Balance Your Teacher Life: Personal Growth Tips, Habits & Life Coaching to Empower Educators to Avoid Burnout

Introduction to Balance Your Life - New Podcast for Educators with Grace Stevens

• Grace Stevens • Episode 1

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Are you passionate about being an educator but crave a more positive experience? One that doesn't consume your whole life and leave you feeling stressed and overwhelmed? You're not alone. 

In this first episode of Balance Your Teacher Life, the new podcast for educators, Grace Stevens introduces herself, shares her background and journey from the corporate world to becoming a public school teacher, author, and educator empowerment coach, and explains the mission and content of the podcast.

Learn how Grace's ECHO Framework for Educator Empowerment © can help teaching professionals avoid burnout, set healthy boundaries, and achieve a better work-life balance. 

Join Grace Stevens as she shares her journey from corporate sales to teaching and beyond. Hear how she navigated this turbulent journey and discovered techniques from positive psychology and neuro-linguistic programming to combat anxiety, depression, and burnout in the classroom. 

Each episode of this new podcast for educators will provide you with practical strategies, inspiring stories, and proven tips to help you craft your own path and experience in the complex yet fulfilling role of teaching. Join her weekly for a healthy dose of inspiration for teachers coupled with realistic and proven tips to take back control of your time and energy and thrive in teaching.

To thrive in teaching WITHOUT sacrificing your personal life, visit www.gracestevens.com/elevate



Want to truly thrive in teaching without sacrificing your personal life? Check out the Elevated Teacher Experience here
Check out the best-selling Positive Mindset Habits for Teachers book here
And the #1 new release for educators Beat Teacher Burnout with Better Boundaries book here

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Speaker 1:

Hey, educator, all Stars. In this trailer episode I'm going to unpack what to expect from the Balance your Teacher Life podcast, why I'm so passionate about my mission and maybe why you should be too. And then, for those of you who are interested, I'm going to offer my five minute origin story of how I went from rising star in the corporate world to a public school teacher for 20 years, and now how I ended up empowering educators like you by sitting at my desk, talking into a mic, sometimes staring into a camera and, yes, voluntarily hanging out on Zoom. I am so glad you're here for this trailer. Let's do this. Welcome to the Balance your Teacher Life podcast, where we talk all things avoiding educator burnout, setting healthy boundaries and achieving better work-life balance. If you're passionate about education but tired of it consuming your whole life, you have found your home in the podcast universe. I'm your host, grace Stevens, and let's get going with today's show. All right, so you might not believe this, but as much as I love talking, I actually am not a fan about talking about myself, so I'm going to make this quick.

Speaker 1:

I was a second career teacher and I became a public school teacher in 2000,. And I taught in public schools all the way until the end of 2022. Yes, I did teach after the pandemic. I know how annoying it is to get advice from people who, you know, haven't stepped in a classroom in the last decade, because we all know too well that things have changed. Anyway, as well as being a teacher, I was also an author, a mindset coach, and have a background in positive psychology a bunch of nerdy stuff neuro-linguistic programming. If you're interested, hang on. Later I'm going to tell you a little bit about my origin story, but basically, I wrote a book that was pretty well received Maybe you have heard of it called Positive Mindset Habits for Teachers. I'm thrilled to say that quite a few schools use it for like book studies and I'm even aware of two or three campuses for teacher education that have it as required reading before you become a teacher, which makes my heart sing. Anyway, I just decided to start this podcast because, yeah, I do like talking. I feel I have a lot to share, I love being on other people's podcasts and I decided let's do that. So all of my work basically, I have been writing about teaching for over a decade, between books and blogs and other things, and I have online courses, but all of my work.

Speaker 1:

I can summarize into four real principles. Everything that I talk about will fall into one of these four brackets and that's what I call my echo framework. Now, come on. Now we're educators, we know how we love our acronyms. So echo, e-c-h-o, because what we put out there comes back to us. There you go, so let's go through it Four steps.

Speaker 1:

The E stands for your energy. Teaches more than your lesson plans. That is my foundational principle. And when I say your energy, I'm not talking about teacher tired, I'm not talking about you got to show up every day like you just have, you know, a triple shot espresso. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about not your energy as far as you know how much vitality you have, but your energy as far as how you show up and what you emanate from your soul and from your being to students, as far as are you happy to be there, are you excited? Are you passionate about learning and about teaching? Are you willing to have fun? Do you believe in your students? Is their success important to you? Right? We can feel that energy from a teacher. That's totally different than a teacher who is burnt out, worn out, low-key, resentful. You know, overwhelmed, unorganized, and you don't even need to be a teacher to know that. You just need to remember your own experience in school. Right? You know the teachers. You were excited to be in their room. You're excited to learn from them. That was all about their energy. It wasn't about the decor on their walls or you know which curriculum the district had purchased. It was about their energy, how you show up matters. It is the foundational piece, and really everything that I gear my work around always seems to come back to that. Your energy teaches more than your lesson plans. So that's the E.

Speaker 1:

What about the C? Well, the C stands for control, what you can control. Listen, education these days it's. You know. I could use all the buzzwords, I'm just gonna say it's cray-cray. It is not sustainable unless you take charge, unless you feel empowered to control the things you can control. There are so many things we can't control and we would literally drive ourselves crazy into exhaustion if we hyper-focused on all of those. So the C stands for control, what you can control, and that's really all I'm about. I'm all about empowerment, taking back control. Stop being a victim. You can do better and have better and still experience joy and make teaching sustainable. Okay, that's the C.

Speaker 1:

What about the H? Okay, the H stands for happiness can be synthesized. Now listen, I wrote a book called the happy habits over a decade ago and at that time there was research, quite a bit of research out of Harvard and other places, explaining how happiness could be synthesized. And what I mean by that is, you know, you don't have really a fixed. Well, you do have a fixed happiness set point, but it's not static, you can move it. Okay, there are intentional habits you can have that will help you have a more optimistic, positive mindset, and I've written books about that. I talk about that a lot and really I find that in the last 10 years the conversation has totally changed. I am so thrilled, my goodness. Thank you so much to the work of Carol Dweck, who now we know all about growth mindset.

Speaker 1:

So, just like your intelligence isn't fixed, neither is your happiness, and I have become really very trained in hacking my own happiness and teaching other teachers how to do that. So that's what the H stands for. So far, we have the energy teaches more than your lesson plans. See control what you can control. H happiness can be synthesized and the oh, wow, here we go. The oh stands for other teachers experience doesn't need to be your experience. And there's the crux of the whole thing. Right, I work a lot and talk a lot and teach a lot about crafting your own experience, having your own experience. The narrative, the collective narrative around teaching is so negative, and for good reason. I'm not about toxic positivity. I'm not about sticking a happy face sticker. You know, on top of it, it, the challenges are real, but other people's experience doesn't need to be your experience. You can create your own path. I did it for many years and I love to empower educators to understand how they can do that too.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so there's really a quick synopsis of the types of things that we will be talking about in this podcast. Sometimes it will just be me, sometimes it will be expert guests, but basically all the things are going to one way or another. You're going to see they're going to fall back into that framework. So let me tell you about some logistics. Right now I'm releasing with four episodes, so that if you think this is interesting and you want to get a little taste about what's this lady about, you can listen to a few episodes After that. It's going to be weekly on Tuesdays. We're going to keep the episodes to around 20 to 40 minutes. That way you can listen on lunch or on your commute, or when you're getting in a quick workout or you're folding your laundry or, you know, whenever else you binge your podcast.

Speaker 1:

If you are somebody who loves to listen but also learns more by reading, I want to reassure you that all of the transcripts and the show notes can be found on my website, gracedevanscom forward slash podcast. You can go there. All the resources that I mentioned will all be conveniently in one place. And you know who is this podcast for? It's for education professionals. It is called Balance your Teacher Life because I have a signature course that is called that and I wanted to keep it simple for people. So I'm the Balance your Teacher Life lady, but it isn't just for teachers. As you listen along, you will realize that it really applies as much to administrators, into anybody, in any type of education, from preschool all the way up through college. They are mindsets, they are practical strategies. Clearly, some of it is really based towards tools that you would use inside an A classroom, but the overall kind of flavor will be helpful for all educational professionals. All right. So that's what you can expect, and here we go.

Speaker 1:

If you're super curious on how did I end up here, let me give you the super brief origin story. Still say words a little funky and there's a whole generation of. When I taught first grade for nine years, there was a lot of kids for whom when I did the rhyming books, they didn't always rhyme because I would say both and not that, and path and not pass. But anyway, that's how the accent came into place. But yes, I was a corporate VP. I had had a very successful corporate career. I had set all kinds of goals for myself. I worked for an international staffing firm and I was a regional vice president for them by the age of 30, and then head of their national sales division.

Speaker 1:

So doing so well for myself, lived in a beautiful home, had the fantastic cars, the expense account, all the things that I thought I wanted, two very young, wonderful children. And I gotta tell ya, beyond stressed Traveling all the time, always anxious, stressed, overwhelmed, never had time for anything in my life. I felt like work didn't get enough of me. I felt like certainly my children didn't get enough of me. My relationships were suffering. My mental and emotional health were suffering. Something had to give. I felt that what I did no longer had purpose when I was really down in the lower level of working for that company and finding people jobs and helping companies find employees. I really found a lot of value in that. But by the time I had got to national account sales, I really just felt like the only real difference I made was to shareholders, and that didn't sit well with me. So I decided to make this huge change.

Speaker 1:

I went back to school at the age of nearly 40 to get my teaching credential and I started working for a Title I school in 2001, I believe, and I loved it. Teaching checked of so many of the boxes I was looking for. It had purpose, it was fun. I found it creative. It allowed me to have more time with my own children. It was just magical. I really felt like I had won the lottery. And then suddenly well, not suddenly, but slowly, it wasn't A lot of the same feelings started to creep back overwhelm, stress, feeling like I was never giving enough.

Speaker 1:

I worked with a very difficult population of students. I always felt I should be doing more for them and then I would come home and I would be crabby and out of energy and didn't really have the patience I needed for my own children. I know if you're a teacher and a parent you can probably relate to that. So at that point I couldn't change careers again and I didn't want to. I decided that what I needed to change was me, and so I really went on this big deep dive into all things positive psychology, the science of happiness, neuroplasticity yeah, I'm like a total brain nerd. I became a certified neurolinguistic programming practitioner. I had never imagined I would practice on other people. I was out to hack my own happiness. I had a strong family background of what would we say, a constellation of mental health issues, and I constantly felt that I was being stalked by, like I was one bad event away from having a mental breakdown. I mean, I honestly felt that way, and so it became imperative for me to learn how to control my anxiety, my depression, my overwhelm. So I did it for me. I did it for me and other people noticed.

Speaker 1:

Other teachers would ask me your experience seems to be different than other teachers' experience. You know, I worked in a small school, that same. We had one grade, one class per grade. So like that same little cohort of students would go through the grades and yet, you know, the teacher before me would have all kinds of issues, the teacher after me would have all kinds of issues, but when they were with me, I'm not saying I was perfect, I'm not doing like a humble brag, I'm just saying that I managed to have my own experience with those students and have fun and create really a magical classroom environment, and it wasn't.

Speaker 1:

You know rainbows and sparkles every day, plenty of times that teaching brought me to my knees truly, but as a general rule, I seem to be having a different experience, and so teachers asked me about that. I had already written a book called the Happy Habits. It wasn't really focused necessarily on teaching, and so about seven years ago, I decided to take those principles and apply them to the classroom, and that's it. I had always said I would be a public servant for 20 years and, lo and behold, 20 years took me through to the end of 2022. And I felt that my impact could be greater if I stepped out the classroom and coached and empowered educators to overcome burnout and have a more positive experience. Realistically, I looked and thought I maybe only have another four or five years left in a classroom with kids. You know what's that? 100 kids, 200 kids at most. I really felt I still wanted to have impact and I could do that more if I worked with teachers. So there you are.

Speaker 1:

Here's how I ended up sitting at my desk and I really believe that, if you want to have your own experience, that you can make teaching joyful, sustainable and really put that sparkle back right, this podcast is for teachers who are really passionate about what they do, but fed up of it, taking their whole life and all of their energy. It will not be joyful or sustainable that way. Right, and it feels like this word you know self care has got weaponized over the last few years like somehow teachers, you know we're careless, we just don't take care of ourselves, without recognizing that the system is set up in a way to make us taking care of ourselves almost impossible unless we invest in authentic self care. And authentic self care is learning to set boundaries, being comfortable with that, learning to watch our mindset, learning to protect our peace, all the things we're going to be talking about, all those things in this podcast. I'm so thrilled you're here, thanks for listening to this trailer, and I'll see you in the next episode.