Designing a Whole Life: Rachel’s Journey to Sustainability

In this episode, Rachel shares her journey of designing a sustainable, whole-life approach to entrepreneurship and personal well-being. She emphasizes the importance of intentional scheduling, self-care, and aligning your business with your life priorities.

Chapters
00:00 Navigating Life Beyond Two Speeds
04:12 Designing a Life as an Entrepreneur
09:11 The Importance of Scheduling and Self-Care
14:46 Creating a Sustainable Business Model
19:37 Embracing Change and Personal Growth
24:34 Intentional Living and Redefining Success

Resources 

PPT Mindmaps

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Welcome to the Teacher to Entrepreneur Podcast. I'm your host, Rachel Siccioni, former classroom teacher turned entrepreneur and mentor to educators building their own unique teacher businesses. This is a space for teachers who are curious about alternatives to the classroom, exploring private practice and other multifaceted work, and for those who want to know what success can look like beyond the classroom. I'm glad you're here. Now let's get into today's conversation. One of the challenges that I personally have struggled with, and I've seen my teacher mentees struggle with as well, is learning how to live in more than just two speeds. Let me explain what I mean by that. After years of being in the classroom, I had sort of learned how to live in just two speeds. I was either on or I was off. I was working to my capacity or I was recovering. I didn't have like an in-between. I didn't know how to have a sustainable workflow. As much as I tried, like the concept existed, but I didn't know how to do it or how to apply it. I was either working constantly until I passed out or got sick or something happened, meaning like in my home life and school life during the school year, it's just full speed, full speed ahead. Because if you don't, you're gonna get behind. And even the first illness, I would start to fall behind. And luckily, there would be some break nearby where I could get caught up, either like a long weekend or Thanksgiving break or something, where I could get caught back up again. That's generally how I used those breaks, was not to explore the other parts of my life. I mean, I visited them, but I didn't really get to be fully there. Part of the brain was always sort of ticking away at this never-ending to-do list. Even when I'm at Thanksgiving dinner, I'm still planning and thinking multiple steps ahead of where I am at the moment. And that was something that I had to learn, or rather force myself to practice and learn how to not live that way anymore, because that pace is not sustainable. That living in either on or off, that pushing yourself as hard as you can and then recovering is not a sustainable way to live. It's not a healthy way to live. But it was all I knew. And I recreated it throughout the different areas of my life multiple times before it finally occurred to me. Oh my gosh, look what you're doing. You don't have to do this because inevitably I would crash and then I would want to give up. And then I would not be able to give up because this little voice in my head is saying, no, this is what you've been working so hard for. This is what you've always wanted, and both are true. And then I would go back at it again. And so over the last few years, I've been really focusing on with intention, learning how to do this differently. Learning that life has a lot more than two speeds and how to downshift, basically, how to live in different speeds, that I'm still moving forward. I'm still maintaining forward momentum, but not either on or off. Like sometimes I'm in first gear, sometimes I'm in second gear, sometimes I'm full speed ahead. And I'm questioning now whether or not my gear shift reference is really going to land with everybody because you can't really find a lot of manual transitions anymore. So hopefully everyone can follow along with that metaphor. And I think this is one of the ways where being an entrepreneur has been such a great teacher for me, is the fact that I really am, as a self-employed teacher, I really am able to make this business and this life exactly what I want it to be. And so it's forced me to look at what I want it to be and figure out how to backwards design it into reality. And if I was working on someone else's schedule, I don't know that I would have these same kind of confrontational conversations with myself. Definitely not in a school schedule. I mean, that pace has just gotten faster and faster and faster and faster. And you're either, you are either on or you're crashed. But I've heard a lot of entrepreneurs talk about how entrepreneurship is a self-growth journey. And I think it's because we have this freedom to say, you know what, that's not really working, or that's not really working for my family, or I don't want it to be this way. And we actually had the freedom to make it what we want it to be. So that's what I want to talk about today. I want to talk about designing a whole life because as an entrepreneur, that's what we get to do. So when I started my French You, my schedule revolved around just one thing, my family. This was 2020. I just survived that awful spring COVID teaching. I knew I could not go back to where I was. And I'm really grateful I didn't because their COVID plan was awful. But there was one thing that really dictated the majority of the decisions we made at that time, because the girls were really little. I had one going into kindergarten and one going into second, so six and eight. And I wanted to be there. I often thought, you know, they only get one childhood, but I only get one motherhood. And I was late to the mom game. I was 34 when I had my first child. And I mean, maybe not late, but later than years. And I really wanted to enjoy my motherhood. I it was something that I was really intentional about. It's something that I had, you know, when I found the person I wanted to build a life with, that was hot on both of our lists. And so, like I said, they only get one childhood, but we only get, I only get one motherhood. My my husband only gets one fatherhood. And so we made parenthood. And our children were the center of the majority of our decisions at that time was really our family. And so that meant that I was teaching while they were at school, maybe one or two evenings a week, but wrapping up before family time started, making sure that I was always available for bedtime and bathtime and dinner time and after school snack time, which I know I've talked about before on this podcast and in my blog post. So at that point, I was still very new to business. And my ideal client wasn't defined by age. It was anyone who wanted to learn French and was available when I was available. And that was not, you know, not even a really a marketing strategy. That was just survival. And thankfully it worked because I was just kind of going blind. And it was a time when you could, because the online spaces hadn't gotten as busy as are now. And this was six years ago. And so clumsy marketing to whomever could still take you pretty far, thankfully. And it did. And then a couple of years later, when I took on my first teacher mentee, when I had figured out a few systems and I knew how to do this sustainably, and I had a process that was repeatable but could still be tailored to each person, I took on my first teacher mentee, who is retired, and her kids are grown. In fact, they both got married very recently. So while I was slowing down every summer so that way I could spend more time with my family, summer is actually still her busiest season. So simple business model. I mean, I helped her build her business, but a completely different life with completely different needs. And that's when it clicked for me that there isn't one right schedule for private practice teaching. There isn't one blueprint, just your life, your priorities, your season of life. And then you build the business around those. And not because anyone told me it should, because my life has changed. I have more flexibility. They're older now, they don't need or even really want me as much. They're 11 and 13, soon to be 14, and they want to be out there experiencing the world on their own and seeing what they're able to accomplish without mom's help. I mean, I'm always nearby. I'm available if they need me, but they honestly don't need me as much. And I think, you know, as a teacher and a parent, I have a similar philosophy. If you're doing a good job, your job is to work your way out of a job. Your job is to not be needed anymore. And so I take their autonomy and their independence as a sign that I'm doing a good job and that I have been doing a good job because they are growing into these very confident and capable teenagers. And I can't say it, but eventually they will be young women and women and older women. Anyway, but because I am my own boss and my life has more flexibility, I have had time for more creative space and more professional development and rest. And if you listen to last week's episode, you know I'm still figuring that one out. I'm still trying to find intentional ways to incorporate boredom and a little adventure so I can get those more innovative synapses bumping into each other. But one thing I have learned is this at some point, I stopped looking at my calendar as my teaching schedule. And I started looking at it as a life, whole life, with a lot of different things that I want to build into it. And that's two very different things. That is a very different perspective. Most of the teachers that I encountered, myself included, are carrying or have carried a nervous system that has been trained to live in constant urgency. Everything is important, everything needs to get done. There's always more on your plate than you can get done in at a time or within a time span, dealing with people who have constant needs that we need to, that we need to anticipate and be prepared for. Sometimes it's hard for us to do it for ourselves because we know it's what's best for us. Sometimes it's easier to make those healthy choices for somebody else. Like, I'm going to stop making negative comments about myself or my body because I don't want my kids to pick up that habit. I don't want my daughters to look in the mirror and say something negative. That's something I used to do. I didn't stop doing that because I knew it was better for me and my mental health. I stopped doing it because I didn't want them to do the same thing. So I'm aware of the things that I'm role modeling for them. And that informs a lot of the decisions that I made. But even if you don't have daughters, I see similar effects for my former students who have since sought me out and have become friends of mine on social media and even now in real life, as many of them are now adults with their own families. And they're still looking at me in this way of seeing the things that I'm putting out there and using it as a reference for how they decide to design their lives. So I'm really mindful now, now that I've noticed this pattern of recreating that breakneck pace of urgency, get it all done. If you don't get it done, then it's going to pile up and you're going to get behind. And then it's just going to become this huge snowball and all that whole anxiety cycle that I used to be trapped in. And I know so many other teachers have also been trapped in. And for years, I thought it was just to become better organized. So maybe you to this one. Summer vacation always looked the same for years and years and years. Even though my kids were different ages, it always looked the same. June was recover. I had no other plans for myself other than to catch my breath and recover. Sleep in as much as I could, zombie out as much as I could, survival on my lowest possible speed, taking care of my kids and taking care of myself, just breathing and recovering as much as possible. July is when I would feel alive again and I'd be ready for adventures. And we would go on our family vacation, usually the second week of July. And I would see my friends and I would make plans and I would be alive. And then as July would start to wind down and transition into August, it was time to plan. Like, okay, next year's going to be better. And I would think about all of the awesome habits. And July, I would wake up and I would do yoga in the morning. And I had all of these wonderful habits that I had recreated for myself in July. And I felt good and I was functioning well and my body felt good and my energy was good. I read a book for pleasure. And then August was okay, how do we make this, these good habits, survive through the next school year? So I don't end up depleted and in zombie mode for an entire month next June. And by October, it was everything was back to the way it had been in years past. All of my brand new systems and organization and whatever, you know, some of them would would help and they would endure and they would live on, you know, for consecutive years in my classroom. But for the most part, I was pretty much back to my usual functioning by the end of October. By then, my kids would have gotten sick. I'm no longer doing yoga in the morning. I'm no longer journaling and I'm just surviving and from break to break to break. In spite of all of my best efforts, I still ended up just in those two speaks. And that stayed with me even when I left the classroom. And I think it's because I had to intentionally schedule in time for these other parts of my life that I wanted to incorporate in. As silly as it sounds, I had to actually schedule rest. I had to actually schedule creativity. I had to actually schedule hobbies and anything else that I wanted to fit into my time, fit into my life, because your everyday is your life. Your life is a collection of your everyday. And I had to schedule in play. And it's those middle gears. It's actually scheduling in those times where you can create the habits that are necessary to build sustainable businesses. So here's one of the exercises I walk my mentors through. And it sounds incredibly simple, but it's for me, I found it to be very interesting. I did something similar to this. The very first time I did something like this was in October of 2019, maybe. I'd been thinking of leaving the classroom for quite some time. And I did Casey Morris's CEO Teacher Academy, I think it might have been called. One of the exercises that she had us do was to map out our lives. So that was the very first time I did it. And I've done it multiple times since then. It's actually something that I do almost annually, actually. When I do my October plan for the following year, I look at all the things I want to have in my life next year. I look at this year, what's going well, what I would like to improve, and like all of that into my next year. So the very first step, and I do this with all of my mentees, is do a mind map, your life, not your business, your life. So the first time I did this, I thought it would take me about five minutes. It took a lot, it took a little bit longer. Honestly, I had to sit with it. It took me a couple of days to get it really mapped out. Because when I first started, I only had two categories. And Casey had like six bubbles. I only had the two. Home and work. That was kind of all my brain could come up with. And there was a ton of things under home and things under work, but really I I only had the two categories. And I just kind of sat there looking at it. I'm like, okay, really? Is this it? Is this all that has become of my life at this point? And sadly, yeah, like that's really all I had bandwidth for. I had two littles in elementary school. And I was a full-time high school teacher with six different. So yeah, that was kind of all I had. And I kept thinking, and then, like I said, there were things underneath those categories. So I did put in like under home, immediate family, extended family, friends, under work. I had teaching, lesson planning. And then as time has gone on, I started putting myself on there. Me. And I added hobbies and professional development and exercise and rest and the admin, like the backside of my business, getting my invoices sent out, tracking my hours of my planning hours versus my student facing hours. That's, you know, something that I put under admin, marketing. Under marketing, I have long form and short form content. I have paid and organic. So these categories have really grown. And eventually I added in play and curiosity and most recently boredom. Still not exactly sure how I'm going to get that in there, but I'm going to figure it out. And when I do, I'll tell you. But I discovered it's important and I want it to be there. So I'm going to find a way to add it. I'm going to find a way to plan around that. And sometimes that's exactly where our creativity starts to come back in line when we are able to slow things down enough that we're able to do activities that are unrelated to our work-life work. Just like, you know, in that episode I did about last week, about our students' brains needing this low stress, low risk creative time in order to reach those upper levels of bloom. We do too. And this week I want to add something else. When we stop living at full speed, we don't just find time to rest. We find ourselves again. We notice ideas. We become curious. We start playing and not just playing with our kids, which is its own wonderful joy, but discovering like our own type of play. And I'm going to say discovering and rediscovering because the person who came out of the classroom, the person you are now is not the same person who went in to the classroom. The person you are now, after having children, is not the same person you were before you had children. And entrepreneurship is going to change you and challenge you to grow in ways that are exciting and interesting and challenging. It's through those challenges that discover other parts of ourselves. And so the person that you're going to be a year, two, five, ten years into your business is going to be different than the person who's listening to this episode for the first time right now. And I think one of the biggest mistakes I see teachers make is believing that they have to build their businesses in the same way that somebody else built theirs. You don't. I'm here to tell you that you don't. I have helped so many teachers in different content areas, even different countries now, and different phases of their lives, and they all look different because your business should reflect your life. And it's okay for that to change over time. It's going to change over time. That's the beauty of being your own boss, is that it can. When my girls were little, family time shaped every business decision that I made. Now that they're older, I'm in a different season. And my business looks different too. Not because it's inconsistent, but because it's growth. And the same is for my retired mentee. Summer is her busy season. Mine isn't. It still isn't. It may be at some point, especially as the private practice teacher continues to grow and I work with more and more teachers over the summer. But as far as my teaching business, my French you, that will still stay relatively slow. I keep just a couple of adults over the summers, and I still only see my high school students during the school year. And none of us are doing it wrong. We are all building businesses around completely different lives. And that's why I'm always skeptical when someone said there's just this one perfect model or blueprint or a template, because I personally don't believe that there are. I think there are principles, but the way that you apply them should fit your life in order for it to be sustainable and authentic. And I really think that's what we're craving now as we're coming into this new way of looking at business and investments and the way that we invest our resources, including our time. And this is also why the first module of in T2E, in the 90-day jumpstart, we spend so much time on mindset before we ever talk about business. Because if you build your business on top of burnout, burnout usually wins. So we're gonna work through self-care. We're going to talk about wellness. We are going to confront beliefs that you have about money and confidence. Remember, Erica talked about confidence. And when she talks about her pricing, she does it with confidence and nobody blinks. Nobody questions it because we took the time to confront all of these things and we were mindful of those things when we were building our stories we've been. Carrying since our classroom days. We talk about those because I've watched teachers build beautiful businesses only to recreate the same stressful situations that they were trying to leave behind. And the strategy was never the problem. It was the foundation. It was these not flashy, not business type things that they skipped over when they were building their businesses that eventually ended up causing their businesses to fail. And that's why this is the only portion of program that I ever make available independently of the whole program is because I believe in it so strongly. I was able to build my business without taking a course like the one I created. But the part that almost killed my business at least three times before I figured it out was the mindset portion. And so that's why I want that to be available to anybody who's thinking about starting their own teaching business. And then if you like it and you want to keep working with me, great. You already know a lot about the way that I work. And if you decide, nope, I got it from here, that's great too. But I want you to be successful. I want your business to work for you and your life, the way that I've been able to make mine work for me and my life. So what does this look like? It starts by looking at your life as a whole, covered that. Check. Identifying your non-negotiables. For me, getting my kids on and off the bus is a non-negotiable. Getting them now that they're older to and from school is not a non-negotiable. Then paying attention to your own energy instead of forcing yourself into someone else's schedule. Some of us do our best work in the morning. Some of us need some space between clients, and some of us can see them back to back to back. Some thrive with packed schedules, others don't. And your calendar should reflect your reality and your strengths, not what anyone else has created for you. Because you, you are an authority. And a lot of teachers I work with forget that they forget their own professional authority. And our calendars should reflect that. And here's the part that I think we skip too much is leaving room for maintenance for our self-care. Because as a business owner, you are the most important asset in your business. Right. You're as a solopreneur, you are the number one asset in your business. And you have to take care of yourself. The well-being of your business is 100% tied to your own personal well-being. And so you need to leave room for maintenance, whatever that looks like for you. If it's walks, if it's fun, if it's prayer, if it's journaling, if it's yoga, if it's healthy foods, if it's time with family, if it's time alone. For me, I need to figure out a way to incorporate boredom. That was fantastic for me. But you need to leave room for you to be a whole person. And that requires you to function at a different pace. You have to get out of that all or nothing, full speed or recovery modes of operating. Here's what I want to leave you with. Take some time to be really intentional about what you want to build, knowing that your business is allowed to look different. A light week isn't laziness and your own boundaries are not selfish. Just because you have been selfless and have developed a habit of ignoring your own needs doesn't mean that taking care of yourself is wrong. It's necessary. You have to. You are allowed to build a business that supports your life that you want to build and you want to create for yourself and the people you love. Because you're not just creating your schedule and your business, you're creating your whole life or recreating it. And I think that's worth taking the time to do it intentionally, to do it right and to re-evaluate it, redo it, and tweak it whenever you feel is necessary. You're allowed to do that because you're the boss. I've linked two free worksheets for you in the show notes today that you are welcome to use. They're just, they're in Canva. You can either print them out as many copies as you want or make your own copy and type right into them. I know mine was a living document for a really long time. It's, I'm probably going to go back to it again now that I have grown some since the last time I did it and see if there's anything that I want to change. But they're there for you, two different versions. So if you like the mind map or you're more of a brainstorming list kind of person, that's there for you too. I hope that you'll spend some time with them and that you will have some moments perhaps when you see your whole life on paper that you maybe will realize that you've been trying to squeeze yourself into someone else's idea of what success looks like, that you can create some space for your own ideas of what success means for you. And if as you're working through them, you realize you would like someone to walk beside you or bounce ideas off of and give some insight. I am here. That's exactly what we do inside the 52E 90-day jumpstart program. And I hope that you have a great week. I'll talk to you next time. Thank you for listening. If today's episode resonated with you, please share it with a colleague or leave a review. This helps the conversation reach other teachers who may need it. You can learn more about what I do and how to work with me at the privatepracteteacher.org. Best wishes always.