From English Teacher to Writing Coach
To celebrate National Teachers’ Day today, we’re sharing the story of one of our book coaches, Jen Braaksma.
Our book coaches come from a wide variety of backgrounds and former careers. Especially for teachers, book coaching can be a natural fit when it’s time to make a career change. At its heart, that’s a lot of what coaching is: teaching.
Jen Braaksma is one of those coaches. She found that book coaching offered her a similar opportunity to work on writing with students–a passion that kept her teaching English for more than 17 years–but with some surprising added benefits. Still, her path from English teacher to book coach wasn’t always an obvious one to her. Here’s how she made the switch.
Before she even considered becoming a book coach, Jen was a writer working on her own YA fantasy.
In fact, she drew a lot of inspiration for her work-in-progress from the high school kids she was teaching. “I love my job, I love my high school kids–they have such energy and passion…so it all fit together,” she says.
It was through her writing that Jen entered the world of book coaching as Jennie Nash’s client. While they worked together on Jen’s debut novel Evangeline’s Heaven–set to release August 2022–she says she became intrigued by the work Jennie was doing. Jen remembers thinking, “How is she able to help me figure that out so clearly when I–as a trained teacher–had been working on this stuff on my own for so long?”
Around that time, Jen was also starting to feel a bit restless with her job. She wasn’t getting tired of the teaching itself, she says. “I just thought: I’m looking for something new, I’m looking to move on, I’m looking for more challenges. And, for a little while, I looked within the educational system and nothing was quite the right fit.”
Further changes within the educational system around her prompted Jen to consider her other options.
This brought her back to her initial interest in book coaching, though Jen didn’t make a change right away. In fact, she says, “For a long time, I did nothing about that, because I had a pretty good gig as a teacher–a steady paycheck, a permanent job, summers off…who’s going to give that up, really?...So I stuck with that for a while, but in the meantime–thanks to the certification course and [Jennie Nash’s] support and mentorship–I was able to start coaching on my own.”
In fact, it was this gradual transition that ultimately helped Jen make a permanent and full-time switch to a writing coach possible.
“Because I took it slow, I was able to build up my confidence and by reminding myself, especially when I still had my day job to rely on, if this doesn’t work out, that’s okay.” She took on one person at a time, building up her client base and challenging herself to learn how to find more clients, without too much added pressure.
“When I started to see a little bit of success, I determined that I could determine my success and that also was a bit of a turning point to me,” Jen says. That’s when she left the classroom and devoted herself to book coaching full-time.
Marketing and building her business were the bigger hurdles for Jen. The coaching was a natural extension of the skills and knowledge she’d developed as a teacher. “The fundamental skills are the same. We need to teach our students those very basics of what makes a good argument, what makes a good story,” Jen says of the similarities.
She acknowledges how different the work can be–in a good way. “The biggest thing is that my clients actually want feedback, they want to improve–it’s not just about the mark or the grade or the percentage for them…Just the idea that I’m working with a different type of motivation is really good.”
Jen also likes that book coaching allows her to focus on one area of interest. As an English teacher, she got to discuss writing, but she was also pulled in other directions.
“Now my clients are focused on the thing that I’m focused on, which is creative writing, it’s fiction, it’s story…it’s a collaboration of interests.”
Coaching allows Jen to narrow her focus in another way, too: she works with her writers one-on-one, giving them highly individualized attention that is customized to their unique projects and needs.
“When I was in the classroom, I would give the time that my students needed but there are thirty of them and a whole bunch of them need a lot of extra time; it’s a lot of extra work and pressure–there’s just a lot of demands on a classroom teachers’ time to do what we know is best for the students,” Jen explains.
This was something that Author Accelerator founder Jennie Nash also experienced while teaching writing classes for the UCLA Extension Writer’s Program. While she loved teaching and found that the work was rewarding, she was frustrated that she couldn’t give personalized feedback and support to each student.
Jennie suspected that her students weren’t making as much progress as they could be in that classroom setting, which is what led her to start book coaching. Working one-on-one with her first writer validated Jennie’s belief that she could help writers improve more and faster through coaching.
Jen says, “That’s exactly what I experienced in the classroom was that my biggest success with helping my students to write was one-on-one; that’s why I think [book coaching] is going to work so well for me, my personality, my skills, my experience.”
Coaching isn’t just about making more time for each student, though. It’s giving Jen the freedom to control her own time–to take on more clients when she wants or to dial back coaching when she’s focused on producing her own writing.
And most importantly, that means devoting her time to her passion. “That’s what I love about coaching, that I get to be immersed in these worlds that these writers are creating–what better way to spend your days?”
