We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Dan Tricarico. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Dan below.

Dan , looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Naming anything – including a business – is so hard. Right? What’s the story behind how you came up with the name of your brand?

I had been a high school English teacher for over two decades and I was facing massive stress and burnout both professionally and personally. I was on a walk one day, pondering the stressors I was facing as a public school teacher, and I said to myself, “Geez, it’s almost like they expect you to be a Zen Teacher.” And that’s when the light went on. I ran home and started a website and a blog called THE ZEN TEACHER that same day. This was 2014 and the domain name www.thezenteacher.com was available, which I took to mean that The Universe giving me a green light to pursue this new path. Since 2014, The Zen Teacher blog has become a book by the same name and that book has become workshops that help teachers reduce their stress, improve their self-care, and avoid burnout. I’m very proud of how many teachers I’ve helped and who now know they will make it to retirement, including me!

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

To deal with the stress and burnout I was experiencing about ten years ago and that was making question if I was going to make it to retirement, I thought back to being a drama major and actor and started using the relaxation, breathing, meditation, and mindfulness activities I learned in my acting training to relax and reduce my stress. It worked. In an attempt to turn my negative experience into a positive, I started The Zen Teacher blog. Since the book The Zen Teacher: Creating Focus, Simplicity and Tranquility in the Classroom came out, I’ve done workshops and keynote presentations for teachers all over the country. A few years after my first book, I published Sanctuaries: Self-Care Secrets for Stressed Out Teachers. I’m currently working on a new book about how teachers can access the internal aspects of their teaching practice and that shows them how to lead in the classroom from their mental, emotional, and spiritual side.
I didn’t expect to be doing this at the end of my career, but it’s been such a wonderful experience getting to help other teachers and see the ripple effect spread to their own students and beyond.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

I remember sitting at the desk in my classroom with my heads in my hands and with our vice principal sitting on the other side of the desk. She asked me what was wrong and I said, “I’m just so stressed out all the time. There always seems to be so much to do in this job. It seems like it’s just never done.” She looked at me and very compassionately said, “You know we have an EAP program, right?” The Employee Assistance Program was the mental health arm of our insurance benefits and we got something like 5-7 free therapy sessions with a counselor. Now, I’m all about therapy. I think EVERYONE needs to therapy. I call it The Emotional Gym. It’s where I work stuff out. But as nice as our vice-principal was being, what she said infuriated me. Why? Because it suggested that I was the problem, not the broken education system. So it was in that moment that I decided that since I didn’t have the bandwidth to change the system, I’d better work on changing myself. I did that, and then I started showing other teachers how they could set boundaries, ignore the rampant gaslighting of our profession (“Take care of yourself. . .but here are 40 more things we need you to do. . .”), and take care of themselves better in a way that was mentally, emotionally, and spiritually sustainable. I tried to take my negative and turn it into a positive for myself and others, and I see that as a journey toward resilience (in fact, Resilience is that last chapter in my book Sanctuaries: Self-Care Secrets for Stressed Out Teachers)

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

While it’s true that education can be a calling and that I’ve loved every moment of my career, it’s important that we realize that, as human beings, we are more than teachers. We are fathers, mothers, friends, spouses, siblings, etc. So we need to save some of ourselves for outside of the classroom. Given that, one lesson I had to unlearn in my profession is the gaslighting notion that we “have to do it for the kids.” While my students are, it goes without saying, one of my top priorities in my job, that expression is often used to gaslight teachers into pushing themselves far beyond reasonable limits by an industry that doesn’t always have the resources to treat their employees the way they should be treated. So when more needs to be done, The Powers That Be often pull out that old saw that “we should do it for the kids.” And since teachers are often caring, compassionate, empathetic people, they step up and make it happen–even when it’s to their own detriment, and often without proper compensation. My NEW lesson is that you can be a GREAT teacher, and do everything you can for your students, and STILL protect your own energy, time, and peace.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.thezenteacher.com/
• Instagram: @zenteacher
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dan-tricarico-a8378710/
• Other: Podcast: Sustain: Manageable Teaching Made Simple https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/sustain-manageable-teaching-made-simple/id1743700073)

Image Credits

Professional photos by Pam Davis