culture that treats stillness as unproductive, Joyce challenges school leaders to reconsider what they're avoiding — and what they're missing because of it. Drawing from her own experience of almost drowning quietly in her first year as an assistant principal, Joyce unpacks why the most important growth you'll ever do as a leader happens not in the noise, but in the spaces between it.

Key Topics:

• Why leaders become addicted to input — and what it costs them
• The grief nobody warns you about when you step into leadership
• The mindset shift that changes everything: discomfort is data, not danger
• The critical difference between holding space and carrying weight
• The five-minute pause practice and why it's a leadership skill, not self-care fluff
• How the Unspoken Mindset Leadership Academy builds integration into leadership development — not just information

Keywords: school leadership mindset, assistant principal advice, new leader burnout, emotional regulation in leadership, leadership identity, psychological safety, first-year principal, leadership development podcast, discomfort and growth, mindfulness for leaders, school administrator podcast

RESOURCES

Grab the book: The Unspoken Mindset: What No One Tells You About School Leadership - https://a.co/d/026ENlpo

Website - https://theunspokenmindset.com

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/joycehemmings/

The most powerful decision-maker in your leadership isn't your training, your title, or your experience. It's the story running in the background of your mind, and most leaders don't even know it's in charge.

In this episode of The Unspoken Mindset, Joyce breaks down the three types of stories every school leader carries: the origin story built from early experiences, the current story shaping how you see your team and your role right now, and the future story that's quietly enforcing your ceiling.

This isn't positive thinking. This is a framework for seeing what's actually driving your decisions, and rewriting it with intention.

🎧 Listen and then download the free Narrative Audit worksheet at theunspokenmindset.com to do the work for yourself.

SUMMARY

Episode 4 introduces narrative identity in leadership; the idea that the stories leaders tell themselves about their capability and ceiling are active decision-makers, not background noise. Joyce walks through a practical framework for identifying, tracing, and reframing the three types of limiting narratives leaders carry. Closes with a guided introduction to the free Narrative Audit worksheet.

KEYWORDS

school leadership podcast, assistant principal mindset, limiting beliefs in leadership, cognitive reframing for leaders, new school administrator, leadership identity, imposter syndrome school leaders, mindset for principals

KEY TOPICS

• The three story types: origin, current, future
• How limiting beliefs become invisible decision-makers
• Cognitive reframing as a leadership discipline
• The Narrative Audit framework
• The story gap in district leadership pipelines

TAKEAWAYS

• Your internal narrative is shaping decisions whether you're aware of it or not
• Old stories feel true because they're old, age is not accuracy
• The gap between capability and execution is almost never a skills gap, it's a story gap
• The Narrative Audit worksheet walks you through the full process at theunspokenmindset.com

RESOURCES

Grab the book: The Unspoken Mindset: What No One Tells You About School Leadership - https://a.co/d/026ENlpo

Website - https://theunspokenmindset.com

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/joycehemmings/