Teachers in Transition - Episode199: Strengthen Your Nets by Narrowing your Focus

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Remember the resume workshop is April 21, 2024 at 2:00PM Central time.  It will be hosted through a Facebook live – all you have to do to attend is to join the group. 

Green Lights by Matthew McConaughey (Alright, alright, alright!)

And remember to send your comments, stories, and random thoughts to me at TeachersinTransitionCoaching@gmail.com!  I look forward to reading them.  Would you like to hear a specific topic on the pod?  Send those questions to me and I’ll answer them. Feel free to connect with Vanessa on LinkedIn!

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 reach your goals and figure out how to navigate the journey from stressed overwhelmed and burnt-out teacher to the career of your dreams with margins in your life to spend with your family, your pets, and whatever else you want to. I provide tips and suggestions to help with stress and mental health, hacks to help your day, and job-hunting tips.  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, I am going to talk about why you should always take a guide with you in a difficult job market, I share my favorite hack for getting writing done when I’m on the go, and in our job hunting segment, we’ll tackle the HOW of preparing yourself to be the most notable candidate in a difficult job market and why it’s important to narrow your focus instead of widening it

In our first segment on stress relief and mental health, we’re going to talk about reframing a difficult job market so that you are better prepared for opportunities, 

Social media, news articles and your own experiences are screaming to all of us that the job market is brutal. It is. But the weird this is that jobs still exist. Remember?  Everyplae you drive by has employees. So what to do when interviews and the job offers just aren’t coming in?  How the heck do we navigate THAT?!?!

Since I started with nautical analogy, I’ll stick with it a bit. You might be tempted to throw as wide a net as possible to latch on to anything. Catch anything at all. After all, you are a wonderfully talented professional! You can do anything if you can just get the chance!  Well, here’s the problem – everyone (and by everyone I mean job seekers, recruiters, hiring managers, sites like LinkedIn – you get the idea)  EVERYONE is throwing out that wide net.  And all we’ve managed to do is to get all the nets hopelessly entangled and we’re not catching a thing! This is why jobseekers can’t find jobs and hiring people aren’t finding the candidates they want. It feels like we’re all being pulled under in this sea of plenty.  
 
 So what do we do?  Back to the nautical analogy: When the weather is too harsh, sailors take that time to mend their nets.  If they don’t mend their nets, they won’t be catching much of anything pretty soon.  The cyclical nature of things provides them the perfect opportunity to hunker down and prepare for the next round.  The weather won’t stay bad forever.  
 
 Another example is how farmers treat their fields.  You cannot grow the same thing over and over and over every year.  You give the field a rest to allow time to replenish nutrients. Sometimes they do this by planting different crops.  There was a time in my life when I would travel to my hometown on a very regular basis so my parents could see my kids when they were small. Our first duty station was “only” three hours away.  Ha!  Only.  You can tell I’m Texan there!) I got very familiar with all the back ways home so I could avoid as much traffic as possible.  and I grew to love watching the crops grow week to week during that spring and early summer.  One year, I noticed that instead of corn, one field was full of sunflowers.  And that became a special treat for me to see the sunflowers on my travels because it was unexpected and so beautiful. The field was getting a break by having something different. 
 
 

There are five steps to what you need to do to fully transition away from teaching.  Step 1 is decide. Step two is to Contemplate. Reflect.  Do a very deep dive on YOU.  Re-connect with what you like, what you want, what you’re good at, and where you are in your element.  And for those of us who have spent most of our lives as a teacher, it can be a big shift to think of yourself as something different. While this is full of information that only you can truly answer, it really does help to have someone guiding you through it – nudging you through the hard parts and calling you out on things you might be telling yourself. We took a trip of a lifetime last year to Scotland. It was a fully guided tour and all we had to pay extra for was lunches, souvenirs, and a few dinners.  Now – my husband and I could have bonked about on our own, and we would have enjoyed it. No question. It still would have been the trip of a lifetime.  But our guide, Cara, was SO knowledgeable about the backstories, and best places to stand for a fun picture.  She dealt with all the parts of the trip that would be a headache and we got to just enjoy, wander, eat, and shop.  The guide made all the difference.  (Haggis Tours was the group.  Highly recommend  Five out of Five Stars! Additional Shout outs here to TrovaTrip and That Midwestern Mom – without whom none of that would have been possible.)
 
I think one of the best reasons to have a guide here is that teachers are so good at taking care of everyone but themselves. Having coaching here will help you remember to spend some time on you. That little bit of accountability goes so much further than you think. But really you know it does because you’re a teacher.  And you teach.  You just aren’t used to thinking of yourself in a place where you need your own coach because Teachers are SO often left to figure things out on our own.  There are a lot of job coaches out there. Many many many people use them. 
 
 
And now it’s time for our teacher hack.  These hacks are designed to help you make your life a little easier in some way to create mental, and/or emotional space for you to spend time on YOU to work on YOU.  Today’s hack is brought to you courtesy of Matthew McConnaughy – no seriously!  I don’t know him, but I did read his memoir last year – Green Lights.  I’ll put a link to that in the show notes.  I highly recommend listening to him read it on Audible because there are parts of it that will be that much funnier when you hear him perform it with accents. 
 
He was talking about how he wrote most of his book – he dictated it into his phone in the car. 
 
And that struck such a chord with me.  I have all my best ideas when I am in no position to write them down, and as we know, the biggest lie we tell ourselves is “I’ll remember that”. In any case, many thoughts get lonely and leave my brain!

We’re going to steal that hack so that you can dictate things into the voice app on your phone when you don’t have time to write. This could include lesson plan ideas, your personal journaling when you are deep diving into your self-inventory, your grocery list – it goes on.  And if you are one of those teachers who are blessed with a long commute or horrible traffic, you probably get very frustrated as thoughts have come and gone on your journeys. 
 
 I know -  I can hear you from here “That’s just dandy Vanessa, but when am I going to have time to transcribe all that nonsense?”

Well first, when you are done recording, before you get out of the car, you are going to send that recording to your email address. (Pro tip:  Give it a little title first.  If they are all New Recording number whatever that won’t help either)
 
 Here's where the magic of the hack comes in: 
 With Word 365, there is that little dictation button on the toolbar in the Home menu. I don’t have a lot of luck with the dictation – it can NOT understand me at all.  I don’t’ think my accent is particularly thick, but oftentimes, the dictation it takes from me doesn’t even rhyme with what I was saying!
 
 If you click the arrow under the dictate button, you’ll see a transcribe option.  You use the file that you emailed to yourself, and you upload the audio.  Then give it a couple of minutes to transcribe it.  It then gives you a variety of options on how to insert it into a document – by speaker, with timestamps, just as good ol’ plain ol’ text – your choice. 
 
 I find it also does a much better job of taking dictation in transcription mode. 

Just be aware that every pause becomes a period, and the sentence structure makes it look odd. It will put in a fair amount of the grammar for you, but like all current iterations of AI, you have to go in and refine it at some point.  
 
 I hope that is helpful for you!  Try it out and let me know if it works for you and if it saves you time or helps you remember your awesome ideas. If you have any other hacks in that area let me know!  We’re stronger together! 

 And in our job hunting segment today…

We are going to talk about specializing and narrowing your focus. We talked earlier in the pod about the dangers of casting too wide a net and the importance of doing that self-inventory.  Why would narrowing your focus be helpful?  I have a handy fable from the book of Aesop that will illustrate it. Y’all know I love a good fable because the morals are so handy at the end. Does it surprise any of my listeners to learn that I have a hardback of these fables on my desk?

The Cat and the Fox
 
One day a cat and a fox were having a conversation. The fox, who was a conceited creature, boasted how clever he was. ‘Why, I know at least a hundred tricks to get away from our mutual enemies, the dogs,’ he said.

‘I know only one trick to get away from
dogs,’ said the cat. ‘You should teach me some of yours!’

‘Well, maybe some day, when I have the
time, I may teach you a few of the simpler ones,’ said the fox airily.

Just then they heard the barking of a
pack of dogs in the distance. The barking grew louder and louder – the dogs
were coming in their direction! At once the cat ran to the nearest tree and
climbed into its branches, well out of reach of any dog. ‘This is the trick I
told you about, the only one I know,’ she called down to the fox. ‘Which one of
your hundred tricks are you going to use?’

The fox sat silently under the tree,
wondering which trick he should use. Before he could make up his mind, the dogs
arrived. They fell upon the fox and tore him to pieces.

The moral of this fable is: 

A single plan
that works is better than a hundred doubtful plans.

When we are trying to apply to any job and all the jobs, we are like the fox who can’t figure out what to do we have a hundred doubtful plans. And we go nowhere. 
 
 Once you have narrowed your focus, then you can target a specific family of jobs.  This makes it much easier to tailor resumes because they’ll be tailoring in the same general direction.  Think how hard it is to for a handyman to do service calls two hours apart when they are 25 miles away from his home base – but in opposite directions! Much easier if they are in the same general direction! 

When you have narrowed your focus, then you can also examine your gaps between what you know and what you’ll need to know and you can work on upskilling those things via Udemy or LinkedIn Learning, or SkillsBuild or CodeAcademy – depending on what you want to do. 
 
 When you narrow that focus, you can also strategically focus your connecting on LinkedIn. You research companies where you would want to work because they align with your values.  And you start to reach out to connect with people that work there well before they’re even hiring. In this time of slim takings in the job ocean, you are strengthening your nets.  (Numbers 3 our journey from teacher life to former teacher life)

You use this time to take advantage and create connections and foster discussions (step 4). 
 
 When the job of your dreams appears, you are fully prepared to take advantage because now you have a name and an in. Just a reminder of the statistic that over 80% of jobs are acquired through networking.  And I’ll through in one of my dad’s favorite quotes (which he appears to have taken from the Roman Philosopher Seneca) “Luck is where preparation meets opportunity.”
 
 We make our own luck around here. 
 

Now I’m going to remind you of our resume workshop. This time it will be through the Facebook group, so head over to become a part of the Teachers in Transition Podcast Club.  The workshop will go live on Sunday, April 21st 2024, at 2:00 PM Central time. No spots to reserve and no registering to do in advance – just join the group and come to the live. We’ll talk about the components your resume needs to have, how to write your bullet points, what not to do in your resume, and how the ATS and your resume may or may not get along out there on the web.

If you know other teachers who are stressed, overwhelmed, and burned out, share this podcast with them. So many people feel alone and despondent about their situation, my goal is to help as many teachers as possible to find jobs they love where they feel not just appreciated, but also valued. Appreciated is nice, but they show value with a paycheck.  As we are rolling up on Teacher Appreciation week, just remember that if your world has to have a week to appreciate you, they know they aren’t paying your value. 
 
 I would love to help be your guide and coach you through this journey.  You can reach out for a complimentary discovery call.  There are very exciting things happening in the new few weeks around the website and a lot of the tech that I’ve been hopelessly behind on we’re finally going to catch up! I am so excited about this, and I can’t wait to help as many teachers as I can because things are only going to get wilder in education as stimulus money runs out, student populations shrink, and parent expectations grow. To paraphrase a Chinese proverb: 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!