29. The pressures of running a teacher business | BONUS Listener Q&A

If your teacher business life feels like a pressure cooker, here's the first question we need to find clarity on in order to fix it.

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Transcript

[00:00:00] I am back with another bonus episode. That means a listener asked a juicy question, and I'm here to share my answer.

[00:00:35] Today's question is about dealing with pressure. I want to send a virtual hug out to this listener because there are days where running a teacher business does make us feel like we are living inside a pressure cooker. And I just wanna send you the biggest deep breath because we have all been in these seasons, and I think when you're feeling the pressure rising, it's important to go on a walk and move your body

[00:01:04] and close your eyes and ask yourself some questions. So if I was on the treadmill next to you at the gym, I would ask you where is the pressure coming from? Is it external pressure or is it internal pressure? And so internal pressure might be that your self-worth is tied up in your TPT dashboard and that if you don't see it trending up or you don't make more than you made last year, you feel like a failure, or you feel that starting your business wasn't the right move, or you feel you're not cut out for business life and it's affecting your identity and your self worth.

[00:01:49] Is this pressure you're feeling coming from you? Or is this pressure coming from an external force? Is this pressure coming from the comparisonitis of social media? Is it coming from other people in your mastermind circle who are moving faster or reaching goals that you've been trying to reach, or speaking in spaces that you wanna be in and achieving goals that you feel stuck in trying to achieve yourself?

[00:02:23] And I think that finding the clarity on where the pressure is coming from goes a long way in deciding what the first step is to get out of it. Another way external pressure could look, could be financial pressure. Some of us are just running a side hustle business just to see what is possible and what can happen.

[00:02:46] Just sharing our resources with the world and knowing that we helped one teacher, feels good. Sharing resources and having a passive income stream and just seeing what happens, feels good. Making marketing content when we feel called to and hoping it reaches the right people, feels good. Those situations don't sound like a pressure cooker.

[00:03:13] In other seasons, we may have left our classroom life and we need this teacher business to match that salary. We might still need the same take home pay we had in that previous job and we need to make this work. We need to make enough money this month to put food on the table and to pay our mortgage. And so identifying the specific pressure and where it originates from helps us understand how to solve the problem.

[00:03:48] And a huge permission slip if it is the financial pressure that is creating this pressure cooker situation, you can't create and solve problems for teachers in this heightened state of stress where you feel concerned with your own safety and your own ability to provide and handle your four walls. And so there are so many ways to make the math, math and to make money

[00:04:17] and if you feel pressure for your TPT store alone to make the money you need, you have permission to make that number happen in any way you need to. And that might mean relieving some of the pressure by getting a side job somewhere else. That might mean working a few hours in the morning in an in-person location, getting some socialization and some vitamin D and a guaranteed paycheck.

[00:04:46] And then growing your business in the afternoon and getting that creative fix where you are the boss and you're in charge. It might mean splitting up your eggs in different baskets in a different way than you have in the past, because there are seasons of life where we need our business to be different roles, and it's okay to meet your needs

[00:05:08] in a different way than how you did last year and the year before. And so look within if you're feeling this pressure and try to figure out if that pressure is coming from you, if that pressure is coming from an external force. I think finding that clarity is a great first step.

[00:05:25] And then if you have someone in your circle who knows your situation really well, that you can trust, you can bring that clarity to them and ask them for help in finding the best next step. And if I'm the right person to have a coffee chat with, I'll share my link in the show notes of this episode, but sometimes I need to know where the pressure is coming from first before another thought partner can come in and help me.

[00:05:49] So that's a very short answer to a very deep question, but I hope that it's given you a little bit of insight into where that pressure is coming from.