Teachers in Transition - Episode191 - Dealing with Anxiety & Hunting for Government Jobs

In this episode, Vanessa talks about anxiety – how to spot it and how to deal with it.  She also shares a hack to save time and make planning easier, and finally on the job-hunting segment, she gives a brief overview of USAJobs and some of the pros and cons for working for a government.

USAJobs Website

USAjobs page explaining grades and pay level

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History of the Alcan Highway and learn how important African Americans were in its construction.

And remember to send your comments, stories, and random thoughts to me at TeachersinTransitionCoaching@gmail.com!  I look forward to reading them.

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

Transcript

Teachers in Transition - Episode190 - Dealing with Anxiety & Hunting for Government Jobs

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 – if you are frustrated with your current teaching position – you are burnt out and overwhelmed, I am here for you. I help teachers reach their goals and dig into what they really want. I provide tips and suggestions to help with stress and mental health, hacks to help your day, and job hunting tips. Today on the pod we are going to talk about anxiety – how we spot it, and how we deal it.  We’ll also share a hack to save time when in planning meetings, and finally, we’ll talk about hunting for government jobs. I’m glad you’re here! And thank you for listening!

In our first segment about stress management and health, we are going to talk about some tips to coping with anxiety. I don’t have any hard numbers on it, but I think almost all teachers deal with anxiety.  If nothing else, more of us are struggling with it than aren’t struggling with it.  Today we are going to talk about some suggestions for dealing with our anxiety. 
 
First – let’s identify anxiety: everyone has their own specific manifestation of anxiety, put some things that you might notice:

·       difficulty concentrating 

·       muscle tension 

·       Disordered eating – maybe you binge eat, maybe you aren’t eating at all.  Maybe you consume things that you know aren’t good for you

·       Sleep difficulties – maybe it takes forever to go to sleep, maybe you wake up in the middle of the night.  Maybe you have nightmares. 

·       That feeling of impending doom but you can’t quite put your finger on exactly where the doom is. 

·       Your brain races, your heart races, you have intense feelings of fear leading to the next one: 

·       A feeling like you need to flee – the instinctive part of your brain is screaming at you to get out of the situation (or fight, or fawn, or freeze).  Fawning is the act of throwing compliments at the source of perceived danger.  Not a thing if you were running from a bear in the woods, but absolutely a thing with a toxic boss. 

·       Maybe Iyou really delay getting out of your car in the mornings after arriving at school because you are afraid to deal with what might not even have happened yet.

 
 - you might have any of these alone or in combination.  

Is there any wonder that teachers become more and more anxious in the classroom?
 
 I am always an advocate for therapy – most insurances cover mental health – and medications where needed.  I am not a licensed therapist, and I have no medical degree, so I cannot prescribe medications.  
 
 What I will share are some things you can do to deal with the anxiety in the moment when a counselor isn’t there.  Some of these are useful at home, and some are useful at school. Different things work for different people, and the correct answer is what works for you.  I also find that sometimes I get my own great ideas after hearing someone else’s ideas for that won’t work.  So feel free to ignore what doesn’t serve you.    
 
 I mean, the obvious answer is self-care, but raise your hand if you’re really tired of hearing about needing to engage in self-care, but you are given neither the time nor the resources to make it happen.  I see you.  Me too.  

1.     Connect with nature.  Maybe you pull out the earbud and listen to the birds on your walk.  Maybe you take kids to the park and sit in the swings while they play.  Maybe you just sit on your porch and breathe for 5 minutes.  I’ve heard of ‘grounding’ or ‘earthing’  where you connect to the earth with bare feet and just sit for five minutes.  There are a lot of articles arguing both ways for this. If nothing else, that five minutes of being completely in the moment in nature is calming. 

2.    The 3-3-3 technique or the 4-3-2-1 technique. They both serveto have you focus on things that are not where your brain is leading you and brings you back to yourself. 

a.    The 3-3-3 technique is to notice and name three objects, three sounds, and then move three body parts. 

b.    The 4-3-2-1 technique is grounded in your five senses.  Don’t get attached to a STRICT interpretation.  Flex and adapt as needed.   

                                       i.    4 things you see

                                      ii.    3 things you hear

                                     iii.    2 things you smell

                                     iv.    1 thing you can touch. 

3.    Box Breathing 

a.    Inhale for a count of 4, hold your breath for a count of 4, exhale for a count of 4 and hold for another count of 4 and then repeat at least three times.  

4.    Belly Breathing – Put one hand on your heart and one on your belly.  You will want to feel your belly move while you breathe.  In for four counts, out for four counts.

5.    The next one is Phone a friend – we are not always in a position to stop what we’re doing and call or text someone, but if you can, you will find that actually talking to a live human can help bring you back down.

6.    Journaling – SO many journals and journaling techniques.  I won’t go into all of them, but an idea of a one-sentence journal might be helpful here.  Write down in one sentence what your brain is spinning about or what is bothering you – or something that made you feel better.  From this you can spot patterns – although I suspect you already know the patterns. 

7.     Schedule a time to worry about things. When we left Alaska to move back to Texas, I was the one planning the trip back down.  That’s a lot of logistics and operations there, and there were a lot of moving parts.  There is this really great resource (in case it ever comes up) called the Milepost which breaks down every single thing – place to sleep, eat, and get gas.  It tells you about towns and attractions and basically covers every mile of the Alcan Highway – the Alaska-Canadian Highway.  I am going to put a link in the show notes to how it was built because it is such a fascinating and amazing story!   Anyway, The current year’s milepost is released in February. I told myself I wasn’t allowed to worry about the trip until I had a Milepost and I couldn’t order the Milepost until February. Honestly no one was more surprised than me to find that this worked. You could tell yourself – I will allow myself to worry about things at 7:30 – or whatever works for you. 

8.    Brain Dumping – just sit down and write, type, or dictate everything that is making your brain race.  This slows your brain down enough to focus on one thing at a time and sometimes once you have it written out, you can address it and see a plan of action. A saying I picked up was “action is the antidote to anxiety.” As teachers, I think much of our anxiety comes from an inability to take action in a meaningful or decisive way. 

9.    Reframing – sometimes a bad thing isn’t so bad.  This might be the most important one. The absolute worst moment in my life led to a host of wonderful things. I was in my second year of teaching.  The new principal had taken an instant disliking to me, and it was a hard year.  I also had my first baby – after a couple of miscarriages, so we were very happy parents. My husband was still in college.  I was the bread winner.  (Side note: I have no idea how we were able to pull that off back then financially. None.).  This principal called me in off my maternity leave to tell me that he thought I was a great teacher, but he didn’t like me and didn’t want me on his campus. Also, he wanted my resignation in two days. I was young y’all. My baby – born almost a month early - was exactly one month old sitting next to me in her carrier, and I was the only one bringing in money.  Ummm… it’s hard to describe what a horrifying and horrible feeling that was.  Because then I had to tell my husband.  And my parents.  And my friends.  It was hard.  
 
 My husband decided to leave college and enlist in the military because he wanted to take care of us. We were a military family for 20 years from 1999-2019, so you know we had deployments and moves and all of that. Had I not been run off from that job, I would have never gotten to teach in my primary subject area. Had I not been run off from that job, I would never have had the opportunity to live in Alaska  which led to a lot MORE things that would NEVER have happened had I not been forced away from a very comfortable zone.  
 
 
 

And finally, the reminder that I know y’all all know – exercise, sleep, and eat right – the holy trinity of health – will also help reduce anxiety. 
 
 And if you are a teacher approaching the end of your cycles – check your hormones. When hormones go wonky in perimenopause and menopause, it also creates feelings of anxiety, brain fog, and joint aches.  That’s a doctor visit.

Our next segment is our teacher hack, which is designed to help you save time and brain space so that you can spend it on you - whether you're upskilling for a new career or applying to jobs, these hacks help you keep your sanity. Today’s hack is useful when you are involved in planning anything that also involves other people.  It is: Make the suggestion.  Let me explain further: 
 
We’ve all engaged in that: What do YOU want to do? I think that comes from a place of wanting to be accommodating and to not make assumptions on someone else’s time. I was watching this in play just recently.  A group of us are in charge of an event.  I am lower down the totem pole in the power structure of the group.  We had to set up the final planning meeting before the event, so the question was posed to the group should we do this before dinner?  After dinner?   What time should we meet? And our leader – an amazing human being whom I adore – asked us what we wanted to do. There was that awkward silence because no one wants to make that assumption for everyone.  
 
With my usual tact and diplomacy, near the end of a meeting that’s gone over a couple of hours, I decide to make the suggestion.  “I want to preface this by saying that I am only throwing it out so that we can pick it apart and change it, but how about a 6:00PM working dinner meeting?” And that was almost universally accepted and someone asks:  “What should we order?” and there were two or three people who immediately said the same place at the same time. And this part of the meeting went much faster! 
 
Here’s why you want to make the suggestion 
#1 – you are setting parameters that probably work for you which is helpful to you – your schedule and everything else and.... 
#2 – it really speeds along the process – saving time and grief. 
 
I find that by prefacing it with the ‘I’m tossing this out with the idea that it can be changed, please feel free to pick it apart and offer something else that works better’ ensures that you aren’t seen as bullying the group into what you want, but it makes things SO MUCH faster!  Let me know how this works for you.  Try it!

Our job hunting segment today is a short one, and we are going to talk briefly about USAJOBS.  If this doesn’t apply to you because you listen from another country, you might want to skip ahead a bit . [Insert pause to come back and give an actual time] This is the federal government clearing house on finding jobs.  Government jobs come with their own pros and cons – the benefits are often good and the holidays can’t be beat!  But The pay is lower, and it can take months to find out that they have rejected your application packet or that they want to talk to you further. It is not for the faint of heart. I had applied to a job there, and I got my rejection notice ten months after I applied. I had forgotten I had applied, and I was working happily for someone else at that point.

You can find it at USAJOBs.gov. I’ll link to that in the show notes.  You’ll have to sign up for an account, but is one of the few places that doesn’t spam you to death for signing up.  You can search the job database by location, job, and etc.   

It includes jobs from everything government related – from jobs on military bases, to the IRS, to the Departments of everything our government has.
 
 I have known soldiers transitioning out of the military that went out and got a bridge job while waiting on the results of the federal job. 
 
 You’ll see things in there like “Must qualify for G11” or some other G number. I’ll put a link to the FAQ, but essentially, it’s a General Schedule (hence the G) of education and qualifications.  It rewards higher degrees and higher grades in the degrees, so that’s encouraging.  

It is important to note that they will give points (a way of establishing preference) to weight certain people for certain jobs – like disabled veterans, veteran spouses, etc. If you have no military affiliation in that regard, you’ll want to use the “open to the public” filter. 
 
 Even through the pay is lower, the pay is clearly defined. Each level has ten steps and it is clear how you move through them. 
 
 Other cons to a government job include furloughs. We’ve all heard about government shutdowns and there are people in departments that are expected to either go home and have no pay, or to work and receive no pay while Congress is sorting out budgets. Those people are usually back-paid, but it’s not a guarantee.  

Similarly, you can look on your state’s website for available jobs, or even your local municipality. They will have similar pros and cons, but they are likely to get back to you faster. 

 Thank you for listening today! If you like this podcast, the best way to help it grow is to share it!  Please share  with friends and colleagues. Your recommendations are a really big help to me and I appreciate it.  Also – rate and review! That also helps people find the podcast. It really does help a lot!  

I want to encourage you to join our Facebook group! We have talked a few times about the importance of a support network, and the ability to share. The Teachers in Transition Podcast Club is just that sort of place. You are welcome there. Just search for Teachers in Transition Podcast Club and it will come right up.  

If you are stuck in your job search, or are having trouble getting started, please feel free to reach out to me to schedule a complimentary discovery call to see how Teachers in Transition can help you pivot careers and find the job of your dreams. 

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!