How to Be Confident as a Teacher [episode 67]

Kelsey

You are listening to episode number 67 of wife, teacher, mommy the podcast how to be confident as a teacher. If you’re feeling less than confident about yourself as a teacher, listen up my friend. Today we’re going to be talking about two ways to look at confidence in yourself as a teacher as a person starting today.

Kelsey

Welcome to Wife Teacher Mommy the podcast. I’m Kelsey Sorenson, a former elementary teacher and current homeschool mom. And even though I’ve been a resource creator since 2014, I’ve realized that printables alone aren’t all you need in order to thrive as a teacher or homeschool parent. That’s why I also created this show and got certified as a life coach to help you finally kick burnout to the curb and feel competent with whatever challenges come your way. But the right mindset strategies and new teaching inspiration, you’re going to be well on your way to your best teacher life. Now let’s go

Kelsey

welcome to the podcast, my teacher friend, I’m so glad you’re here today. And whether or not you feel like, Man, I just love myself as a teacher, I’m doing amazing. Or if you’re like, Oh, I just don’t know if I can really do this. You are in the right place. Because I feel like we can always learn more about how to be confident as a teacher. So today, that’s what we’ll be doing. We’ll be answering that question. How can I be confident as a teacher, but first, you may or may not know this, but we just had our reveal party about educate and rejuvenate just a few days ago earlier this week. And I’m so excited that the cat is finally out of the bag. We’ve revealed our keynotes, we’ve revealed everything about the event, our full speaker lineup, the date segment, we already had the dates, but more information about how it’s going to work, how it’s going to be even better than last year. And last year was amazing. I’m just so excited. So in case you’re unfamiliar with what this is, if you haven’t been listening over the past month, educate and rejuvenate is our virtual conference. We call it the education event of the year because we really believe that and stand by it. It’s really a virtual event like you’ve honestly never seen before. Like take your favorite PD and add in live workouts add in life coaching, add in fun and giveaways. We have so much going on. It’s a great time. And our attendees last year really said that like it helps light the fire back in under them help them to be excited about teaching again the next year feel rejuvenated and that is what it’s there for. Because I mean, real talk these last few school years they’ve left many of us feeling a bit frazzled, right, and we’re here to kind of rejuvenate. So that’s why it’s educating, rejuvenate. We’re like educating you on lots of new like teaching topics. Like there’s such a wide variety. Like if you look there’s stuff about reading and writing and math and social emotional learning. But then there’s also like concepts about mental health and coaching and all these things. You’re going to learn a lot. But then you’re also going to rejuvenate. That’s why we’ve got those like workouts we start the day with a workout. It’s like holistic, like we believe in the whole teacher mindset and health and taking care of yourself taking that time for yourself. That’s what we’re all about here at wife, teacher, Mommy. So we’re super excited to be launching this event. It’s our second year. The first year was a huge success we had over I mean exactly 3334 teachers who purchased a ticket and attended the event and it was just such a great time we all came together. We had a really fun time. But this year, we have two amazing keynote speakers. And I’ve been teasing them on the podcast if you listen to the bonus episodes, but we finally revealed them. So our first one who was keynote number one if you’re listening to the clues, and finally been revealed, it’s Joe Dombroski. And you might know him as Mr. D He went viral some years back with a an April Fool’s joke prank where he had a spelling test with a bunch of fake words. He took this video I saw it back then. It was hilarious. I just laughed so hard at it. He’s so funny. He does the podcast with Gaspar Randazzo, the social studies podcast. So we had Gasper at our last event and he was on the podcast. So the two of them both of them are so funny. This time we got Joe to come to our event, and it was in 2017. And he had that spelling prank test. Like he was kind of thrown into the spotlight. After that he was on Ellen a few times. He’s now a top international public speaker, stand up comedian and social media star, but he prides himself on still being a fool to Hi, I’m classroom teacher. And he earned his master’s degree from Oakland University and a bachelor’s in elementary education from Central Michigan University. And He currently lives in Seattle, Washington where he teaches fifth grade at a title one school. So He is hilarious. We are so looking forward to having him as our first keynote at the event. Now, our second keynote, you may have probably also heard of if you don’t know her name, you’ll probably know her face one or the two or both. Her name is Christina coos bitch. And she is so hilarious also, and her main audience is moms. And this year in our event, if you haven’t seen that page, yet, we have a very clear we have a teacher track. And then we also have if you look at the toggle on the page, we have, like as many speakers for teachers, probably as we did last year, I think, very similar number. But then we also have teachers who are specifically teaching to parents. So if you’re like, I’m one of the homeschool parents that’s listening to the podcast, we have you covered too. And then we have speakers who are talking to both teachers and parents. So you can kind of choose your own adventure, you can pick one track and stick with it, you can be like, I want to watch these ones on these ones these on that you couldn’t listen or watch all of them if you want to totally up to you. But anyway, so we wanted one of our keynotes to be applicable to our mamas as well. So Christina is very well known, but she also loves teachers, she’s done videos about teachers as well. So I actually got on a zoom call with her and kind of talked about the content. And she’s going to be really speaking to the moms but also the teachers too. So if you’re like a teacher, Mom, you’re definitely going to want to watch this one. She is the best selling author of hold on but don’t hold the still. She also has a very popular YouTube channel. And she has funny videos all over Facebook. She has almost 3 million followers over there. That is where I first heard of her. And she’s just so down to earth and amazing. I met her a few times. And went on her initial book tour when she came here when she released it. And then she did hope and humor tour that she does. And it was so funny. She’s so hilarious. So I know the fact that she’s going to kind of take some of the content and tailor it towards our teacher and mom audience it’s going to be fantastic. Also it paid more for that ticket to see just her than you’re going to pay to come to this event. And same with Joe like either of them. If you were to go to one of their shows like just them you would pay more than educating rejuvenate tickets. So such a good deal, because then you’re also going to hear from so many other speakers. We have Britney Blackwell, we have Kerry Tracy, we have Jamie Sears, who you’re going to hear on the podcast very shortly. Carrie Brown is back. She was here last year. We’re so excited to have her back. Stay with Alexis Shepherd. She’s a returning speaker we have Cassie to breezy from creative abilities. Angela Watson from the 40 hour teacher workweek. Linda Cardenas who also just heard on the podcast. Chrissy Nichols, who’s our amazing life coach on wife, teacher, mommy club, just so many incredible teachers. We are super excited about the speaker lineup we have. But then also for parents, we have speakers such as Joanne crone from noget mom who I interviewed on the podcast in the past, she’s amazing. She is the host of the be resilient summit that we did earlier this year. Meg Thomas, who’s the hippie mama, she’s the life coach for moms, we have so many incredible speakers who are going to be joining us. So I just can’t wait for you to I mean, I can’t name all the speakers here on the podcast, it would take way too long of a time when we need to get into how to be competent as a teacher. But go to educate and rejuvenate.com you want to see all the speakers and what they’re going to be speaking about and what they have to offer, you’re going to get to watch as many of those as you can with the general admission ticket, I think it’s going to be like at least a week, we wanted to give you a little over a week to build a watch those so you can have time to watch those. And then also attend the live segments, there is the option to upgrade to have six months of access to after purchase. So and if you remember wife, teacher, mommy club, you get access to all of that just included in your membership, huge perk of being in the club, we also do a bonus day just remembers. So Christina is coming back for that bonus day for members and doing like an intimate q&a with our members. I’m going to be doing an additional keynote, we’re going to have lots of other fun stuff. We’re still planning the member day, but it’s going to be a great time. That will be so the main event is June 27 and 28th. And then yeah, you’re gonna want to come you’re gonna want to grab a ticket so much, Ben. Okay, so let’s talk about how to be confident as a teacher. And first I want to just kind of back up a little bit more and go over why is this even important? So I want to kind of refer back to some of the episodes from earlier this month that you might have listened to. So on the episode where he talked about the bad kids and the lazy kids that you know, often we label students is that like how to handle those children in our classrooms or if they’re our own children. One thing we talked about is our confidence in our teaching abilities often has to do with how well we are able to manage those students. Like if we are confident in our abilities, then we’re better able to show up as a teacher and in those results that we create of how like obviously, we can’t control everything that our students are doing, but we’re in control of how we handle it. And if we’re not confident and we’re just always in this reactionary mode. We’re not going to do as well as if we are confident in our abilities like okay, when did this happen? because this is what I do, I kind of plan ahead kind of have that classroom management plan like we talked about in the episode with Linda Cardenas earlier this month as well. So those you’ll want to check out Episode 63, which is how to motivate the, quote, lazy students or the quote, bad kids. And then Episode 64, which is how to create your ideal classroom management plan and minimize classroom disruptions with Linda Cardenas.

Kelsey

Those we talk a lot about, you know what to do about those things. But we also touched on confidence, like how if you have that confidence in yourself up so with your classroom management, helps with how you can problem solve with working with your students, or honestly, anything else, like a challenging colleague or your administration, or just having that confidence to back yourself up. It also impacts how we show up to things such as, like classroom observations, like, are you going to get extra nervous on those and maybe kind of, if you’re thinking I better not mess up, I better not mess up. I’m going to talk about a bit this a bit more in a episode next month. And then also job interviews. So if you’re like, I am just finishing up my student teaching, or I’m looking to move to a different school and I have job interviews coming up. Our confidence impacts how well we perform on these things that just does. And then last, and definitely not least, is confidence impacts our overall job satisfaction, like how we feel about being a teacher, like if all the time we just feel like, I’m just so bad at this, like, we’re probably not enjoying what we’re doing day in and day out if we just feel like we’re not any good. So let’s talk a bit about competence. So where does competence come from? Think about it. Where does it come from? And I’m going to tell you right now that our confidence honestly comes from how we think about ourselves, how we think about how we’re doing in our teaching. So when you’re newer teaching, you may think I’m just not good at it. And when we think that, how does that make us feel? And as we talked about it, it’s our thoughts that create our feelings, right? So when we think I’m not good at teaching, how do you feel when you think that? Now this is where I think looking at your wins, but how far you’ve already come really comes in. And I’d love to talk about this on the podcast as well. Because when you think about one point, you wanted to become a teacher, you didn’t know anything that you already know about teaching right now, like you didn’t know anything about creating a lesson plan, you didn’t know anything about managing a classroom, maybe you thought the idea of even just getting up in front of those students was like, you know, really overwhelming. I know, I thought that before we actually got into this, and look at how far you’ve come earlier you like you five or 10 or however many years ago, 20 years ago, might be like dang girl like you by your own classroom full of kids. Or you’re actually homeschooling now and not just stuck in indecision, you’re actually doing it like you were actually able to tell your mom, that you’re homeschooling or your dad and not feel like weird about it. Wow, like you’ve already come so far right? On the fact that you’re already here, you’re in your classroom, where you’re homeschooling your kids, and how much you’ve already learned to just to get to this point where you’re at. And then when you think about it, if I’ve been able to come this far, if I’m able to learn and grow and get to this point, What’s stopping me from getting to where I want to be. And all it is, is just continuing to learn and grow, right. So that’s what we just want to be ready to do. We want to be ready to continue to learn and grow and have that be something we’re excited about. But just because you can get even better doesn’t mean you’re not also doing just fine. In fact, doing the things exactly how you should be right now. Because here’s the truth, like you’re not going to walk in to your first day teaching your first day student teaching or even your third or second year, whatever. And you’re not going to be teaching as if you’ve been teaching 20 years, that’s not even a fair expectation, right. So just own the fact that this is where you are. But you’ve already learned a lot to get to this point, and then be excited about how much you can learn and grow. So you know, we’re looking at this and we’re like, you know, learning and growing is a good thing. It’s not a bad thing. So that is something to keep in mind when what you might think is like a sticky moment might come up. So this is when you might see something as criticism such as like a lower score than you want it on an observation, or something happened in your classroom or with a parent that you’re embarrassed about, or you wish you would have handled better, or a term or acronym came up during a staff meeting, then you don’t know what it means. And you need to like ask and clarify. Or even something as a veteran teacher where you’re like, oh my goodness, like maybe you’re even feeling like these new teachers coming in. And they know Oh, wow, they know the latest research they know more about like the science of reading than I do or whatever. You know, we all feel this at times, right? But remember, we are the ones that add meaning to any of these situations. Now that these things I just mentioned, make you a bad teacher, there’s always room to grow. And that is okay. Just take that as the information and feedback that is unlikely if there’s somebody on the other end such as like an admin, or a fellow teacher or even a parent, likely that person wants you to succeed as well. Right? Even if like say they’re coming at you kind of angry. The fact is they want you to succeed because they want their child to succeed and everybody wants us all headed in the right direction, right? So just take it as the feedback that it is and that okay, what can I learn from this and how can I improve and get even better, but not as a way to beat yourself down so you can take this as a gift of knowing Seeing what we can work on and improve. And as we implement that feedback and learn and grow, that leads us to practice. And when we practice something, we naturally get better at it. And this is the power of repetition. When we repeat things over and over and over again, we get better at them naturally. I mean, you know, this, right? You’re probably like, yeah, Kelsey, I know that, but it applies to our teaching as well. But the one thing to think about with this is if we’re always kind of throwing in the towel, like, oh, that I tried that one time, it didn’t work. And every time changing what we’re doing, we’re not getting that power of repetition. We’re maybe like starting over each time. So maybe it’s more like, what do I learn? What are some little tweaks I can make? Instead of throwing in the towel and being like, oh, I need to I everything I did that was bad. What if it’s like, okay, what little tweak can I make at a time so we can continue repeating and improving on what we’re doing. And instead of feeling like we’re always throwing in the towel, we’ll always starting over because then you’re not getting that power of repetition. So that is where we can create routines and get more practice. So I guess kind of what it comes down to is competence as a teacher comes down to these kind of two things that I’ve kind of started talking about. But the first is our self confidence. So that’s our belief in ourselves and our thoughts about it. So we’re believing how we’re already amazing how far we’ve come. We don’t want to like should all over ourselves, like I shouldn’t be a better teacher, I should do better at this, I should be better at that. We’re believing in where we’re going. So we’re like, Hey, I may not be like the expert teacher right now. But I know where I’m headed, I know, I’m going to be that. I’m going to enjoy the ride all along the way. And I’m going to take that feedback for improvement or the learning moments are not a bad thing. It’s a gift. And I want to give some examples. A, I’m really excited to tell kind of a longer story that I’m not going to share in this podcast. But in a future episode, I’m going to tell a story about a teacher observation. But we can still have self confidence in ourselves while still building confidence in our actual abilities, if that makes sense. So Self confidence is our belief in ourself to be able to do something whether or not we actually are fully capable of that right now. It’s kind of like having a growth mindset. So like, when we fail at something, it’s just feedback. So we don’t need to base our self confidence in ourselves on what we’ve done in the past, like what we’ve messed up on or what we feel like, oh, that lesson wasn’t good. Like, we take it as feedback. We learn from it. But we don’t base our beliefs in ourselves on that we we believe that we can handle any challenge that comes our way. And that we can feel any negative emotions that come up. Like the worst thing that happens is those negative emotions, maybe like shame, we can feel that right? We can feel that and then we can learn from it. And we can move on. And when we are able to do that, and when we’re able to be like, okay, yeah, that wasn’t great. I kind of feel this shame. Oh, Where’s that coming from? I question it, I learned from it. And then we can kind of build that self confidence in ourselves where we believe in ourselves like, Okay, I learned this from that. And now I’m going to do this, that self confidence is what fuels future action. So we can start with that self confidence, right now, we can believe in our ability to get to the level of teaching, we want to no matter how long it takes, no matter how many mistakes you might make along the way, no matter what lessons you need to learn. That doesn’t mean you can’t believe in your ability to do it, you’re like, I believe that I will do it, I believe that that I will overcome any of the obstacles. And we really have to have this first, the self confidence in ourselves in our ability to grow in our ability to do this is the most important part. And you can start with the self confidence today. So that’s our self confidence. The second part is our external confidence and capabilities. So the first part we talked about self confidence is internal. It’s our beliefs in ourselves or thoughts about ourselves, it’s understanding that we can believe that we can get to where we want to whether or not we’re there right now. And this self competence is what you can really lean into right now starting today. Okay, so that second type of confidence that we’re going to talk about is our external competence in our specific capabilities of specific teaching things. So you can look at your wins and what skill sets you already have competence. And that’s external validation, right? Like I already did really well at this. So that means I could do really well at this too. But then you can also see that anything beyond that is something that you totally believe you have the capacity to learn and do so you have confidence in your capabilities in the future. But then for feeling completely competent in that abilities. When we look at let’s say, I don’t know, if you’ve read the book, Outliers, it’s by Malcolm Gladwell. And he talks about the concept of having 10,000 hours of practice in order to become an expert at something. He was looking at a lot of like athletes and people like that. But when you think about let’s say, for example, that you’re teaching, you’re doing like 40 hours a week, you might laugh at that, because we’re talking about that with Jamie series and a couple of weeks too, but you might work more than that. But let’s say and approximately 40 weeks of the school year, somebody’s a little more than six full school years to be an expert at teaching, and maybe you haven’t hit that six years yet. Totally fine, right. But that’s the power of repetition. So when we Continue doing things over and over again, we create routines that we follow. And we continue to do that, then we can find that confidence in those abilities faster if we create those routines. And we do those same routines over and over again. So talking about for example, like with Lynda Cardenas, creating that classroom management plan, like maybe you’re like, but I’ve been teaching more than six years, and I don’t feel like an expert yet. That might be because you’ve been doing that throw in the towel thing and constantly changing up the way you’re doing things. But if you kind of are like, Okay, I’m gonna try to like do this, and I’m gonna tweak and then I’m gonna tweak and I’m gonna tweak until you figure out what really works for me as a teacher. And then when you keep doing those routines over and over again, that is the power of repetition and the power of repetition. My business coach, Kara, Sharon, she is amazing. She’s actually starting up a brand, she has these new gratitude journals, they’re awesome. It’s called Be the best to you. She’s starting a whole podcast and brand behind that. So I will definitely bring her on the show when she has that already. But she talks a lot about the power of repetition. And in her gratitude journals are like doing a lot of the same prompts throughout them, like she switches them out a little bit. But like, throughout the 12 weeks, you’re doing a lot of the same ones. And that’s because the power of when you continue to do something over and over again, you’re building upon those skills. So some examples of that, for me, too, are like, with homeschooling my kids, we kind of follow the same routine of like, you know, we do our homeschooling in the morning, and we do these certain things, and we use these curriculums, and then we use these wife, teacher mommy activities to supplement. And it’s really helped build my confidence in homeschooling them, because I kind of know what we’re doing right. And I’m still continuing and building off of that foundation that I started back in 2019, when I started homeschooling, so it really is just like how we can build upon it and build upon it and build upon it. And we can naturally kind of feel more competent in something, which then is that external confidence in your capability. So there’s the internal self confidence. So we can have right now in the external that as we continue to practice, we can do that. Now the other thing I want to mention is kind of layering them on top of each other. So let’s talk about self confidence that might not be something you’re in the habit of you might be doing where you should all over yourself. So I guess I’m gonna say there are three. So there’s, there’s the number one is self confidence. Number two is external confidence in your capability. And I guess kind of number three, two and a half maybe, is putting those together. So having that confidence in your ability to have self confidence in yourself, kind of like in little Inception there. But the more that you practice, believing in yourself, no matter what, looking at your wins, looking at feedback as constructive and what I can learn from it, instead of beating myself up about it, the more you practice doing those things, even having self confidence, practice, believing in yourself, practice feeling any of the negative emotions that come up, instead of resisting them, allow yourself to sit there and big. Who Okay, right now I’m feeling some shame, what a shame feel like shame, I kind of feel it right here. And as you kind of name like what it’s doing, like, Oh, I’m kind of feeling like my blood is rushing quicker and filling it like in my heart or whatever the once you start naming it, you’ll notice that feeling starts to calm. So the more you practice that the more you practice, managing your mind and noticing what you’re thinking. And like, Oh, I just caught myself thinking like, I’m a terrible teacher, or whatever. And you actually catch yourself doing that, instead of just thinking it, like catch yourself do after the fact, the better you’ll get it, the better. You’ll notice, like in the moment, oh, I’m thinking this right now. So really, you can kind of build that external confidence in your internal confidence by practicing the skills of having that self confidence. And then you can use the same thing to get more confident in your teaching abilities. So you can practice those routines. So at the same time, you can kind of be practicing the skill of self confidence of like believing in yourself feeling any of those emotions, managing your mind, and with building your classroom management plan or creating routines that are repeatable and getting that power repetition. And as you do both of those things together, I really believe that both of these are important. You’re going to see how that impacts your confidence in your teaching abilities. So if you have any questions about any of that, I’m happy to like kind of talk to you about it. Feel free to send a DM on Instagram at wife, teacher Mommy, I’m happy to talk with you. But most of all, I want to thank you for taking the time to listen to this podcast and for doing this work on your mental health. I really feel like it’s so important to take that time a lot of us feel like oh my goodness, I just have so much to do. I don’t have time to like listen to a podcast about how to be more competent because I have too many things to do. So the fact that you made it what like 26 minutes or whatever into this episode, and you’re still listening, you are doing the work to work on yourself which is going to make it so you have a bigger impact on your students on your children and that you can just enjoy your life and have more satisfaction with it. I just feel like that is so important. So if you want to take a step further in this work, be sure to I also had to educate in rejuvenate.com to sign up for the event that I was talking about at the beginning of the podcast. Because at the event, I will be coaching you, I will be teaching you, you’ll be hearing lots from me, I plan on having some pre recorded sessions, I’m going to be doing some live stuff, I’m gonna be doing some live coaching. Plus, you’ll also be hearing from so many other amazing teachers and homeschool parents, life coaches and experts all from the comfort of your home, all helping you being the best hole teacher hole person that you can be, because you are absolutely worth it, my friend. And there’s just one thing I want to leave you with. Because at the end of the day, there will always be someone who doesn’t see your value as a teacher. Don’t let it be you. You can believe in yourself and your ability starting with that self confidence right now. And then you can believe in your abilities to create routines that can be repeatable, tweak a little bit here and there. So you can build those skills that competency in addition to your competence. Okay,

Kelsey

thanks for listening today. And next week, I am starting double episodes, you’re going to get two episodes a week now until educate, rejuvenate is the plan. Going to have lots of interviews with our speakers. So on April fourth, you’re going to be hearing from Jamie Sears. We’re talking all about how to enjoy teaching while still working less. It is a great interview, we actually already did it. We did this one a bit ahead of time but didn’t want to launch the episode before her amazing book is also out. So be sure to tune into Tuesday’s episode and then next month I’ll also be doing some about like more things to tie into this confidence such as like observations and job interviews and all kinds of things. So make sure you’re subscribe I hope to see you educating rejuvenate to, but if you’re enjoying this podcast, be sure to hit subscribe so you don’t miss an episode. And if you’re ready to take the next step with me, then you are going to love wife teacher mommy club. Our top selling resources for pre K through sixth grades have been used and loved by 10s of 1000s of teachers. The club gives you one click access to all of them to meet the needs of every child to teach while saving tons of time. Plus, you’ll have our certified life coach in your back pocket with several monthly workshops and an Ask a coach portal you can use 24/7 The combo of resources and coaching is our secret sauce to your best teacher life. Think of my team and I is your personal team, doing the lesson planning for you and on the sidelines coaching you and cheering you on as you focus on what you do best impacting the children you teach. Plus, if you’re loving this podcast, you’ll also have access to our private podcast just for members, where I continue the conversation with all of our guests with members only bonus episodes. And don’t forget the club with VIP access to educate and rejuvenate our Summer Conference and our private Facebook community full of like minded educators support each other. You do so much for everyone else so it’s time to invest in yourself. Your t shirt friends John’s will drop when they see just how quickly you finish your planning. Not to mention the glow of the happier, more fulfilled you head on over to wife teacher mommy club.com to learn more.