Teachers in Transition – Episode 200: Are you feeling lucky? Or: How to find what you’re looking for
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 – I’m a career transition and job search coach specializing in teachers. I am here to help you reach your goals and figure out how to navigate the journey from stressed overwhelmed and burnt-out teacher to the career of your dreams with margins in your life to spend with your family, your pets, and whatever else you want to. I provide tips and suggestions to help with stress and mental health, hacks to help your day, and job-hunting tips. If you are frustrated with your current teaching position, if you are stressed, overwhelmed, and burned out you are in the right place – Welcome!
Today on the podcast, I am going to explore how lucky you are, we get a quick hack for staying awake when we’re tired or bored, and we learn about using OnetOnline.org as a tool to help us research jobs adjacent to or completely outside of education.
I want to start the segment on stress and mental health by confidently saying: We find what we look for so it’s important to know what we’re seeing!
Do you suffer from triskaidekaphobia? That’s the fear of the number 13. Take for example, Friday the 13th. It’s a bad luck day. Theoretically. People share out about all the bad luck they have on this day. When I had this idea, I looked to see when the next Friday the 13th was to perhaps include it then, but our next one is five months away! Meanwhile, I didn’t want these thoughts to get lonely and leave! Is 13 inherently an unlucky number? It depends. It was certainly bad luck if you were a Templar Knight in the 14th century, but there’s not a whole lot of evidence that any given Friday the 13th is a bad luck.
My husband was born on a Friday the 13th. At 11:13. And X pounds and 13 ounces. And was reported to be the 13th baby born on that shift. (Busy day. I wonder if the nurses felt unlucky that day?) Seeing as how I am quite enamored with him, I decided that all Friday the 13ths would be minor family holidays and official good luck days for us. And they are.
When you are looking for things to go wrong – you find them. When you are looking for the wonderful little blessings in a day – you find those too. Henry Ford had a saying related to this that goes “If you think you can or you think you can’t – you’re right” Once our brain has a course of action, it looks for data to support its hypothesis. This might be one of the reasons that a gratitude journal is very effective at reducing stress and lifting moods. By the way, I am horrible at keeping a journal. I always want to and it never quite works out that way. Instead, when I find something I’m grateful for, I say it to myself that I am thankful for this or appreciative of that. I feel like it accomplishes the same thing. If you have trouble writing gratitudes down, cut yourself some slack and just say them to yourself out loud (or in your brain). The important thing is to take note of them in a conscious way.
But you know, sometimes the world tries to place things in our paths so that we become convinced that something is true whether it is or it isn’t.
And here’s an interesting little factoid that starts with a true story:
Once upon a time several years ago – I was still in school and nightly news was still something everyone watched because there was no 24-hour news cycle yet. And it seemed like every time we watched the news, we heard about another shark attack with all of the gory details from the ‘if it bleeds it leads’ mentality. It was the Year of the Shark. People started rethinking their vacations because it seemed too dangerous to go to the beach and play in the waves. It got so bad that coastal vacation spots were losing millions (billions weren’t a thing yet either). Towns stated ad campaigns along the lines of “we don’t have shark attacks! We’re begging you to spend your tourist dollars in our town!”
I’m pretty sure that summer was the inspiration for Shark Week.
Many years later, someone pulled some stats on shark attacks by years, and it turns out that the Year of the Shark actually had fewer attacks than an average year. It’s just that practically every single one of them got reported and gave us the idea that it was worse than it was. And because this station in this this market got a huge bump from reporting their shark attack, that station in that market wanted a piece of the shark-flavored ratings pie.
I taught both my own personal children and my students about this and cautioned them to be wary when they started to hear a cluster of stories. Was it really a growing problem or a Shark Week kind of mania.
When you are having a particularly rough day, take a moment to stop and think of a couple of things that have gone WELL that day and were right. Then start to look for the lucky things that happen thereafter.
Because we find what we look for. And it will change the shape of the rest of your day. It won’t undo the frustrating things that have happened, and it won’t make people behave better, but it absolutely helps you to realize that not everything is stacked against you ad there are a few wonderful nuggets hiding out there.
And on to today’s teacher hack. These hacks are designed to help you make your life a little easier in some way to create mental, and/or emotional space for you to spend time on YOU to work on YOU. But today’s hack is really more keeping you out of trouble when you’re ready to sleep through a meeting, or for the kid in your class who says they can’t stay awake either.
When you feel those eyes get heavy or that head start to nod, pick a leg and lift your foot off the ground an inch and hold it there. That’s it. It is beautiful in its simplicity. I have tried it. These days I have a fair amount of Zooms in my life or trainings that aren’t so interactive, and I have a hard time staying awake if I have to sit still and quietly. So I tried it. And much to my surprise, it worked!!
So try it out and let me know if this worked to keep you (or a student) awake when they needed to! My email is in the show notes and also I’ll share it at the end of the podcast.
And now on to our job hunting tips.
Remember how we started off talking about how we find what we look for? Well it works here too.
Facebook and TikTok algorithms are based on this. If you search for something, you immediately see ads the next time you scroll Facebook. The more you interact with a certain sort of content on TikTok, the more of that sort of content automatically pops up for you. (Side note: remember when assorted politicians from both sides of the aisle were complaining about all the icky things they found on TikTok? They searched for that and either interacted with it somehow or spent time watching it to trigger the algorithm. That’s a bad look…)
Where am I headed with this:
You’ll hear about bad the job market is. And it is. It’s bad. But it’s not impossible. And some areas are worse than others (tech is particularly hard right now) and that’s why it’s all the more important to be very strategic and deliberate in your job hunt. Clicking apply every couple of job postings is NOT going to cut it. But people are getting hired because they know how to position themselves as the best person for a job, AND show they stand out from the crowd.
So when you wander around LinkedIn or Indeed, when you click on jobs and explore titles, it remembers and sends you to more of the same. If you feel like your in a rut with what you’re for, check out O-Netonline.org. This is all things job related. (I have a link in the show notes). You can take their interest profiler. A word of caution here – oftentimes it says “Hey! You ought to be a teacher!” Remember that teacher is more than just a job for us – it’s been an identity. So be aware of that. Maybe look at what’s right below that. And when you find something you’re interested in, you just look it up.
Let’s walk through what it offers.
I used the key word accountant. That pulls up a page for accountants and auditors, and it is full of information. It tells you the tasks that an accountant would do on a regular basis, what technology skills are going to be needed, the work activities in detail that you would do at some point as well. It includes the context in which you work - Is it online? Is it indoors? Is it outdoors? Then it talks about the job zone, which is how O*net categorizes things like the difficulty of the job, how much education is needed, etc. You can look up where you live by state or zip code (or desired state or zip code!), and it starts to tell you how you could get trained for that job. And it will tell you what you can expect to get paid.
It'll tell you what the characteristics of a good accountant would be. What kind of knowledge you need? What your work style and your values should be, and then you can go to wages and employment trends and that is fascinating. It will show you based on the state and ZIP code what the average and expected pay is for your area. It will have a low end and a high end and it will show you a good little bell curve. Then it'll break down by other regions in your state so you can see if you’d get paid more by living in another city. It's cram-packed full of information and that is a really good place to start researching potential careers.
But wait! There’ more! Because they will also tell you if this is a career that is expected to be hiring or not. Is the expected number of people in this job growing or shrinking? One of the things I find interesting with the accountant and auditor job description is that it says it has a bright outlook. You would think that AI would be taking all of those jobs away, but since we know AI sometimes makes things up, this may not be what we want happening in our corporate accounting. Certainly in researching potential careers, a new thing to examine is how AI is impacting that field. I will give you a little bit of homework to go check out O*net online, and check out some jobs that you think might be interesting for you. And don’t feel limited when looking through here. What did you want to be when you grew up when you were in 3rd grade? What’s the outlook these days on that job? Let’s be prepared to make our own luck out there because we absolutely find what we’re looking for.
In the upcoming weeks, we are going to doing some exercises that come out of the book, Finding Your Element by Sir Ken Robinson. If you have a chance to read it or listen to it on audible, you’ll really enjoy it.
If you know other teachers who are stressed, overwhelmed, and burned out, share this podcast with them. So many people feel just like you do about their situation, my goal is to help as many teachers as possible to find jobs they love where they feel not just appreciated, but also valued. And remember, appreciated is nice, but they show value with a paycheck. Teacher Appreciation week is just a week away, and your friendly remember that if your world has to have a week to appreciate you, they know they aren’t paying you right.
I would love to help be your guide and coach you through your journey. You can reach out for a complimentary discovery call. There are very exciting things happening in the new few weeks around my website – it’s currently under constructions - and a lot of the tech that has not been working will be up and running soon! I want to help as many teachers as I can because it’s just going to get worse. To paraphrase a Chinese proverb: The best time to start working on your transition plan was about six months ago. The next best time is now!
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 here again next week and remember – YOU are amazing!