The Principal's Backpack: Tips and Tools for Managing Yourself (So You Can Manage Everything Else) (Become an Effective School Leader with These Tips and Tools for Essential Principal Self-Care.)

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.

• 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

Nancy Karlin Flynn, EdD, has been an administrator in the Saint Paul Public Schools district for twenty-four years, serving as an elementary, junior high, and middle school principal. She is passionate about coaching, mentoring, and reflecting on leadership practice with aspiring principals as well as those with all levels of experience as school leaders.
Flynn created LeadersHike!, a professional learning workshop for school leaders based on this book, that combines her passion for coaching and her love of nature and hiking. Flynn was a contributing writer for LeaderTalk, an online blog through the Educational Leadership journal, and has published articles in Leading and Learning With Technology and other technology-related journals.
Flynn earned a bachelor’s degree in business administration from the University of Connecticut, a master’s degree in educational technology from the University of Nebraska, an education specialist degree in educational leadership from the University of New Mexico, and a doctorate in educational administration and policy from the University of Minnesota.
To learn more about Flynn’s work, visit leadershike.org.