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 –a career transition and job search coach specializing in educators. I am here to help you reach your goals and figure out how to navigate the journey from stressed out and burnt-out teacher to a new career that allows you time and space. I want you to have that time and that space to spend with your family, your pets, and whatever else you want to – especially during these summer months! I provide tips and suggestions to help with stress and mental health, hacks to help your day, and job-hunting tips. If this last teaching year got on your very last nerve and kept going, if you are stressed, overwhelmed, and burned out you are in the right place – Welcome! Today on the pod, we are going to talk about why it’s all good, how to save yourself massive amounts of grief and regret with just your phone, and finally we’ll talk a bit about whether you need to hire someone to write your resume.
We’re going to start with a bit of a fairy tale.
Once Upon a time. There was a land far away and in this land a child was born who would one day become king. And elsewhere in the land, at about the same time, another child was born. It was taken as a sign that this child was born to be an advisor and companion to the Future King. Thus, this child was taken from his family and raised alongside the king to be his friend, his advisor and his confidante, and to be able to anticipate every need.
And they grew up together, and they had adventures together, and they were the best of friends. And they got along in every respect except one thing. You see, no matter what happened, the King’s best friend and advisor would always say “this is good.” And sometimes this made sense – as when a baby was born to a family, it was a beautiful sunny day. But other times it didn’t make sense – like when it rained when a picnic was planned or if some plans fell through.
One day the future king ascended to the throne and became the King of the Entire Realm. And his best friend and advisor ascended to be the King’s Right Hand. And this one annoying habit seemed to get worse. A baby is born? This is good. A neighboring kingdom threated war? This is Good. In times of plenty? This is good. In times of drought and famine? This is good! This drove the king nuts. He would ask, “How is this good?” And his Right Hand would say, “I do not know, but it is good”
And then one day they were off hunting on a hunting excursion, and it was the Right Hand’s job to load the weapon. (long time ago, you know?) And he made a dangerous mistake so that in firing the weapon, it backfired. And it blew off the King's thumb.
The King was, of course, furious. And he cries out, “look what you've done! My thumb! The Right Hand says to the king, “but this is good”
and the King's replies, “This is not good!! How can THIS possibly be GOOD?!?!?!?!” and he was so incensed and so angered that he threw his Hand, his best friend, his confidante, and advisor into his deepest, darkest dungeon, locked away from family, sunshine and everything else.
Years go by. Years go by, and the King is hunting in another corner of his Kingdom.This is a corner that had not been visited very often. It turns out that in this corner, there was a tribe of cannibals, and they captured the entire party.
The king is ranting and raving. “I am the king of this land! You must let me go! I am your king!” And the cannibals’ attitude was essentially “We bet you're as tasty as the other guys,” and they were not going to let him go.
As they were prepping their captures for sacrifice, they realized that the king did not have a thumb. In their rituals, they could only sacrifice those people who were whole and intact, so upon seeing the king was missing his thumb, they let him go.
The king looked at where his thumb used to be, and he thought to himself how good it was that he has lost that thumb. And that caused him to remember that his friend, his Right Hand had also told him it was good years and years ago. The King races back to the Kingdom, goes straight to the dungeon, has them bring out his former Hand and strike the chains. The former Hand comes out, blinking at the sun that he has not seen in so very, very long. He is dirty, smelly and nasty looking. Nevertheless, The King falls to his knees in front of his friend and asks, “can you forgive me? I am so sorry” He tells the story of what had just happened, what he had just endured and continues, “ You were right. This was a good thing that I didn't have my thumb. I can never make up for all the years that you were away from your family, but can you ever forgive me?”
And the Right Hand looks down at the king, and he also drops to his knees and says “My friend, my Liege, my King, there is nothing to forgive. This is good.”
And the king drops his head and remembers just how annoying this guy was. “Just let me recap for you. You have been in this horrible dungeon that I've thrown you in, and you haven't even seen the sun in 20 years. You, you missed watching your kids grow up. You missed living these decades with your wife and dear God, you smell like that and you say that it doesn't matter and that this is good?”.
And the king says “I don't understand. Why is this good?” And the king looks at his friend and his friend looks at the king - looks deep into his eyes and says, “Sir. If you had not thrown me in jail all those years ago, when you went on this hunting expedition where you were the only one to return. I would have been with you.”
And the story illustrates that we don't really know what is good and what is bad until we've lived through it and look backwards. The most horrible moment of my life ended up being one of the gateways to an amazing realm of possibilities. I've talked about that in a previous podcast. In a nutshell, I was listening to a man tell me that I was a great teacher but he didn’t like me, so I had to go – while my 1-month old baby was sitting next to me in her carrier. While my husband was still in college. So, scary times. Without that moment, I most likely would have stayed in the hometown I lived in my whole life. But because that happened, I HAD to grow. I followed my soldier around, got to teach music to thousands of kids, make friends all over the country (some of whom might be listening to this! Thank you!) and have a wonderful life.
So we just don't know what's going to be good or what's going to be bad until we have distance from it. I combine that story and the knowledge that anything can be good with a poster that I think was in every classroom when I was growing up. There's a poster of a little flower growing up in the sidewalk that says “Bloom, where you were planted”, and that has been my go-to phrase for many, many years. With that simple knowledge that anything can be good and that you can bloom wherever you are planted, you can make a success at anything. Let’s face some facts – teachers do the impossible several times a day.
And now it’s time for today’s hack – our hacks are designed to find some small way to make your life easier somehow so that you can free up time in your life to send time on YOU and your hopes, dreams, and goals. Todays’ hack is one I hope you never need, and it is the reason I’m delayed in getting this recorded this weekend.
The hack is to make sure that you have 2-factor authentication enabled on your Facebook and Instagram accounts and have separate passwords for them. Another thing that will be useful in this situation is to have an email address that has never been linked to any Facebook account or Instagram or What’s App or whatever else is out there. So have that in your back pocket.
I was awakened this morning to the message that my Facebook account was suspended because of violations with my Instagram account. So, hacked. I am not completely technically illiterate, and I got to digging around so I could figure out what I could and to try to get it reinstated. All that is in the air. Dealing with Meta in these situations is as helpful as asking a toddler to write your Shakespeare thesis for English Lit Degree. It isn’t just the hours I’ve spent trying to make my case understood – it’s the loss of over 15 years’ worth of stuff – posts, memories, pictures. I had downloaded all my pictures into Google Drive a few years ago, so I guess it’s only 3 years’ worth of Facebook photos. It’s the loss of pictures and posts and conversations – with no real hope of recourse that hurts. And it is occupying so much of my brain space right now. I don’t want that for you.
That also means that the Facebook group for this podcast is without an administrator or moderator, and unless I get that back, there’s no way to add one. Please know that anything coming from me might not be me. I’d go so far as to ask you to leave the group and I can announce on here when it is safe or what the new group might be once everything settles out.
So, I am going to try and take my own advice from the beginning of the podcast and tell myself even though it is out of my reach for the moment – and possibly forever, it is good. I just might not know how for awhile.
And moving on to our Job-Search segment. Today we are going to talk a little more about resumes. I want to answer the question – do you need to pay someone to make yours? The answer is, I believe, No.
As my husband was preparing to retire from the military and we were getting ready to move back to our home state, I paid someone $300 to make a resume for me. I hired someone because I felt lost and because I didn’t want to take any chances. Oh, the things I did not know back then! I hope this will save some of you that grief. And that’s not to say that the resume writer did a bad job. On the contrary, she did a WONDERFUL job. But that wasn’t the point.
I was coming back into the state with more skills than I left with. I would have been equally at home with a band director or an orchestra director job. My husband and I decided that this time we would live where *my* job took us, so where I was going to get hired was where we were going to land, and put down roots for the last move.
I hired a resume writer because I was feeling the weight of being the primary breadwinner for awhile and I didn’t want to take any chances.
I felt like I was carpet bombing the state of Texas with my resume - I had sent it to districts in every major metropolitan area, many smaller towns and places well off the beaten path. I had one person call for an interview. One. It was one of the smaller districts. Everywhere else got crickets.
I didn’t know back then about keywords and ATS systems and the like. I did not know that even then, tailoring to a job description was necessary in the event one has many diverse talents and skills. Here’s why:
Every time I applied for a band director job, all of the orchestra work counted against me. So less than a 50% match. The computer would have flagged it or tagged it or whatever and not allowed my name through the system. Whenever I applied to an orchestra job, all of the band jobs worked against me. And I was closed out of the system.
With one job, I was doing what I knew to do – reach out. It turned out at one district I knew one of the superintendents because we had class together in college. I reached out. Not only was I encouraged to apply, but this individual offered to walk my resume down to HR. That’s how I got an interview. Someone in the central office walked my resume down. When it came to the nitty-gritty of setting things up for that interview, I had to make a lot of calls because my application was not showing up in the system. It was closed. It was relegated to the dead files that shall ne’er see the light of a screen. Someone in HR had to physically go in and unlock it – which never would have happened if my resume had not been walked down to HR. I did get that job by the way. My skills as a teacher were sterling and I knew I’d do well in an interview – if I could ever get there. That whole story is a lesson in resume writing and the power of networking.
But you CAN write your own resume. It is one of the skills I teach in my programs and when I work with people one on one. And this skill is very much like that whole fishing adage: Give someone a fish and they have dinner, teach someone to fish and they can feed themselves. This is a skill you can learn and adapt to other job families and situations as it comes in life – it’s even applicable if you are just interested in looking for a job in a new district.
If you know other teachers who are stressed, overwhelmed, and burned out and looking in the summer for what might be next, share this podcast with them. I am trying to help as many teachers as I can to find work they love where they are valued and can do the things they find meaningful. If you would like to talk further about your possibilities or resume writing, remember that you can schedule a time to talk on my website! If you aren’t ready to talk but you might want to sign up for the newsletter, you can do that too. A monthly newsletter will be starting during the summer months. Check it out at TeachersInTransition.com (and of course a link is in the show notes!)
If you are ready to go, I would love to help be your guide and coach you through your journey. Remember: 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!