Teachers in Transition Episode 182 - When Life Hands you Lemons

Today on the podcast, in our segment on stress and health, we talk about overcoming adversity during the winter months when many people deal with seasonal affective disorder, the absolute BEST place to put that family calendar, and we’ll refine our quest to figure out our transferrable skills as we continue our mini-series in the What Color is Your Parachute book.  Vanessa shares one of the stories she uses to pull out her skills 

What Color is Your Parachute 2024 and the Workbook 

PDF of Parachute Skills Grid 

Prioritizing Grid

Some prompts for your stories (taken from the book): 

·       A situation that made you feel part of something larger than yourself

·       An experience that stood out because you were proud of what you accomplish

·       Helping someone, or making someone else's life better

·       Something you did despite others saying that you could not do it

·       Something you did that you would like to do again

·       A strong skill or interest of yours and how you used it 

·       Something that was exciting or inspiring to you

·       An experience you look back on fondly

·       An experience that taught you something even if it wasn't fun at the time

·       An experience that required you to take a risk

Gretchen Rubin’s Quizzes

Authentic Happiness Main Page 

Transcript

Are you a teacher who is feeling stressed out and overwhelmed? do you worry that you're feeling symptoms of burnout - or are you sure you've already gotten there? Have you started to dream of doing something different or a new job or perhaps pursuing an entirely different career but you don't know what else you're qualified to do? You don't know how to start a job search and you just feel stuck. if that sounds like you, I promise you are not alone. my name is Vanessa Jackson; and I am a career transition and job search coach and I specialize in helping burnt out teachers just like you deal with the overwhelmingly stressful nature of your day-to-day job and to consider what other careers might be out there waiting for you. You might ask yourself, What tools do I need to find a new career?  Are my skills valuable outside the classroom?  How and where do I even get started?  These are all questions you deserve answers to, and I can help you find them.  I’m Vanessa Jackson. Come and join me for Teachers in Transition.  

Hi!  And Welcome back to another episode of Teachers in Transition. I am your host, Vanessa Jackson - a compassionate Career transition and job search coach who specializes in working with burnt out teachers who are ready for a career change but are not sure where to begin. If you are tuning in on the day that the podcast drops, it is the Eve of Christmas Eve. I hope that you are getting to spend time with family, friends, pets, and anything else that fills your cup.  I hope that you are taking time to rest during the holidays – whether that is time spent in quiet contemplation, or time spent in social settings.  We spend so much time giving to others.  Make sure you spend time on YOU during the break.  The Spring Semester is coming.  Today on the podcast, we are going talk a little about overcoming adversity, our hack for making sure you see your calendar, and identifying and translating our skills as we continue Part 3 in our mini-series in the “What Color is Your Parachute” book. This week, I share one of my stories.

A lot of people suffer from SAD this time of year (Seasonal Affective Disorder).  This is a temporary depression that is induced by the lack of sunlight in our day.  The good news here is that we have passed the winter solstice, so days are officially getting longer again – although those of us in more southern zones will not notice until about March. If you are dealing with any sort of depression, that just makes everything harder – the analogy I like is that it feels like we are trying to move through Jello. And often, we don’t even realize how down we are because it happens by degrees.  Those of my listeners who are a little older (Gen X and up) won’t think to ask for help. They tell themselves – “I can get through this!  I’ll pull myself up by my bootstraps!”  Or maybe you’ve even heard the old expression – “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade!”  Fun fact about lemons – they didn’t exist in nature until humans made them.  Really.  Lemons were derived from sour oranges crossed with citron.  And life isn’t giving you the problems to solve – a situation is.  And a situation can be broken down and solved.  We don’t have to make the best of a bad situation – we can change the situation! We don’t have to “make lemonade” out of our lemons – we can do anything we like with them – If you enjoy an adult beverage, try a lemon margarita. Personally, I like cutting them into small pieces and running them through the garbage disposal for a fresh scent in a stinky place. There might be a metaphor in there.  I’ll leave you to think on that.   

In our next segment, This week’s Teacher Hack is really more for a home hack.  It works people who have a family calendar, or a shared calendar with a roommate or spouse, or who are just extraordinarily busy.   And it sounds like an odd hack in a digital world, so hear me out. I am a planner junkie. In fact, I'm going to talk more about planners next week so please make sure and tune back into that.  If  you are trying to coordinate activities across a household, it can be difficult to make sure that everyone is on the same page. Sure, you can set an alarm on your phone, but that doesn't really help you if the alarm goes off and you are nowhere near where the alarm is set to take you.  And if you, someone you love, or someone you just share a home with happens to have ADHD, that it is really important to make sure that you can see all of the important things.  As anyone with ADHD knows, if I don't see it, then it doesn't exist. And how often have we scheduled something for, say, December the 27th, but then later someone asks if you are available to do something on Wednesday? So you reply, “sure!” Then later your brain connects the fact that December 27th is Wednesday and it is impossible to do both.  This can lead to frustration and embarrassment.  And let's say you do not have ADHD, but you are just a very normal, busy, and overwhelmed teacher? Then the same tips will apply.

Get one of those large desk calendars – the white ones with the big squares. I really like the one that Office Depot right now because as of right now, they were on sale for only $4.  Us an old shoesting, or piece of paracord, or a piece of yarn – put it through the holes, tie it together and make a hanger.  Here’s the magic – hang it in the bathroom. That’s right the bathroom – the one room where EVERYONE is guaranteed to go everyday.  We have one of those water closets where the toilet has its own little room, so that calendar hangs directly opposite the toilet.  Even with phones as our constant companions, this gets seen.    In our current home, the door opens inward to that water closet, and I didn’t want to put any holes in the door, so I used a wreath hanger.  Easy.    As a bonus tip, I color code everyone with flair pens.  Flair pens perform better than ball point pens on the wall, and it is easy to see at-a-glance who has what coming up.   This is literally one of the first things I see every morning, so I can mentally see what is coming in my day.  Let me know if you try this hack and how it works for you.  I’d love to hear if this works for you and if you have any improvements to this hack.  
 
 And on to our Job Hunting segment where we have been working through the Flower Petal Exercise as taken from the book “What Color is Your Parachute” by Richard N Bolles with Katherine Brooks.  Petal Three is a long one and we broke it into two, so now our 8-part series is a 9-part series.  We started Petal 3 in episode 181.  We are using stories to help us find our skills, and where we left off, we were starting to look for patterns in our stories. If you are having trouble finding the patterns in your stories, ask a friend, a family member, or a job coach to help you look.  If you were having trouble writing your stories, I have put some prompts from the book in the show notes.  Since we are looking to transfer your valuable teaching skills, I strongly suggest that you use stories from your classroom and educational life. 

For this portion of visualizing your skills, it will help you have sticky notes available.  So you might want to pause for a moment and get those.  

One you have written your stories, and used the Parachute Skills Grid to check off what skills are in those stories, it is now time to look through that grid and pull out your Top Ten Favorite skills. These are guesses, and the book really emphasizes that these need to be your favorite skills and not just things you think the job market wants.  There are a lot of different jobs out there, and every skill is desired by SOME job somewhere.  Go with your favorites!  

The next step is to PRIORITIZE those skills. The book/workbook has a wonderful Prioritizing Grid that can help with this  - I have put a link to that on the publisher’s site in the show notes for you.  I say it is wonderful – it is equal parts frustrating, because it can be difficult to have to choose favorites on an almost cellular level, but it’s worth it.  I promise.  

Write each of these skills on a sticky note and make sure the sticky notes indicate the order.  “My favorite skill is…. My second favorite skills is…” and so on.  Arrange those sticky notes in a pyramid with the top skill at the pinnacle, skills 2-3 on the second row, skills 5, 6, & 7 on the third row, and skills 6-10 on the bottom level.  

Your top skill can help you determine what your ideal job is, so it matters greatly that you are very clear about what that is.  

Now we go back through the stories to dig deeper and pull out your traits.  Traits deal with things that tends to be associated with those “soft skills” like time management, emotional intelligence, how your respond to crises, and so on. If you want to know more about your traits, this is another excellent opportunity to check with the people around you to see how they would describe you and how you are perceived.  You can also check many different sites and quizzes.  I am a huge fan of Gretchen Rubin (author, podcaster, and all-around deep thinker.  She has written several books including: The Four Tendencies, The Happiness Project,  Better than Before (a book about habit formation) and one of her constant themes is in order to move forward with habits or happiness – it is so important to know yourself better.  She has a few quizzes and questions on her site which I will link below.  The parachute book suggests the Values in Action assessment which you can take at the Authentic Happiness site developed by the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania – also linked in the show notes.  Dig into learning about you!  

It's time to expand those favorite transferable skills as identified from the Parachute Skills grid and Prioritizing grids and describe these skills beyond just a few words.  As an example, lots of teachers are good at organizing.  Organizing is too broad.  As an example:  my brother recently went through and cleaned out my parents’ garage and organized every screw and bolt he ran across by both size and that the threads did.  And he did that much more easily than I could without things to compare and measure.  Meanwhile, as you will see in my story below, I am skilled at logistical organization. 

I promised to share one of my stories this week.

My story is not related to work at all. My story comes from knowing that my husband was about to retire from the military, and we were going to move from Alaska to Texas.  I wanted to make our 4000+ mile drive to be as much of a pleasant vacation as it was a journey.  And since it was our final military move, and since we didn’t know where we were going to land exactly in Texas, we knew it was going to be months before we would have all our things. So I had to also consider what we needed to take with us to set up a home wherever we landed. We had access to a UHAUL trailer to pull behind us, so we had very limited space. One of the most important things to ME was that I did NOT want to spend six months or so sleeping on an air mattress, so it was really important to me that we moved our bed with us.  We planned to do a lot of camping, so all that gear needed to be at the back of the trailer for easy access. 

First, I assigned everyone a tubby for their precious things.  As I explained it:  if the army moving truck were to catch fire, what could you not BEAR to lose?  Put those things in your box, but you only have that box.  Next I considered the most basic pots, pans, and cooking utensils necessary in a kitchen. Sure we could buy a few plastic plates, but it made no sense to buy EVERYTHING.  We had a kitchen box with those items.  And because we are musicians, we put our instruments in there. I say most because of course we did not put the piano in there! They take up more room than you think. As were organizing the house for the move, I taped off a section of the floor to match the dimensions of the UHAUL subtracting 3 inches per side for “wiggle room.”  I also put a piece of tape at the height of the trailer so I knew the limits on how high we could stack.  And, we measured and stacked things so we knew it would fit. 

I plotted the route we would take home, calculated the mileage, used a combination of a publication called “The Milepost” and Google Maps to break the trip up into manageable days with mileage not to exceed 500/day. I put in activities and sites to see.  I made sure to have reservations at every campsite prior to leaving. I also planned hotel stays sparsely – one after completing the trek through Canada so we could do laundry, and again when we got to desert areas where it would be too hot to camp.  I planned an extra couple of days so we could visit dear friends.  I calculated all approximate costs and designed our departure times to avoid high traffic times in metropolitan areas.  This worked everywhere except at the border crossing back into America, which is impossible to gauge – so that was a short-mileage day to compensate.

During the trip, I tracked all the costs of food, lodging, gas, activities, and souvenirs.  

The trip took two weeks. 

We arrived in budget. We had what we needed and we were able to save a LOT of money on the trip by camping and using groceries instead of eating out all the time.  Those two weeks for three people and two dogs cost less than $3000 (not counting the cost of the trailer).  As it turned out, we didn’t actually receive the rest of our things for seven months.  I was very happy to have my bed during that time. 
 
 Planning this trip required a lot of research and attention to detail.  Errors would be very costly.  I learned that I had the ability to create a budget even when accounting for a lot of unknown factors like the price of bananas in very rural parts of Canada. My abilities to look ahead to potential problems and head them off made the trip easier and more pleasant for everyone involved. 

After listening to that story, what traits and skills do you see? Go beyond just ‘organzing.’  That organizing included strategic thinking, communication, money management research, time management, spatial reasoning. You see the ability to start with the goal in mind and work backwards to make sure all tasks are accounted for in their correct timelines (project management, anyone?)

The million-dollar question here is:  WHY go to ALL this trouble to consider our skills and what transfers?  This is a direct quote from the book because it is SO powerful:  when you are face to face with a person who has the power to hire you, you want to be able to explain what makes you different from nineteen other people who can basically do the same thing that you can do. It is often the self-management skills, the trait, the adjective or adverb that will save your life during that explanation.

Your expertise is valuable beyond the classroom, and I’m here to help you translate and showcase it. Don't let uncertainty hold you back – take the leap towards a fulfilling career outside of teaching. Let Teachers in Transition guide you  not just through the process of identifying your transferable skills, but also to build a compelling resume, and navigate today’s job market with confidence. You can work with our DIY program, or for a more tailored experience, we have group calls and one-on-one services with me – someone who has taught in the classroom and worked in the staffing industry. Embrace the possibilities that await you and give yourself the gift of change. Elevate your career aspirations and contact me!  I’m here to help.  

That’s the podcast for today! If you liked this podcast, tell a friend, and don’t forget to rate and review wherever you listen to your podcasts. Tune in weekly to Teachers in Transition where we discuss Job Search strategies as well as stress management techniques.  And I want to hear from you!  Please reach out and leave me a message at Teacher in transition coaching at gmail dot com.  You can also leave a voicemail or text at 512-640-9099. 

I’ll see you her again next week and remember – YOU are amazing!