Nov 23, 2020
Joey Mascio is a certified life coach, teacher, and counselor. He works with young adults ages 16 through 24 on learning crucial life skills they aren't getting in school to help them achieve more and live happier lives after high school. He was certified through The Life School and works with young adults on those social emotional skills that aren’t really taught in school that can help students thrive in the real world. He’s also an experienced performer, a trained comedian, and a talented story-teller. He was able to build a side hustle that is the teaching career he wants to have- teaching kids life skills without all the red tape.
Joey considers himself first and foremost a husband and father. He and his wife have been married for seven years with three kids ranging from 5 down to an infant. He started his teaching career as a high school theater teacher but now teaches middle school theater and is in the discipline office. With a juggling act like that in his school work, how was he able to get involved in a side hustle?
Well it started when he and his wife decided to joint venture into selling diaper caddies as a Fulfilled by Amazon (FBA) gig. That...didn’t work out so much, so they moved on to selling Montessori materials, but did not find passion in that either. Around that time, Joey’s wife gave birth to their second child and was having difficulty with postpartum depression. She sought out therapy which did little to help her.
He Found Coaching
Still wanting help, she found life coaching, specifically with Jody Moore’s podcast. She’d frequently share what she heard a life coach she was following say with Joey. He would realize it was the same things he was telling her and the same way he was thinking. Joey started listening to more life coaches and then, in his school work in the disciplinary office, started applying the things he was learning as a sort of beta test on the students to see if they were able to accept this sort of social/emotional building at an early age (middle schoolers). Through this, he realized his new passion and he created his side hustle, Firmly Founded Coaching.
His pitch of, “I teach skills schools can’t,” with the tag of, “because schools were never designed to,” should ring true with any teachers out there. Joey knows that classrooms are for the hard skills. He wants to ease the recent pressures being applied on teachers by many school districts to implement the social/emotional skills that students need during their already limited class time. To get started with his side hustle, Joey jumped right into it.
He Built A Side Hustle That Fed Off His School Work
He listened to some podcasts, created his website, created a mastermind group of likeminded teachers, and just got to it. Wanting to further buckle down and learn all he could, Joey and his wife went to Jody Moore’s Be Bold Masters program, a week-long intensive about self coaching. After riding the high of that program, Joey decided to take the big dive and go to The Life Coach School. With that certification behind him combined with his school counseling and teaching skills, Joey felt more confident than ever he could help teens with what they need through his program.
Focus On Your Mindset
One of Joey’s more impressive feats is how he put the website and program out there and asked people to pay for it before even being 100% certified to do it himself. He accomplished this through two specific mindsets. The first is a success mentality; people want you to succeed. When you have that feeling, that people are behind you, then it’s a lot easier to put yourself out there.
The second concept is called “B-minus work.” It’s one that teachers may find particularly difficult to grasp because it’s accepting and being okay with putting out b-minus work. As teachers, we spend all our time pushing our students into A+ work. So, when we do something ourselves we spend extra time trying to achieve that same A+ we expect from students. Getting into this B-minus work attitude keeps you from that cycle of, “oh, it’s almost done." It offers work that is not only good enough, but gets the job done. Just put it out there. “Build the plane as it’s flying,” Joey says. If you get negative feedback, all the better! That’s how we improve. Take in what you’ve learned from launch 1.0 and implement it into launch 2.0.
Watch Your Thoughts
Joey’s advice to those who struggle with the idea of this B-minus mindset: watch your thoughts. If you don’t want to put out something, ask yourself, “Why?” Then ask yourself, “Why?” again and again until you figure out what you’re making it mean. Is the base “why,” that you think you’re going to fail? What does that make you do? Chances are, it keeps you from launching whatever it is and then, guess what, you’re already failing preemptively. So ask yourself, “Why?” and find out if that bottom line is preventing you from achieving your goals, or helping you achieve your goals.
For Joey's freebie, 5 Skills Every Teen Needs After High School, and Signs That They Don't Have Them, go to Firmlyfounded.com/5skillspdf.
Head over to sidehustleteachers.com/quiz for help finding your "Just Right" side hustle.