You Give Everyone Grace. Try Giving Some to Yourself.

Think about the last time a teacher came to you struggling. Maybe they were overwhelmed by a difficult class. Maybe they’d made a mistake they were beating themselves up about. Maybe they were just having a hard stretch and couldn’t see the end of it.

Think about what you said to them.

You probably said something like: this is hard, and the fact that you care this much is not a weakness. You probably reminded them of what they’d done well. You probably helped them see the situation with some perspective — that one hard week doesn’t define a career, that making mistakes is how people grow, that needing support is not the same as being inadequate. You probably made them feel seen before you offered any advice.

Now think about the last time you made a mistake, had a hard week, or needed support yourself.

Think about what you said to yourself.

For most principals, the gap between those two conversations is enormous. The standard they apply to their own struggles is a different standard entirely from the one they extend to everyone else in the building. Everyone else gets compassion, context, and the benefit of the doubt. The principal gets a ruthless internal audit.

This is not who you are. It is a pattern worth breaking — not because it makes you feel bad, but because it is making you less effective and burning through your reserves in ways that affect everyone who depends on you.

Why the Double Standard Exists

The gap between how principals treat others and how they treat themselves is not accidental. It is the product of several things working together.

First, there is the “I should know better” trap of leadership. When you are the person responsible for the building’s functioning, for the staff’s performance, for the students’ outcomes — making a mistake or struggling feels categorically different than it does for anyone else. It feels like evidence of unfitness, not just evidence of being human. You hold yourself to a different standard because you believe the role requires a different standard.

Second, there is the visibility problem. When a teacher struggles, it’s a private conversation between you and them. When you struggle, the whole building can see it — or you believe they can. The fear of the visibility of your own difficulty makes you manage it harshly rather than holding it with any gentleness.

Third — and this is the one that doesn’t get said enough — there is the identity dimension. The compassion you extend to others is part of your professional identity. You are the person who holds space for other people’s struggles. Being the one who struggles threatens that identity in a way that makes self-compassion feel less like care and more like a category error. The caretaker isn’t supposed to need care. The steady presence isn’t supposed to be unsteady. So when you are, the response is to manage it harshly and get back to steady as quickly as possible — rather than to acknowledge it, hold it, and let it inform what you need.

What Self-Compassion Actually Is

Self-compassion is one of the most misunderstood concepts in leadership culture, so let me be clear about what it is and what it is not.

It is not self-pity. Self-pity focuses on how uniquely bad your situation is and tends to isolate. Self-compassion recognizes that suffering and difficulty are universal human experiences — that what you’re going through is hard, and that hard things happen to people, and that you are a person.

It is not lowering your standards. Researcher Kristin Neff, who has studied self-compassion extensively, found that people with higher self-compassion actually take more personal responsibility for their mistakes — not less — because they can examine what went wrong without the self-protective avoidance that harsh self-criticism produces. You make better corrections when you’re not in self-attack mode.

It is not weakness. The research is consistent: self-compassion is associated with greater emotional resilience, less anxiety and depression, more stable motivation, and better long-term performance. The harsh self-criticism that most high-achievers use as a motivational tool is actually less effective than self-compassion — it produces short-term compliance and long-term depletion. The guilt that drives you to keep going past empty is the same mechanism — and it has the same diminishing returns over time.

One Concrete Practice to Start

The most effective entry point for self-compassion for people who find it genuinely difficult — and most principals do — is to use themselves as the reference point.

The next time you catch yourself in harsh self-criticism, ask one specific question: What would I say to a teacher who came to me with this exact situation? Not a hypothetical teacher — a specific one, someone whose struggles you have genuinely held with care. What would you actually say to them?

Then say that to yourself. Out loud if you can. The specificity and the out-loud piece both matter — they make the compassion real rather than abstract.

This is not a cure. It is a practice. And like any practice, it becomes more natural over time — the gap between how you treat yourself and how you treat the people you lead begins to close, not because you’ve lowered your standards but because you’ve extended to yourself the basic human dignity you extend to everyone else as a matter of professional principle.

You have spent your entire career making other people feel seen before you offer them help. You deserve to be seen too — starting with yourself.

The private space to hold your own struggles — to speak them without judgment, to process them without an audience, to extend yourself the compassion you give everyone else — is exactly what Principal Well was built to provide. $19.97 a month. No performance required. Entirely yours.

And if the self-criticism runs deep into how you’re showing up as a leader — if you need a professional reset alongside the personal one — The Principal Playbook is thirty days of rebuilding both layers.

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Share this with the principal who holds everyone else together but won’t let anyone hold them. They know who they are. They need someone to say: the same grace you give everyone else — you are allowed to give yourself some of that too.

— Dr. Tania Loyola | Principal Realities