The Real Reason You’re Burned Out (It’s Not Teaching)

The Real Reason You’re Burned Out (It’s Not Teaching) (Coaching Framework Series: Part 1) === [00:00:00] You think you’re burned out because of teaching, and let me tell you, I get it. I was you a few years back, and I thought that leaving teaching would be the thing that solved all my problems. I would no longer feel burned out at my job, and what actually happened surprised me. Today I’m going to tell you why the burnout is likely not to do just with teaching and what it actually is Speaker 2: Welcome to educate and rejuvenate the podcast to help you revitalize your teaching, renew your spirit and reignite your passion for life. I’m your host, Kelsey Sorenson, a former teacher, current homeschool mom, published author and certified life coach. Whether you are a teacher in a traditional classroom homeschool from your kitchen table Or anywhere in between, I am on a mission to help you not only survive as an educator, but thrive, get ready to uplevel your skills with incredible insights from guest experts and discover the missing piece, rejuvenating yourself. Are you ready to both [00:01:00] educate and rejuvenate? Let’s go. welcome to Educate and Rejuvenate the podcast today. If you hit play on this episode, likely you are feeling some kind of burnout and you’re like, “What do I do about this? Like, teaching is such a big problem. It’s such a hard job. I love teaching, and there are so many things about it that stress me out.” I get it. I’ve heard so much about it. I’m coaching teachers week in and week out inside Educate and Rejuvenate Club. It is one of my favorite things that I do. But one of my other favorite things that I haven’t been doing for a while is recording new episodes for this podcast. And I recorded a while back about why it was a season where I needed to take a break from it, but now that season is coming to a close. We’ve been doing replay episodes for the last little while over the summer. Now we’re into September 2026, and now I’m about ready to start recording new content for you. But for now, uh, for the next three weeks, I’m going to be [00:02:00] sharing the episodes that I recorded when my book was released just about two years ago for my– And they were all about the coaching framework that I use here on the podcast, in the club, everywhere. Again, um, behind the scenes, even when I haven’t been doing this podcast, I’ve been coaching teachers week in and week out and came up with so many more great ways to explain these things, and that’s why I want to relaunch this and make sure that you get the best up-to-date version of the Educate and Rejuvenate frameworks and everything that is going to help to support you in your life, um, and teaching. But until September 25th when those new episodes start to relaunch, I’m replaying three episodes that are going to help to lay the foundation. They are the episodes that I recorded when my book was released, and I can’t believe I’m saying this, but two years ago in September 2024. It is now September 2026, and these episodes, they stand the test of time. These will walk you through each step of what I now call the inside out teacher framework. I didn’t have that name for it when I recorded these or when I wrote the [00:03:00] book, but again, it’s still the same thing. Now I just have a name for it, which we’ll talk more about as we get into the new episodes of the podcast. But today, we are going to talk about the first step, which is to observe yourself. And you might be thinking like, “Wait, I thought we were talking about burnout. Why am I talking about observing myself?” Because here’s the thing, burnout is an inside thing. Burnout is what you’re feeling. It is what happens when you’re often trying to control the things outside of you that you actually have zero control over, instead of focusing on what is happening inside that you do have more control over. And so that is what we’re going to talk about in this episode. So I’m really excited for that. Um, until now and when the new episodes relaunch though, make sure that you are on our email list if you are not already. Go to educateandrejuvenate.com/teacherbrainbreak. That is what we are now calling our newsletter that we send out each week that has the most recent podcast. It’ll have any information about upcoming master classes and events. It’ll also have, every week I write something. Again, I’m the one writing these. I write these for you. And make sure that has [00:04:00] something for you to take away, something for you to think about or ponder on. Like, if you love this podcast, you’re going to love the Teacher Brain Break newsletter as well. So just make sure you’re subscribed, educateandrejuvenate.com/teacherbrainbreak. With that, let’s get into today’s episode Speaker 2: I am so excited for today’s episode. It is the first time I’m doing a three step series here on the podcast, fully dedicated to the framework that I developed while writing my book titled Educate and Rejuvenate, a three step guide to revitalize your teaching, renew your spirit, and reignite your passion for life. And the book comes out in just two days. When you’re listening to this, when it goes live, like, I cannot believe it. It has been such an amazing project for me. It has been, honestly, I created this book for you. I poured my heart and soul into the pages, into as I typed. Every word of this [00:05:00] book and the Teacher Goals team helped me edit like 10, 000 words out of it while keeping the meaning for all of you to make it a quick and easy book for all of you to read and understand and really take this work that we do here on the podcast to the next level and as a side note, because the reason the book is out here, the reason it exists is not for me, but for you. It was such a personal development experience writing this book, researching to find sources to cite for everything that I mentioned in the book and coming up with a framework that really put everything we talk about in the podcast into perspective. Into something concise and easy to understand because we talked about the self coaching model, but then that’s not the only thing you need because there’s also, what about our nervous system? What about when we’re activated? What about our feelings? What about processing emotions? What about goal setting? What about intentional scheduling? Everything we’ve been talking about here. And when I was writing my book at first, like it was just a bunch of like individual chapters. And I was like, how do we like put all of this together? How do we put it [00:06:00] into a framework? And I was actually working with my original life coach, Lizzie Langston who I’ve had on the podcast before. And also if you have been to any of our educate and rejuvenate event, she’s always done the yoga at it. She’s amazing. She actually was my book coach, which was a fun thing because she’d actually never been a book coach. And it was really just. Kind of, I wanted this full circle thing where I’m like, you were my original coach. I just need someone to bounce things off of, to share, where I’m struggling with writing, where I’m stuck. And one of the ways I was really stuck was just like, how do I put this together into something that makes it easier to understand where it’s not all these disconnected, disjointed things where I can make it so you can be like, Oh yeah, this tool falls under this part of the framework, or it can be used in these different parts or whatever. And I wanted to create just something that’s three simple steps a lot of books have sections. Right. And I felt like three, it just felt like a good number. One, two, three, like when you think of like kind of the three steps to do anything. What Lizzie asked me, she’s like, well, if there were three steps [00:07:00] to what it is, kind of the process, when you work with a client, what is it that you take them through? And I couldn’t even answer that right in the moment. And what it did is I actually got out my Kindle scribe. Those of you who are in the club, you know, that I love my Kindle scribe because not only can I read on it, but I can write and it’s just amazing. But I got it out and I journaled for about 15 full note pages on my Kindle about what is the transformation that I want my reader to have. And what is the process that when I work with a client, I take them through that I could do on the page in a book. And what I finally realized is everything falls under these three categories. First, we need to observe ourselves, but it’s not just our thoughts. It’s observing our feelings, our emotions, our nervous system. And that’s really what we’re getting in today, getting into today. And then we use those observations to choose what it is we want consciously, because up until the point where we start becoming an observer, We are unconsciously doing it. We, I mean, we are choosing, but we’re not doing it with our [00:08:00] conscious mind. And that’s what we are learning how to do is make decisions more consciously, more in tune with ourselves, more in tune with what it is we need, what it is we want. And that’s when we’re choosing our direction. We’re more starting to consciously think and be like, what is it? I want to think, what is it I want? And. And let’s create like a map, a goal, like of what it is I want to do. So I kind of know what I’m doing. And then the third step is to align yourself, to follow through with that, to notice when you get off track, to bring yourself back, to assess and all of that. So that is the simple three steps that really makes it so easy to understand. Even when one of my editors was writing it, she’s like, I learned so much. And yet this framework is so simple. And that’s the point I wanted it to be simple. So let me see the framework. You’re like, Oh, this is so simple. It’s easy to utilize and understand. And that is, that was my goal with this. It was not simple to put together. It was like a heart and soul pouring out, figuring out how is it that I can make these concepts easier to understand. And I am really excited with how the finished product turned out. And I want to give that to [00:09:00] all of you here today on the podcast. All the work that I poured into these pages, into coming up with this framework, I want to make sure that you all have it for free. The framework is out there. Anyone can learn it and utilize it. It’s here on the podcast. I’m sharing it with you today. Well, not just today, the next three weeks, I’m doing an episode dedicated to each section of the book, each section of the framework. So today we are going to talk about observing yourself. And I actually want to read to you the section introduction. I wrote a little section introduction to go before each one. So before the Observe Yourself section, what I wrote was normally we just go with the flow of our lives. We don’t take the time to notice what we’re thinking, feeling or experiencing. Our brain sees problems outside of us and naturally overlooks the solutions that can come from within. When we become observers, we pay attention to the way we think about problems so that we can resolve them from within. So what does it mean to be an observer? You might be like, okay, , I observe myself. What does that even mean? [00:10:00] And really, that just means you’re paying attention to your internal experience. It’s not all about everything outside of us, what everyone else is thinking, what everyone else is doing, what is going on outside of us. That’s what we pay a lot more attention to. That’s what our mind is usually ruminating on. But when we’re observing ourselves, we want to really pay attention. What is going on inside my mind? What is going on inside my body? How am I experiencing all of this? Not just what is happening outside of me, but what is my experience? Am I activated? What’s going on in my nervous system? That is such an important part of it too. So within this section, there are the three things we observe, and then we also want to keep in mind, like, how do we have so much compassion with this? How do we not judge ourselves? How do we just come in super cool? Curious. And that is the whole idea of being an observer. We’re just coming in with a lot of curiosity and that is why, and I have mentioned this on the podcast before, but in case you haven’t heard it yet, I want to share it again. And I actually want to explain it a [00:11:00] little bit better because the great thing is, as we learn as teachers, right, we realize like, Oh, I’ve been explaining something this way. And someone asks a question and you’re like, Oh, like I should have made that a little bit more clear. So I want to talk about the analogy that I have talked about in the podcast before, but I want to make it even more clear. Okay. of when, whether we want to observe ourselves like a principal coming in to observe with a checklist of, these are the things that I’m looking for, or whether we want to observe like a student teacher, not like a student teacher who’s teaching, but a student teacher who is starting their observations of veteran teachers. And trying to see like, Oh, what is going on? What is it that they’re doing that I like? What is it that they’re doing that I’m going to change up or whatever? But there’s not like drama or anything attached to it, right? And that’s where we want to come at it. We don’t want to come in and observe ourselves like with a checklist. Like, Oh, we better be doing this. They better be doing that. Why am I thinking that? That’s dumb. We don’t want to be doing that. We don’t want to have this judgment. We don’t want to have expectations of what it’s supposed to be like. We really want to come in and just be [00:12:00] curious and also offer a lot of compassion and realize, Oh, this makes so much sense. It makes sense that I’m reacting in this way because I’m thinking this thought or because I’m activated or because there’s this thing in the past that my brain has seen a pattern and it’s repeating that pattern. There’s just so much to it. So, the reason that this section comes first, and the reason why it’s so important, and the reason that it has five chapters while the other sections have only three is because it really is the most important. And really, it is continually weaved throughout the rest of the book, too. In you’ll notice in chapter six and beyond of the book, when, once you read it, that we’re still observing the entire time. And when you get your copy of the book, you’ll see that even as kind of like a staircase where it builds on top of each other, but you’ll see that the other staircase is still the foundation underneath the additional steps, because we’re always going to be observing ourselves. So it’s the most important because we need to be conscious. This is really our awakening. It’s our understanding, okay, I’ve been [00:13:00] unconsciously been my whole life, I haven’t really been noticing what I’ve been thinking. I haven’t been noticing my internal experience. And this is most of us. This is most of us. If we aren’t, if we haven’t been consciously doing any inner work, and some of you might have been already, you might be like, Oh, no, I’m doing this. But really, Most of us, at some point, there’s a point where we weren’t. And then there’s a point where we’re like, okay, something needs to change. I need to do some of this internal work. And we are hoping to kind of bridge that gap in the future, like for future generations, and that’s why we need to do this work on ourselves. And we’ll be talking about that even more in a few weeks when we talk about social, emotional learning on the podcast and how, wouldn’t it be amazing if we had learned some of these things more growing up, but we can start now. Right. And that is what we’re doing. We’re observing ourselves. We’re seeing what is going on. We’re becoming more conscious. Of our thoughts, of our feelings, of when we’re triggered in our nervous system. And we’re not trying to change anything. This is the other thing. When we are observing ourselves, we’re not looking to change. We’re not even looking to immediately fix or be like, Oh, I’m [00:14:00] doing that. I got to switch that right now. Because really what we’re trying to get by observing ourselves is just a deeper understanding. It’s kind of like when a student has a feeling grade. Right? Think about it. We have a kid or, if you’re teaching your child and they’re not understanding, we don’t want to just be like, Oh, well, like she’s doing it wrong. Or he’s doing it wrong. Or why is she not doing that? Right? Or Oh, she just doesn’t get it. We need to just change that grade from an F to an A and put that bandaid on it and she’ll figure it out. Or, you know, Okay. Just kind of move along. We need to really see what is going on with that child. Where is the gap? What is it that needs to be taught differently? Where is it that maybe I wasn’t clear enough? What, what is going on? And, Again, it’s like my mom, for example, hey, mom, if you’re listening, you probably are, love my mom. She has a shoulder injury right now. And if she were just like, I’m going to just put a band aid on it and just keep doing what I’m [00:15:00] doing with it. Or I’m going to just try to fix it without actually understanding what’s going on, right? That wouldn’t work, right? We need to, she’s been going to doctors, she’s been going to physical therapy, they’ve been looking into it for months, it hasn’t been an overnight healing experience. And that’s the same thing in life, our bodies don’t heal overnight, we might need to see multiple doctors, we might need to like, try this one thing, maybe that didn’t work, we need to try a surgery or whatever, right? We can’t just immediately be like, Oh, here’s a quick fix. And try to immediately, as soon as you notice it, just like fix it, fix it, fix it, right? We need to kind of be like, why is this happening? To get the right fix, we need to look at the why. We need to look at what is actually going on with the shoulder. Where is the joint or the bone? And again, I’m not the doctor. I don’t know everything that’s going on. But, we need to look at the why. And that is what we’re doing when we’re becoming an observer. We need to get a holistic picture of what’s going on. And what’s going on with a lot of teachers right now is burnout, right? Okay. I did a poll on Instagram very recently [00:16:00] that showed, I asked a question on my Instagram stories and the funny thing is my Instagram on Educate and Rejuvenate for a while. I didn’t have a lot of time to put a ton of effort into it, so we were just kind of posting stuff. But the last like month, we’ve really been trying to get more intentional with it again. And so if you don’t follow us on Instagram, come on over. Follow, like, comment definitely helps me out. I posted a poll on our stories and I got over 300 votes in this poll, which again, because we’re just kind of starting to put emphasis on it again, that was a lot of people for our Instagram. And I asked the question, like, how often do you feel like you put teaching above yourself? Or it was something like that. And it was 78 percent said teaching. And it was then 3 percent that said, rarely, and in between it was sometimes. So really we have like 78 percent of teachers who feel like almost always they’re putting their job ahead of themselves. And that even, I feel like that’s a more accurate statistic than even the one I cite in the book where the Gallup panel is [00:17:00] 44 percent say they’re burned out all the time. And it might even be, maybe it was the wording change. Maybe they’re like, Oh, I’m not burned out, but Oh, I do put teaching above myself. I’m not sure the exact. But all I know is every time I coach teachers, overwhelm comes up. Stress comes up, like all these different feelings of overwhelm. And so we need to understand that there’s a reason behind that and there are obviously circumstances, right? There are things that have changed. There is COVID. That was a big thing. There are more students that are at varying levels than ever before, and it was that way before COVID, but we’re still like recovering from that. It’s been a years long thing, right? And we’re still looking at the why. Again, all of this work, all this healing, it’s never overnight, right? And that’s what we’re doing. There are also tons of other things like, and this podcast isn’t about that, but there are so many things we can’t control. But in this book, we’re looking at what we can control. And it’s actually a lot more than we think, but we need to start by the observation, by understanding what is [00:18:00] it that I’m doing that might be, Contributing to the problem or what I’m not doing. Like, how am I not taking care of myself enough? How am I not allowing myself to move through the stress cycle? How am I, getting stuck in this activated state because I just go, go, go all the time when I’m never taking that time for myself to rest or recover? Really what we need to do is just understand what is going on for us. Observe like that student teacher really is just like wanting to know what is going on. In the book I mentioned that it’s really like I’m almost pulling back like I am somebody watching what’s going on. I am watching as an outside observer like I have a Diet Coke, I’m at a movie, I’m watching the movie of my life and I’ve got this Diet Coke and this popcorn and then Just sitting back and watching the show, watching all the suspense, watching all the, you know, everything and just seeing what is happening. I want to get a deeper understanding of that. And we want to watch for how you treat yourself, your internal dialogue, your emotions throughout the day, [00:19:00] and which seem the most common, which seemed to be coming up a lot. What patterns are we seeing? What do you do when you get overwhelmed? When you get stressed, when you get sad, how does each, how do each of those emotions. feel in your body? What is the internal experience? One thing I’ve noticed, like a lot of times when I’m coaching is that I ask somebody, how do you feel? And they just start telling me more thoughts. They just start telling me, Oh, I feel like, and they like, again, it’s all the thoughts that are ruminating in their head. And it’s interesting because it shows that we are so in our heads and we aren’t as connected with our internal experience. Again, it makes sense that you would answer a question like that, like, how do you feel? Because we also tend to say things like, these kids are making me so frustrated, or I feel like these kids don’t care, or whatever. And that’s us attributing the circumstance to our feelings, right? Or it is saying that I feel a thought. We’re really getting mixed up. on these different parts of the self coaching model that I talk about on this podcast. So [00:20:00] what we want to do is get really clear, what am I thinking? That’s what’s going on my head. What am I feeling? That is the experience in my body. So let’s talk about that for a sec. So our thoughts, right? Like I mentioned, we tend to think our circumstances are what are causing our feelings, right? But it’s our thoughts, right? So we see things like, I’m so excited that, so for example, I’m going to Maui tomorrow with my husband. And again, not obviously two days before my book comes out as I’m recording this episode. And I might say I’m excited because I’m going to Maui tomorrow, but honestly, it’s not that. So I’m excited that I’m going to get some time to rest and rejuvenate because I’m thinking like, Oh, this is going to be so restful. Or, Oh, I’m going to get to spend some time with my husband. Or, Oh, it’s going to be really cool to have these different experiences. Some people might have very different thoughts about that. Right. And again, there are ones that are more common, right? The people might have more similar thoughts about it, but there is always something in between, right? It’s not. the circumstance that makes us feel a certain way, for example, I could be like, Oh my [00:21:00] gosh, I have so much to do before my book launch, like this is terrible timing for a trip. Now I’m just anxious about going there. Right? That’s an example. Like sometimes like a trip can actually feel overwhelming depending on, Oh, what are the other things? What am I thinking about it? All of that. So in my book, I also mentioned a story of Viktor Frankl and he was at Nazi concentration camps. He is the author of the best selling book Man’s Search for Meaning. And obviously he went through a horrific experience, unlike anything else. So a lot of times we’re like, oh no this like thinking about our thoughts. It doesn’t work. And again, there are times where we need to do other things. That’s why I’m saying it’s not the only thing, but even Viktor Frenkel in Nazi concentration camps, he talks about how it was his perception that was the reason why he was able to. Make sense of this experience while he’s been able to go on and do great things in his life, even after having such horrific times. And one thing that he said is between stimulus and response, there is a space in that space is our power to [00:22:00] choose our response. In our response lies our growth and freedom. But before we can choose, we need to actually notice, right? Cause we’re going to talk about choosing our direction, but we need to notice, right? What kind of thoughts are troubling us? All kinds of cognitive distortions we have. And those are just distorted ways of thinking. I talk about this a bunch in the book, for example, there’s all or nothing thinking everything is amazing or it’s terrible. Oh, I have to do my classroom to the nines or it’s awful. Right. Or saying overgeneralization. That’s things like, Oh, I always mess up. I always mess up during my lessons, which, that’s not true, right? But then your brain is going to look for the evidence that all the times you’re always messing up. Or should a statement, like, I shouldn’t have been doing that. Or the student shouldn’t be doing that. Or I should have done it this way. Like, all of these things that we think that are very distorted, that aren’t always based in reality. I talk about it on the podcast a lot, but again, it’s not those expressions. It’s our perception of it. It’s our [00:23:00] thoughts and our deeper ingrained core beliefs that are what kind of our automatic thoughts are based off of, right? And I talk about this in the book too that it’s not just like these thoughts don’t just come from nowhere. There’s these preconceived core beliefs are, the way our neuropathways are wired, our experiences, that’s where our automatic thoughts come from, right? We can’t control every thought that comes into our mind, right? So when we’re observing, we’re going to notice these thoughts come up, and we didn’t choose all these thoughts, right? We can’t control every thought that comes into our mind, but when we become an observer, we can start to notice the thoughts. We can notice that they are shaping our feelings, actions, and results. And we can decide, wait, do I actually want to keep thinking that thought? Do I want to believe it? We can question it. But if we don’t ever observe, if we don’t ever get conscious, we can’t question it. The next thing we really want to observe and pay attention to, like I mentioned, is our feelings. And we think we feel our feelings, but frequently we do everything we can to try to not feel them. And a quote that I found for the book that is widely attributed to Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud [00:24:00] says, Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways. So basically, we can try to bury our feelings, but they’re still there like zombies. They’ll arise and wreak havoc if they aren’t dealt with. And that’s why it’s so important to allow and process our feelings rather than resist them and try to push them away and bottle them up or have an emotional outburst with them or just head to our pantry and stress eat or doom scroll. We want to really dive in and feel the feelings. We want to dive in and really notice what they are. Like, notice what our feelings are, tap into our body and what we are actually experiencing. Not just everything that’s going on outside of us. We can notice what feeling is there. We can without judgment, without being like, why am I feeling this way? I shouldn’t be feeling this way. Just notice it’s there. It is. Have some radical acceptance. So just be like, yes, I am feeling this feeling. I’m feeling this feeling. anxious right now. I am feeling stressed right now. I am feeling overwhelmed right now. And even just naming that [00:25:00] feeling, like I mentioned, and I mentioned all the research behind it in the book, but just naming that feeling alone helps to, it simmer down. It actually helps to regulate our nervous system. If it’s activated at all, it helps bring in like, Oh, I’m okay. It helps soften it a little bit. And that is why noticing that feeling is so powerful. Breathing it in. What does it feel like in my body? And I talk about so much more of that in the book as well, about how we can move through our feelings, how we can process them, how naming them in different ways is so powerful and understanding what it is we’re feeling. And then the last thing we need to observe and keep in mind is our nervous system, right? Because it’s not only our thoughts. Right? Sometimes it’s our body trying to protect us that is causing us to feel stressed or activated or freeze. We might fight. We might like suddenly have this burst of energy. We might want to run away in flight. We might want to freeze and just be like, why did I just forget everything? When my principal walked in for an observation, we might find ourselves like people pleasing, but again, there’s people pleasing and then there’s fawning, [00:26:00] the trauma response of it, where it’s like, I have to do this to be safe. If I don’t do this, then I’m in danger. And the reason this is, is because our body, our nervous system is always scanning for safety and danger. And even when that perceived threat is just an everyday thing, our body doesn’t know the difference of if we’re actually like being attacked, like actually like we are about to be in a car accident or something, or versus there’s a stressful situation in the classroom or my child is having a meltdown. Our body. Doesn’t know the difference. Either way it’s going to react the same way. So that’s why when our nervous system is activated, it’s just like oh there’s danger. It doesn’t be like oh it’s this kind of danger. It’s just that there’s danger. Right? And even when the stress goes away, for example, let’s say, for example, you have to slam on your brakes and you realize, oh, I’m okay, right? We didn’t get in an accident. We’re safe. Does your body immediately, be like, oh, I’m all good? No, right? You still feel that heightened stress. You still feel that blood rushing through you [00:27:00] and it takes some time for that to simmer down and that’s because the stress and the stressor are different things. They’re not the same thing. And even when the stressor goes away, we need to deal with the stress itself. And I talk about that in the book too. And there are different ways that we can do that through deep breathing, through movement, connection with others. All of these things can help. And as we get better at noticing and regulating our nervous system, building that into our regular routine, we can also see our window of tolerance, like the amount of time that takes to come back to normal. homeostasis to be not activated anymore. We can see that window increase, right? We can handle more. We can deal with more stressors as we befriend our nervous system and get to know it and learn how to regulate it, that can really help us. So this is really the three things we want to observe. We want to observe our nervous system. We want to observe our feelings and our thoughts. And it’s funny, I used to say like, oh, feelings and nervous system, they’re both in the body and the thoughts are in mind, but really our mind is our body, [00:28:00] right? It’s all our internal experience, right? And how it all comes together is really, and we have this nice flowchart in the book, and this was inspired by Leah Davidson, who I had on the podcast a while back. If you have not listened to the episode, Get to Know Your Nervous System with Leah Davidson, you must listen to that episode. It was so good. So I also, use that interview for my book and cited it in there and Leah and all her work. And she showed a flowchart and We had a variation of it in the book that was just very, only very slightly different. But it’s basically when you feel stressed, you check in and like, am I safe? Yes or no. If you’re not safe, definitely get to safety. If you, are safe but you don’t feel safe, you regulate your nervous system before you try to get to safety. process your emotions, right? And the way you’ll know is if you try, because again, if you’re like, I don’t know, I’m going to try to do the model. I’m going to try to process my emotions. You’re not going to be able to do that because you’re not going to be able to use your rational mind or really tap in when you’re super activated. [00:29:00] So once you’re able to regulate yourself, then you’re able to come back and you’re able to, look at your thoughts, look at your feelings. And there’s no right or wrong in that sense. You can pick which just makes the most sense for you in the moment to do that. And no matter what you’re doing, whether you’re using the thought model, you’re observing your thoughts, you’re seeing how your thoughts are driving your feelings, or you’re really just tapping into those feelings and how they feel getting into that internal experience. It’s so important to have tons of self compassion all along the way. It’s so easy to beat ourselves up, especially with the self coaching model. I feel like, why can’t I just think differently? It’s me. Hi, I’m the problem. It’s me. And, sometimes we are, but that’s okay. That’s just what we learn from it and say, Oh, that’s interesting. Do I want to keep that thought? Remember that the way you’re thinking right now makes sense. It’s coming from somewhere and change isn’t going to happen overnight. It took however long. to wire your neural pathways the way they’re currently wired. And it’s going to take time to rewire them again, but you’re [00:30:00] also going to see progress along the way. And even those who’ve been in the club with us for a few months, they do see that progress. It just takes time. It’s always going to take time. It’s not this thing that’s meant to be overnight. In fact, it’s a thing that’s really meant to be our whole lives, right? For us to continue learning and growing and getting to know ourselves and getting to know how we can, support others and support ourselves and contribute to this world and teach the kids and take care of ourselves too. That’s really what all this is about. And that’s why we’re doing this. It’s because yes, we love teaching. And that’s why I mentioned like a few teaching examples in this, but really a lot of this book, it’s more about you and taking care of yourself. And it’s because that really is that missing piece that educate where, yes, we’re educating. We’re not stopping that. We’re teaching the kids. We’re helping the kids. We’re helping our colleagues. We’re, you know, want to have other relationships in our life and all that. But we also need to rejuvenate ourselves. That is often the missing piece that I see for educators. That’s why teacher burnout is at an all time high. And that’s why this [00:31:00] work is so important. And so I hope that you will Snag a copy of educate and rejuvenate if you haven’t already Speaker 2: So that, my friend, is step one of the Inside-Out Teacher Framework. And like I probably explained in that episode, it is the most important step of the framework and the one we continue to use and layer on top with the next two steps, choose and align. We’re going to be talking about choose in the next episode in this series. And here’s a taste of what’s coming with that. If you ever feel like you’re putting your students, your family, um, your spouse, everybody ahead of yourself, again, we care about those people so much, right? We’re always going to. But if you feel like you’re always last on the list, if you feel like you are just burned out by the end of the day because you’re giving and giving and giving and not finding that time to refuel yourself, you likely are not doing this second step of the framework where you choose with intention. Because otherwise, everything else around us, all those external circumstances, all those things that everybody else needs or even that we just think they need, are going [00:32:00] to take over, and that is where we need to choose with intention. What do you really want? For, yes, everybody else around you, but also for yourself. We’ll get into that next week, so make sure you hit like, subscribe. Um, I highly recommend if you are on Apple or Spotify, subscribe on YouTube. And I know, you might be like, “I love audio.” I love audio, too, but even with YouTube, you can listen, but then you can still kind of watch, too. Like, maybe you’re doing your dishes and you have your phone out and you can kind of peek at it. We are going to be doing some really fun things with the visuals as we relaunch the podcast. And so I highly recommend subscribing on YouTube if you’re not already. But again, we will still, um, be on all the audio platforms. So check it, check us, check it out next week if you’re listening to this live. Otherwise, you might even be able to jump right into the next episode in this series, I’ll see you there Thank you for joining me on educate and rejuvenate the podcast today. If you love what you heard in this episode, be sure to hit subscribe. So you don’t miss the next one. And if you’re hungry for even more, be sure to check [00:33:00] out the book that I wrote. It’s called educate and rejuvenate a three step guide to revitalize your teaching, renew your spirit, And reignite your passion for life. It takes everything you learn here on the podcast and that I teach our members inside the educate and rejuvenate club into a guidebook. You can refer to again and again, one of our early readers said it was like clarity for her brain. Plus it’s not only a book with your purchase, you’ll get a full. PDF guide with exercises and links to videos and more so that you can not only consume, but apply everything that you learn. If you’re ready to make, educate and rejuvenate, not just a podcast you passively listen to, but a lifestyle that you put into action, it’s time to grab your copy on Amazon today or head to educate and rejuvenate.com/book to read the first chapter and the introduction today.