The holidays may be behind us, but that doesn't mean our stress is. In fact, as we enter a new year and a new decade, stress may still be very much part of our lives to a greater or lesser degree.
If you feel stressed but you aren't sure how concerned you should be about it, why not take this opportunity to take a stress assessment? I provide this instrument for my clients and participants in workshops and seminars that I conduct on stress management.
Have questions? Contact me at kittyboitnott@gmail.com.
Kitty Boitnott:
Are you a teacher who's 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 some other kind of job or perhaps pursuing a whole different career, but you don't know what else you're even qualified to do? You don't know how to start a job search. You just feel stuck. If that sounds like you, I promise you're not alone. My name is Kitty Boitnott. I'm a career transition and job search coach and I specialize in helping burnt out teachers just like you deal not only with the stress and overwhelm of your day-to-day job, but to consider what other careers might be out there waiting for you. Join me for"Teachers in Transition." In some episodes I'll be speaking to stress management techniques and how you can manage your stress on a day to day basis. In other episodes I'll be talking about career transition. What tools do you need to be successful in a job search when you're moving from one career into a totally different track? These are questions that you need answers to and I can help you find those answers. My name is Kitty Boitnott. Welcome to"Teachers in Transition." Welcome to episode 40 and the first episode of 2020 my name is Kitty Boitnott of"Teachers in Transition." And today's topic is stress. We've just made it through the holidays. It is January 2nd, 2020 and everybody's sort of getting back into the swing of things, uh, or maybe still got a few days off until Monday before having to go back to work. But all of the Christmas packaging has been tossed away and that you may be, you have the tree up or maybe you're in the process of taking the tree down the holidays of 2019 or now a memory and we're ready to launch ourselves into not only a new year but a new decade. And it occurs to me that a lot of people are feeling really stressed. In fact, I saw yesterday that one of the top topics for 2019 was burnout. And since I'm an expert on teacher burnout, I thought it might be appropriate for me to offer as a gift for today's episode and the assessment that I provide for my clients and people who attended by workshops and seminars on stress management. It's an assessment of your level of stress and I'm offering it to you for free. You can find the link to it in the show notes and when you, the questionnaire, you will be asked 32 questions and you're in invited to answer them quickly without thinking about them. Just go with your first gut impression of how you feel about that particular question. There's some questions that have to deal with your health and your S, your sense of, uh, peace of mind, uh, and relationships. And at the end you are directed to consider that if you answered more than 10 of the questions with a yes, then you are overstressed. You know, a certain amount of stress is normal. So if you have five or 10 or 12 of the questions answered with a yes, that's, that's normal and it's manageable. I mean, none of us are going to be living stress free lives. And if we were, we'd be bored to death. So a little bit of stress is a good thing. A little bit of tension in our lives is enough to get us out of bed in the morning and to get us to work and, and one make us want to manage a project successfully at work or a situation in our lives we that we want to have a positive impact on. And that creates a certain amount of tension and stress that's positive, that's even healthy. But when you get into trouble is when you feel overwhelmed with stress that there's so much going on in your life that you don't feel like you can manage it. You just, you're just pressed down by it. You're, you're being grounded down by the stress in your life and nothing is going well. You know, I just watched the um, prime special Brittany one's a marathon this weekend. And in the beginning of the story, Brittany was an example of overstress not taking care of herself. Everything, you know, sort of go into crap because she felt like her life was out of control until she decided to do something about it. And then the story is that she took control of her health and other aspects of her life and things began to turn around for her. We are each able to do that. We're each in the position of taking responsibility for our own lives. But first we have to decide that we're willing to do that. And not everybody is willing. So if you are willing, take the assessment, determine where you are on the spectrum, are you normally stressed or out of whack? Stressed. And I'll offer a cheat sheet on how to manage your stress along with my free book, stressed, stretched, and just plain overwhelmed that offers some strategies for how you can start managing your stress and determine ways to become more resilient so that when something does come, some majors, something happens. And it always does. There's always some something that comes along to knock you off kilter, off balance. If you are taking care of yourself and you're not overly stressed in other areas of your life, then you will at least be able to respond appropriately to what has happened. That's a bigger stress that may happen like the death of a friend or a family member. That's a, that's a big stressor. Or um, having some other disruption to go on in your life like a, a separation or divorce or maybe even a child moving off to college creates a whole different relationship dynamic in the entire family. So when those kinds of things happen, if you've been taking care of yourself and you're not overwhelmed already with stress in your life, you're able to be resilient. You can, you can come back from whatever is knocked you on your butt. You can get up and move on more quickly and having an understanding of the importance of reframing the things that happened in your life so that you're not constantly down and negative, but instead look, try to look for the things to be grateful for the things that are going well in your life. Concentrate on those things and it'll help you to feel less stressed. But the starting point is to know where you are on that stress spectrum. So I'm inviting you to take the stress assessment and then to download the cheat sheet. And if you want the ebook, go ahead and download that as well. Start taking control of your life in 2020 and start by taking control of your stress and managing your stress in a positive and healthy way. That's it for the message for this week. I hope you have a wonderful week and I'll be back next Thursday. Happy new year. So there you have it, an episode of"Teachers in Transition." I hope you enjoyed the information and I hope you'll plan to come back. Please subscribe to"Teachers in Transition" so that you can be alerted of future episodes. And let me know if you have any questions or topics that you would like me to specifically cover in a future episode. I'm more than happy to help with individual questions as well. So email me at KittyBoitnott@BoitnottCoaching.com. If you are interested in finding a new career or just enjoying your life more, this is the place to start. Hi, I'm Kitty Boitnott and this is"Teachers in Transition."