Goal Banger e1

A former teacher, Laurieanne Poirier, quit her job and is now exploring entrepreneurship. She plans to homeschool her daughter and create e-courses. She feels a surge of panic when reminded of her former job. Despite having experience with career changes, she feels ill-prepared and experiences imposter syndrome. She starts a podcast to document her journey. Laurieanne encourages listeners to face fear and take the next steps towards their goals. She sets her own goals, like recording podcast episodes and brainstorming ideas for an email list. She challenges listeners to identify three small steps towards their own goals. So I got a text today from a former colleague. It was sent at 1015 a.m. and it said, missing you at the staff meeting with a crazy faced emoji. I'm gonna be honest, it actually sent a surge of panic through my body. Not because I was supposed to be at said staff meeting and it dropped the ball, but because I quit my job two months ago. And this is the first reality-inducing reminder that I'm not just on vacation, I really quit my job. And now life is moving on without me. Welcome to the premiere episode of the Goal Banger podcast. I'm your host Laurieanne Poirier, former school teacher who decided to throw caution to the wind and launch a new enterprise of her own, documenting the process by banging on one micro goal at a time. If you've got some big goals you want to break down and want to follow the process, I'd love for you to join me. So let me back up a minute and fill you in. My name is Laurieanne Poirier and I have been a teacher at an amazing little private school in Kelowna, BC for the last five years. I started out as a teacher's aide and teaching French to grade five and six students and middle school for a couple of years before being given my own classroom to teach a split class of darling grade three and four students. The best possible class any teacher could ever ask for in my opinion. And then I switched it up a tiny bit the next year by teaching grades two and three. Last year I made the jump into middle and high school and taught humanities subjects to grade seven, eight, nine, and ten students. And it was an amazing five years. I loved my co-workers, my students, and their parents. And I grew enormously both personally and professionally as a result. But at age 52, yes you heard that right, I'm 52, not a twenty-something year old five years into her job, I just found that the demands of a teaching career were more than I was willing to commit. With two teenagers at home, a husband, I had to fit in between unit plans, grading, report cards, and education meetings, not to mention that feeling that time is sprinting by as fast as it has been. I mean sometimes it leaves my head spinning how fast it moves. So I made the very difficult decision to step out of the rat race and focus on what matters the most to me. My last official day was the 30th of June 2023, which just happens to coincide with the start of summer break. So the last almost two months have been pretty standard for my summers as a teacher. Catching up on housework, catching up with friends and family, camping here and there, getting on my bike for some long bike rides, and trying to establish my long-neglected gym routine. But now all the other teachers are back at school. They're having staff meetings, decorating their classrooms, outlining the next ten months. And I'm, well, this is where the reality hits with a surge of panic. Because you see, I didn't quit with no backup plan whatsoever. I'm planning to homeschool my daughter this year, and I have this vague vision of transitioning into entrepreneurship. Maybe taking my teaching skills online and creating some e-courses. I mean the experts make it sound so easy, so profitable, so fulfilling. But aside from reading numerous books, listening to even more podcasts, and indulging in a big-ticket course, I have done little to move myself into my dream. To make that leap over the giant chasm between where I am right now and where I want to be. That text this morning became a little bit of a wake-up call. Time is moving on. People are being productive, but what am I doing? Now to be clear, this is not the first career change I've experienced in my life. I mean, I'm a Gen Xer, and as you're probably aware, we are the generation that first said, what? One career for the rest of my life? One job to rule them all? Pshaw! So after getting my degree at university, I had a stint as an ESL teacher in Korea before switching gears to become a freelance journalist for many years. After getting married and starting a family, I retired from that to raise my kids and even homeschooled then for a few years. When that wasn't working for us anymore, and my kids were enrolled in school, I, well, basically followed them there. When a job opened up at their school, it, well, it seemed like a no-brainer. Transitioning from a whole school family to an everyone-at-school family. But despite my plentiful experience making career changes, today left me feeling a tiny bit ill-prepared. Even with all the notes that I've made on possibilities and techniques and really useful tips for becoming an e-course entrepreneur, I felt more like a dropout schoolteacher than a burgeoning entrepreneur. I mean, what does an entrepreneur even feel like? I don't know, but I'm pretty sure it isn't like this. There's actually a phrase for what I felt. It's imposter syndrome. You've probably heard of it. It's that feeling where you're pretending to be something that you really aren't. In my case, I would say that it was a feeling of being a small, humble, clueless, wannabe success who just talks big but really has no clue about what her next step is. Ever feel that way? And the voices in my head were yelling at me. What kind of 52-year-old throws away a perfectly good, respectable, solid, and stable job with fair pay and benefits, no less, to start this intangible career that may or may not depend more on luck than skill or else on skills that you will never have? What kind of example are you setting for your children or even your former students? And when will you even make your first dollar? Who is even going to want to buy anything that you have to sell online? Okay, I'm starting to scare myself all over again just saying the words. Does anyone else out there ever feel this way? Or are you more inclined to do the sensible and rational thing and keep the status quo? I know the big names that I follow faithfully all say they started out feeling the same way, but I find that so hard to believe today as they sit on top of so much success. And it's so hard to envision little me reaching their level someday, especially starting at the age of 52. Come on! And that's largely why I'm starting this podcast. This podcast is less the actual thing that I'm going to do next and more just an attempt to chronicle my journey to get to the actual thing. I don't know right now if this will be a journey into wild success or dismal failure, but I guess either way it's going to be a story. Perhaps you're in a similar boat, hovering somewhere around the midlife portion of your life, unhappy in your work situation and longing for something new, whether to free up your time or make more money or just be your own boss for a change. You're feeling called to something different. You feel it inside, but you're afraid. Afraid it won't work out and you'll lose everything you already have. Afraid you'll end up looking foolish for chasing such wild dreams. Or maybe you're not afraid, but you just don't know the next steps that you should take. Well, if you want to follow someone vicariously as they try it, I'm your girl. I've already quit my job, been replaced, and I'm about to watch the new school year unfold without me. So my first little piece of homework that I'm giving myself for this week is to work on my mindset. Not, I might add, to punch fear in the face. That expression always infuriates me because, I mean, our brains default to fear in order to protect us, to warn us to be careful, and fear saves us from, you know, standing too close to a dangerous cliff. It encourages us to seek safety in an emergency or to keep ourselves alive. So I need to change the way that I deal with that fear. Instead of letting fear paralyze me or encourage me to give up and retreat to a safe place, like my former job, I will work with my fear to move ahead. In other words, I will turn the fear around to work for my good, reminding myself that what I need to be afraid of is not moving forward, not taking the next steps. Instead of fear keeping me where I am because I'm afraid to move forward and fail, I will use that same fear to propel me forward because if I don't take the next steps, then I will fail. Does that make sense? It makes sense in my head, but I don't know if it came out exactly right. Basically, there is a fear that is there sitting with me, and that fear can hold me back from trying, afraid that I will fail, or it will push me forward for the same reason. Fear is there in both scenarios, but one version of it holds us back and the other version moves us forward. You get to choose the version. Make the fear work for you, not against you, you see? So that first step is to harness my fear and make it work for me and not against me. So in doing that, I'm going to make a little list of first steps that I can do to move forward. The first one is to record my very first podcast episode. And so if you're listening to this, then I have a big fat check mark beside that item. Yay! High five! The second step is to make an idea list of four more podcasts that I can record. I've got a fancy notebook ready just for that, but haven't yet written anything down in it. Tune in next week to find out if I moved ahead on that. And one more piece of homework I will challenge myself with is to brainstorm some ideas that I could use to create an email list. That's something I've heard is a must-have when you're just starting out in your own business. So I want to get that going and I'll share more about that topic another time. But how about you? What are three small things that you can do that will move you closer to your goal? Maybe you're happy with your job and don't like the idea of working on your own, and that's okay. I know it's not for everyone, but there is probably something that you've been wanting to do for a long time that seems too big to start. Maybe you just haven't figured out those first few steps. Maybe you would like to lose some weight. Maybe you'd like to run a marathon or write a memoir of your life. Maybe you'd like to travel to a place far away on the other side of the globe that you've never been to, and maybe you've never even left the town you grew up in before. So it can feel so big and impossible, but it doesn't have to be. I want you to make your own list of just three small things that you can do this week that will move you closer to your dream goal. Maybe it's just pricing tickets to that faraway place. Maybe it's researching potential piano players so that you can take lessons. Perhaps it's as simple as voicing that goal to someone else, to say it out loud just like I did, to make it real by giving a voice to it. Your goal right now does not need to be to jump on the next plane to the other side of the world. I'm not challenging you to jump across a scary chasm, but to build a bridge across it, one micro goal at a time. I'd love for you to check in next week, see how I'm doing, and I'd love to also know how you are doing too. I'd really love to bang away on our goals together. I am so excited about this adventure, and I'm glad that you joined me today, and I sure hope that I'm back next week. Until then, could you do me one small favor? Could you, very sweetly, share this podcast with someone else that you know who has a big goal to work on, and could maybe use a little bit of support along the way? After all, you know what they say, the more the merrier. Well, that's all for today. Thanks for joining me, and I hope that we can meet again next week. In the meantime, keep banging on your goals.