The Extraordinary Educators Podcast
Best practices, tips, and stories to help you be extraordinary in your classroom and beyond, featuring Curriculum Associates' Director of the Educator Community Sari Laberis.
The Extraordinary Educators Podcast
Balancing Act: Insights into Juggling Work, Family and Personal Wellness with Emily McCann and Dave Dubois
Ever found yourself pondering the secret to balancing work and family life? Consider this episode your guide! We're thrilled to welcome Emily McCann, Senior Vice President of Marketing at Curriculum Associates, and Dave Dubois, Senior Director of Business Transformation at Curriculum Associates, to share their firsthand experiences. These two busy bees manage to keep it together, with Emily juggling four kids and pets in her bustling home, and Dave nurturing his growing family. Hear their secrets on setting boundaries, creating family moments, and achieving long-term balance.
Now, we all know that it's not just about the work-life balance, right? It's also about carving out time for self-care amid the hustle. Dave and Emily, with our co-hosts Danielle and Sari, elaborate on this in the second part of our episode. They cover strategies they use to make time for themselves, ranging from physical activity to focusing on gratitude through "Joy Jars"! It's not just about compartmentalizing your professional and personal lives, but ensuring you have the time to recharge and find joy, even in the busiest of schedules. So buckle up for an insightful, heartfelt conversation on work, life, and the happiness that lies within the balance.
Visit CurriculumAssociates.com/blog/strategies-for-juggling-work-life-balance-as-a-teacher-and-parent to read Emily's blog post! Follow us on Twitter at @CurriculumAssoc and Instagram at @MyiReady, and email ExtraordinaryEducators@cainc.com to contact us with feedback, questions, or if you want to be a guest!
Curriculum Associates presents The Extraordinary Educators Podcast with hosts Danielle Sullivan and Sari Laberis your tips, best practices and successes to improve your teaching and leadership and drive student growth and learning. We're here for you.
Danielle Sullivan:Hi, this is Danielle and welcome to The Extraordinary Educators Podcast.
Sari Laberis:Hey everyone, it's Sari, and this week we are joined by two fabulous guests Emily McCann, who is the Senior VP of Marketing at Curriculum Associates, and Dave Dubois, who is the Senior Director of Business Transformation at Curriculum Associates.
Danielle Sullivan:And we had such a great time talking about life, not just work and work-life, balance and joy and all of these wonderful things. I hope that when you listen to this, you're going to see that there is a whole world out there besides work right?
Sari Laberis:Yes, absolutely, and we talked a lot about families and juggling working whether that's teaching or what we do with having children and a partner. But no matter your situation, hopefully you can find this useful with some best practices and strategies to kind of manage I don't know if we'd call it the balance, but just juggling it all and trying to figure out what to prioritize when. So here is our conversation with Em and Dave. Em and Dave, thank you so much for joining us today. We are so happy you're here.
Dave Dubois:Pleasure to be here.
Sari Laberis:Yes, thank you. So, Em, you recently wrote a blog about kind of juggling being a working mom, and so today we would love to just dive into some of those best practices that you mentioned, but before we do that, we would love to hear you tell our listeners about your home life. Who are you at home, is it in your family, and what home life is like.
Emily McCann:Yeah, absolutely so. I am proudly married to a US history teacher and coach and admissions officer and we have four children 19 year old, twin 17 year olds, 12 year old two dogs, a micro or dwarf hamster and seven fish. So those are all the living things. We have one plant, but I think it may have died.
Danielle Sullivan:There's no partridge in a pear tree.
Emily McCann:There's no partridge in a pear tree, no.
Sari Laberis:Awesome. Thanks so much for sharing about your full house there. Yeah, dave, what about you?
Dave Dubois:Yeah, thanks. So I am married, my wife is a saleswoman with LinkedIn, so she sells software, and we have two kids at the moment expecting a third. So I have a four year old almost five year old daughter and a two year old son and we're expecting in September and then, beyond that, we have one dog, and that's it for animals, but, and then a few house plants as well.
Danielle Sullivan:And then Sarah, since we're talking about family, why don't you describe your family? Thank you.
Sari Laberis:So I am married to an investment banker and we have two daughters who are three and one no animals, because we're waiting until they ask and then are old enough to help take care of them.
Emily McCann:It's a good strategy by the way they will ask and they will promise to take care of them, and they will not.
Sari Laberis:I'm fully prepared for that. We're not quite ready yet.
Danielle Sullivan:Right. So for me I don't have kids, but I do have a dog, who is she's something else, and I am married to my wife Haley, and she also. She actually works for curriculum associates, so it's been very interesting because I feel like I have a lot of other projects as my babies. Sounds weird, that weird. That sounds weird.
Sari Laberis:No, it just means that you care about what you do.
Danielle Sullivan:Yeah, there's a lot of things that I care about and I get to borrow some nieces and nephews too, so I want to know how do you set boundaries and with family and work and making sure that you are still showing up for both?
Emily McCann:Yeah, great question. It is not something I have done regularly all my life. It's something I've really learned how to do, and I will give my brother actually credit for some of the best advice I've ever received, which is it's important to strive for balance, but not every day. Strive for balance over the longer term, because if you don't achieve balance every day like one, that's pretty normal in life, I think what I've learned about setting boundaries is that there is, you know, you've got to recharge a battery, just like you know, an iPhone or any device that you use, like you've got to figure out how to get your fuel source back so that you can be present for people, whether that's your family or the people you work with.
Emily McCann:And for me, I get so much juice from spending time with my kids.
Emily McCann:I get so much juice from coaching my kids, and so what I do is I make sure that I'm creating time to do that, so my evenings will be devoted to that on a regular basis, and I find that it's important for me to not have my devices around when I'm hanging out with my kids, because it just means that I'm listening to them.
Emily McCann:And as your kids get older which is a little different than Sarah, you and Dave but as your kids get older, they want you to be there for them at very specific times that work for them. So it is not that you can say, hey, let me just finish up three hours of work and then I'll come talk to you about the thing you tapped me on the shoulder when you got home from school. They want to talk about that now and it might be that later. That moment's passed. So try to be very, very thoughtful about how I am cordoning off time to be with them. At the moment they need it. Working from home allows for that. It's actually helped me set better boundaries to be able to spend time with my family.
Sari Laberis:Thank you so much for sharing that. I think it's so much easier said than done, right? Because you could say, oh, I'm going to be there when they ask, but it's you can get into the whole of, like I'm just going to finish this one email. But you're right, it's like my three year old doesn't even remember what she wanted to tell me, if I, if I wait two seconds. So you know, setting the device is so important and I try to do the same thing. You know, when they come home from school to when they go to bed, I don't have my phone. And, danielle, do you want to share what you do on the weekend with the drawer, because I think our listeners appreciate that?
Danielle Sullivan:Yes, I have, and I'm about to go on a week vacation where my phone will be off and in a safe, so I have limited control when it comes to checking work emails on the weekend. So I just take my phone and I shove it in a box. We have a note, we have a tech box. So if I want a full day, I just put the phone in the box and there you go. And it's crazy because you're out and about and you're like wait a second, I don't have my phone. Well, how did I do it when I was the first 25 years of my life? That's really important. So, dave, how do you set boundaries and manage the whole work and home life?
Dave Dubois:Yeah, thanks, it's very hard, I would say the work from home thing for me is made it a little bit more challenging because there's blurred lines, I think, just all over the place. It's in the last year, intentional unless I'm intentional about setting those boundaries they just you can't multitask. I used to think multitasking was like the way to do things and I've learned to just really invert that thinking where it's all about focus and having set times for things. So I came from a career prior to CA where I was in consulting and I would travel, I would physically go to a client location and I would work from Monday to Thursday and then I'd come home and it was sort of the boundaries were very clear at that point. It's like work really hard Monday to Thursday, go home and be around for the Friday and the weekend, where here it's just blurred lines all over the place. So for me it's about, I guess, the stage that my kids are in. They need us in the mornings and in the evenings. My kids go to daycare during the day and my wife and I both work, so it's really trying to find ability to recharge myself and to be present when they are around, because they need you.
Dave Dubois:In the evenings and in the mornings my wife and I I guess to make it a little bit tactical we have a shared calendar that everything goes on and we're pretty good about respecting if someone wants to go do an activity or something. As long as it's on the calendar, we respect that and a willingness to jump in and share responsibilities for the kids. In the evenings. We've put in place this Wednesday night thing where every other Wednesday is like a girls night and a guys night, so my wife will go with her girlfriends on a Wednesday and then the next Wednesday I try to get together with a few guys and it works, I guess, just because it's planned and it's sort of guilt-free time to recharge.
Dave Dubois:The other thing I'll the other hack I'll say is and I know Siri appreciates this is the Peloton. I just like for me. If I can get a 20 minute ride on the Peloton I'll come out the other side a new person Like my. Mind is clear. I just sometimes I just need that, I guess, that physical exertion and the sweat, so that helps and with working from home there's more flexibility to squeeze that in between a meeting or something and that's it's just being mindful of when you need that and being able to give yourself that space.
Sari Laberis:Thanks so much, dave, and that's a perfect segue to our next question. So, em, in the blog you also talked about finding the thing that brings you joy. I think you know ideally everyone, everyone knows what brings them joy and they want to do that thing. But how can you actually ensure that you are doing the thing that brings you joy when you're, when you're so busy with both work and your responsibilities at home?
Emily McCann:Yeah, it's a great question and something I didn't struggle with quite as much as I thought I might when I had kids, because I saw my parents model this so beautifully and the thing that brought my parents joy when we were growing up was running, and, interestingly, they would always say to me it's very important for us to create time to go for this run. Sometimes I would go with them if I felt like I wanted to, I don't know, feel like an adult, or sometimes they would go by themselves, but they said this is my time to recharge so I can be fully present for you, and I watched that growing up and I saw the joy that it brought them. It brought me joy as well, and so, as an adult, I was actually able to communicate really clearly to my husband like I need this, I need this to be the best for you, I need this to be the best for our kids, and if you give me this 30 minutes, everybody's gonna feel the dividends of it in space. So so I was just very, very intentional about it and obviously you have to remain somewhat flexible. Things come up, you have to be dynamic, but I learned how to communicate that really, really clearly, and so it's been a really exciting journey for me as a runner.
Emily McCann:It's allowed me, it's probably when I do my best. Thinking, my best writing happens when I run, and so it becomes really a place of solitude and and a place to recharge. But you do have to clearly communicate your need for that and you have to be vigilant about it. And my poor kids, like I think we brought one of those triple jogging strollers, like there were times where I was like, okay, nobody's here to walk, watch you, you are coming with me. And so we have all talk often about these memories of just rolling around the neighborhood in what really was the Mack truck of strollers, just to get out and find that joy.
Danielle Sullivan:And what I like the most about what you shared is that your parents modeled it for you too, and now you are also modeling that for your children of how important it is to take the time.
Danielle Sullivan:I mean, for me my thing's not running. You'll see me running if I'm being chased by a bear as much as I'll be running. But I do like to go for bike rides and also I have a morning routine where I get up and I meditate and journal and if I don't do that then my whole day is off. So it's important no matter if you have children, if you have a demanding job, if just all of it to find something that does refill your cup. So I know, dave, you talked about the Pelotem. Is there anything else that you can think about that is helping you? I guess joy slash filling up your own cup to be able to go up.
Dave Dubois:Yeah, I love how you said the morning routine, danielle. So I'm a morning person as well and when I think about what finds you joy, or what finds me joy, it's being in the space that you are. So I appreciate throughout the day and actually, like I've tried a little bit of meditation I'm not as diligent about it, but it does help. If I can just get that time and space to be reflective in the mornings, like I'll have my cup of coffee and I'll just be thinking about how grateful I am for the things that I have around me and the people I have around me, it just puts me in a much better place. So it's beyond the workouts and just being able to go and get the things that you need to be present and be yourself. I think gratitude and tapping into gratitude is just so important, and then that in and of itself brings me joy in the rest of the day.
Danielle Sullivan:So I do want to say one thing. That's what you just made me think of, what you just said about joy and gratitude, because we reference Brené Brown's research a lot in the podcast. I love Dr Brené Brown's research and joy is actually one of the most vulnerable emotions that you can experience, and a lot of people. She calls it foreboding joy, because when people get into that I mean all of you are parents I'm sure you've looked at your child sleeping and you're so filled with love and joy and then all of a sudden you're like what if they die in their sleep? Like that's what our brains do.
Danielle Sullivan:So that's called foreboding joy. But what she found in her research people who can get into a gratitude practice stop that from happening. So if you're looking over at your child being like I love you so much You're going to die, I'm really grateful for you. So that kind of helps disrupt that. So it's interesting that the gratitude plus the joy. Just thought that'd be a fun research fact on this podcast.
Sari Laberis:Thanks for sharing, danielle. I think too, for our listeners, it's often hard. You think, oh well, I get up when it's dark out. I go to school all day. I'm so tired when I come home. So you just have to find that the thing that works for you.
Sari Laberis:For me, when I was in the classroom, it was bringing my workout clothes to school. I would change at school and then I was ready to go, because if I came home I would sit on the couch and not get up or even lay in my bed and go to sleep at like 5 PM or find someone to hold you accountable. We also, speaking of gratitude, in our teacher workroom we had chart paper and every day we would write one thing that we were grateful for, and of course there are some days you didn't do it. But just writing it down forces you to actually do it, and then you get to read what your colleagues are grateful for. So you can find different systems and ways that work. But I think at the end of the day, we all have to do that thing Because, like Danielle said, you got to fill your cup because we know we can't pour from an empty one.
Emily McCann:I have one more idea that we just it's a new tradition we started about a year ago and we essentially call it Georgia and it's on our kitchen window sill and there's a bunch of slips of paper next to it and every time something joyful happens in one of our six people's lives I have not talked to the dogs about this or the blood cancer, so they are not currently included or contemplated in the joy jar, but every time something joyful happens we just write it down and we write down both what happened and the emotions that it elicited for us and we throw it in the jar.
Emily McCann:And what we do on New Year's Eve is we go through that joy jar and it's this wonderful journey of really positive moments throughout the year which is a form of gratitude and it's a form of reveling in the moment, recognizing when something has brought you either bridal or unbridled joy. So that's a practice I really hope my kids continue. I don't know if they'll continue it in college that maybe doesn't quite work in a college dorm room but I do hope they continue it with their families, because it's a wonderful way, in the hustle and bustle of life, to remember the smaller moments that are often shrouded by the larger stresses and requirements.
Sari Laberis:That's awesome. I want to start that. That'd be a really cool activity to do with your students too, for our listeners. So, thank you so much, Dave and Em, for coming on and for sharing all of the great things that you're doing and how you're balancing work and home and all the things in between. We really appreciate your insights and you being here.
Emily McCann:Thank you.
Sari Laberis:Thank you so much. Get inspired by following us on social media and please tag us in your posts on Twitter at curriculumassociate, and on Instagram at myirety. If you have feedback about the podcast, a topic of interest or want to be a guest, email ExtraordinaryEducators at cainccom. Subscribe where you listen to podcasts and if you'd like to help more educators like you, join the conversation. Please leave a review.
Danielle Sullivan:Remember, be you be true, be extraordinary. The Extraordinary Educator Podcast is produced by Curriculum Associates, editing by Whiteboard Geeks, social media by At City Hannan, guest booking by Ceri Liberis, production by Hailey Browning. This podcast is copyrighted materials and intellectual property of Curriculum Associates. And please check out our blog the Extraordinary Support of Curriculum, fairly, efal�� and the Cont. 謝謝大家.