Welcome to the first episode of the Skillabration podcast hosted by Nikki Lubing, the owner of Skillabration! In today's episode you'll learn about Nikki's backstory from teacher to entrepreneur, and how she became bilingual.

Through learning Spanish, Nikki acquired 5 unexpected skills that have served her well in life.

Nikki started her career as a public school teacher and later founded Skillabration, an online foreign language school.

While teaching in the school system, she recognized a significant gap between essential life skills and the core subjects that are emphasized in the classroom. She is bridging the gap between school and life with the Skillabration Podcast.

Highlights from the Episode:

• Nikki's backstory from going to Mexico for the first time to studying abroad in Spain
• How she finally became fluent in Spanish, and struggles she went through along the way (Nearly quitting!)
• How she has navigated the job market after graduate school during the 2008 financial crisis, and dealt with unexpected challenges.
• Quitting the public school system and going through various iterations of her business
• The 5 skills she nailed from learning a foreign language ranging from resilience to financial literacy.

Nikki launched the Skillabration Podcast to show that anyone can learn the skills necessary for the real world. She want to give today’s youth a leg up before they graduate.

At Skillabration, we’re not just about teaching languages; we’re about empowering young people to succeed in all areas of life. Her mission is to take kids’ skills from zero to fuego, sparking their potential for success.

Get on our email list! We’d love to hear your suggestions for the podcast. https://skillbox.skillabration.com/p/skillabration-podcast-newsletter

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Welcome to episode one of the Skillibration podcast. I'm your host, Nikki Lubing, the owner of Skillibration. We're an online foreign language school and we take students foreign language skills from zero to Fuego. But this podcast is to bring other skills that can help students around the world improve their that can help students around the world prepare for their future. So in today's episode, I'm going to be sharing my story of how learning a foreign language really impacted my life and taught me skills beyond bilingualism. If you are watching on YouTube, I'm going to be sharing a presentation. So for those of you who might not be watching on YouTube, just know that you can go to the YouTube video if you want to see the images that go along with this episode. All right, so let's get started.

All right, so in the trailer episode, you may have heard this, but if not, we're starting from the top. Let's go on a trip. Alright, so close your eyes and imagine that you're on a beach in the Caribbean and you're taking in that view of the beautiful ocean, and you're just loving every second of being on that beach and relaxing. But all of a sudden, your stomach growls and you're like, I'm hungry. And you take a little walk over to the palapa, and as you're walking over there, Estana Blando and Espanol. They're speaking in Spanish. Well, this was me when I was a child. They're speaking in Spanish and you see the banter that the waiters are having with each other and you're like, oh, man, they're having so much fun.

They're laughing, they're joking while they're doing their job. And you're like, I want to know what's going on in that conversation. I want to be a part of that conversation. So that was actually me when I was seven or eight years old, and that seed was planted. I was like, I'm going to learn Spanish. So if there's one takeaway that I want you to get from today's presentation is that the youth of today does not have to wait until they graduate from high school or they graduate from college to get the skills that I'm going to be discussing in this presentation. These skills from acquiring a foreign language, such as Spanish. It doesn't mean that you have to go through everything that I went through to get the skills I'm going to discuss today.

Stick around. Make sure you stay until the end because I will also be talking about the benefits of bilingualism. If you are interested in learning a foreign language, it doesn't have to be for this episode particularly does not have to be for people who want to learn a foreign language. This can be for just the youth of today who are interested in acquiring skills and being prepared for the real world. And then you can share with your middle, high school or college age student. That would be amazing. Learning a foreign language gave me a global perspective because I studied abroad two times. Once when I was 15 and once when I was in college, when I was 20.

And the first one was in Mexico, and the second one in college, it was in Spain. And I'll talk more about the details in the episode. I learned a ton of communication skills, not just because of speaking the language, but you have to learn how to navigate living in other cultures and understanding cultural norms. So in a sense, you have to learn diplomacy and how to navigate being in a different situation than what you might be used to. And then, of course, there's perseverance and stamina, which I think is an amazing skill for our youth today to consider, because this day and age that we live in, there's a lot of instinct, gratification. You know, we get a notification just like that on our phone, and your whole nervous system ends up, like, wanting that instant gratification. It's like our bodies almost become used to it. So consider perseverance and what it can do in terms of setting you up for success in life, because there's hardships that happen in life.

And when you have that perseverance and the ability to stick with something and stick through it, there's so much. There's so much, so many advantages that come with sticking with things such as learning a foreign language and other things in life. And then, like I said, at the end, we'll talk about the general of you who are interested in learning a foreign language. Even if you're not interested, you probably want to hear it just because there's research about it that you probably haven't heard before. And it's just super interesting to hear about those things. It may even motivate you to want to learn a foreign language that you didn't think of before. All right, so let's get more into this episode. Let's talk about a global perspective.

So traveling from a young age opened my worldview. Just going to Mexico on family vacations, I mean, we typically would go to tourist areas like Cancun or Puerto Vallarta. What I would say is that it was like the early nineties, the very first time that I went to Mexico and Cancun was not anything like it is today. It was very small. There were just the first few hotels there. There was one tiny little mall. Interesting fact, there was a burger queen, not a Burger king. So that just gives you an idea of how much smaller it was.

It's really fascinating when you get to witness something like a city grow into what it is today, and you saw it from where it started. But in any case, traveling gave me an attitude of appreciation of experiences over things and learning about cultures and understanding how the world works in different parts of the world. And also just a general joy of discovery and respect for others. In these images. In one of the images, a couple of images, I'm in Puerto Vallarta in the Sierra Nevada mountains. I was swinging on a branch in the jungle there in the mountains. And then I did, like, a donkey ride. And I've also done deep sea fishing a couple times in the Caribbean near in Cancun or Playa del Carmen.

But I would play so hard when I was a kid, I actually fell asleep at the dinner table, which is, you can imagine, is kind of hard to do because it's pretty noisy. But that's how worn out I would get from all the experiences that I had. And I feel very blessed and lucky that I got to do these things as a child and see this world because of the traveling that I did. I had a hobby, which was pen pals. I had pen pals from across the globe. So some of these pen pals came from a program that my high school spanish teacher told us about my freshman year in high school. She told us about this program where we could basically choose a student from any country. And when you submitted your address, the school would set you up with somebody.

Whatever the program was, I don't remember the name of it now, but the program would send out your address to a school, whatever country you chose, and then they would. A student would then mail you a letter, and then you would start just to mail each other. So because I had been to Mexico several times already, I was like, I want to have a pen pal all the way on the other side of the world. I want to have a pen pal in China. And so I chose a chinese pen pal, and we actually wrote each other for about ten years. So basically, from age 14 to 24, I have a huge stack of letters from her. And that was such a rich experience. I think we started writing each other in 90, 719 97.

And I, you know, one of the first things that I told her in my letter was that I have an older sister. And when she wrote me back, she goes, oh, my gosh, you are so lucky that you have a sister. I wish I had a sister because at that time, they had the one child policy. And so again, it just opened up my worldview to understand what's going on across the world, geopolitically, economically, what people are experiencing worldwide. It can be so different from what your experience is. And that really can give you a great perspective on how to communicate with people because of what you're learning about them. It gives you so much context for the world. And then I also had a pen pal from that same program from Africa, from Kenya, and then I had a pen pal from Brazil, but she was from vacation.

I actually met her in person. The two from the one from China and the one from Africa, I never met them in person. I'd love to one day if I could. I feel like I was close to possibly meeting the one from China because she did come to New York, but we didn't get to meet each other, unfortunately. But in terms of communication, one of the things that my mom used to do when I was younger, when I was old enough. But maybe I was, like, the first time she did it might have been when I was in middle school, when we were in Cancun. And keep in mind, like, at this time, you know, she would never put me in a situation where she would consider it, like, dangerous or something like that, but she would put me in the front seat of the taxi cab driver, and, you know, my sister and her maybe sitting in the back, and she would just encourage me to ask questions to the taxicab driver in Spanish. So getting that real world experience of communicating with all walks of life, it goes so far.

So when I talked about communication skills in the beginning, that's kind of one of the examples that I'm talking about is just not being afraid of asking questions to a stranger, asking, maybe even asking for help or just approaching somebody, asking for directions and things like that. These are the kind of experiences that I'm talking about that can really make an impact on you. So the first time that I studied abroad, this was actually more of a cultural exchange. I was 15 years old, and I was just. I had just turned 15, and I went for six weeks during the summer. So it was between my freshman and sophomore year, the summer before I became a sophomore, and I went to Mexico. I stayed with a family outside of Mexico City in what's called the state of Mexico. It was called Cuatilan Eskali.

And I'm showing a picture right now of me at the Teotiocan ruins in Mexico City, and a picture with the family there that I stayed with. Some of them are aunts and uncles and cousins, and some of them are the family that I stay with. Stayed with. When you go abroad, you call them your host family. So my host brother, my host sister, my host parents are in the picture, along with aunts, uncles, and cousins. And then it's just a picture with the cousins and siblings on the couch, a couple of siblings. There were two brothers and a sister that were my host siblings. And the host sister was about my age.

And then the two host brothers, one was younger and one was older. But this is with my host mom and then some of the cousins and one of the brothers, the younger brother. So when you travel alone like this. So even though I was with a host family, what this taught me, the skills that I learned from this is how to make decisions on your own. So even though, like I said, even though I was with a family, I still had to make a lot of decisions about, let's just say, how to be polite, how to, you know, interact with the family in a diplomatic way, how to maybe ask for something from them. Maybe it might feel uncomfortable to ask a family that you don't know for something that might be normal with your own family, even with financial literacy, learning your budget for how much you're gonna spend during the trip, and also, of course, learning different cultural norms. Even before we went on this trip, there was a group of us that were going to Mexico from the US. And so we all met up in Houston, Texas, for two days, and they gave us a whole, basically like a whole, not a conference, but like a.

A little mini workshop is what I would call it. So it's like a two day workshop of just learning about culture in Mexico. One example might just be like, when you go into the house, you don't take your shoes off, you leave your shoes on. It might be the opposite of what we do here in the US. I'm sure we have global listeners. So you might have a different norm in your country. Comment below. What's the norm for walking in the house? Do you take your shoes off, or do you leave your shoes on? Do you have house slippers that you wear? Like, maybe you put those on right away when you step into the house.

So just things like that. So learning these things as a teen, it really improves confidence. It helps you be more self reliant, which goes so far in life, and you just learn competence, how to be a competent individual on your own. And, of course, risk taking, too. Even, like I said before with the story with the taxicab driver, there's an element of risk taking with that as well. And these are some more pictures with the family that I stayed with, with the siblings. And then I also stayed with their cousin for, like, about a week. So this is their cousin who lives in Mexico City.

And we had a great time in Mexico City because she showed me, like, museums and taking me to the mall and taking me to restaurants. We were busy. Every single day, she took me somewhere new. It was a fabulous time. And I learned so much, even more about independence because she was 18 years old, I was 15, and she was just starting college. So she was really confident with taking the subway, taking a taxicab on her own. That was so fun to witness and see somebody who is so independent navigating their city in their country where she grew up, that was, you can't replace something like that. It's invaluable to have an experience like that at that age.

So, yeah, that was just amazing to do that. But the point here is that these experiences create lifelong friends. 25 years later. I believe it was 25. Is it that many years later? We met in person in Chicago. So I got to show her my city when she came to visit me just in 2023. She came in the fall, I think it was in September of 2023, and I got to show her around for a day. It was so nice to give that back to her, too.

And just to show, like, doing this kind of thing can create lifelong friends. I would even say, like, you could consider this part of your network. So when I was in college, sometimes I would message my friends. Her name is Tere. So Tere had a brother named Jorge. These are the cousins that I stayed with in Mexico City. So sometimes I would message Jorge. When I was in college, we used something called an instant messenger.

It's different than, like, Facebook messenger. It's kind of similar to that. But back in the day, we used AOL instant messenger, and we had, like, the hot MSN hotmail instant messenger. So I would message him because he would always be online. And I might ask him, like, hey, I'm reading this literature in Spanish. Just imagine when you're in college and, or, like, in high school, you often read Shakespeare. Well, Shakespeare, you need some guidance. Even as a native english speaker, you need guidance to understand Shakespeare.

Well, that's what I was reading in Spanish. And Spanish was my second language. So I would reach out to Jorge and just say, hey, can you tell me, am I getting this right? Is this the, you know, am I understanding this story correctly? He was always there without any questions asked. So that's the power of learning a foreign language like this. It really has so many benefits that you might not even think of even later on in my career. Sometimes I would email or message Jorge about when I did some translation work. He was just so kind to me again, never asking for anything in return, always answering me. And maybe that just speaks to him as a person.

But I just imagine, like anyone in that family, you know, I would do the same for them. They would do the same for me. So it's just a great resource to have when you do something like this. When I came back from Mexico that summer, when I stayed with the family, I was going into Spanish, too. And if you're not familiar with the different levels of Spanish, especially back in the nineties, what the classroom was like was more traditional. This day and age, you know, some people still teach their traditional style. Some people do more of, like, what's called an immersive style. And at skillibration, we actually offer both.

But the immersive style nowadays is something that people are promoting more because you can learn the language in a different way, where you're not memorizing a vocabulary list, you're not memorizing grammar, you're not doing what's called, like, kill and drill or drill and kill, where you're basically doing all these verb drills, and people get, like, burnt out from that. So in Spanish, too, that's kind of the situation that I was in. It was a very traditional, even more traditional than, like, maybe even your average teacher. So in this case, I thought I was going to fail the class, and I wasn't even failing. I might have been getting, like, a c, but for me, because I was so passionate about Spanish, that to me, felt like a failure. So this is the part where I talk about perseverance and stamina. Do not give up. And sometimes the people who don't do the best in a classroom situation can become more fluent later on because of that struggle.

That's me. I became fluent in the language because I struggled with it. So anytime you're struggling, no matter what subject it is, just know that that struggle, if you see it through and push through that and get the right help through it, you can absolutely be a success, probably. And maybe even beyond what maybe your peers who get an a in the class can do so in this situation. My point in saying that is just because somebody can ace a test doesn't mean they can take it and apply it in the real world. But in this class, I was thinking like, I can't do this. I'm going to fail this class. That's kind of the mindset that I had.

And so I went down to my guidance counselor, who at the time, when you want to drop a class, you typically go to your guidance counselor and they can switch your classes around for you or talk you through your options with classes. So I told her I wanted to drop Spanish too. And imagine I had just come back from Mexico. Okay. So I go home, talk to my mom's. Like, I heard you want to drop your spanish class because I think the guidance counselor had to call her. I can't remember if my mom called the counselor or she called vice versa, but whatever it was, I talked to my mom about it and she had a heart to heart with me. And I thank her to this day for that because I wouldn't be here where I am right now, talking to you in this podcast if we hadn't had this discussion way back in the day.

So she was just like, Nikki, come on, this is your creative side. She knew I was a creative person. She's like, this is something that's going to help you in your career. You really want to do this. You've always wanted to do this. Do not give up. So I listened to her. I reflected on what she said, and I was like, you know what? She's right.

I'm going to continue on with this spanish class. And thank God I did not quit. I kept going. I did four years of high school Spanish, and from there I majored and got my bachelor's in Spanish. So I went to Loyola University Chicago. So I went to Loyola University Chicago. And at this point, when I went, went into Spanish in college. So the program that I had in high school with four years of Spanish, we didn't have what's called advanced placement at the time.

Advanced placement is when basically that sets you up. It's like a college level class, and you can get credit for college when you go into university if that's something you want to do. But they didn't have that program at the time. And so I kind of went into college with like an intermediate level of Spanish, almost like a beginner intermediate, though. So when I tested into Spanish, there I was still at like Spanish 102 or 104, I can't remember. But then I had one or two classes at the 100 level, and then I got in the 200 level. But that is just, it goes to show you, like, again, when you want something, if you set your mind to it, it doesn't matter what level you are, as long as you fight for it and you have the mindset of not giving up. You can absolutely get to your goal.

In the end, it's just a matter of not giving up. In college, I had to write a lot of essays, so this was kind of a turning point for me. And this is another skill, too. If you're interested in foreign language, this is a great skill to have. So somewhere along the way, because I was writing essays for spanish class, somebody had mentioned, like, you have to start thinking in Spanish. So what that means is because Spanish functions differently than English. When you're thinking in English, there's a different way process for the grammar. Well, in Spanish, there's a different process for that grammar.

And so if you're not thinking in Spanish, you're constantly translating. So I would actually, in the beginning, I would start writing in English, and then I would translate to Spanish. And I realized, I think it was like beginning of my sophomore year, I realized I had to start thinking in Spanish. And so I challenged myself to start writing the essays in Spanish, and that took my Spanish to a whole new level. In spring of 2002, I decided to study abroad in San Sebastian, and I set myself up for that. I applied to the program where I was going to study abroad in San Sebastian, Spain. And so I went the next summer, I believe, and I had. I had asked my college roommate if she wanted to go with me, and we were going to study there for three months.

I did three months. She did two months. But I told her, I'm like, listen, we cannot speak in English together. And we made a pact that we weren't going to speak in English. I think we might have spoken English inside the house, but even still, we had roommates. Like, we had a spanish roommate who was from Spain, so she spoke. Obviously, we had to speak Spanish to her. I think she might have spoken some English, but it wasn't that much.

And she knew we were really serious about learning Spanish, so we spoke to her in Spanish, but she wasn't always around. But I said, every time we step out of this door, we are always speaking in Spanish. So at a minimum, we were always speaking outside of our apartment, which the majority of the time, we were outside of the apartment anyway. But this is where I became fluent in Spanish. And if you're watching on YouTube, I'm sharing. Or if you're listening in on apple or and you're not on YouTube, then just know that I'm sharing pictures right now of some of my trip from studying abroad in Spain. So some of the amazing aspects of this trip were getting to know our professors, obviously full immersion classes. Also in Loyola University, the classes were always full immersion as well.

There's a lot of benefit to that. Especially I do feel that the traditional method in high school, it set me up for success with immersion because I did understand the grammar really, really well, and I had a strong enough foundation of vocabulary that I was ready for the immersive environment. But this is what San Sebastian looks like. There's a beach there. It's on the Bay of Biscayne. It's in the northern part of the country and what's called the basque country. So I got to learn a whole new culture. You could even say it's a culture within a culture because the basque culture, they consider themselves different from Spanish culture.

They speak a basque language called. So I didn't learn that language at all. It's one of the most difficult languages in the world to learn. There's not really an origin. They don't know the history of where it comes from. It's not part of the indo european languages. I recommend, if you're not sure, familiar what with indo european languages are, go and check that out and research it. But it's basically that just means that there's connections to the Indo european languages, like from India to Europe.

There's connections to those languages that you can find that they have similarities within the languages. But check that out and research that because there's so much more to it than that. So the eos quera language and the history of the basque people, they've not figured out, like, exactly where they came from and where the language came from, because it is different than other languages and they preserved that language. So some of the interesting facts about the spanish culture, like I learned about the siesta, everything closes down in the city midday for like a couple hours, where most things will be closed except for maybe like a pharmacy or two. But you're not going to find shops that are open or restaurants that are open in the middle of the day in Spain. And this is throughout all of Spain. And then there's something called Semana Grande. So that's like the big week.

It just means that it's a big festival where they do fireworks, music, and different cultural things, like there's bullfights and things like that. Too. One of the things from spanish culture that I learned, too is the word tranquilo. That's kind of like, don't worry about it. Relax. Things are okay. So it's like a calm attitude in Spain. During this trip, I actually went abroad, or I actually traveled other parts of Spain by myself.

So I'm showing a map of Spain right now, and I'm showing where San Sebastian is. And I traveled down to Salamanca by train. And then from Salamanca, I went to Lisbon, Portugal, by myself. So studying alone or traveling alone like that is actually something that I learned that I don't like doing. I don't like traveling alone. I like having the experience with other people. I also feel safer traveling with a group of people. And I just, like I said, I like experiencing new things with a group of people, especially people that I love, like family.

I love having those laughs together and, you know, just eating the food together, people watching together, having conversations together. I think it is so much fun to travel with, with people that I love versus going alone. I just, it wasn't for me. So that was something, again, that I learned, just not only about how to travel alone, like going through setting everything up. So I was 20 years old at this time. You know, I spoke with a travel agent before I did the trip. I booked it with the travel agent. She helped me book the train tickets.

She helped me book the hotel or the hostels where I stayed. So, yeah, just going through that process as a 20 year old was a great experience to learn more about independence, learn about the cost of it. So getting some financial literacy in there, even traveling abroad, you're learning about currencies. So you're learning about a currency rate. What's the rate of the euro versus the dollar, or the mexican peso versus the dollar? So there's so many things to learn when you're learning a foreign language, and these are the things, too, that skillibration. We don't want you to think like, oh, I have to learn a foreign language to learn these skills. You do not have to. You could take our, we're going to have a skill box for our podcast listeners specifically, and I don't know if we're going to have it launched live when we launch the podcast, but we will definitely have it at some point where we're going to be teaching these skills in the skill box.

So look forward to that. You don't have to learn a foreign language to get these skills today and be ready for the world when you either graduate high school or graduate college. This is me in Lisbon, Portugal. That's me in Spain. Outside the apartment, they didn't have a dryer, so that's something you learn, too. A lot of it's really expensive to have a dryer in Europe, so we would have to line dry our clothes. And this is one of the bullfights from the Semana Grande. So after college, I moved to Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

And, you know, when I graduated college, I wasn't. At this time, I wasn't 100% sure if I wanted to be a teacher or not. I was interested in international studies. Like I said, I was interested in geopolitics and even international business. But I had only graduated with a degree in Spanish, so my bachelor's was in Spanish, the spanish language and literature. So I moved from Chicago to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and I decided to start substitute teaching because I wasn't 100% sure what I wanted to do. And so when I did substitute teach, actually, it was not. It was not longer than one month that it took me to get my first job, like, full time teaching job.

And this is where something really interesting comes into play, so. All right, so this is where something really interesting comes into play from learning to talk to people when you might feel uncomfortable. So, like I said, I was, you know, I talked to the taxicab drivers. I would always talk to people on vacation, traveling alone, you know, having to approach people in different situations for different things. And I do want to talk about this, too, just real quick here, about safety. I absolutely always would stay safe and aware of my surroundings while traveling, whether I'm in a group or with, by, or by myself. So that's just a little side note. But approaching people, this played into my career.

So when I was at one of the schools where I was substitute teaching, I walk up to the secretary, because I was kind of thinking to myself, like, I had a break or whatever, and I was like, you know, it'd be really interesting to go observe a spanish class. I'm just curious if anything's changed. You know, it's only been, like, four years since I've been in high school, but I'm just like, hey, maybe it'll be interesting to see a spanish class. So I asked the secretary, I was like, hey, could I observe a spanish class while I'm here today? She's like, oh, yeah, we could set that up for you. So I go and observe one of the spanish teachers, and this teacher was actually going to be retiring within a year, but so I go after I observe her class, her name, the lady that I observed. Her name is Betty. I'll never forget Betty. Betty with an e.

That's what she would always say, but she was a great woman. And so I go back to the secretary. I was like, oh, thank you so much for letting me observe. It was actually the end of the school day, and I was like, thanks so much. And she's like, hey, nikki. So the principal actually overheard you asking about observing the class, and he wants to talk to you. He wants to interview you. And so I was like, oh, sure, yeah, okay, I'll do an interview.

And so I go interview with him and one of the assistant principals, and she, the assistant principal speaks Spanish, so she kind of tested my Spanish. I think it was like a 20 minutes interview or 30 Minutes interview, maybe. And they basically hired me on the spot because they had a position to fill that year. Like I said, it wasn't the one. It wasn't betty, but another teacher. And so I took that position and basically started, like, a week later, and that was that. And from that point, I absolutely loved teaching right away. I had, you know, I taught the Spanish one and two.

I was teaching freshmen through seniors, and I did. I sponsored the spanish club. So spanish club would meet. I don't know if we met, like, monthly, but we did some field trips locally and things like that. I was into it right away, but eventually I moved back to Illinois. And when I came back to Illinois, I got my masters in education. So when I got my master's in education, then I started working. While I was getting my master's, I did more substitute teaching.

Right now, if you're listening to the podcast, I did show a couple slides with images of just with students and from the yearbook and things like that. But stars are on the students faces just for respect for their privacy. But, yeah. So when I came back to Illinois, I got my masters in education, and I graduated with my masters around the time that it was the economic crash with the subprime mortgage crisis. So it was actually not that easy to get a job at that time, even as a teacher, even as a bilingual teacher. And that was kind of a slap in the face because, you know, as a millennial, I'm an elder millennial. I was one. You know, I'm one of the first years of the millennial group and generation.

And, you know, we were told, like, you go to college, you get a good job, and then you get a good pay. And so that's something else I want to discuss on our podcast, too. Like, college doesn't necessarily mean you're gonna make a lot of money. You still have to get a lot of experience, and you have to go through years of experience until you get a certain level of pay. And that was the other thing, too. Like, I thought, oh, Spanish. I'm gonna have a foot in the door. Like, that'll be easy to get a job.

No, it was not, because you never know what's going to happen in the world, in the economy. And even still, like, there was plenty of other teachers who speak Spanish, too. There was competition, and that's where networking comes into play. Because I can tell you this, when I knew somebody at a school, I was ten times more likely to get a position than if I didn't know somebody at a school. In fact, one of the jobs that, one of the last teaching jobs I had in the public school system was with a teacher, had referred me to the principal, and that's how I got that job. I wasn't even looking. I didn't even have an application in the system. They reached out to me.

So that's why I always talk about the power of networking, even for kids to know. Now, our youth needs to know that word. You need to know that term. You need to know what it means. You need to know how to do it and be prepared for that, because, again, we're not preparing our students for real world skills. And that's what skillibration is here to do. Skills are a celebration. That's why I named my business skillibration.

So I'm very passionate about that. So when I was getting my master's degree, I was substitute teaching throughout my area in Illinois. And that was a great way to get positions, like at high schools. I was, you know, I was pretty much like, I'm going to teach high school. So I got my master's in secondary education with a focus in Spanish. And the substitute teaching did give me a job at a high school. But when I graduated, like I said, because it was the economic crisis, I couldn't find a job. And the only job that I got an offer to wash first grade.

So I have one year of experience teaching first grade. Bilingual elementary education just wasn't for me. So I actually, at that point, thought, like, I don't know if I even want to teach, because the way that the system was, what I saw with the system in Illinois was very different than what I saw in Florida. In Florida, there's a lot of autonomy. There's. You can still be at that time, at least in Florida, this was like 2005 to 2007. So this is so many years ago, but at that time, there was so much creativity that I could utilize there. Like, there was nobody looking over your shoulder or micromanaging or looking for all these data points.

It was just totally different in Illinois. And I don't know if it's like that today, but when I taught that first grade class, I basically got the passion sucked out of me because it just. I really didn't feel like the school system was serving the students. The things, the decisions that were being made were a disservice to the students. So after that job, that full year of teaching, I took a break from teaching for a couple years, and I did retail management, and that just kind of gave me some time to figure things out. And I was going to start a tutoring business. And I think I started that tutoring business for a few months because I quit retail. And then I was like, okay, I'll do a tutoring business.

And I got some students that I was working with, but it wasn't, like, full time yet. And so then I heard from another teacher who also worked at that school. So this is where I said, like, the power of networking. She referred me to her principal at the local middle school for teaching English as a second language, which you might hear as ESL or English language learners. Some people say english speakers of other languages, which is e s o l. So there's a lot of different abbreviations. But in any case, I was working with a lot of students who were either bilingual and English and Spanish, or they were learning English because their native language was Spanish. So I loved that job.

Teaching middle school was great. I absolutely love working with middle school kids. I never would have realized that if I didn't take that job. So I basically, I took that job jumping ahead here. But it was so I kind of, like, put that tutoring business to the side, because at that time, I just didn't have the business. I didn't understand enough yet about starting a business, and I was kind of like, okay, this job is right here. It's kind of landed in my lap. So I still love teaching.

I'll give this a try. Maybe it's not going to be the same as the other school. The first year was amazing. I had a great principal, great team of principals, and unfortunately, things started to kind of turn again where there was a lot of decisions being made. And this is no hate to anybody who is a decision maker. I understand people's hands are tied. I understand that, you know, the system is what it is. People don't always have control over it.

So. But for me, I just felt like there was a lot of decisions that were a disservice to the students. And the students are like, you know, that's why I teach. I love to lift people up. I love to use the creativity that I have to help them grow and to be successful in life. So because there's not a lot of creativity, there's not a lot of freedom in the workspace in the public school system. I quit the public school system. So I was at the middle school for about four years.

So in 2016, I started again on my own. I went from teacher to teacher preneur or teacher entrepreneur. I became self employed for a few years and then eventually established my own business, which is called an LLC, a limited liability company. And the first few years, I was a contractor. So I contracted teaching jobs at other companies where they would set me up with students. I was specifically teaching English to speak to english language learners, to the Chinese. So I taught English all the way from babies to retired adults at several different companies out of China and Taiwan or Hong Kong, so all throughout Asia. So this is kind of interesting, too, because all of my experience with traveling and understanding languages set me up for success with working with the Chinese, because I understood how cultural differences can play a role in communication.

So when I understood that, I was like, okay, now I understand how chinese culture works. I kind of observed for, like a year, and then once I understood how things were working, I was like, okay, now I need to do this. And then I kept getting, like, levels up in terms of different teaching opportunities, leadership roles where I was mentoring teachers and training teachers. I was recruiting teachers when I was teaching and training teachers, that I became almost like a pillar in the community. So I was able to create a business off of my contracting jobs. And I had this vision where I was like, I want to help other teachers do the same thing. I want to share this opportunity with teachers. So I started building an online presence.

I created a YouTube channel. I had my social media outlets where I talked about these opportunities to teach English to the Chinese. Well, I ended up creating a course where I coached other teachers. So I had a coaching program, and I launched a course, which there was like a video course pre recorded for other teachers. And what's interesting is I knew I wanted to create a course. Actually, from the moment that I quit teaching that summer of 2016, when I first quit, I thought I was going to create a course for english language learners, because that was really my focus at the time. Even though Spanish was my background. I knew launching a course was something I wanted to do.

It just wasn't exactly what I thought it was. So if you ever think of launching a business, just know that sometimes things kind of change and different opportunities come your way and you want to go with what the community is telling you that they need. And the teachers were telling me they needed help with getting prepared to teach online and getting the skill set that they needed to create their own teaching business. So that's the avenue that I went because that's what came my way. And so what's interesting is all the soft skills that I learned from learning a foreign language. So when you look at soft skills, these are the skills that you kind of. That you need, whether you're in a career or you're running your own business. These could be things like work ethic, communication skills, emotional intelligence.

These are all part of soft skills. So because of that, that's how those other opportunities came my way. I got invited to go to Taiwan and celebrate the 20th anniversary party for one of the companies where I was contracted. And I got to teach and meet some of the students and both the adult students and the kids. And then I got, when I was in Taiwan, they took us around, we went to the museums. We got to see the headquarters of the company where I was contracted. So it was a great time. And this was about from 2016 through 2020, 2021, when I was working for these companies, like as a contractor.

But I went from a solo teacher to skillibration, which is what I have now, which is a business for. We have a team of teachers that teach other foreign languages, not just Spanish, but we have Mandarin, French, and we're going to be adding more languages as we go. But the reason I shifted away from the Chinese is because in 2021, a lot of the companies, they shut completely down. There was a law in China that changed everything. And the law basically said that teachers couldn't work with students after school hours. And a lot of the time is what, that's pretty much the primary time that a lot of us teachers were working with those students was after school hours. So because of that law, it basically shut down all those businesses. So I found a new avenue to host my classes, and I started hosting my classes on outschool.

So outschool is like a homeschool. They're focused on serving homeschool students k to twelve students for a variety of subjects. So if you go to outschool.com, if you type in skillibration, you'll find us on there but you can also find us@skillibration.com we do plan to offer classes on our own website as well, but so out school, I was like, alright, maybe I'll try Spanish again. So I created spanish classes and my Spanish one for middle school class was wildly successful. And because of that I was able to add other teachers onto my team. So I created skillibration because learning a foreign language is a skill and a celebration. And now we have, now we have French and Mandarin as well as Spanish. And this is my team of teachers currently and we're adding more as we go.

But skillibration helps students ages eight through 18 take their world language skills from zero to fuego, preparing them for success as they advance their education. And it says eight through 18. It's not that we won't have younger ages than that, but that's the primary age right now, the primary demand that we have. I do encourage our listeners to get on our email list because then you can find out about other classes, but you can also tell us what you want. So if you listen to this episode and you're like, can you create an entrepreneur class or can you create a soft skills class or a networking class? Teach us these things. Let me know if you're on our email list. Let me know. We'll have it in the show notes where you can go to sign up for our newsletter or just be on the list.

We don't email out a lot. So I know like this day and age, you're like, I don't want to give my email out because I don't want letters every day. I don't want emails every day. I totally understand that because I don't like that either. I promise only to email at a maximum weekly, but I don't even see that, at least not right now. But we'll just email pretty much when there's any major announcements. And like I said, that way you can be connected to us and you can let us know what you want. Classes on they're all live online classes, but we will also have pre recorded classes as well because we know people are sometimes strapped for time.

But if you're looking at the YouTube video, you can see I just put a slash through world languages because we are also going to be offering those other skills as well. So it's going to be take their skills from zero to fuego, preparing them for success as they advance their education. But I promised you guys to talk about the benefits of bilingualism. So even if you're not interested in learning a foreign language. This still might be just interesting facts to know. So you get cognitive flexibility, which just means, like, mental flexibility, flexibility in your brain. It just means that you have the ability to switch tasks easily, so it's not difficult for you to go from one thing to the other. You see things from multiple perspectives.

So I talked about culture and even being able to navigate my way through a totally different culture than mine. Like the chinese culture, totally different culture than mine. That's where that flexibility comes in, having fluid thinking rather than rigid thinking. So fluid thinking is like, you're not just gonna say no to something right away. Like, you're kind of like, you might see all these different ways that somebody might understand something or different perspectives. So it's not just like, nope, just this way. And that's that you're able to see in different boxes. Studies also show that children who learn a second language at an early age have better memory and attention levels than monolingual students.

There's links between bilingualism and delayed symptoms of dementia. There's links between bilingualism and increased executive functioning. So that means, like, the multitasking, reaching goals, and then there's also a link between that and creativity. So I thank you guys so much for listening today. And like I said, get on our email list. You could ask me follow up questions if you're curious about something that maybe you didn't hear in this presentation. And like I said, I really appreciate you guys sharing today or listening today all the way to the end, if you made it to the end. And make sure you come and look at our next episodes, you subscribe and follow to this podcast, because we're going to have all different backgrounds on our when we do our interviews.

So it's not all going to be about foreign language. I'm going to interview people from all different careers. I will be interviewing two of our foreign language teachers right away. So the first few episodes will be foreign language focused. But then from there on, we have somebody in the blue collar industry. He's in manufacturing. We have somebody in home building. We have somebody with a finance background that we're interviewing another homeschool mom.

I'm not a mom, but I am in the homeschool space, so I interact with a lot of different homeschool families. And if you guys have somebody you want to recommend that I interview, I would absolutely love to hear from you guys. So again, thank you so much, and I'll see you in the next episode.