Teachers in Transition – Episode 215: Be Like Carrie Fisher, Anti-Procrastination Strategies, and Making Sure You Have the Skills You Need.

Today on the podcast we talk about Carrie Fisher – and why we should be more like Carrie!  In our Teacher Hack segment I talk about how to clear some brain, and I have a bonus segment this week about drawing a boundary.  Finally in our job hunting segment I talk about how to determine what skills you need when you have decided on which 

Here’s a link to Carrie Fisher’s first memoir, Wishful Drinking.

Here’s a link to the podcast episode with Tamara McLemore.  You can visit her site at www.iwantmypmp.com

You can check out www.udemy.com  to find courses to gain the skills you need. You can also tap into the LinkedIn Learning over at www.LinkedIn.com

I’d love for you to come and join us on our Facebook Page! Join the discussion and toss in your two cents!

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 helping teachers leave the classroom. 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 Carrie Fisher – and how we can learn some very important tips from her.  I’ll share my teacher hack about freeing up some brain space by checking off some chores, and in our job hunting segment, I talk about how you conduct your own gap analysis to see what skills are missing from your future career.  We also have a bonus segment this week which touches on drawing a boundary and protecting yourself from bad judgment calls from administrators. 

SEGMENT 1: Be Like Carrie

I'd like to talk a little about Carrie Fisher this morning. Carrie Fisher is perhaps best known to generations of fans at this point as Princess Leia. Carrie Fisher was the daughter of another famous actress that we still remember—Debbie Reynolds. I remember first watching Debbie Reynolds in The Unsinkable Molly Brown, which my mom made me sit down and watch because my mom was into those sorts of things. And Carrie grew up in Hollywood, and you can see a bit of her natural sass shining through when she called out Han Solo for being a scruffy nerf herder or told that walking carpet to get out of the way.

Carrie was known as a script doctor in Hollywood. What that means is, for whatever reason, when a script wasn’t landing, a writer or somebody with talent would take a look at it, take a pass at it, and it would be better because they messed with it. She worked on a lot of movies especially in the 90s and early 2000s.  Much of her work goes uncredited.  Some of them include Hook, Sister Act, The Wedding Singer, The River Wild, , Coyote Ugly, and a couple of my favorites: Mr & Mrs. Smith, and  Kate & Leopold. (Hugh Jackman is so wonderful in that movie.) She stopped doing that when they started asking her to do it for free. It used to be they would pay you to do that, but she said that what the industry evolved to was, "Give us your pass, and if we like it, then we'll pay you for it." And she decided that's not how she was going to work, and thus, she stopped script doctoring at that point.
 
 Be like Carrie – don’t work for free. 

Carrie had a wicked sense of humor and a sharp wit. She was able to really cut through. She also struggled with a lot of mental health issues, but she didn’t hide them. She felt that when people hid them, it became a matter of shame. One of the reasons we can have these mental health conversations today is in part because of the steps she took.

Be like Carrie – know when it is time to talk to someone. 

Her character, Leia, became legendary. There’s a tweet or a little snippet of something where they overheard a flight attendant chatting with a family. They asked, "What is your daughter's name?" and the mom said, "Leia." The flight attendant goes, "Oh, like Princess Leia?" And the mom says, "No, like General Leia," because in the Star Wars series, she didn’t evolve into a Jedi—although we learned that she did have that training. She evolved into a general, leading the cause, maintaining her position of authority, and strategy. She kept a ragtag group of scruffy nerf herders cohesive and on point. And in the series, she loved her son so much that she was able to change him into something different than he had become.

Be like Carrie. Rally the troops. Organize the troops.

One of the things Carrie struggled with was being told that she needed to lose weight, even when I saw her in 1977. I saw nothing wrong with her. She was thin and pretty, but she had been told to lose 10 pounds for that role. She claimed she didn’t do that, and I don’t think they noticed—which is a whole other can of worms. We're often told to do things just for the sake of being told to do things, as some sort of power move, but nobody notices if you don’t.
 
 Be like Carrie – don’t waste your time on things no one will notice. 

I, like so many others, have a story of my own on this. And it’s  about lesson plans. we had to post our lesson plans online. So I did, and I had a link to a Google Drive folder that anybody could view. That was also where we would submit lesson plans for our administrators to look at. The new year came around, and we were asked to continue posting them digitally, but I got no further instructions on that. So I continued to submit them to that folder—the Jackson folder. Then I got one of those little emails (you know what emails I’m talking about!) saying, "We need your lesson plans," and I replied, "Well, they’re posted to the same place they’ve been posted for the last 18 months." And they said, "Well, now we need you to post them here." So I said, "OK." At that point, I was well done with the lean-to to do things just for the sake of being told to do them. I included a link they could click right through to, so in the new folder, all I had was a link to the existing folder. That’s it. And no one ever spoke to me again about the lesson plans.

I feel fairly certain that if they had actually opened that file again, someone would have said, "No, that’s not what we meant. You actually have to file them here." But I didn’t feel like doing more work for the sake of doing more work – I have enough to do already. And let’s be honest—in many non-union states, they are asking teachers to craft almost scripted lesson plans. I know how much time I take putting together this podcast just to make sure that we are not awash in "uhms" and "ahs." Man, I like to use the word "and" as a filler—my "ands my "so-s," and my buts.” I’m all about the conjunctions. But you can’t spend the amount of time it would take to create a scripted lesson plan in a 40-hour week. That’s ridiculous. A lesson plan needs to have room to flex, to adapt, and to allow people to seize serendipitous moments because that’s where the best learning occurs.

Speaking of serendipitous moments in learning - 

Legendary at my high school was our physics teacher—really, he was one of the few who taught all the upper sciences. You know, back in the ‘80s, he had written the computer programs to track attendance and whatnot before people were buying them out of a box. He was a brilliant man who served in the military during Vietnam and was now continuing to serve his country by teaching high schoolers. Nice guy, with a real gift for teaching science and life lessons to us.

This man noticed that the most popular freshman major at Texas A&M was engineering, but the most common sophomore major was business. He resolved to make sure his students were better prepared. He put some things together, and the freshman physics curriculum at A&M actually became the syllabus for our Physics 2 curriculum at my high school.  He even got some of those books donated to campus.  

My home town was about 30 miles away from the Gulf Coast, and didn’t get a lot of cold weather as a rule. One year, there was a freak snow while he was teaching, so he scrapped his planned lesson and decided to teach projectiles that day. The kids went out and had snowball fights and learned all about projectiles. Then they came inside and learned the math on projectiles, and I guarantee you that those kids learned more from that projectile lesson than if he had said, "Oh, I’m sorry, it’s not on the syllabus today. We must wait for three months before this comes up again."

Because the best learning happens through experience in that serendipitous moment, and policymakers have completely forgotten that.  

SEGMENT TWO
And in today's teacher hack—our teacher hacks are designed to help you gain a little headspace back, get a little time back in your day, and just make your life a little easier, leaving you room in your brain to take care of your whether that is to spend more time on the things you want or even think about your career transition and job hunt. In today's hack, I'm actually going to pull from a couple of people I admire whom I’ve talked about before on this pod. The FlyLady calls this Anti-Procrastination Day, and Gretchen Rubin calls it Power Hour. But really, what it is at its core, is taking some nagging little tasks that are hanging over your head or weighing on your heart, that you’ve been putting off. Then, you finally get them done and realize, A) they didn't take very long, and B) how much better you feel with them off your plate. Sometimes we build a task into a much bigger deal than it really is. 

As a small example, there’s a vent—our vents are in the ceiling and you can move a lever on the vent around to change the air direction. I was up there messing with a vent in one of the bedrooms, trying to move the direction of the air to make it a more comfortable room to sleep in, and the little lever for the vent broke. Of course, it broke in the closed position, so I took the vent completely off. Now, it’s just a gaping hole in the ceiling that I see every time I go by, and I’m really making this out to be a much bigger job than it is. The holes for the screws weren’t ripped out; it’s just a matter of putting a new vent in. They’re not even terribly expensive.

It doesn’t take very long to grab the old one, haul it off to Lowe’s on my next round of errands, find one that’s the same size, and then it’ll take just a little bit of time to put it back up. In fact, all of those things don’t have to be done at the exact same minute. I can put the vent in my car, and the next time I go somewhere, I can stop by Lowe’s or Home Depot. Then, the actual chore itself will take 5 minutes or less. And how long have I put it off?

So, make a list of those little things that are driving you absolutely bonkers and see how many of them you can get done in one day. Or, if one day seems like too much, in one hour. You’ll find out how much better you feel when those things are not weighing on your brain and are done. Remember, these are just the little tasks—these are not the big ones like, you know, painting your house. Just the little tasks – like ordering the new filter for the water in the fridge. 

 This is not one of our regular segments, but the instant I heard it, I knew I  was going to talk about it. 

One of the things that drives me bonkers at the beginning of the year is listening to some of the things that teachers have to go through to get ready to teach for the year. Things like 10-12 hours of mind-numbing training videos.  One teacher shared anonymously that they were going to spend all day in ALICE training. ALICE stands for Alert, Lockdown, Inform, Counter, and Evacuate and is a lockdown training designed to keep kids safe.  I’ve been through that training before.  It was a few hours long. This teacher was reporting that  one of the activities for this all-day training is that the police are going to shoot blanks at them while they try to get out of the building. I don’t know if it was campus resource officers or local LEOs or what, but just wow. 

Teachers shouldn’t have to go through that sort of training—that is first responder training, that is military training, and it should not be a part of teacher training. Anybody that tells you it’s okay and that absolutely you  have that training needs to have their head examined. How can a teacher possibly be willing, ready, and able to welcome children after being traumatized like that? Oh my goodness.

 I want you to know that you have the right to nope right out of that.  A more palatable term might be ‘opt-out.’   A respondent shared that they had been through something similar and had fallen and gotten hurt in the process.  And that’s why you can say no.  The teacher that fell had the right to file a workman’s comp claim – most districts have a fee just to file the paperwork even if they aren’t on the hook for damages.  I’ll encourage folks again to join their union or teacher organization.  The sad but simple fact is that many people banding together on a topic carries more weight than one – even if what they’re saying ought to just be common sense.  Additionally, the access to lawyers that are on staff and paid by your dues make the whole thing like insurance – you hope to never need it, but when you need it, you NEED it. 
 
 And I’ll move into our career transition segment today.  Today we will talk about how to figure out what skills you are missing to move into something different.  When you decide that you might want to leave teaching and go into something different, most people lean towards training or instructional design because that’s what they’re most comfortable thinking about. But in reality, there might be many things you can do. Especially at the beginning of a career transition, you can daydream about what jobs you might be interested in. Read up on different jobs. Think outside your comfort zone.  Consider what you thought you wanted to be when you were younger if it was different than teaching.  Maybe you wanted to be a forest ranger or a —I don’t know. But you take those ideas, and you head over to sites like LinkedIn or Indeed, or many other job boards, and you look up those jobs that pique your interest.

Then, you take one job description you find, and you just copy it. Plop it into ChatGPT, and prompt  “ChatGPT,  to pull the keywords and skills out of the job description.  And ChatGPT pulls them right out for you in a list. Copy them, dump them into a spreadsheet. And repeat this  for three to five job descriptions in the same field, because not every company looks for the exact same things. And as with all research, the larger the sample, the better the overall picture.  
 
 When you look over all your data, you will find patterns—patterns of what is most wanted in this job description. You’ll see them asking for familiarity with apps or programs. In fact, nowadays, being able to work Microsoft Office is basically assumed that everyone knows how to do that.

You take all of these keywords you found in these jobs and look for a way to visualize them, and you could make a word cloud out of them, or you can sort them alphabetically on a spreadsheet and group the similar things.  Then you can start to look for patterns. What words come up the most? What words might mean something else you might not know? What skills do you lack? Because you can take that knowledge and go seek the skills you’re currently missing. You can take a course through Udemy—they have some good sales right now. You can find them on LinkedIn Learning. Get the skills you’re missing for your next career. It doesn’t automatically mean you have to go back and get another degree. You can get the knowledge you need without the cost of a whole degree.  In most cases, you can get what you need for less than the cost of one college class BEFORE you buy the books!

Earlier, in some places like when we talked with Tamara several weeks back, there might be a boot camp that you can go to help you gain the skills you need. The options are out there and you will have a lot of fun looking for them. 

If you are having trouble figuring out what some of the terms are, or if you have no idea how to start a career transition and job hunt, that’s where I can help!  I help teachers strategize their exit and acquire the skills they need to be competitive in a job hunt.  The five steps to leaving the classroom are to Decide, Clarify, Build, Refine, Attract.  It is this path which takes you from being overwhelmed, burned out, and frustrated beyond your limits to a job that gives you actual weekends, PAID days off, and doesn’t expect you to work for free. Researching these job descriptions falls in the Clarify portion of the program.  
 
 If you’re ready to have the discussion,  you can reach out for a complimentary discovery call through the website at TeachersinTransition.com.  That’s teachersintransition.com.  You can check out our Seven Signs of Teacher Burn Out, sign up for the newsletter or book that discovery session with me.  You can also join the Facebook group  - just look for the Teachers in Transition Podcast Club and we’ll pop right up.  You can ask questions there and get suggestions and advice.

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!