Life is Not a Dress Rehearsal: My Journey in the Classroom as an Empath and Teacher (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781662455377)

In Life Is Not a Dress Rehearsal, the author takes the reader along a journey filled with love, laughter, hope, and courage. Through detailed storytelling, the author takes the reader along the path of how she came to discover her empathic abilities as a teacher during her time in the K-12 and preschool classrooms. Most of the stories will confirm what you may have suspected about what most teachers go through to an extent, but this story is very unique in that these stories occurred during the author's first two years of teaching. Granted, most people would have given up after the first year, but the author realized that there had to be a deeper meaning for all of the traumatic and head-turning things encountered. During this journey, she is able to relate her experiences in trying to work with both children and adults who have their own set of issues while trying to remain grounded and self-aware and maintaining a healthy learning environment for her students.

If you like a story about overcoming obstacles and challenges, this book is for you. If you struggle with maintaining healthy workplace boundaries with coworkers or others in the workplace, you will enjoy reading about the author's trials and tribulations as a newly recruited teacher fresh out of college. If you have ever felt like there was something more that you should be doing in your life and your career, this book will be an entertaining and page-turning read. It is the author's hope that you will be able to apply some of the knowledge gained from her experiences of trial and error to avoid many of the workplace pitfalls that come with a toxic work or social environment.

Through the experiences shared throughout this book, the author was essentially forced to come to terms with her own empathy for others, all while navigating within a toxic work environment. It is the author's sincerest hope that all readers-whether empaths, highly sensitive persons, or non-empathic-be able to find their own inner voice while navigating challenging or toxic work environments, social groups, or awkward situations in a more empathic and humane way. As you read this memoir, you should ask yourself, "How would I react or respond in a challenging situation?" or "How can I become a more empathic or understanding person while maintaining healthy boundaries?" Through the sharing of these various experiences, the author hopes to help all readers, empaths and non-empaths alike, to find their own inner strength to overcome negative situations in work, school, and in general.