Back-to-School 2024 Pt. 4 - A Better Metaphor for School and Life Balance as a Teacher

Attention ALL stressed educators! If you’ve ever felt overwhelmed by the never-ending to-do list or guilty about not getting everything done, this episode is for you. We’re breaking down the myth of the perfect balance and giving you tools to prioritize effectively so you can lead a more fulfilled and empowered teaching life.

In part four of our Back-to-School series, we’re diving into one of the most powerful metaphors to help you redefine what balance really means in your teacher life. Spoiler alert: There's no such thing as the perfect planner or a one-size-fits-all strategy. Instead, we're focusing on intentional choices that will empower you to handle the overwhelm and prioritize what's truly important.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode:

🔍 The Myth of the Perfect Planner - Why balance isn’t about finding the right tool, but about making intentional choices.

🎯 The Glass vs. Rubber Ball Metaphor - Discover a new way to categorize your responsibilities and how this mindset shift can transform your approach to both your professional and personal life.

📅 Strategic Prioritization - Learn how to map out the glass balls and rubber balls in your life, so you can focus on what truly matters without burning out.

💡 Actionable Tips - Practical strategies for managing your workload, from knowing when to say no to understanding which tasks can wait.

👩‍🏫 Real Talk for Real Teachers - Why it’s okay to drop some balls, and how to make peace with the ones you choose not to pick up.

Listen today to feel more educator empowered tomorrow! 🎧

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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Transcript

  Hello teacher friends. Here we are again. This is part four of my back to school series. The essentials of what you need to get you set up, feeling empowered and with the right vibe for the new school year. How exciting. We got all our shiny new supplies and our class list. Hopefully we're all excited getting through our routines and right now.

Oh, this is a big one. This whole podcast is called Balance Your Teacher Life. And in this one,  I'm going to bust the myth. There is no perfect planner. There is no perfect one strategy for having balance in your teacher life. It takes intention. It takes attention. I'm going to give you some tips. 

actionable strategies but most importantly I'm gonna give you a new metaphor for having balance and I think that it's gonna really help you reframe how you prioritize things and help you deal with that balance. Overwhelm and help you make intentional choices about what you do with your time. I can't wait to get into it.

You, this metaphor is amazing. I didn't come up with it, but I really think it has, I talk about this a lot. It's one of my keynotes  that I do in PDs for schools. I'm going to just give you the brief version because we're all about the action on this podcast, but you're going to love it and I can't wait to share it with you.

So I will see you on the. 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, I'm gonna start. So some of you may have. Come to know me through my book, Positive Mindset Habits for Teachers. So it's been six years since I wrote that book, but I'm going to give you a just read a brief quote of a chapter that I wrote in there called keep all the plates spinning, right?

You know how you see those so many memes of the teachers juggling. We have so many metaphors for it. All the different hats. 

So, here's what I wrote, when my life is in balance, teaching is a whole different experience. I have passion, energy, and gratitude for it. Not only do I benefit from this, but so do my students. When my life is in balance, I'm a better teacher, a better parent, a better partner. and a better friend. When my life isn't balanced, I'm overwhelmed, easily irritated and drained.

Okay. So I still believe that all of that is true, right? You know what I'm going to say? Your energy teaches more than your lesson plans, right? If I'm feeling overwhelmed, if I'm feeling resentful, that there is too much on my plate to ever get to. Done, right? That's just, that's not a good look in the classroom, right?

It's not a way to live your life either inside the classroom or outside, right? Being resentful that everyone else's needs come first and that you're just overwhelmed and you can't get it all done. Okay, so I still believe all of that.  But I have changed my mind on something.  That's one of the benefits of getting older, right?

Now, remember that that book was written in what I'm going to call a simpler time in teaching, right? That was before the pandemic and we all know everything since we did our little, you know, 18 months of, of, of staying home and teaching a different way that the repercussions of that have been pretty significant now that we're back in the classroom.

Okay, so you know, maybe it was a simpler time. So I'm gonna just  tell you this. There is no way to keep all the plates spinning. Okay, so I'm gonna give you a new metaphor. All right, and the new metaphor I did not come up with, to the best of my knowledge, it was a gentleman called Brian.  And it was during a commencement speech that he did at a university and he's actually at the time he was the CEO of Pepsi, I believe, but. 

So what was his metaphor? He was, again, a lot of the things that we hear is, Oh, keep all the balls in the air, right? Keep juggling, keep all the balls in the air. And we know that there are just too many balls to keep in the air, right? So that's number one. We need to make peace with the fact that there is more that we can ever do that is required of us, right?

That people just keep throwing the balls at us, okay? So here's, you know, I've talked about this before and we know it's true.  When you're a really, really competent teacher, and by competent, what I mean is that at least from your administrator's perspective, you are low maintenance. You get the job done.

You are not a complainer. You know, your students are not always in the office. You manage to take care of your own discipline. You manage to keep all the parents happy. They're not calling the office either. You know, you, you show up every day, you're doing what you need to do. You're generally pleasant and you know, probably your students test pretty well.

You know, all those things, all the things that make an administrator's life Easier. Translates to them thinking, you know, Oh, she's got it together. They have it together. That teacher's really great and competent. The more competent you are, guess what? Do you get a raise? No, you don't get a raise. You get more work.

They're going to give you more challenging students. They're going to be more high maintenance parents. They're going to volunteer you. Voluntold, right? You know that phenomenon where they tell you that you've all, your name's already been put forward for another committee. Right? You're just going to get more work.

So you need to make peace with the fact that there is always going to be more work than you can do. Okay? So that's a discussion for a different day. Okay? The strategy of making a not to do list, right? What are some strategies? How can we be strategic about things we're not going to do? Okay? But that's the premise that I, that I'm going to begin with here before I get to the metaphor. 

is that you need to make peace with the fact that there are some things that are not going to get done. Okay, so you need to prioritize accordingly, right? Know the difference between what is urgent and what is important.  Right, just because it comes with an urgent sticker on it doesn't mean in the whole scheme of things it might be important.

And there are things that are important that do seem like they can be put off till later. You know, but eventually they will come back and bite you. Okay, I can give you a personal example of that. Okay, I had, well, you all know this, how many times have you put off  a routine or a minor ailment?  Okay, something that was small that you're like, okay, you know, you know, when you call you got to like, oh, I need the last appointment of the day to see the doctor.

It gets put off for weeks. You finally go there and they're like, well, you really need to take care of this. But in my particular case, it was something that was small and was you know, oh, it's benign, but you do need to take care of it. But there's a two week period. Recovery. Oh my gosh, I cannot take two weeks to recover, you know, during the school year.

Can it wait? Well, it can wait, but we really don't want to wait. Okay, we'll schedule surgery for the first day of summer. Okay, fair enough. By the time the first day of summer came, what had been the size of a pea was now the size of a plum. Way more complicated surgery, much Longer recovery time.  It stole not only all of my summer, I couldn't do anything fun all summer.

When I returned to school, I was sitting on an inflatable donut for the first few weeks. Try and explain that to first graders, okay? So, while that, you know, benign thing did not seem urgent, it really was important. Okay, so that's just an example, but you, you know that even if you were looking at a school related one, you can see that the things that aren't always urgent can be important and vice versa.

Things that seem very important to other people and very urgent in the whole scheme of things may not be important. Okay, let's get back to the metaphor. Okay, Brian Dyson, former CEO of Coca Cola, used it in his commencement speech at Georgia Tech University in  1991. Okay, and what he said is, when you're trying to keep all the balls in the air, you're making a mistake.

You can't keep all the balls in the air. You need to categorize those balls as either  rubber,  or glass.  Okay, so what does that mean? A rubber ball, what happens with a rubber ball? If you drop it, oh, it'll bounce, it'll roll away, it's not the end of the world, it's not gonna break. You can either pick it up later,  or I'm gonna say in education, just let it roll away.

If you don't need to pick it up later, somebody else can pick it up. Okay, but a glass ball. You cannot drop a glass ball. If you drop a glass ball, it's going to shatter. There is no going back. Okay, so you see where I'm going with this. So what we need to do when we're deciding, we're being intentional about what we're not going to do.

Okay, and what we definitely are going to do is we need to ask ourselves is this thing rubber or is it glass?  And the important thing to remember is sometimes we need to flex. OK, we have a life at school and we have a life at home. outside of school. And just because we get paid to be at school, right, we sign a contract, we get paid, we need that money to pay our bills, we need that job for our health care benefits, all the things.

But it doesn't necessarily mean that just because Everything that happens at school is a glass ball. There are many glass balls in your personal life, right? As with my other example, my health, your children's health, your financial health, right? Some people have incredible responsibilities outside of school, right?

There's the whole sandwich generation. Many of us were a sandwich generation, caring for aging parents and young children at the same time, right? There's a lot of glass balls there. So, what you should do Or what I'm suggesting you do is that you take a step back and you, you know how we have a scope and sequence for the year for, okay, you know, I love having me a whole new planner, right?

And open it up and get out all my curriculum and scope and sequence map out the year and then  I'm suggesting that you do the same thing with your personal life, right? That you make a scope and sequence for that and you look at where are kind of the busy months, the hot months, the glass balls in my year that I already know are going to be there.

Maybe I have a kid graduating this year, right? So even though at school there's a lot of activities around promotion and especially if maybe you're in eighth grade or high school and all those things, right?  There might be a lot of, you know, at the end of the year, that might be a glass ball for you.

But in your personal life this year, it's going to be a glass ball. You're going to want to participate as a parent in those things, not as a teacher for your own children, right? Are your children involved in traveling sports, right? Are there some things that you participate in every year? Okay, so make a scope and sequence for your personal life too.

Okay, now, let's look at it. That's great if things are planned, but many things come unscheduled. Many balls are thrown right at us. So let's talk about at school, okay? At school, there are times where things are going to be busier. Okay, there's going to be more glass balls and there's very little kind of flex in that.

We've signed a contract and these are parts that we're contractually obligated to do. They might be things like the report cards or the end of a grading period, right? Back to school night, open house, conference week, oh my goodness, doing all those conferences, right, any athletic tournaments that you coach, any athletic competitions that you organize, right, science fair, spelling bee, math decathlon, right.

If you are you know, if you do theater or choir or orchestra, right, Right. Oh my gosh. State testing. Right. These are all things. There's no flexibility there. They're going to happen when they happen. They are glass balls. Graduation. Right. Either you're organizing it or it's mandatory that you attend.

Right. Any committees  that you're signed up for. You see what I'm saying. You know that there is going to be certain, you know, glass balls. Anything that's in your contract. Right?  Rubber balls, like, you know, a rubber ball, let's give an example of what a rubber ball might be. Okay. For me, it was always, and I know,  so hopefully my, well, I don't care if my administrator listens.

He probably knows too, right? You know, for me, it was the data. Oh, we're having a data meeting. You need the data reports. Now I already had the data, but you know, our systems didn't talk to each other. Okay, so my grading system didn't talk to, you know, the testing system, didn't talk to the other system. So I had all the data in my head.

I had all the data, you know, on, on different pages, whatever. But they wanted to aggregate it into one spreadsheet, so that we could just have each child down as two or three data points. Okay, so even though that's like, you know, so annoying and counterintuitive, this is a child. This is not a child. data point.

But still, really, that's serving somebody else's agenda. They want to be able to aggregate  that data and show it to somebody else and do all those things. And for me, I already know my students strengths and weaknesses, right? I never compiled a data report for somebody else and was shocked. You know what I'm saying?

It was not, it was never new information for me. It was really a matter of convenience for somebody else. And so what happened?  They would ask for it, they would schedule the meeting, the meeting would get cancelled because we couldn't, how many times? We just couldn't get enough subs, okay? And so now I've spent five hours putting together this data in the format that they wanted.

And now by the time the meeting gets rescheduled and all that happens, Well, it's old news. It's no longer relevant and I need to redo it. So for me, to be honest, the first time I got a request for this is the meeting and here's the data and here's the format, for me that was a rubber ball.  Right? I'm not even going to touch that until I get confirmation the night before.

Please confirm the night before that we have a substitute to cover my class that day.  So if somebody's like, Oh, well, we want it without the meeting. Like I, there were things I would wait till I got a second email to be honest. Okay. Things to me that were not, you know, mission critical. So some rubber balls might be, you know, replying to every email.

email. I know that sounds really, you know, disrespectful and  counterintuitive to some people, but to be honest, if it's that important, they'll send a second email, right? You all know the beginning of the year, you just sat through a whole bunch of PD, you got the binder, the binder's going to collect dust.

Right? Maybe somebody will follow up one time  on whatever the new initiative was. Very unlikely they'll follow up more than once, okay? So,  here are some other rubber balls. Grading every assignment, right? Putting every grade into the computer. Like, whatever your policy is, minimum of two grades a week or whatever, you know, I'm not suggesting you only do the minimum.

But it's not something that, you know, I'm going to consider I'm going to stress out over. All right, having Pinterest worthy lesson plans. Like they, if that, if that plan doesn't have all the bitmojis  on it, the, this, it doesn't have fancy fonts on your slide deck, you know, so what? That's a, that's a rubber ball to me.

It's not that important. Now, if I'm getting observed,  you know, my lesson plan is going to become a glass ball.  You see that? You see what the difference is? That's a glass ball. But what else? Let's see. Classroom decor. You know, fiddling with that all the time. Laminating. Oh, this is in the low grades.

Laminating all those letters that you put on the wall. Oh, please. Come on. Those are rubber balls. I mean, if it gives you pleasure and you enjoy doing it and you have time to do it, go for it. But it's not something I'm going to stress about. In the whole scheme of things, it is not a glass ball. Okay? So what about your personal life?

Again, now, here, when there are people. Here's the point. You need to have some kind of, hopefully, you are part of a team at home, some kind of support structure, even if you don't have, you know, a partner and children you know, maybe you have pets, maybe somebody needs to help, you know, walk the dog, somebody needs to help do whatever.

When you have more glass balls at school,  at home, some things need to become rubber balls.  Okay, maybe a glass ball for you at home is always doing your laundry on a Saturday, is always cleaning your house, that's how you function well. You know, maybe if there are more glass balls at school, some of your glass balls that are at home need to become rubber balls.

Realize it's not forever. It's just the season that you are in. And you, if you do have a support system at home, then you need to hand off. It's okay to have that conversation with your partner that says, you know what, you know that this is, you know, a performance week. Maybe you're a music teacher. Okay, we have three performances this week.

You know it's my busy time.  There are glass balls at school right now. Can you pick up some glass balls at home? Can you drop the kids to their activities? Can you pack the lunches? Can you make sure the laundry gets done? All right, you want to tag team it. So there's the concept.  You Cannot keep all the balls in the air.

Make peace with that, OK? And then understand that you have two areas of your life. You have a school life and you have a home life, right? And when there are more glass balls at school, you need more rubber balls at home. And when there's more glass balls at home, you need more rubber balls at school, right?

You need to rely more on your teammates. Hey, you know what? This thing's happening at home. It's gonna consume a lot of my extra time. Would you be willing to do more of the lesson planning this week? And next week, I gotcha. Okay, you just gotta communicate your needs. And again, one strategy that I find is really helpful is at the beginning of the year, you know where there are going to be a lot of glass balls in your personal life.

We always know what they are at school. Right. When we get that brand new teacher planner, first thing I do is go in and put in all those mandatory dates that we have to do.  That's not true. The first thing I do is put in all the holidays.  I go mark off when we have three day weekends. Hey, I'm just keeping it real here.

You know, you do that too, right? And then you go put the mandated days and then we go. Highlight testing week and, you know, all those things, right? We do it for school. We should do it for home too. And hopefully, you know, there's not too much overlap, right? If you, we know this. If we have a choice when we can do things at home, we're not going to do them during conference week, right?

Right. That's a really long, stressful week. Okay. So I hope that metaphor helps. Now there's so much more to balance than that, right? I have an exercise I take if you do PD with me, or if you are part of the membership, or you've taken some of my classes, we do do a very kind of really helpful exercise called the wheel.

Of balance and it takes into account different areas like school, family, health, friends, hobbies, spirituality, finances, all those things all through a teacher lens, but I always used to try and tell people, Oh, you know, the, the whole idea is that when we do this, this wheel of balance you, it, it's a very helpful tool to quickly see where your life is.

is out of balance, where you need to spend some focus, you know, if you're feeling irritable, resentful, worn out, you know, typically it's because some area of your life has been neglected for too long. And I always used to coach people, you know, in an ideal world, you know, everything will be balanced and, and looking at this tool, it would make this perfect circle, right?

And I've really moved beyond that. I don't think there really is a time where there is a perfect. circle, okay? I think we just need to have intention,  attention, and a little grace as to when things are out of balance and know that it's not forever. But I, I think this metaphor helps. Okay, that is it for this week.

Trying to keep it shorter. Think of all the balls that are getting thrown your way. Remember, this was a big life lesson for me. The day that I realized I don't have to go to every party I'm invited to, right? What do I mean by that? When someone throws a ball at you, you don't need to catch it. Some balls you don't need to catch that are always going to be rubber balls for me are standing around commiserating how awful education is. 

How terrible my class is, this competition of, oh that's nothing, I had this kid do this, no, and I had that parent do that. Right? That conversation where we're competing as to who has it worse, that is always going to be a rubber ball for me. You throw that ball at me, you're going to see my head just turn as I watch it hit the ground and roll away.

Okay? I'm never going to catch that ball. So think about that too.  Are there balls that you are catching  voluntarily and complaining about later that you can't keep them in the air? You know, you do not need to catch every ball that is thrown at you or in what I say, you don't need to go to every party you're invited to.

Because not all the parties are great. All right.  Okay. Well, I hope you have found that helpful and empowering. If you have any questions, you know what? You can always email me if there is something you want to hear on this podcast. My goodness. Do you know that you can leave reviews for podcasts? You can also leave  If you leave a comment, something that you want to hear me talk about, I would be so happy to do that for you.

And something that would also would be great is if you are finding this information helpful, it would mean the world to me. If you would tell a colleague about it, right, it seems like, you know, I'm on this big mission to empower teachers and the more.  Okay, let it will be a great thing for you to do for you.

Make you feel good. It will make them feel good and my word. It would make me feel good. So until next time, create your own path. Bring your own sunshine. Watch out what balls you're catching.  See you next time.