Skills from the Classroom I Use Often in My Business

Transitioning out of Being in Education was More Interesting Than I Thought

Hello, lovelies and more,

Glad to have you on this journey with me. I am learning to love it a little more each day and accept life more for the blessings that they are. As Anna Corina tells Ian throughout Season 1 of The Merna Annals, “Count blessings, not riches.”

Can one be the other? Sure! I think so. I would rather the blessings at this point in my life. I have hardly ever been rich by most societal standards, but a richness has been in my life unlike any other. As much as we have our differences, and as much as I am estranged from my mother these days, both of my parents did well to instill a value of learning into all of their children. It doesn’t matter if it was book smarts, life smarts, street smarts, business smarts, all the other types of smarts people can be—or more importantly, as they emphasized—a combination of somewhere in between that benefits where you want to go in your life. I was the odd child out. I was very book smart early on—unlike my brothers, who were latchkey kids. That’s all my parents knew how to raise. “Get out of the house and out of my hair” for me often involved bike rides to the library. Not always to go get muddy at the river or skin my knees in an alley way.

So, I guess it makes sense then that I became a teacher. However, so much of my book and teacher smarts rolled right on into my business smarts. What are some skills from the classroom I use that benefit my business?

Thank you to a former student, Cleo, for supplying the picture. Creative Writing I and II. Circa 2014? Ten years ago… wow. As Cleo said when she sent the picture, “You were so done with our ____.” And yet those are the moments I miss most, kiddo… ANYWHO. On the with show!

1.) All the Teach Ever Does is Plan Things Plan Things Plan Things

Focus on those scores and grades
How to cross the gaps
PLAN IT PLAN IT PLAN IT

Kudos if you have “Practice” from Swan Princess playing in your head right now. I never thought in a million years that so much data—so many numbers and spreadsheets—would have driven me to do what I did in the classroom for almost fifteen years. That’s legit almost half of my life. I flunked math. HARD. The second irony in all of this? OMG Do I plan. OMG Do I track my numbers in my business. Holy crap—the spreadsheets. I’m trying to get back to where I can manage my business from a single planner again. I SWEAR! lol

All of my knowledge of how to make goals based around that planning and to serve that planning has also been a huge help. How to write SMART goals and how to scaffold them for over a couple of hundred kids a year has been interesting. Taking that energy and reclaiming it has been just as interesting and just as mental health repairing as it sounds. I loved teaching. It taught me so much about organizing myself for the service and sake of others. I could not imagine having to learn that skill for the first time while also starting my business. I’m learning a ton of new ways that build on the blocks of knowledge I have, for sure! I’ve also learned the importance of K12 education’s greatest flaw.

The old adage for most teachers in the US has been OVERPLAN AND OVERDELIVER. Dude. That’s called burnout. That’s called I don’t want to take more pills that give me side effects. That’s call there isn’t enough FMLA and unpaid time off in the world to fix that stress. Instead, I am taking the notion to underplan and overdeliver to heart more and more and more.

2.) MS Office Certified, Google Suite Certified, Zoom Educator Certified—OMG How Many Certifications DO You have?

Because of K12’s professional development requirements to keep my certifications in five states and internationally, that means a lot of certifications have come my way over the years. They’re just pieces of paper that claim I can do a certain thing. I am grateful more so for the skills gained in them that I use daily. I forget half of the time how many people don’t really care about those sheets of paper, too. What do they care about? I say to my editing clients, “Thank you for trusting me with your book baby,” as often as I do for a reason. Certification or not. You are taking a risk on me.

Given the current state of K12, I have seen some districts struggling so much to fill teacher roles with bodies that the certifications there also no longer matter as they once did. I encourage you to do what you love, therefore, as part of the services end you provide in your business. I happen to have tons and tons and tons and tons of practice not only editing and proofreading things of various genres for professional authors and writers thanks to doing it as a bonus job alongside teaching, but teaching itself has given me so many SOFT Skills I can’t even begin to categorize under a certification to begin with, too. I am a hermit by nature because I was legit told as a child by my parents, “You are a female. You are to be seen, not heard, preferably not seen when other people are around.” That’s the kind of old school things I had to kick from my system while being a teacher. I had to become comfortable in my skin in front of a room of the world’s most judgmental people. TEENAGERS. Nope, I apparently did not learn that lesson in high school, and I worked five jobs during college to keep a roof over my head.

3.) Teaching taught me so much about just being a leader—even on the bad days

I don’t like being the leader at the front of the classroom. However, I preferred to sit down among my students facilitate their learning. Consider it more akin to teaching as if you are a bowling alley with bumper pads in your lesson. There’s territories you’re not planning to touch, but you know the kids know your out of bounds and what is off limits.

You guessed it. I like to coach that way, too. I’ll ask you twenty questions and have you figure out the answer on your own in a Socratic, discovery learning way. Why? It sticks. You own it. Authenticity. So on. So forth. Things my students took for granted are what many of my adult coaching clients crave.

4.) What happens in the teachers’ lounge and cafeteria (other peoples businesses) is really none of my business!

I quickly became the teacher who students would go to for nap time during lunch, and boy did I prefer that over the caddy drama that went on in the teachers’ lounge. Some adults truly never advanced in maturity past high school in other ways, and they often liked to become admin or work right alongside—and they all loved the teachers’ lounge. My mindset then was not to let other adults’ opinions poison how I felt about the students when they were in my classroom. Relearning to apply that to my business has been a true wake up call.

This is why I say I only really look at my numbers in analytics and things. I compare to where I was x timeframe ago to see what I did that worked for me. It’s all part of the experience and experimentation of growing a business. Like a classroom does with benchmarks, you have to check in your business in the same way.

5.) Course Building

I think this one was an assumed notion, lol. I am slowly taking a lot of what I gathered over 15 years or more of being a teacher and reformulating it for my coaching clients. More importantly, I know so much about building courses from multiple perspectives and modalities and for this reason and for that reason. Why? Well, there is that professional development and overtrained thing I mentioned above. On the other hand, I had to learn how to adapt anything I planned to upwards of 150+ IEPs and 504s each school year. You read that right. Most of my students were assigned to me for one of two reasons: they do not express themselves well verbally or in writing OR they were grades and grades and grades behind in reading and writing levels. Therefore, I would always have the most modifications and adjustments to make on the fly in my department. Teachers whom work with special education populations make so many more micro decisions in a day — and you can see where that can lead to exhaustion. However, it means that in course building, I know the importance of flexibility for the self and others.

So many of you following me are fellow teachers. How many of you have skills that can take you out of the classroom and into another career that you built to feed your soul and your family as much as it serves others?

More than you think.

Welcome back to school, students and parents. Please take care of you in the coming months. You have been worth it from the beginning.

Books 1 and 2 file updates and the new version of Book 3 coming soon!