In November, I received an invitation from Sharon Coleman, "The Joy Mentor," to be part of her "Winning the Happiness Game Summit." You might remember that I offered an invitation to sign up for the summit a few weeks ago.
We also talked about the following topics:
7 Tips to build resilience
Permit yourself to consider your happiness at work
How to transition from a burnt-out career
How stress affects your health
How to ensure you get restful sleep
How sleep clears out our neuron toxicity
Help for stressed-out teachers
How Alzheimer's is linked with sleep
Advice on sleep (I am a Certified Sleep Science Coach)
And so much more!!
If you would like to hear the conversation Sharon and I had, you can click on the image below and be taken to YouTube for our episode:
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 burn 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 to 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 and transition.
Speaker 2:
Welcome back to episode 89 of teachers in transition, the podcast and the YouTube channel. My name is kitty. Boitnott the owner and founder of teachers in transition and boys not coaching. If you have listened to me in the past, you already know that I alternate topics each week between stress management strategies, because I am a stress management coach and career transitions, tips and strategies, because I'm also a career transition and job search coach. I specialize in working with teachers who are brought out or are approaching burnout because of stress. I specialize in helping them manage and cope with their stress. And I also assist if they are at the point of ready to look for a new job or career, I have worked with an international coaching company for a number of months in my previous life and understand the necessity for relevant resumes and cover letters and LinkedIn and all the rest for job search this week. However, the topic is not job search. It is stress management and what I'm going to be offering in the show notes is a link to an interview. I did, uh, last month with a woman named Sharon Coleman. She refers herself as the happiness mentor, I believe, or the joy mentor. Maybe you can I'll I'll, uh, attach a link to her website. I believe she's the joy mentor. And she conducted this summit a 21 part summit on the happy winning the happiness game. And I was one of the individuals that she interviewed for that summit. And my interview went live, uh, on Saturday, the 5th of December. So what I did in my newsletter this week is I shared the link to the interview. And I'm going to do the same for you today, but because you may or may not decide to go to the show notes, I'll give you a recap of what we talked about during our session. It was related to managing day-to-day stress and the importance of sleep in the VA and other stress management strategies in developing resilience so that you can't cope with the stress of life in today's world of pandemic and all the rest that's going on. It's December, 2020. So we're coming up on the holidays. Christmas holidays. Thanksgiving is now behind us, and I hope you enjoyed the Thanksgiving holiday in a safe manner. And I'm going to encourage you to do the same for the Christmas holidays to keep it small, to keep it insulated to your nuclear family and to not travel and to connect with family and friends who you would otherwise get together with virtually you can ship and mail your Christmas packages if you want to be exchanging gifts. But I know that's not the same and it's, it's maybe not going to feel as satisfying. But what you have to remember is you're taking care of your own health, as well as the health of your loved ones. And you can be as careful as you think you're being and still run the risk of bumping into someone who has the virus and doesn't know it. And unwittingly passes it on to you. I had a friend who just had that very experience. She had some workmen come to her home to do some work on her fireplace. A few days later, she received a phone call from the company telling her that one of the workmen had tested positive for COVID and they encouraged her to likewise get a test, which she did. She was positive. The next few days, she began to feel worse. And, uh, eventually she called for an ambulance because she was having trouble breathing. She went into the hospital for five days. She was one of the lucky ones because she was in there for only five days. And she got to come home. She's been home now for a few weeks and she's feeling better every day, but that just goes to show. She was being very careful masking up, not going that many places. And that, that one incident where you know, that guy came and he probably didn't have any symptoms on the day that he was there and didn't know that he was contagious. So please, please, please careful this holiday season, this means not going to, or planning any big parties or get togethers, unless you want to do it virtually. And thank goodness we're in the position to do these kinds of get togethers for choice so that we can see each other instead of just being on the phone, we can get together in a virtual environment that keeps everyone yeah, safe. So that's, that's what I wanted to say about that. But as far as what I talked to Sharon Coleman about, we talked about ways to be more resilient and how to maintain your health in spite of, or maybe in the face of all of the stress that we are all feeling. I mean, everybody's feeling it. No one is immune to feeling the stress of the pandemic election, everything that's going on and in the, in the world right now, we're all stressed out and unfortunate reality about stress is that it tends to depress our immunity system, which makes us more susceptible to catching bugs or being injured, exposed to things like the flu and COVID and colds and other things that are so easily transmitted through the atmosphere. So if you are feeling stressed, passed out, no that your immune system is struggling to keep up, to keep you safe. And some ways that you can build your resilience by adding to the strength and combating too, the extent that you can, the stress in your life, there are certain things that you can do. And I'll, I offered in my conversation with Sharon, I offered my free e-book on stress management strategies. I'll include link for that in the show notes too. But, and I've talked about these before, but they're so critically important and we take them. So for granted so quickly, staying hydrated, drinking the amount of water that you need every day, eating properly, eating for good nutrition, rather than for comfort cut back on the carbohydrates, eat more protein of beet. Fill up on leafy vegetables may maintain your health with whole foods, whole grains, whole vegetables, whole, whole fruits, fresh fruits, getting the exercise that you need. It's hard, harder when you feel like it's not safe, perhaps to go to the gym or the why, where you ordinarily would go to get a good workout, but that doesn't stop you from walking the neighborhood or finding some other way to engage in exercise at home. There are plenty of ways for you to find opportunities, to do some, some kind of even short workout shorts, better than none at all. You also want to practice your breathing. Every time I mentioned breathing, I have to re I just automatically take a deep breath. And what you want to do is stand up and breathe deeply into your diaphragm. A few times a day, breathe slowly in for 10 and out for 10. I've heard of breath, ologists, actually two different breath. Ologists recommend that you breathe in both through your nose and out through your nose, as opposed to in, through your nose and out through your mouth. So remember that in, through your nose and out through your nose, slowly, deep breath, all the way into your diaphragm. And the purpose of that deep breathing is it can help to relax you for one thing. It also feeds your millions trillions of cells in your body and all of your various organs oxygen that they need in order to function properly. The same is true now for the hydration in it, your body needs those, the HTO and that water and the fluid to help your blood circulate properly so that your, your other systems can function properly. And you need the whole foods, fruits, and vegetables, and whole foods for the nutrients and minerals that your cells need. So it all works together. Your system, your human body is a finely tuned system that works like a miracle, but you have to maintain it. You have to do your part. So those are a few of the things that you can do. And then you don't want to forget that the possibility of, uh, perhaps a practice of prayer and meditation or prayer or meditation, whichever works best for you and not forgetting to have fun along the way. Now, the one thing I didn't mention is sleep. And I talked at length with Sharon about the importance of working sleep into your day-to-day routine. If you want to maintain your mental, physical, and emotional resilience, we often undervalue sleep and we believe wrongly that we can defer and delay sleep. That is simply not the case, especially okay. As we age, we need as sleep routine one in which we go to bed at a regular hour and we get up at a rate regular hour. And depending on your individual and unique needs, you may need to sleep anywhere from five and a half to eight and a half to nine hours. Now, the average for the average adult is six and a half. That's that's, that's an average. The range can actually be as short as five and a half. And as long as nine, what you want try to do is determine how much sleep do you need you individually, not as an average, but you, how many hours of sleep do you need to feel completely rested, and to be able to function at your best, to be productive and to maintain your sense of emotional equilibrium throughout the day. Because a lack of sleep will cause you to be cranky and irritable. It will impact your productivity and your creativity. A Duke university study shows that if you don't get the sleep that you need, you're creativity is negatively impacted as well as your ability to be productive. So gauge how much sleep you need need, and then make sure that you get the amount of sleep that you need every day. If you find yourself waking up in the middle of the night, that can have a number of causes, it can be a result of a worry that you have on your mind, that, that wake awakes you in the middle of the night and causes you to start having fearful racing thoughts that can happen. It may be hormonal, and you might want to talk to your doctor about that. There may be some other underlying reason, and you might want to chat with your physician about what you might do to ensure that you get a full night's sleep, but we all need that full night's sleep in part, because during the night, our brain literally flushes out toxins that flow through the brain STEM and into our bladder where we in the morning eliminate those toxins. But if you haven't slept through the proper cycle, you're up in the middle of the night pacing, or you're trying to get a project done, and you've decided you're going to do an all-nighter. You're preventing your brain from being able to clear out that toxin and these toxins, this toxic waste that your brain builds up, occurs over a 24 hour period. So you need the sleep every night to clear out what's built up during the day. And there is increasing research that shows that it's possible. There may be a link between you're not getting the sleep that you need and not clearing out that toxic waste that builds up in your brain regularly. There's a link between that and early onset dementia or even Alzheimer's. So you want to be sure you're clearing out your brain with all of that toxic waste every night, so that you can start fresh in the morning when you get up and you feel refreshed and ready to move on with your day. So those are some of the things that you can do for yourself. That don't cost a lot of money. They can, in fact, many of these things you can do for free, and you can take care of yourself so that you maintain your immune system. You keep yourself at an equilibrium that allows you to function properly so that you're not cranky and irritable with the members of your family who may be locked, locked down with you. And you have the, the resilience that you need, the patients that you need, the ability to face, whatever stresses are coming your way. And you know, they're coming at us full speed. Aren't they from every direction. So we have to be resilient so that we can manage day to day, not to give into the stresses that are occurring in our lives. So I will include the link to the interview I had with Sharon in case you'd like to listen to that, I'll include a link to the ebook on stress management, in case you would like to see that I'll even include a link to a cheat sheet on stress management during the holiday season, that you might find useful as you begin to prepare for the holidays. And, uh, before I go, I'd like to ask you to please leave a review and let me know what questions you might have or what thoughts you might have about this podcast, or go over to the YouTube channel and subscribe there. If you prefer that medium, as opposed to the podcast, I would love to hear from you. So email me@kittyboitnottatgmail.com. And if you would like to talk about career transition for yourself, or you need additional information about stress management and you just so happen to be a teacher, don't hesitate to set up a discovery session with me. I offer a complimentary discovery session. We can talk about your stress, or we can talk about your career aspirations either, either or both. And the way to sign up for that discovery session is to go to teachers in transition.com forward slash calendar. I'll include the link in the show notes for that as well, but it's at teachers in transition.com forward slash calendar until next week stay well, stay safe. Thank you so much for listening.
Speaker 1:
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 kitty boy, not at boys, not coaching.com. If you are interested in finding a new career or just enjoying your life more, this is the place to start. I'm Katie Boitnott. And this is teachers in transition.
