Teachers in Transition – Episode 212: Accepting Compliments, Pockets, and the Strategic Visioning Process

In this episode, Vanessa talks about how to accept a compliment, a recommendation for some fun and comfortable and totally appropriate teacher-wear, and we’ll wrap up by talking about why you need a strategic vision process when making your career transition.
 
 Find fun teacher clothes with POCKETS at https://svahausa.com

The Recipe (from Memory!) from the Nancy Drew Cookbook:
The Case of the Smothered Pork Chops: 
Ingredients:  
4 pork chops 
1 cup uncooked rice 
1 can Beef Consomme
1 lemon (4-5 thick slices)
1 onion (4-5 thick slices) 
 
This works best in one of those old Corell square baking dishes with the blue squiggle design on them! 

 (preheat the oven to 350°)
Pour the rice on the bottom of the baking dish 
Arrange the pork chops on top so that they do not overlap
Put one slice of onion on each pork chop
Put on slice of lemon on top of each slice of onion
Pour the can of beef consommé on top of the whole thing. 
 
Bake at 350° for an hour or until the rice is cooked. 
 
 
 

Send answers to the movie trivia questions – and any other comments, stories, and random thoughts to me at TeachersinTransitionCoaching@gmail.com!  

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Feel free to connect with Vanessa on LinkedIn!

If you’d like to sign up with Vanessa for a Complimentary Discovery Call, head over to her calendar and sign up for a time that is convenient for you.  

The transcript of this podcast can be found on the podcasts’ homepage at Buzzsprout. 

Transcript

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 navigate the journey from stressed, under-appreciated, and burnt-out teacher to a new career that allows you margins in your life.  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 we are going to talk about how to accept a compliment, a recommendation for some fun and comfortable and totally appropriate teacher-wear, and we’ll wrap up by talking about why you need a strategic vision process when making your career transition. 

Stress and Mental Health Segment: 

I know that in other parts of the country, teachers may not yet be back in classrooms, but where I live, the faculty parking lots are starting to fill up.  Teachers are preparing for students and, as my dad used to say, putting the big pot in the little one.  This is of course, code for doing something that seems impossible. So it’s come to the time that we're going to talk about how to own the wonderful things that we do. Women and teachers—it's double if you're both—have a habit of not really accepting praise. I am just as guilty as anybody else. When someone says, "Wow, you did this amazing thing," we tend to bpass it off and say, "Oh, it was nothing. It really was so-and-so or something else,” or worse, we start to point out the small imperfections and magnify the weaknesses of what we’ve done.  We pass along the credit to anyone who worked with us.  

However, if we get a negative comment or are told that we screwed something up, everything changes.  We internalize that very deeply and think that we are responsible for the world. And we are not. We don't often think about the fact that the same people who contributed to the success also contributed to the failure.  Some of that may be something that gets wired into us through our teaching practice as we are told that no child gets left behind. As the lead flight director said during the Apollo 13 disastrous trip and in regards to bringing the crew home when there seemed like no hope at all, “Failure is not an option” (some administrators take that too far and forget that failure is a learning tool in an of itself!) 
 
 

But back to compliments - When I was younger, I was visiting an aunt and uncle, and I cooked dinner one night. I was, I don't know, somewhere between 12 and 16, and I was excited to show off my skills with my one dish that I knew how to cook. It was out of a Nancy Drew cookbook.

When my uncle praised it by saying, "This is very good," it was actually very high praise because this was a man born to money who had dined in some of the finest restaurants in Manhattan. He told me that it was really good, and it was clear that he meant it. I looked at him, smiled, and said, "Thank you." And that's all I said. A couple of minutes went by, and he looked up and said, "You do a wonderful job of taking a compliment." And followed up with “I would have brushed the compliment off and been self-deprecating about it.”  

So let’s practice accepting a compliment.   Smile and say “Thank you.”  That’s it.  That’s all there is too it.  You’ll feel the urge to add words. You don’t have to.  
 
 Your turn.  I’ll give you a compliment, and you acknowledge it.  I admit this may come across odd if you’re in public somewhere with earbuds in, so adapt as you need to so it works for YOU. 
 
 Here we go:
 I see how hard you are working on making this your best year ever, and I am inspired by your efforts.  You’re pretty awesome, you know?”
 
 (smile….. thank you)
 
 Then take the compliments and examine them in your soul and know that you deserve all the compliments.   I guess I’ll give you homework for this week – practice accepting all your compliments with the Smile-Thank-You protocol.  You’ll find that it lightens your day.

Recommendation Segment: 
 
And for a recommendation this week, we're going to talk a little bit about fun clothes to wear for school. I would like to highlight an amazing small business owned by a woman. The company is called Svaha, and you can find them at Svahausa.com. Let me spell that:  S V A H A U S A dot com. They have wonderful dresses that are beautifully designed with intelligent ideas These dresses feature themes from different scientific subjects, as well as English, art, and math, and they are just so much fun.

The dresses come and go. For example, I've been a fan for a long time and was able to get a dress with sentence diagram stitches all over it. Another dress I have features the Dewey Decimal system. One of my favorite dresses looks like a simple black and white patterned dress, but it's actually covered with the caffeine molecule. Whatever your subject area, this company has the dresses!

The genesis of this company came about because their founder, Jaya Iyer, went shopping with her daughter, who wanted an astronaut shirt. There were no little girl astronaut shirts, and the only way to get one was in the boys' section. That was the seed of the idea.  Why can’t girls have shirts with astronauts on them too! They also have some children's clothes and unisex shirts, but they're mostly known for their dresses.

Now, here's what differentiates them from other companies and why I'm actually talking about them now: these dresses come with really amazing, functional—wait for it—pockets. These are pockets that can hold things without spilling out the moment you sit down. And if the pockets weren’t enough of a draw, these dresses come in inclusive sizing so whatever size you are, there is a dress there that fits you. It is an amazing product. Check them out at Svahausa.com. There’s a link in the show notes. This isn’t a sponsorship – just an amazing product and company – although I’d grateful accept a sponsorship in case Jaya hears this!   

Career Transition and Job Search Segment

Moving on to our career transition and job hunt segment, we are going to focus on what it means to be strategic. You simply won’t be able to be successful without strategy. 

 The 1989 movie,  Working Girl, is about a woman, Tess, who is diligently working to better her circumstances even though the deck seems perpetually stacked against her. She finds herself assigned as an executive assistant to someone who is a week or two younger than her, but WAY higher on the corporate ladder. The new boss wants to throw a dinner party and make sure that she has created an impression, and this little dinner party is hosted at the supervisor's home. The assistant is helping pass out the steaming hors d’oeuvres, and it has not done kind things to her clothes, her makeup or her hair.  And this was the 80s.  There was a lot of hair.  Tess watches the boss artfully dodge a male colleague who was subtly propositioning her via innuendo.  Tess tells her boss "Wow, you handled that really well." The boss's comment was, "Today’s junior jerk is tomorrow’s senior executive." While this is a commentary not just on what we tolerated in the 80s, there is a truth here combining the fact that we are all connected to each other with the notion that we never know how someone else’s circumstances might change that could help us or hurt us later.   To borrow a quote from a different 1989 movie (I am clearly on a movie kick today) “Be nice.”  And bonus points to anyone who emails me and tells me what movie that is from!  Remember the 6 Degrees of Kevin Bacon game. We don’t even know yet how many people we are truly connected to. (You can earn double bonus points if you can tell me which movie I’ve referenced today actually includes Kevin Bacon in the cast!).  Networking is an important piece of the job search.  

But before you go off and network to strangers,
 
 you have to understand that what you are doing is marketing a product. You are the product. In that sense, you become a mini-corporation of one. And as such, you need to go through your own strategic visioning process. This process has several steps.

First, you're going to create a clarity quadrant or a SWOT analysis. What is a SWOT analysis you ask?  

SWOT – S W O T

A SWOT analysis is a strategic planning tool used to identify and understand key aspects of a situation, project, or in this case, a job search. SWOT stands for:

1.     Strengths: Internal attributes and resources that support a successful outcome. For a job search, this could include your skills, experience, education, and the personal qualities that make you an attractive candidate.

2.     Weaknesses: Internal factors that might hinder your success. These could be gaps in your skills, lack of experience, or any personal traits that might need improvement.  Next is: 

3.     Opportunities: External factors that you can capitalize on or use to your advantage. This might include industry growth in a particular field, networking opportunities, or emerging job markets.  And finally:

4.     Threats: External challenges that could cause problems or obstacles. These could be high competition for jobs, economic downturns, or changes in industry standards.

By conducting a SWOT analysis on youself, you can gain a comprehensive understanding of where you stand and develop strategies to leverage your strengths, improve your weaknesses, take advantage of opportunities, and mitigate threats.

A clarity quadrant is essentially a more personal version of a SWOT assessment: 
 Instead of specifically identifying those strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, you ask yourself these four questions. 
 
 1.  What is the potential risk of doing this? 
 2.  What is the potential risk of NOT doing this.
 3.  What is the potential benefit and payoff of doing this?
 4.  What is the potential risk and payoff of NOT doing this. 
 
 

I find the clarity quadrant more helpful when making big life decisions like “Should I change careers” 

In creating your Strategic Visioning Statement, a SWOT will better meet your needs 

Stage 2 you are going to set your visions, goals, and objectives.  Write them down.  Don’t be afraid to go big.  After all, if you have big goals and only accomplish 50-75% of them, you are way ahead of accomplishing 100% of a tiny goal. With big goals you’ll go farther. 

Set big long-term goals and smaller SMART-style objectives to help you get there.  SMART of course stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timebound. I’m sure you’ve heard this often in your career. 
 
 Stage 3 is to develop your strategy.  
 One thing youwill need to do is to gather those close to you to lay out your goals and get their support.  None of us lives in a vacuum.  If you are married, have children, have a standing racquetball game with a friend, you need to talk to those people. This probably seems scary, but that’s OK.  You can do the scary things.  And you might just find support and insight you weren’t expecting. 
 
 Create an action plan to go after the objectives and goals you created in Stage 2.  Ask for help where necessary. Consider in what order these things need to happen.  Maybe even make a timeline.  If things happen on a slower pace than you anticipated, at least they’re happening.  

Stage 4 is to execute your strategy.  – This sounds so simple. It usually is much easier to say than to do.  Make sure you have people in your life to cheer you on and provide accountability where necessary. 

Stage 5 is to monitor and evaluate your results. 
 To do that, you have to track your trends. You can create a spreadsheet to do this. I have a spreadsheet that I use with my clients, and I help coach them through it when they are looking for jobs, as we create their strategic objectives.

But look at your data and honestly answer the question: Are things working?  If yes, then Great!  Keep at it!  If things aren’t working or aren’t where you expected, then on to stage 6. 

Stage 6 is to correct course as necessary. If you have submitted a couple hundred applications and they're going nowhere, then you need to change something – it might be how you are presenting yourself or it might be where you’re aiming.  Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results when things aren’t working is a recipe for a lot of frustration.  Being able to course correct is a great way to avoid those icebergs out there in a rough sea of job hunting.  

Think how much worse it would be or feel to not even have the data to know that you needed to make a change?  That’s why we track it all. 
 
 So I wish wonderful things and easy classes for you in this upcoming school year.  As I have discussed very recently – make sure to take care of yourself as you transition back into the new school year.  If nothing else, prioritize sleep!  I promise you aren’t getting enough!
 
 But it you’re already so overwhelmed that you know you need to leave the classroom, that’s what I do – I teach you to translate your skills in a way that will get attention and make sense outside of the World of Education. Remember, I worked outside of education in a job where I routinely worked with managers and employees we’d hired for them. I’m not just guessing – I know what it’s like on both sides of the hiring table. 

If you are interested in exploring what it would take to change careers or to work through a clarity quadrant of your own, feel free to sign up for a free Discovery call to see how I can help you. You can find that at Teachers In Transition dot com slash calendar. I have a link to it in the show notes too. 
 
 You can also connect with other teachers in the Teachers in Transition Podcast club, or peruse the website at Teachers in Transition dot com. I’d love to hear from you!  Did you try the recipe in the show notes?  Were you able to spot the Kevin Bacon or identify the movie from that short “”Be nice” quote? 
 
 Remember: The best time to start working on your transition plan was about six months ago.  The next best time is now!  In fact, this is a great plan to start your strategic vision process if this is going to be your last year in the class room, and I would love to help you.  
 
 Give me a call. 

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!