The Impact of Teacher Bullying on Your Career & Your Adult Self

Yesterday, my morning began with a deeply unpleasant surprise. My close friend and old classmate shared a comment that our old middle and high school English teacher, one who had once bullied both of us, had posted in response to a newspaper article.

The article spoke to the impact of teacher bullying in Estonia and shared stories from students' painful experiences.

Her response? "Rule number 1 - a teacher shouldn't have favorites but should scold students as necessary."

The same person who had once told me in front of the whole class that I would not become more than a seamstress, paired with other episodes of being humiliated and taunted in front of my peers, dared to speak up in light of this article.

Immediately, memories of getting home from school and crying into the ether came back to me.

What did I do to deserve to be "scolded" this way? What did other close friends of mine do to be "scolded" in her class?

For the first time in nearly 20 years, I had the audacity to go and speak up to her by responding publicly to her comment.?

Here's the tough truth - for some people, speaking up for themselves at an early age comes easy. And that's fantastic. For me, that wasn't the case growing up, particularly with teachers who I now recognize as bullies in hindsight. In fact, it is still really hard now.

How did I muster the strength to speak up now, years later? What nuggets of wisdom can you take away from reading this?

1) Recognize your patterns. Four years ago, while training to become a coach, I realized, for the first time, that my inner sense of inferiority, my imposter syndrome, was rooted in specific instances in middle and early high school. Predominately, in cases in which teachers and a few fellow students would ridicule my career ambitions and show an utter lack of empathy in my most fragile moments. The patterns? Crippling perfectionism. Fear of sharing my aspirations. Embarrassment of speaking about my achievements. Workaholism.? Distrust in others. An inner desire for recognition. A deep discomfort in being vulnerable with others.

2) Recognize the cost. Feeling inferior led me to become an overachiever by the time of college. To the point that ironically, I received a dedicated award from my university for it. In my 20s, my seemingly unstoppable drive earned me the 'Forbes 30 Under 30' title in my home country for my role as a startup founder and CEO. With such praise, it became increasingly harder to acknowledge the cost of all of this on me. Depression. Anxiety. Utter lack of work-life balance. Trusting the wrong people. Losing my romantic relationship. Plummeting into burnout.

3) Share your pain with friends and peers. It wasn't until the past few years that we started talking about the scars we had shared from our schooling with my close friends. Most of them had painful memories to share that burdened them to this day. Recently, I came to know people here in San Francisco from my school, who had similar scarring stories to share despite graduating many years apart. Hearing from them about their experiences and sharing mine felt validating and liberating. "I'm not alone!". And yesterday, their stories partially fueled my response to the teacher above. In a way, I was doing it for all of us.

4) Speak to an impartial ear in therapy. Therapy has helped me to discover and dive more deeply into my behavioral, emotional, and thought patterns. It has helped me recognize the cost of these patterns through the lens of my therapist. Above all, through therapy, I've started to feel heard and validated like never before. Therapy has also helped me organize my traumas and, in the process, reduce their impact on me, a process that has given me a sense of control in something that, for a long time, I thought I would never be able to control. It wasn't until attempt number #5 that I found the right therapist for myself.

5) Set realistic goals for your professional or personal growth and empower yourself into action through coaching. Every coach has a coach. So is the case with me. In working with my coach, I've been vocal about my tendencies to go from high achiever to overachiever, a pattern that I've come to recognize through introspection and therapy. That telling me, "You can do it!" and helping me develop a laundry list of highly ambitious goals can lead me to action paralysis instead of propelling me forward. I'm uncomfortable and, at times, intimidated by promoting what I do or publicly speaking about my successes. The combination of recognizing these patterns and having a coach who recognizes them, too, helps me set realistic goals for building my business in a way that doesn't suffocate me but, instead, moves me forward.

And lastly - have empathy for yourself. Healing enables strategy. Strategy, in turn, empowers action.

At 33 years old, I'm finally feeling the action part of this process. Me writing this article is a testament to that.

I'll be writing more on this topic in my future posts and in a short book I'm currently working on. If you'd like to stay in the loop, feel free to connect with me here on LinkedIn, or use the little bell button on my profile to be notified by my future posts if I'm already in your professional orbit.