Teachers in Transition – Episode 237: Less Noise, More Impact, & Resume Updates that Get You Noticed

This week, Vanessa focuses on managing stress, understanding the impact of yelling, and keeping up with evolving resume trends. Designed for educators transitioning to new career paths, this episode provides actionable insights and practical tips.

In Our Segment on Stress Management: 

•  Vanessa talks about how yelling, whether literal or metaphorical, can activate stress responses such as fight, flight, freeze, or fawn, leading to feelings of anxiety, guilt, or withdrawal. Recognizing the emotional toll of yelling is essential for maintaining mental health. Strategies to help build resilience are detailed. 

Career Transition and Job Search: 

• Vanessa advises replacing the “Competencies” section on resumes with a “Highlights” section to showcase 3-4 impactful skills or achievements.
• Keywords from job descriptions should be bolded to improve visibility in Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS).
• The rise of short-form video resumes as a new standard for job applications is highlighted, encouraging listeners to prepare for this trend.

Today's Teacher Hack

• Vanessa provides a practical hack for becoming comfortable with short-form videos, emphasizing that discomfort with self-viewing on video often stems from natural facial asymmetry and unfamiliarity with mirrored images. With regular practice, individuals can build confidence in their video presentations.

Links!
Montage from the movie, Real Genius  LINK

Connect with Vanessa

              Vanessa@TeachersinTransition.com
              Leave a voicemail or text at 512-640-9099
              Connect with Vanessa on LinkedIn!
              Schedule a free Discovery Session with Vanessa here
                 Follow Vanessa on Bluesky @beyondteaching.bsky.social
              Visit the homepage at TeachersinTransition.com to learn more!

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The transcript to this podcast is found on the episode’s homepage. 

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 who specializes in helping educators just like you. I taught in a middle school classroom for 25 years, left teaching to work in the corporate America in the world of staffing. Now, I provide tips and suggestions to help with stress and mental health, hacks to help your day, and tips for job-hunting and career transition.  Today on the podcast we address how yelling – literal or metaphorical – triggers our stress, and we talk about what we can do about it.  I talk about some of the latest wisdom in resumes – which includes the idea of a short video resume.  In today’s hack, I talk briefly about how to get started on that. 

Today in our segment on stress management and mental health. Today, I want to explore how we respond to stress, particularly in the context of noise, yelling, and the emotional toll it takes on us. These factors often stem from generational patterns and societal norms, but they’ve permeated every aspect of our lives, including social media and the workplace. While I work very hard to strive to keep this podcast apolitical, it’s important to acknowledge that certain policies and events can directly contribute to our stress, so I don’t think I can completely ignore it. Let’s dive in.

Generational Roots of Yelling

In some families, yelling is normalized. For instance, I am firmly, smack-dab in the middle of GenX.  I grew up in a household with one Silent Generation parent and one Baby Boomer parent. During their time, children were expected to be seen and not heard, and yelling was sometimes used as a tool for asserting dominance. The belief that the loudest person is the “rightest” person was a common thread whether or not that person was actually right. For me, yelling wasn’t just noise; it activated a fear response and often left me feeling powerless. I vividly recall  once or twice hiding under the bed.

This dynamic influenced how many of us respond to yelling as adults. Teachers, in particular, often avoid yelling because we know that is  ineffectiveness firsthand. I posit that teachers, over a few decades, changed that dynamic is perceived and are directly responsible for the fact that yelling is no longer the norm. However, yelling persists—whether it’s from students, angry parents, or even administrators. When an administrator yelled at us as a staff, it immediately  killed off my respect for their leadership. Effective leadership doesn’t rely on intimidation; it requires calm and constructive communication.

Let’s dig in more on the Impact of yelling on Mental Health:

Yelling triggers our stress responses - fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. This reaction originates from the amygdala, often referred to as the “lizard brain,” which overrides rational thought when we feel threatened. You might want to fight – to yell back. You might want to flee and get away from the situation – like hide under a bed.  You may find that you freeze up and can’t think of anything except to be as quiet as possible to help it all end sooner.  You might fawn -  you start telling the person yelling whatever you think they want to hear to pacify them.  If you grew up in a household where yelling was common, your response to it might include anxiety, guilt, confusion, or withdrawal. These reactions don’t just vanish; they can accumulate and impact how we function in daily life leading to regular feelings of anxiety.

The current societal climate makes this issue SOOO much worse. Social media, in particular, feels like a constant barrage of metaphorical yelling. Heated debates, persistent arguments, and endless rants can leave us feeling emotionally drained. And it’s crucial to recognize when engaging online is harming your mental health and to take steps to protect your well-being. I find myself engaging with these pointless arguments from time to time.  I think that comes from that deep desire to educate.  And fascinatingly, even if you try to end that argument with “you’re right, I’m wrong, moving on…”  They want to argue that you weren’t wrong ENOUGH somehow. It’s insane and it isn’t mentally healthy.

Here are some practical tips for managing  stress in noisy, high-pressure situations:

Limit Your Exposure: Use social media wisely. Unfollow or snooze individuals and groups that contribute to your stress. Remember, algorithms feed off your engagement. The more you react to stressful content, the more it’s pushed to us.

Grounding: When stress strikes, pause and take deep breaths. Engage your senses by focusing on what you see, hear, smell, or feel. This brings you back to the present moment and helps you regain control.

Preplan Your Responses: Anticipate stressful scenarios and mentally rehearse calm, effective reactions. Your brain can’t distinguish between what you think you’re doing and what’s happening in reality, so practicing calmness prepares you to act calmly in real situations.

Set Boundaries: Advocate for yourself in a respectful but firm manner. Whether dealing with a yelling administrator or an unruly social media thread, know when to disengage and protect your energy.  It may be necessary to reconvene that conversation with an advocate in the room like a union rep, a spouse, or even an attorney. If you live in a one-party state, you can record the conversation without their knowledge.  If you live in a two-party state, you might offer to record the conversation to “help *you* remember the salient points later on.”  Wink, wink. 

Seek Support: Surround yourself with individuals and communities that uplift and empower you.  I hope this podcast is one of those places for you. Teachers often bear the  brunt of societal stress. Collective support can make a significant difference.  I recently had the opportunity to spend a weekend with dear friends from high school – basically a slumber party for adults.  Even though I knew how much I would enjoy it and how much I was looking forward to it, I had no IDEA just how much good it would do for my heart and soul to have that time with my friends even though we have a group chat where we support each other all the time.

And a special note here: Here’s the part of the segment I have had so much trouble putting into words - recording and re-recording many times.  Recent policies, like executive orders involving ICE agents and schools, take situations that were challenging – SO challenging that they were crushing to being with and turn the pressure up exponentially.    No one can be their most effective selves in a state of fear and uncertainty and that’s what these policies do. As educators who are still in the classroom, we cannot ignore the effects of this on the well-being of our students. On my podcast and in my work, I believe in supporting teachers first. We must also prioritize our own mental health – teachers need to put the oxygen mask on first. Teachers have always been on the front lines, and while no one trains us to navigate these scenarios, it is necessary to approach this with mental resilience training much like you’d train the body for a sport. 

For those who have already left the classroom, we have to provide support for those who are still there.  It may be as simple as checking in with former colleagues and chatting with them.  It might mean advocating for policies that protect them or voting with their best interests in mind.  Our actions matter.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: taking care of yourself is not selfish - it’s essential. By prioritizing your mental health, you equip yourself to better support those around you. Remember, you can’t pour from an empty cup. Make a commitment to yourself to foster resilience, set boundaries, and practice compassion for yourself. Together, we can navigate these strange times with quiet resolve.  
 
 Moving on to today’s segment on job search skills, we are going to talk about some important changes that you resume needs.  I had been advocating for a section of competencies in the top half of your first page to show off the skills you know you have, but that have not been officially battle tested in that new job field.  
 
 NOW we are going to replace that with a highlights section.  
 I know not everyone is worried about why this is necessary, but I also know I am not the only one who NEEDS to know why this is an important change. 

 We can blame AI - a little bit. 
 
 There is a scene from a movie that perfectly illustrates the issue. In the movie, Real Genius, If you haven't seen it, it's an 80s comedy classic which does NOT pass muster in today's world.  If you choose to watch it, just know that there are very problematic elements as we look through today’s lens of understanding.  There are also still some very funny moments.  The primary character, Mitch, is the youngest person ever accepted at the university where the movie takes place.
 
 There's a montage (because of course there is!  It's an 80s movie!) where Mitch is going to class.  On the first day, everyone is there busily taking notes while the instructor lectures.  The next time he comes in, there are several cassette tape recorders and some boomboxes recording the lecture.  The next time he comes in, he and the instructor are the only ones there - they're surrounded by recorders of varying shapes and sizes.  And the last time Mitch comes in, he is frustrated to discover that not only is he the only student ACTUALLY in the room, but the instructor has a reel-to-reel recording of the lecture that it is being broadcast to the recorders.  I’ll provide a LINK to watch that scene in the show notes. 

All that to say that  scene is eerily prescient. I teach my clients and I have advocated here  to use AI as a tool to help customize our resumes for applications.  Many people out there just ask AI to write one.  And LinkedIn has launched their Hiring Assistant which has the ability to write job descriptions.  A situation now exists where a job description can be written and someone can create a resume for it with practically no human interaction or actual understanding of what needs to happen at the actual job.

Instead of the core competencies at the top, you’ll now put in 3 (maybe 4) of your best bullet point items from your work experience that shows why you are the best person for this job.  The pertinent keywords from the job description are formatted in bold to stand out.  In a sense, these bullet points show up twice on the resume which is why you really just want a very few up there. 

There are those in the industry that say that the resume is going away. I don't think it is. I believe that it's going to evolve. People are always going to want that piece of paper to look at sometimes to hold, but also to use against you if you lied about what you said you could do. Or probably more accurately that AI hallucinated some skills for you that you don't really have. 

What is coming next is going to be short form video. If you are not familiar with what I am talking about, it’s time to start paying attention to Reels on Facebook, short storytelling videos on YouTube or, I would have said TikTok videos, but you can't really upload those anymore if you don't already have it with the pending ban. You want to watch to get the feel of what short form videos look like, what are some good ones and what are the bad ones. You have about a minute to get your idea across.  A minute is both really short and really long.  In that minute you are going to need to practice saying all of the important things that make you qualified for the job, and you're going to need to do it in such a way that you look engaging with your personality shining through. 

So if this is something that you are uncomfortable with, now is a great time to start practicing that because I do think that we are going to start being asked to upload these short form videos in order for people to watch them much like scrolling TikTok, so that they can get a sense of who we are and what we can do by actually seeing our faces.
 
 And if you are like me and you hate seeing your face in pictures or in videos, let me lead you right into today’s hack – which is in the wrong place to day for a reason!
 
 It's science.  First of all, we are not perfectly symmetrical. They have done some studies and some work where they were trying to codify what we find beautiful. In reality, what we find beautiful is symmetrical.  So the more symmetrical someone's face is, the more beautiful we would rate them. 
 
 Most of us are not symmetrical, and we are used to seeing ourselves in mirror image, and so when we see the horizontal flip version  of ourselves, it looks jarring because we are seeing our asymmetry in a way that does not look natural - maybe a little bit of that uncanny valley popping up. Zoom recognized this and gives people the option to mirror their image so that they feel more comfortable in the Zoom meeting. 

But the other thing that I want you to absorb here is this: When you take a picture with your with your camera or with your phone of a beautiful landscape or a sunset or the ocean or something, you almost always look at that picture and say, “that is not as pretty as I saw it with my own eyes”

And yet we don't allow ourselves the grace and understanding to do that to our own faces because we are always our own harshest judge. You are so much more beautiful and you are amazing.  The more you practice short form videos with your phone, the more comfortable you will get with them.  I believe in you!

If you are thinking of leaving the classroom, or if you just KNOW it’s time to go, I’d like to encourage you to reach and sign up for a free discovery session with me. You can find that at Teachersintransition.com/calendar.  There is a link in the show notes.  I believe there are five phases to leaving the classroom – Decide, Clarify, Build, Refine, and Attract – and I can help you move through those phases to find what you’re looking for outside the classroom. 

It can take quite a while to find a job especially in the market right now, so it very smart to get started on a career transition plan and an exit strategy several months before you actually plan to go. Now is a very good time. 

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 Vanessa@Teachersintransition.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!