About Kathy Archer
Kathy Archer knows what it’s like to constantly put out fires, question every decision, and carry the weight of an entire organization. She was once that overwhelmed nonprofit leader, teetering on the edge of burnout. Now, she helps nonprofit leaders stop drowning in work, doubting themselves, and carrying it all alone, so they can lead with confidence, set boundaries, and finally take control of their leadership and life.
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Resources Mentioned
Character Driven Leadership For Women
The Transcript
**Please note that all of our transcriptions come from rev.com and are 80% accurate. We’re grateful for the robots that make this possible and realize that it’s not a perfect process.
Sam Demma
Welcome back to another episode of the High Performing Educator podcast. This is your host Sam Demma and today we are joined by Kathy Archer. Kathy knows what it’s like to constantly put out fires, question every decision and carry the weight of an entire organization. She was once that overwhelmed nonprofit leader teetering on the edge of burnout. Now she helps nonprofit leaders, educational leaders, stop drowning in work, doubting themselves, and carrying it all alone so they can lead with confidence, set boundaries, and finally take control of their leadership and life. She is the author of Character-Driven Leadership for Women, and she is now a friend of mine. Kathy, thank you so much for coming on the show here today. You’re very welcome.
Kathy Archer
I’m so excited to be here and yeah, talk to you because you have such a brilliant mind and a brilliant way of looking through your mind at the world and I’m excited to talk about things today.
Sam Demma
Well, I appreciate you being here and I would love to just start with the new book. Please tell us a little bit about what inspired you to write it and why you’re excited to get it in the hands of more readers.
Kathy Archer
Yes, character-driven leadership for women is a five-step framework for helping shape your management style with strong values, ethics, and morals. So when I was in leadership, I hit two big leadership lows and I fell out of integrity.
Kathy Archer
And I don’t just say that, like my staff said that twice in performance reviews. Like Kathy lacks integrity. I’m like, what? That’s not me. And so I spent about 25 years in the nonprofit sector, got introduced to coaching the second time I hit my big leadership low and the staff had filed a grievance against me. And I fell in love with coaching and I learned that we need to come back to how we’re leading, the way we’re leading, not just what we think we’re supposed to do in our work, but how we’re doing that in our job.
Kathy Archer
You know, I know you know this, there’s a difference between being and doing, and we do a lot of doing, you know, we tick off the boxes and checklists and go to the meetings, but how are you doing that? And so character driven leadership comes back to the who’s behind the work, and how we lead in a way that’s authentic to us, aligned with our values, our missions, our visions, all of that kind of stuff.
Sam Demma
Kathy is a business-minded individual, which is why she chose the niche of serving women. But let me tell you, it’s not a book only for women. It’s for everyone who wants to build more ethics, morals, and values in their leadership styles. Something we talked about before the podcast began was that we’ve really learned about
Sam Demma
leadership in an inauthentic way and in all the wrong ways. Can you speak about that a little bit and how you want to shift that conversation?
Kathy Archer
Only if you answer me one quick question. Name the top three to five motivational speakers that you listen to, follow. I mean, Jim Rohn, who else?
Sam Demma
You know I love Jim Rohn. Jim Rohn is one of my favorite lecturers and speakers. I have a personal mentor who’s not so known in the world, but he’s one of the people I look up to the most. His name is Chris Cummins. I also listen often to Alan Watts and Tony Robbins and I’ll stop there.
Kathy Archer
Yeah. Yeah. Napoleon Hill, think and grow rich. In the leadership world, we’ve learned to lead from masculine role models. If you look at any of the business schools, the leadership stuff, the motivational stuff, 90% of it is male, white male, and was written 30, 40 years ago, and definitely pre-COVID.
Kathy Archer
And so part of what’s happened is we’ve missed the softer edges of leadership. We’ve missed, and this is both true for men and women, we’ve missed the feminine qualities of leadership. I cannot tell you how many times a woman says to me, and again, I primarily coach women leaders, but I also coach in the corporate sector, and I coach male and females alike. So I experience both. But I just I coach male and females alike. So I experienced both, but I just want to shut my emotions off. I don’t want to bring my emotions into that meeting. I just wanna, right? And I’m like, no, no, no, no, no, no. We need to manage our emotions, but our emotions are guides, they’re clues, they’re so valuable to us. And so we need to do that. Or, you know, if you bring compassion in or kindness or fairness or any of those things that somehow you’re soft as a leader. And so we’ve learned to lead in this very rigid, stiff sort of way, right? And we need to come back to but what’s my way? What’s my way of leading? And I am a crier, I’m gonna admit, I’m a very emotional person. And so it was very hard for me to shut my emotions off over the years.
Kathy Archer
I’m compassionate. I love to do things like craft and crochet and take care of plants and nurture things. And when I was in leadership, it became a very do this, go to the meetings. And while I wanted to have this really strong relationship with my staff When I got busy, I felt like I had to push that aside and that’s where the the disconnect and integrity came Family’s important to me, but I was the one traveling when you know, my kid was in a car accident and I didn’t come home You know work-life balance is important, but I’m sitting there on a Sunday doing time sheets. So I had lost my integrity. And now I’m confused about the question we were on, because I went on a whole challenge.
Kathy Archer
Oh, authenticity. So we need to come back to who we are and find our way of leading. And this comes back to, and I’ll pass it back to you, Sam, the self-reflective work, which I know you do all the time, it’s so important that we connect to who we are through that self-reflective work.
Sam Demma
I’ve had some of my greatest breakthroughs after experiences unfolded and I wrote about it. And maybe it’s through my conversations with Kate, who happens to be a close friend and my therapist, who encourages me to write things down. And those reflective journal entries end up providing you with some big breakthroughs, which lead to shifts in the way I live my life and the choices I choose to make. So reflection has been a massive part of my philosophy. And maybe it was borrowed a little bit from Jim Rohn, who always talked about the importance of journaling and how you’re, you know, one of the most valuable things you can hand to somebody else when you leave this planet is your journals. You are someone who has worked in the space for a long period of time. You’ve worked with lots of individuals, many of which have likely experienced burnout.
Sam Demma
You yourself have experienced burnout. What are some of the key turning points in your journey that help you like recognize when you’re reaching that point and to get back out of it?
Kathy Archer
Yeah. The first time I ever hit it really hard was when I was sitting in the doctor’s office, getting prescription for antidepressants. That was a big turning point for me. Right.
Kathy Archer
It was like, Ooh, Kathy, do you want to keep doing this? And I had one of those moments where I was like, do I wanna leave the career? Like it’s hard, right? I was just new to leadership, but I came back because I had that strong passion for the work I do, very committed to it.
Kathy Archer
And what shifted for me then and what has always shifted for me was that’s when I started my degree. So I had a college diploma, but I’m like, no, I don’t know anything about leadership. I knew the work. And this is true for, you know, educators as well. We’re good teachers, but we move into leadership. But do you know, but have you learned leadership? Right? It’s different. It’s not the same as teaching. Certainly very, you know, similar things that you do. But so I went back and I started working on my degree and it took me eight years to get my management degree because I was raising four kids at the time and working full time. But education, learning, growing has always been foundational for me and shifting. And so the same was true when I hit that second really big low. That’s like I say, when I decided to become a coach, but it was not the same kind of, I mean I took courses to do coaching, but I really started to dive into learning and and many of the same mentors that you have learned from and again, this is why I come back to teach women because women don’t have enough role models out there. We’re learning from men and and there’s nothing wrong with that, but we’re just wired differently. And so, I would dive in and I would dissect the term integrity. Like what does integrity actually mean, right?
Kathy Archer
What’s moral courage? Or when you’re really demonstrating compassion, what does that mean? And I started to really learn more about that and started to create goals. Like I wanted to really learn more about that and started to create goals. Like I wanted to do this more. You know, I’ve always been goal-driven, but when you start to really identify specific goals, it starts to shift what you’re doing, I think.
Sam Demma
What about setting goals and having something you’re aiming at has been helpful in getting out of that state of burnout when you’ve gotten close to it.
Kathy Archer
Yeah, yeah. We’re teleological beings, so we want a target, right? If we don’t have a target, we spend our time head down. I always talk about whacking the moles, right? Meeting, email, right? That’s all we’re doing. That’s our only target is just hitting those things that are like this close in front of us. So we need to create goals. So for me, yeah, it was creating goals, not just about what I wanted to accomplish, but who I wanted to be. And those kinds of goals really is what started to drive the change for me is anybody can run a meeting, but how do you run a meeting, right? Anybody can give somebody some advice or critique their performance, but how are you doing that? You know, you think about a good coach that you’ve had over the years, there’s a way of being, not just doing there. And that’s what those kind of goals, and when we look at, you know, our performance appraisal kind of goals, it’s like, yeah, I want to, you know, finish this and complete that and do that. It’s different than that. It’s that, but it’s more than that. And creating goals like that really helps. So for me, I wanted to, at one point, I really wanted to learn how to be better at forgiving.
Kathy Archer
Forgiveness for me is not easy, right? And there’s things that happen in our lives with people that kind of hurt us. And you know, when I started going, oh, forgiveness isn’t about them, it’s about me. Oh, okay. Okay. That changes it, right? You know, back to journaling, then I can start to go, okay, am I better able to understand forgiveness? You know, thinking cognitively, am I better able to understand it? Okay, I’ve met that target, right? I may be not better at doing it yet, but I’m better at understanding it. So there’s that target. Then I can journal about ways that I’m doing it or practicing it. And so, yeah, you start to grow personally as well as professionally.
Sam Demma
It sounds like it would be a wise decision for us to create our own professional and personal growth plan? Is that something that you have?
Kathy Archer
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So in the book, I talk about your character plan, right? So create your character plan, but I’m often talking, I have a membership for leaders and I’m often talking about creating your own personal and professional learning curriculum.
Kathy Archer
So, you know, what are you learning? When are you learning it? Cause if it’s not on your calendar, there’s a good chance you’re not going to learn it. How are you learning it? And then what’s your measure? And when we’re talking about maybe being a more organized leader, okay, so what does organized mean, right? And so it might simply be jotting down the number of times you actually plan staff meeting before staff meeting. Because I can’t tell you how many times I’d run into a meeting like frazzled and last minute and bringing agendas with me while nobody else had a chance to prepare. I’m just dumping stuff on them or it’s a monologue and I’m just, that’s not what we need from our staff meetings, we need some engagement. So are you planning those meetings? Maybe you’re looking at setting better boundaries. Okay, so how often are you leaving the school at five o’clock, right? Like that’s a measurement, right? So having those measurements is incredibly important part of it.
Sam Demma
I’ve personally experienced it to be very difficult to create boundaries when you love the work so much and you just want to show up. And I’m assuming it’ll be particularly difficult in the nonprofit space as well, where people are very heart-centered or any person who’s in a leadership position is likely there because they love what they do and they want to serve and they want to support.
Sam Demma
What practical strategies have you found very effective in helping people get comfortable creating those boundaries?
Kathy Archer
So you’re right, it is hard. And I love the work I do and it’s easy for me to get sucked in, evening and weekends. I don’t typically, because I create other things that are interesting and exciting. So I know we’re both Toastmasters. So, you know, if I have a Toastmasters meeting that night, I’m definitely going to end work because I want to do that. Health and wellness is incredibly important to me. I need to get my walk in every day and do some of those other things. But you know, I think about family when the sort of the year of COVID, you know, I knew that it’s like, how do we get together? And I have five granddaughters and it was just tough. And so the goal I created that year was to create 12 experiences with our family. That was it, right? So sledding was one, right? Like we all went sledding for the day. We went to the pool another day. You know, it didn’t have to be anything big, but I had to be intentional. And again, back to that teleological, if your focus is the passion at work, you’re gonna go there, but if you create a target over here too, there’s gonna be a pull because we’re just drawn to hitting targets. There’s gonna be a pull to go, okay, I also have to do that. So yeah, you’re less likely to do work on a Saturday afternoon to do that. The other thing I will say is we often think about taking care of ourselves as an afterthought or something that happens after our work day. And we have to learn, and there’s a big component in the book around wellness, and I talk about weaving in wellness throughout your workday. You are not going to be patient, you’re not going to be focused, you’re not going to be able to manage your emotions or say what you need to say when you’re hangry, when you haven’t left your desk, right? This is stuff you can’t lead from an empty tank. Throughout your workday you have to weave in wellness and so again if I’m so passionate about what I do, then I also should be so passionate about my wellness because it will raise this level here.
Sam Demma
I recently added a few new practices to my day-to-day life and recognized that I didn’t want to do some of them during the workday because I wanted to save that time for meetings with people and conversations and meetings with my team. And it got to a point where I recognized, hey, Sam, you kind of have to, you kind of have to choose. You know, there’s, there’s only so many hours available in the day.
Sam Demma
And so I started going to bed a little earlier so I could do some work in the morning and the quiet hours of the morning. But I’m close to capacity and I’m curious to know, how do you decide what you prioritize each day or each week? Because there are a set number of hours we have.
Kathy Archer
Yeah, yeah. But the most important things early in the day. I love that you say that. I’m a 5 a.m. riser, 9 p.m. bedtime. Like you bookend it, right? But also, the other part, and again, I talk about this in the book, is a weekly review as well as a daily review. So each week I look at what’s on my calendar, what appointments do I have, and I talk about which ones can you ditch, defer, or delegate, right? Like, can somebody else take that task on?
Kathy Archer
Can you get rid of it? Like, you know what? I mean, there are things that we do just because we’ve always done them. Do we still need to do them, right? Or defer, okay, that’s important, but I just don’t have the energy or bandwidth this week. I’ll move it out. And we sort of assume what’s in our calendar, we have to do. Do I have to go to that meeting? Do I have to go to the full meeting? Right? Can I just show up and hand my stuff over or show up at the end? And that’s not always fair or the right thing to do, which goes back to who am I, right? How am I having those conversations? But I do, I think we have to look at, you know, I only have X amount of energy in a day and time in a day, and they’re different things, right? I only have so many hours in a day, but you’re running out of energy. And if you’re doing some of those things with, you know, mediocre energy, you’re just not doing them well. And so again, that comes back to who’s doing this job, who’s doing this work? If it’s, if I’m, can I say half-assing it? If I’m half-assing it, I’m not being my best self. And if I have to look in the mirror every day, and again, this is why the journaling is so important and the self-reflecting is, am I being my best self today? And if I’m being my best self today, does this schedule match. And it might be, and this is the other thing I talk about, is micro moments. Like one or two minutes. What can you do in one or two minutes? Like I, maybe more than two minutes, but I used to walk around the block, like a five minute walk. Like that was enough to recharge me. Stretch, like get up and stretch your arms. Like, you know, do a squat and, you know and do something. I would do squats at the photocopier. I don’t even know if they still have photocopiers. Today I would do squats at the photocopier.
Kathy Archer
Waiting for things. But yeah, like micro moments of wellness, a drink of water, something to eat, connection with nature, a little prayer, meditation of one minute. Like something you can weave into your workday is gonna bring that energy back up.
Sam Demma
Those micro moments seem small, but have a massive impact. I talk about it all the time with small consistent actions. One of the little things I love to do before I start the workday is even if I’m still inside, position myself near a window where the sun can hit my face. If it’s freezing, just seeing the sun, it has an impact on how I feel. I work out every morning. I love reading and journaling and meditating. And those four habits have a really big impact on how I feel. Are there any other micro moments or habits that have been very influential in your personal development?
Kathy Archer
Microelements of learning. We often think I need an hour to sit down and read a book. Three minutes. Like I am, I can read like three paragraphs and go, hmm, and think about it and write a note about it. And then it’s going to simmer in the back of my mind. A micro moments of learning, hugely, hugely important. Again, sometimes you need those deeper dives, but you can take in just a little piece, a podcast.
Kathy Archer
You know, I’m listening to a podcast where I’m folding laundry. Like it doesn’t take a ton. But those micro moments of learning are going to stimulate creativity in you, you you, awaken that, oh, I could try that over here or that over here or different things. So, I mean, your podcast is a great example. I was listening to some of the past episodes
Kathy Archer
and I can imagine a teacher or a leader in a school going, oh, that’s a good idea, I like that. And it’s like a two minute conversation that they listen to and it’s like, bingo, there’s an idea.
Sam Demma
Always digging for the insights.
Kathy Archer
Always, always, always, always, yeah, yeah.
Sam Demma
This has been such a lovely conversation. I wanna say thank you for taking the time to share some of your insights, talk a little bit about your book, discuss the difference in leadership styles the world needs right now, especially with a little more feminine energy. I would love for you to share where people can connect with you and purchase your book because I know they’re gonna wanna read it.
Kathy Archer
Yeah, yeah. So I’m at kathiearcher.com is my website, Kathy D as in Diane Archer on all of the socials. Instagram is my favorite place to hang out. You can grab the book on Amazon or wherever you buy books. It’s available March 3rd. The audio version is out there too, so listen in. And I have a, this is my second book. My first book is Mastering Confidence, so it’s also on on all of the the platforms as well. So yeah, please connect with me. I love to work with, you know, leaders who are interested in growing themselves, growth minded, engaged leaders who want to leaders who are interested in growing themselves, growth minded, engaged leaders who want to not just do better, but be better.
Sam Demma
Kathy, this is lovely. Thank you so much.
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