Celebrating Year One of My Podcast for Teachers: ECHO Framework for Educator Empowerment

🎉 Celebrating 1 Year of Teacher Empowerment: The ECHO Framework Revealed! 🚀

Are you a teacher feeling overwhelmed, stressed, and ready to reclaim your passion for education? 🙋‍♀️ This episode is your lifeline! 

Join me as I celebrate my podcast's first anniversary and unveil the game-changing ECHO Framework for Educator Empowerment. 

🔑 Key Takeaways:

1. Discover why your energy matters more than your lesson plans 🌟
2. Learn to control what you can (and let go of what you can't) 🎯
3. Unlock the secret to synthesizing happiness in your classroom 😊
4. Break free from others' expectations and create your own teaching experience 🦋

🎧 Episode Highlights:

• My journey from corporate burnout to empowered educator 🏃‍♀️
• The science behind happiness and its impact on teaching 🧪
• Practical tips for bringing joy back into your classroom 🎨
• How to stay positive when faced with challenging class lists 📋
• The power of focusing on what you want, not what you don't 🔍

📚 Resources Mentioned:

• "Positive Mindset Habits for Teachers" book by Grace Stevens
• Yale's free online course on happiness by Laurie Santos https://online.yale.edu/courses/science-well-being

Don't let burnout dim your teaching light! Tune in to learn how the ECHO Framework can transform your classroom experience and reignite your passion for education. 🔥

➡️ To get your FREE 🎁 PDF Guide The Professional Teacher's Guide to Saying "No" visit: www.gracestevens.com/sayno

Want to truly thrive in teaching without sacrificing your personal life?   
Check out my signature on-demand self-study course, Balance Your Teacher Life.  Complete details here: www.gracestevens.com/balance

📘 My latest (and greatest!) book:
The Empowered Teacher Toolkit
Check out the best-selling Positive Mindset Habits for Teachers book here
Beat Teacher Burnout with Better Boundaries book here

My TPT Store: https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/store/grace-stevens-happy-classrooms

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Old school: Website : www.GraceStevens.com (courses, blog & freebies!)

Transcript

 Teacher Friends, welcome back. Settle in. This week is part of a two, maybe three week celebration. Let's see, what are we celebrating? We are celebrating the anniversary of this podcast and personally, I am celebrating that I kept a commitment that I made myself. We need to focus on the gift. Gain, not on the gap, right?

I've talked about that before. I am not going to worry about the things that didn't happen in the last year in my business since I published this podcast. Those of you who've been along on the journey know that my life got a little derailed right around December and it's taken quite some time to get back on the tracks and I needed to. 

literally just stopped working on my business. The parts that generate revenue actually, regrettably the writing of the books and the making of the courses and all those things  I had to put on hold and take care 24 seven of somebody that I love. And I was happy to do that. But I made myself the commitment.

I am so passionate about teachers feeling more empowered and giving them the tools to do that, that I promised myself no matter what I would produce at least one new podcast episode a week, even when all that was going on. And I'm really proud to say I did it. So I am celebrating that. And so this week I am going to dive into, I've quite a few new listeners.

I love that. I'm going to dive into my foundational  Principles, my echo framework for educator empowerment. It is the framework, the basis of basically everything I teach. I'm not gatekeeping it. I am going to share it all with you. And I can't wait to tell you all about it in the inside. You are going to finish this episode feeling empowered with some tools, knowing which other episodes to go listen to, to flesh out things that I just gloss over, find the, the pieces that interest you, and then go scavenge listen to some other content.

You're going to be here for it, I promise you. All right, I will see you on the inside.  Welcome to the Balance Your Teacher Life Podcast. Where we talk all things, avoiding educated burnout, setting healthy boundaries, and achieving better work life balance. If you're passionate about education, but tired of it consuming your whole life, you have found your home in the podcast universe.

I'm your host, Grace Stevens, and let's get going with today's show. 

All right, we're gonna get right to it. I'm going to give you a one minute of recap of how I got here. I know how you got here. You're overwhelmed. You're a teacher. Enough said. You want some practical tools, advice, some love, some encouragement, some empowerment. That's why you're here. How did I get here?

Some of you may know I was a second career teacher, right? I was crushing it in the corporate world. And had myself a kind of midlife awakening, shall we call it? Let's not call it a crisis. And I just needed to make a change in my life. I had met all the goals I had set for myself, financial goals.

I was happily married. I had these wonderful children. You know, I lived in a beautiful house. I made a really good salary, all the things I thought that were gonna really, you know, things that were on my checklist. Here, let's get these done before we're 30. And I did and then by my mid thirties, I got to tell you, I was stressed, overwhelmed just a hot mess, constantly anxious, felt like I outsourced my life, right?

Drop the kids off at the sitter, have someone clean my house. I, I didn't feel connected to my life at all. And I had this constant sense of guilt. I didn't feel anybody at home got enough of me or the best of me. And when I was at work, I was always wanting to be home with my kids. And it was just this terrible cycle.

And anyway.  I decided to become a public school teacher  and you know, it was magical, all the things, and then within two years I'd created the same circumstances for myself, right? So I realized, I couldn't change careers again. I couldn't put my family through that.  It had taken a huge financial toll the first time.

Let's not do that again. And I truly believe in education and felt that it could be fun. And so I  All the skills that I teach was skills that I went and learned because I wanted to have a better experience. Not just of teaching, but of life. And I've been chipping away at that mission for 25 years. And I have invested.

years of my life. So much time and energy reading the seminars, the trainings, the this, the that and I regret none of it. Okay? None of it. I live a pretty joy filled life regardless of what's happening on around so I consider that to be the biggest measure of success there. So  having said all that  There are a lot of things I teach, but I simplified it into one framework for people in it's, this is my foundational framework, the fit, the four, the four real things that I teach about.

And if you go back and look at a lot of the other episodes, you will see where they fit into one of these four categories. So I'm going to sum it up for you now. I call it the ECHO Framework of Educator Empowerment. Now, why ECHO? Well, firstly, because we all love our acronyms in teaching, right? So, E C H O. 

On a kind of, you know, broader scale, kind of, yeah.  Woo woo adjacent, I get it. Echo, what you put out there is coming back like an echo. I mean, that is really, that's a very a simple concept, but at the same time something deeply spiritual that that only life experience could teach you. You know, for a teacher, I often say words don't teach, which is funny for a teacher, right?

But this type of work that we do here, this. personal development this, this learning about ourselves and how we show up in the world, right? That is a different type of work and, and really the wisdom that comes through it. You can only get through actually doing it. So life experience will teach you.

What you put out there comes back. Okay. So anyway, echo. Let's start with it. E C H O E.  Now, this is my foundational principle, copyright, here we go, your energy teaches more than your lesson plans.  What does that mean? That means how you show up in your classroom matters more than almost anything else. More than, you know, what kind of flexible seating you have, what curriculum you have, which students you have, which grade span you're teaching, how you show up. 

matters more than all of those things. And you don't need to have been a teacher very long to know that you only need to have been a student. You know, that if you're in a place where you could just close your eyes, like not if you're driving and doing other stuff, obviously, but think back to your favorite teacher,  right?

That room where you felt. valued, safe to take chances where you learned so much, where you were happy to come every day, where the vibe was positive, collaborative again, safe, allowing you to take, you know, chances in your learning. Like that, what, what was that about? That was about the vibe of the teacher, right? 

A teacher who is Overwhelmed, frustrated, exhausted, is going to show up like resentful, under prepared, you know, there's this whole question of, you know, co regulation, everybody picks up on that, behaviors start coming up, the teacher's going to be easily triggered by behaviors and that starts this awful cycle in, of negativity and like controlled struggles in the classroom.

Like all of that is bad. You know what that looks like, right? And that, I'm not saying it's the teacher's fault. I'm saying co regulation. That means that that happens as a transferring of energy and other things between the teacher and the student. And the students, you know, a teacher who shows up calm, confident, you know, positive, you know, willing to teach and not going to be like super reactionally or yelling and all those things, right?

That's the teacher you want to have. Your energy teaches more than your lesson plans. And all of these skills that we learn are really, to help us show up as our best self. It's hard to show up as your best self. You know in teaching you need your A game every day and that's such a high expectation to put on people and it's unrealistic.

You're not going to have your A game every day but if you have your A game many days by the time you're having a B or a C day or something else is going on in your life or you're not feeling well you're Whatever, you will find that students will give you grace and they will not turn your C Day into a C Day in the classroom.

Okay, they will give you grace. Grace, if you have that foundation of respect, collaboration, cooperation, that only comes when you show up with your best energy, then on the days where you don't have it, you will be okay. You will be okay. All right, so that's foundation number one. Your energy teaches more than your lesson plans.

Okay, and that's where I have many, many episodes talking about setting boundaries, protecting your energy, not just protecting your, your time, right? You can't, you have the best energy if you're exhausted, but how do you protect your energy from negative co workers from all those things, from vicarious trauma.

We have episodes on all of that. Okay, so E, your energy. teaches more than your lesson plans. Next, C.  Here we go. The C stands for control what you can control. Now, that is a foundational part of living a peaceful life, right? Getting out of victim mode and getting into proactive mode. Understanding how your thoughts, your emotions, your mindset really affect what you notice.

Right? And what you notice affects how you feel and how you feel  affects how you react. Right? It's all tied in together and you want to go through life being proactive, not reactive, not just like everything that gets thrown at you. You're just, oh my gosh, running around and getting more and more worn out and worn down, right?

Controlling the things you can control. Focus on the areas that you can influence the rest of the stuff. There's so many things in education we have no control over.  We just know that. Standardized tests, school board policies, how the students show up, right? The amount of dysregulation in their lives and then they show up and we're expecting them to sit down, be quiet and to learn when they're coming from some  Trauma outside of the classroom.

Like we have no control over that. And if we sit around worrying about that, we are going to be exhausted and like paralyzed. Okay? So control the things you can control. Can you control the standardized test? No, what you have control over is how prepared your class is, how you hype them up, Fred, how you make students feel that, you know, their worthiness is not attached to a grade, even though they want to try their best, right?

You, you know that. Or work on the things you can control, right? And, and the more you work on the things you can control, the less the other stuff. Where you get into reactive victim mode is where you're standing around what I call admiring the problem.  Okay? Just standing around having a kind of pity party about how awful everything is.

Because when that's what you do, I'm not saying that they're not valid. Of course your complaints are valid. There is so much  to complain about. I mean, it's legit. There is a lot that isn't going right in education. But it isn't empowering. It doesn't serve you. It just makes you feel like, oh, what could one person possibly do?

Right? That's not the vibe we want.  Okay. All right. So we have E, your energy teaches more than your lesson plans. C, control what you can control.  H stands for happiness can be synthesized. Now, when we're talking about empowerment, like why are we suddenly talking about happiness?  Many of you might have found your way to me via my book, Positive mindset habits for teachers.

It is required reading. I'm so pleased to hear that at a couple of teacher training colleges. But why is happiness important? Really? We have so many issues in education. We're going to worry about being happy. Yes, we are. Because, let's go back to E.  Your energy teaches more than your plans  and let's really just take a step back  and think about  anything that you want in life, anything,  whether it's a changed physical condition, different financial situation, different relationships, anything that you want, you want because you think you're going to be happier in the having of it. 

And so being happy boils down to a decision and a skill set.  Okay. So there are  a bunch of episodes. I kind of did a deep dive into a few chapters of that book which was episodes 26 through episodes 32. Which really talked about when episode 26 was the science of being happy. Like kind of what does the science say, right?

Science out of Harvard. You, did you know I shared in that episode, you can take a 10 week class at Yale. . Laurie Santos provides it online for free, in fact. So you can go look at the show notes for episode 26. There's the link for that. Bye. But the other episodes are about how do you go about being a joy detective, how do you bring joy back into your classroom and your life.

And then episode 32, which is the key to  a lot of this that we just skim over there. Obviously we can't do a deep dive in one  episode, but hopefully it opens your mind to this notion,  focus on what you want. Not on what you don't. I mean, if you only take one concept out of everything, that'll get you a really long way.

A really long way to feeling more empowered and feeling more in control and feeling more in peace if you can learn the skills. In your classroom, outside the classroom, in your conversations, in the things that you think about, you watch, you listen to, focus on what you want,  not on what you don't. Okay, go to episode 32 for a deeper dive into that concept.

Okay, and if happiness is your vibe, if being positive and just having a better teaching experience if you feel that education right now, that your campus, the rules, the students, the behaviors have just sucked the joy, sucked the joy  out of your experience as a teacher I would encourage you to yeah, go read Positive Mindset Habits for Teachers.

It's, it's a quick read. It's actionable at the end of every chapter. There are things that you can do, scientifically validated habits, and  none of them cost any money. They're all cheap. They're all easy. You can do them in the classroom. So go look at that. Usually, you know what, that book, I keep that book always under 13.

I know it's crazy, but textbooks are so expensive. And especially as I know that some schools teacher college schools are requiring it. Like I would really. Hard to keep that book affordable. I think sometimes it's even like, I have no control over Amazon's pricing. But on Amazon, sometimes it's like 10 bucks, 10.

99. Go get it. Comes with a free workbook. Okay.  All right. Where we at? We have E, C,  H,  last one, O.  Love this one. O stands for other people's experience doesn't need to be your experience.  Okay. You get to have your own experience.  Let's talk about some examples of that. Episode 60  was just in time for back to school for a lot of teachers, and it was about how to stay feeling empowered and positive when you get your class list, right?

And there are some. Frequent flyers, we like to call them. You know, the kids who are often  seen crossing campus for one reason or another in the company of an adult,  never bodes well, does it? So what if you have a disproportionate number of those students in your class, right?  Other people's experience of that student does not need to be yours.

You get to have your own experience of students, of parents, of co workers, of grade spin ins, right? So how do you do that? That is a lot of what I focus on, looking at limiting beliefs, how are we creating what we're creating, how are we, you know, the self fulfilling prophecies, all those things. You know, I often say we need less curriculum coaches and more life coaches in education.

You know how to,  how to present that curriculum. Likely it has a script that you're supposed to be following, right? I used to say, oh my gosh, a trained monkey could teach the curriculum that we had for English language arts. It said, at this word, say this, at that word, say that. Like, oh my goodness, the antithesis of what good teaching should be, right?

Okay.  of reading the room. So more life coaches. That's what we need. We need some of these skills. How do we understand how what we're thinking, saying, doing is creating what we're noticing and what's happening in my room and how do I have my own experience? Okay, so that is one of my foundational principles.

All right, well hopefully that helps us. As an overview, sometimes it might be fun for you. If you go binge watching, excuse me, binge, listen to a few episodes, you might be, Ooh, what category does that fall into? E, C, H, or O. And you're going to find that most of them fall into at least two or three categories.

They're all very intertwined. Okay. And so with that, I just want to leave you. So here is my. You know my signature closing, create your own path. What's that about? Right? That's about other people's experience doesn't need to be yours and bring your own sunshine. What's that about? That's about that you have the power to create happiness in your life and and there are lots of proven ways to do that based on science not just based on wishful thinking.

Okay so that's my celebration. of one year. I did it. I did what I promised myself I would do, which was show up every week, no matter what. I had no idea when I said no matter what, what was coming down the pipeline.  Careful what you ask for, right? No matter what, I was going to show up every week for teachers, and I'm so proud that I have.

And, You would, oh my gosh, you would be such a rockstar if you would share this podcast with a colleague. If every single person who enjoys this podcast went and told another colleague about it, like don't be gatekeeping,  share the good stuff. It would double the reach of this podcast. How cool would that be?

Right? It is hard to grow a podcast in this environment where there is so much choice. But it is a challenge I relish and if you want to help me with that, that's the easiest thing you could do is smash the stars to rate the show. I know, you know, writing a review, that's kind of ridiculous. If you're listening on your phone, nobody has the eyesight for that, right?

Or the patience, but just at least smash the stars and then tell a friend about it. Send this episode, another episode, your favorite episode, whatever to a colleague. That would help out. Okay. I believe in you. I know that you have what it takes to feel empowered and to influence  education in a positive way.

And until next week, here we go. Create your own path and bring your own sunshine.