Empowering Teachers: 3 Essentials to Take Back Your Agency & Avoid Teacher Burnout

If there were one word separating joyful, impactful teachers from those stuck in overwhelm, and burnout, wouldn’t you want to know it? 🚀 Spoiler alert: It’s Empowerment. In this foundational episode, we’ll unpack how you can claim it, why it’s essential for thriving in your teaching career, and how it transforms every part of your life. 

🔑 Key Takeaways:

• The #1 Word You Need: Empowerment isn’t something given—it’s something you claim. Discover how this mindset shift changes everything.
• 3 Core Components of Empowerment:
  1. Decision: Recognize the power of owning your choices.
  2. Mindset: Ditch disempowering thoughts and embrace empowering questions.
  3. Action: Learn actionable strategies to reclaim control over your time, energy, and passion.
• The Burnout Connection: Understand how disempowerment drives burnout—and how to reverse it.

🎧 Listen Now:
Don’t wait to feel empowered. Start reclaiming your time, energy, and passion today!

This episode is an introduction to a four-part series on the best new educator manual for success: The Empowered Teacher Handbook - get your copy today, and for a limited time, it will come with a free workbook!

Want to truly thrive in teaching without sacrificing your personal life?
Check out my signature on-demand course, Balance Your Teacher Life. You can go the self-study route or join a cohort with group coaching for Summer 2025.

Check out all the 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

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Transcript

 Okay, if I could unlock for you the one word that separates the teachers who are feeling fulfilled, impurposeful, and having fun with their students in really feeling that they're making an impact  and the difference between those two teachers in those educators who are worn out, overwhelmed, feeling like they just, it's just never going to get better.

They're starting to burn out. They're afraid that teaching isn't sustainable, right? We all know that feeling. But the difference between the first teacher and the second teacher, again, if I could sum it up in just one word, that word would be Empowerment. Now, what is empowerment? How does it play out in teaching?

How can we get it? That is the topic of this week's episode. We are going to look at the three major areas of the three major components of empowerment. You may know that it is the title of my latest book, I'm all about empowerment. I wrote the Empower Teacher Toolkit. Proven strategies to take control of your time, your energy, and your passion for teaching.

And so let's get into the first part of it today. What is empowerment?  How can you get it?  See you on the inside. Welcome to the Teacher Self Care and Life Balance podcast, where we focus all things personal development to help teachers feel empowered to thrive inside and outside of the classroom. If you are passionate about education, but tired of it taking over your whole life, you have found your new home in the podcast universe.

You will love it here. I'm Grace Stevens, your host, and let's get going with today's show. 

Here we go. So this is going to be what I envisaged to be like the first part, maybe part one. I think I'm probably going to end up with four parts. I want to break down these tools into In my teacher empowerment toolkit, many of them we've already gone over inside different podcast episodes. So I'll reference those.

But again, I feel like if I could do a deep dive into some of these strategies, the toolkit, it will really help teachers feel more empowered. But I thought I would start off, you know, part one of this with really looking at what is Is it to be empowered? You know, why do we feel disempowered?  Because many of us do feel that way.

And what are really the three components that we kind of need to take responsibility for? So that's kind of the roadmap.  All right, here we go. If you were just to look in the dictionary, right? That's where a lot of people start. Oh, let's look up the word. Okay. Dictionary is going to say  empower means to make someone stronger and more confident, especially in controlling their life and claiming their rights.

Right, when you feel empowered, you feel that you have agency. I really like Brene Brown's real description of  empowerment. If you know her book, fabulous book Daring Greatly, you might have come across this quote. I'm kind of paraphrasing from memory here but she says empowerment  isn't something someone gives you.

It's something you claim for yourself. So, bad news, you know, you can't go get it on Amazon Crime. Crime. Amazon Prime. That was a Freudian slip there if ever I had one. Okay, so it is something you need to claim for yourself. It is not something somebody bestows on you. Okay, so that's the first thing to remember.

But how does it show up in teaching? So, if you were to say, what is it, what is empowerment in teaching? I would really say owning your own time, your own energy, and your own choices. Feeling like you have some measure of control over them. But it's more than that, right? It's knowing that your worth goes beyond what you do for others.

Sometimes we try and justify if we don't want to do something or if we're leaving early, you know, all those things. Having a life, right? We feel like we, we feel disempowered. We feel like we're a victim of a  institution, a kind of set of cultural norms that expects us to give everything and we do feel very disempowered.

Now, there is a real reason for it.  I feel that the lack of, I would say, agency or control or autonomy that teachers have over curriculum, schedules, professional decisions, I feel like they're at an all time low.  Certainly I know that that when I started teaching, which is now going back probably 23, 24 years, at this point, there seemed to be so much more flexibility, right?

And really left up to a teacher's discretion. And I see a lot of that has really gone, and that helps me. teachers feel disempowered. But, so it's not, but it's just not over really autonomy over our curriculum and schedules and all those things. It's really these cultural norms in education that teaches a condition to always go above and beyond, right?

There's this kind of perception that the last car in the parking lot is the best teacher. Right, we know, I've been trying to bust that myth for, I don't know, 85 episodes now. But these people pleasing tendencies are really just very rooted in our kind of,  you know, we're people who are givers. We want the best for the kids.

We get easily guilted into stuff, right? We tend to be, you know, conflict avoidant. Okay. And we kind of, we have this internalized belief that has been drilled into us. Like I said, we get guilted into stuff, you know, Oh, if you don't do it, the kids are going to go without, especially in areas that have been taken, you know, that we've lost funding for sports.

extracurriculars, all those things. Like if a teacher doesn't spearhead doing that as an extra unpaid duty, the kids are going to go without. Okay, so there is really a big cultural thing that we're playing against. So we have every reason to feel disempowered. It's not that we're kind of, you know, wishy washy.

But the problem with it is that Is really this, is that it's going to lead you to burnout. It is, you know, low job satisfaction, burning out, physical exhaustion, emotional exhaustion, like starting to feel, you know, insecure and ineffective, really feeling  Like when you feel disempowered, you know a student when we say, oh that student is disenfranchised, like they're just not engaged, they just feel they can't win no matter what, like that, that's how you feel as a teacher, right?

You start to have this chronic stress, so it leads to, you know, anxiety, health issues, all those things, right? Overextending, resentment none of this is good. It's not good for our health, it's not good for teaching, you know.  Cue my, what I say every time, right? Your energy teaches more than your lesson plans.

How you show up matters. You gotta find a way to feel.  Okay, how can we reclaim it?  It's there for the grabbing, but again, we can't buy it from the store. We have to do the work. So I'm going to break it down. I'm going to try and keep this brief because this is an introduction to this whole idea of teacher empowerment and I call myself a teacher empowerment coach.

That's what I coach. people to do is to feel more empowered. Okay, let's look at the three kind of areas. The first is there is a decision to be made.  A decision.  Dr. Stephen Covey  I am not a product of my circumstances. I am a product of my decisions. I love that quote, right? That is really the essence of empowerment.

I'm not the product of my circumstances. I am the product of my decisions. Like we have control. We can decide. differently. Now, you may know if you have been a big fan of this podcast from the beginning about my complete fangirling for Dr. Stephen Covey. He was like my, I'm going to say my gateway drug into all things personal development.

I'll, I'll say this, probably over 30 years ago now. In fact, I did a whole episode for him. Episode nine was about his really life changing book for me, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.  I think I titled that episode something like, you know, the best book for teaching teachers that isn't about teaching.

So if you haven't listened to that and if you've never read the book, Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. People really  again, life changing. Okay. One more time. He said, I'm not a product of my circumstances. I'm a product of my decisions. Okay. So that's number one, right? It's a choice. It's a decision.

And what this makes me think of if you remember Michelle Pfeiffer in the movie  Dangerous Minds, right? Oh, great movie.  I remember this so clearly that she is teaching in a really, really tough school students who have all kinds of, it's a true story, and really difficult circumstances, a lot of Gang violence, just all kinds of things.

And she is really feeling out of place and trying to inspire them to make different choices for their life. And I remember this so clearly where she stands and says,  there are no victims in this classroom. Right. She wants students to take responsibility for themselves and know, even though circumstances are difficult, they don't need to be a victim.

They have a choice and sometimes I got to tell you, I used to, I have to tell myself when I was down, when I was really deep in my stuff as we all get some days and things just weren't going well, and it feels like you're set up to fail. You've got all the challenging kids, you have all the belligerent parents, everything seems to be, you know, going against you.

And I would get really down in my stuff. I remember I would have to look in the mirror and tell myself. There are no victims in this classroom and I would have to tell myself that, like, come on, be the adult, make the choice, make a decision. So that's number one, make a decision, right? That's part number one to empowerment.

Part number two is mindset. Mindset. Always, everything starts with mindset. It starts with managing your  self talk.  Now,  part of that is, yes, first, this decision that I am not a victim of my circumstances. I don't need to react to everything. I have choices on how I react. I can be proactive. But the bigger part for me on mindset is this part of asking yourself.

Empowering questions. It's really having this kind of tweak in my mindset. If I'm saying, Oh, my gosh, you know, some people are very, you know, problem focused. You know how I feel about that people standing around admiring a problem. And when I say somebody admiring a problem, you know, It's the teachers around the staff room table or at the water cooler, if you still have one of those. 

And they're just, you know, complaining is basically what it boils down to. You know, this is so difficult, the students are all this, the parents are all that, the administrator is all this. It's just you know, disempowering. It makes you feel like you have no control over it. And it doesn't mean it isn't valid.

Of course there are many, many challenges. I'm never going to be about toxic positivity. Their concerns are valid, but it doesn't help you feeling empowered. So an example of a empowering question would be, you know, given that, how can we?  Right? That's your reframe. Given that, given this situation, given that students are dysregulated, given that there's been a learning loss, you know, how can we?

That's really being solution focused. That's the difference from being problem focused and feeling in victim mode to being problem focused. solution focused and really feeling empowered, knowing that you have the means to come up with solutions. You have the ability to make incremental improvements.

Even if you can't change everything to be perfect, you can certainly make it feel better. Okay. And a lot of this mindset work is about. Yourself. How do you free frame from, oh my gosh, I'm so overwhelmed, I have so much to do. An empowering question might be,  what can I purposely eliminate this week to give myself some wiggle room, to alleviate some stress, to give me more room in my schedule?

What can I purposely choose not to do? to do, right? So that's going to be all of my strategies and episodes on saying no, on setting boundaries. I'll kind of give you a laundry list of those in a minute when I, when I talk about the third part, which is actions. I'm actually going to do a whole episode on empowering questions in a school focused environment.

I think that's going to be next week. So stay tuned for that. But just give me, let me give you one more example here. So it would be, let's say that you kind of Beat up on yourself, right? You beat up on yourself or you're just feeling kind of in victim pity party mode like why doesn't anybody ever appreciate me?

Like I do all these things like that's the breeding ground of resentment, right? Which is, you know, not a good look on anyone. It doesn't make you feel good. You don't come across with a great energy when you're resentful. So then, you know, oh I do all this stuff. stuff. How, how is it? You know, no, everybody takes me for granted.

You ever find yourself, you know, saying that at home to your family? So a more empowering question. I find if you always start with a how, that really helps or a what. What can I do to better communicate my value effectively? Right? That would be more in a corporation kind of setting, not so much at home.

But you see what I'm saying? Instead of just the woe is me, or, oh, I'm overwhelmed. Why? Why is very disempowering. Why does this happen? Why does it have to be that way, right? I always think Y equals whiny. Maybe you'll remember that. Y equals whiny. But how And what can I? And how can I? Those are how you ask empowering questions.

Okay, so if you want to feel more empowered, which we need to do,  part one is make a decision, right? The decision that you have a choice to make, right? Things aren't just randomly happening to you. You are, there are things you can do about most things, okay? So number two is this mindset piece of managing yourself, talk, asking more empowering questions.

Get out of the why, get into the how can I and what can I, all right? Get more into the problem solving mode. And then the third part is the actions. So you've got to make a decision, you've got to have the right mindset, and then you've got to have the actions. Well, what are the actions? Well, the actions to help you feel more empowered are literally the,  there are many, but I broke down the seven most important inside the Empower Teacher Toolkit.

So, good news, some of them I've already made many episodes about. So the first one is Really? setting boundaries, setting healthy boundaries. Now I, you,  I have so many episodes on this so I don't want to like invest in repeating myself here. You can go straight to episode two which was right at the very beginning because I felt that's what I seem to be coaching a lot of people on was the five steps to saying no in a professional student focused way.

That was the stu that was the secret sauce, right? That you don't say, oh, I can't do that because it's not my contract or I'm overwhelmed or I have too much to do already. You give a student focused reason. Okay, so the five steps to that was episode number two. Setting boundaries with your family and other areas.

That was episode 50. I made that before summer because a lot of us have trouble over summer when the rest of our family just checks out. Oh, you're off for summer and nobody does anything else.  Right? They feel like everything now is our responsibility. So if that is something that you struggle with setting boundaries with your family, go look at episode 50. 

And then episode 48 was very specific about, you know, there are lots of things  that you actually cannot say no to. I mean, extra things that have nothing to do with your particular job responsibility is not a problem. Try and say no to those. But some things are your responsibility, right? I say they're adjacent to your job.

Let's say you're the science teacher.  Science camp,  science fair, science Olympiad, all those things, it's going to be expected that you do them. You're a music teacher, it's going to be kind of expected that you do choir or band practice or put on performances, right? Those are kind of adjacent to your job.

So how do you, if you can't say no to something because it's kind of in your area of responsibility, how do you say yes with limitations? So yes, I can do that. And, and then set limits. Boundaries on it. Okay. That's also part of boundary setting. So that was episode 48. Okay. So the first part, which is setting the boundaries is really, you know, episodes 2, episodes 50, episodes 48.

There's plenty of stuff on that. So these are the things, setting boundaries, controlling what you can control,  right? The, this going back to Stephen Covey, that you have a circle of influence. And a circle of concern. And the more things you're worried about, and when you focus on all the things that you're worried about, that circle of Concern is very, very big.

Inside that circle of concern is a smaller circle, which is your circle of influence. And the more you worry about things, the smaller the things you can influence, the smaller that circle gets. And the more you focus on the things you can control,  then there are less things to worry about, right? That's a very common  practice, a very common exercise in personal development, I'm not sure if I've actually done an episode specifically on school related things to do with that.

I have a lot of them in the book, okay, so I'm gonna go check that out and I, I, you know, I can't remember. I've done a lot of trainings on it recently but I can't remember if I did a podcast episode, kind of all blurs. So if I haven't, I will do a specific episode on that. Alright, so setting boundaries.

Focusing on what you can control, right? These are some of the actions. Having, being really clear about  your foundational values. I call it making a north star, so that when you are overwhelmed, so that when intentional choices need to be made about what you're going to do and what you're not going to do, which things you're going to drop, that you kind of have a roadmap.

You're going to do the things Things that support your primary values. My primary values was never making administrators look good. Making board members look good. My.  Primary value, my guiding force was always student success, right? And so when there were decisions that needed to be made, that was my compass.

OK, I will probably do a whole episode on that.  So these are all some of the actions that help you feel more empowered, learning to set boundaries, controlling what you can control, having a clear vision of where you want to go, right? You see that these were all things that give you personal power and agency.

Other actions would be, how do you proactively protect your peace? How do you protect your mental space? I mean, what is the point of leaving school on time,  even if you don't drag homework with you, but you drag home with you the emotional stress, right? You're not sleeping well, you're not present with your family, you're preoccupied, you are anxious, you are constantly worried about, you've absorbed this kind of, This stress, this anxiety, this constant busy mind thinking about all the things you have to do.

They all seem so overwhelming. And at the same time, you are frustrated that you're not really relaxing and kind of regenerating so that you can be productive. It's just like really Unhelpful circle that you get into when you're overwhelmed and stressed, but then you're so exhausted. It's like a trauma response.

You get home and you don't do the things that you want to do that would support you feeling better, which would be go for a nice walk or have some fun or sleep well, right? You Find yourself vegging out on the couch or on social media trying to distract yourself. Okay, so how do you proactively protect your peace?

How do you mentally separate school from home? How do you let go of vicarious student trauma? How do you let go of the conversations, you know, when you have that kind of, you repeat in your mind again and again things that didn't go well during the day, or maybe you're doing this mental rehearsing, like you're stressing out about, Oh my gosh, this parent is going to do this, or my admin  wants to talk to me, and we're going to have this meeting, and you're already in your mind making all these scenarios, and, and having these arguments, and.

All kinds of conversations in your head that haven't even happened yet, right? And probably won't happen, a lot of them, right? So how do you proactively protect your peace? That is all part of feeling empowered. Having empowering routines, processes and kind of practices to protect yourself that way.

And then another part, again, with the mindset Is asking empowering questions. How are you intentional about your narrative? The things you're telling yourself, I am going to do one of the episodes in this series that I'm going to do is going to be about limiting beliefs. What are the stories you tell yourself?

about school and teaching and education and students and parents in general. Are they empowering? Are they helpful? Are they resourceful? Or are they making you feel worse? So we're going to dig into that into a different episode. Okay, so let's recap here. First off, and I should have started with this because I really don't want anybody to listen to this episode and kind of beat up on themselves and say, Oh my gosh, I've been in a victim mode and I've been whiny.

No, it is not your fault.  Okay, did you hear that?  None of it is your fault. Nobody has taught you this, these skills, how to feel empowered,  you know, but most of us,  many of us, let's not say most of us,  Many of us are females. I don't think anybody has, you know, I don't think a lot of us will raise that way if we're of a certain age to be empowered, to have agency for ourselves, to take up space.

It's something I've always struggled with my whole life. I am physically a pretty petite person. I'm short and I Always struggled taking up space. And that was an empowerment issue. I remember when I was in the corporate world, like back in the day, oh my gosh, I cannot believe I'm going to share this story, but it was really I was moving fast up the corporate ladder.

I was in a vice president capacity, and I was having to go close big sales deals. And. So my manager, my boss, went and hired somebody to, I had to do a sales presentation on a stage and they recorded me and gave me feedback.  Okay, old school, like, you know, massive video camera that, you know, He's crazy now to think we can do that on our phone.

Okay, but I remember standing there in my little, you know, white suit and doing my presentation and I'm sure there was lots of feedback but the feedback that really stayed with me was you need to take up more space. You need to have more. And I was like, but I'm little. Like, I'm like, what, spread my legs, I can't do that, wearing a short skirt, like some power pose.

And I remember the lady coaching me saying, no, taking up space is an attitude. It is really about feeling empowered and having agency and speaking confidently. Take up space. And really, it has been the work of a lifetime to take up space. Eh, eh. in relationships, in, in all kinds of areas. I know that if the only way you know me is from maybe my books or from this podcast,  it will be hard for you to believe that I am somebody who would quietly.

Try and blend in the background and  apologetically exist. I mean, that's what it really brought it down to. Like apologizing for even existing is really where it was at. So it has been the work of a lifetime. Okay.  You know what? I went off on that tangent and I forgot where we were. Hold on. Okay, right. We were conditioned, many of us, to, you know, be quiet. 

And so, I don't want you to feel bad. It is not your fault. Okay? However, just because something isn't your fault, doesn't mean it's not your responsibility to fix it now. Okay? Let's take responsibility for ourselves, and for our happiness, and for our joy, and for our health, and let's start to feel better.

Empowered. And that comes down to three things. Number one, a decision. You could do that right now. Not a product of your circumstances, a product of your decisions. Okay, and I know, I work with many people, and I've done it myself, who, what I would call, argue for their limitations. They would say, yeah, but you don't understand.

You don't understand. My principal, my admin, my school district, this group of friends. That is giving away your power.  Don't give away your power and your agency to another group of people. Okay, so is it a reality that it might be difficult for you?  In certain situations with certain people, absolutely.

But don't give away your power. Don't argue for your own limitations. Okay. So number one, a decision. Number two, the mindset of turning your whys into given this, how can I, right? Learning to flip the switch and have some empowering self talk, being more solution oriented. Okay. Right, getting out of the  kind of victim mode, out of the problem mode and into the problem solving mode.

It's kind of a lens. And then number three is actions. And actions comes down to learn, skills you can learn. That's the good news. These are skills you can learn. I was the most compliant, people pleasing, terrible at setting boundaries very anxious. My, my brain left to its own devices. I mean, when I had kids, I mean, it was a joke.

I could see five ways they were dead and buried between the front door and, and the curb, right? It's really,  I mean, I just had these scenarios. I was constantly anxious. This could happen. That could happen, right? So these are not things that come, you know, naturally to me. They took years of practice, but they are skills that you can learn.

And that's my whole goal, right? My whole goal is to shorten the learning curve for you. It took me 30 years, you know, a lot of work to learn these things. And I like to think that I can take these concepts and these skills and my unique kind of twist in it is I know what it means for a teacher. I know how to apply this to a classroom, to a school setting.

So the good news is these are skills you can learn, okay? These are skills you can learn. So decision,  mindset, empowering questions, and then actions. And as I mentioned in the Empower Teacher Toolkit, I broke it into seven real areas that I felt would give you the most bang for your buck. A couple of them I have already covered in many podcast episodes.

Setting boundaries, I think I have talked about again and again and again. I understand that not everybody has listened to all the episodes, so go back and look at 2, 48 and 50. Focusing on how far you've come and not being constantly mired in how much you still have to do. I did a whole episode on that episode 35, which is focusing on the gain, not on the gap.

Okay, episode 35. So those are two very empowering skills, the boundary piece and focusing the gain not the gap. And then some of the other pieces that we talked about, I will do whole episodes on in the coming weeks. Okay, so I gotcha. I gotchu. It doesn't matter.  Here's what we're going to say. That was then.

This is now. Okay? If you haven't been doing a great job in this area, no worries. You can learn. I can help you. Okay. I hope you have got something out of this introduction and if nothing else go ask yourself, do I feel empowered?  How can I feel more empowered, right? That's the empowering question and then just ask yourself only because at this point, do you take up space?

Do you take up space? Awesome.  Work of a lifetime, my friends. Okay, until next time. Listen, this is, this is the foundation right here of empowerment. Every week when I tell you, create your own path.  Right? Other teachers experience doesn't need to be your experience. You can create your own. So until next time, sweet friends, create your own path and bring your own sunshine.