Your first step to make teaching feel like a more sustainable career
You complain and sometimes pray for a storm day. But you’re not ready to leave teaching, yet.
Teaching isn’t a perfect profession (is any profession perfect, though?) but it’s pretty far removed some days from what you envisioned when you were in University.
I mean, where are all the “thank-yous” for delivering amazing lessons, and “good jobs” for going above and beyond? The appreciation? The gratitude? The accolades? (I’m being somewhat facetious. 🙃)
Even though sometimes you get to the end of the day (a shell of your former self), you can’t picture flipping the calendar to “September” knowing someone else is sitting at your desk.
You don’t want to leave, but you also don’t want to keep living like this - never having time for yourself and perpetually feeling like you’re drowning.
So…what do you do?
That’s what I had to figure out a few years ago when I was feeling burned out and Googling what else I could do with a Master’s of Ed besides teaching. In my bones, I knew I wasn’t ready to leave teaching but I also knew I had to make some changes to stay AND be happy.
I figured out how to make teaching feel like a more sustainable career for me and I can help you, too. 💜
But how exactly can you make teaching feel more sustainable?
I’ve put a lot of thought into this. And, in true teacher fashion, I created an acronym for “SUSTAINABLE” to help explain exactly what I mean.
It all starts with “S”: Self-compassion.
If you’re like lots of teachers, you can be soooo hard on yourself for not doing a good enough job reaching all your students.
I know that’s something I still struggle with lots of days, even still.
You feel like your students deserve to have the most engaging lessons and have the work corrected and back to them super quickly, but all that takes time.
And you also want to give your best to your partner and your own kids (and maybe youself, some day?).
You haven’t changed your Back to School bulletin board… and it’s February.
Your family has been living on chicken burgers and spaghetti for longer than you want to admit.
You can’t find the time to work out.
You feel like when give your all in one area of your life, another area goes to shit and you’re always letting someone down. Even when you’re giving 100%, you feel like somehow you’re still failing.
Let me say it again,
No one ever improved their mental health by being harsh and mean to themselves.
Being nasty to yourself isn’t going to make you a better teacher or make you feel like a better mom.
And, no productivity and time management strategies in the world are going to matter if you’re going to be hard on yourself because you didn’t do a good enough job in some other area of your life.
What needs to happen first, before any strategies or hacks is real self-compassion.
And it can be hard because sometimes you feel like being strict with yourself is the only way anything ever gets done and if you’re too easy on yourself, it’s like you’re letting yourself off the hook for something you should be doing.
But there’s a balance and it’s possible to be gentle with yourself and show yourself the kindness you’d show a friend AND still do the things you need to do. The thing about self-compassion is that you’re able to handle things more flexibly when they don’t work out exactly as planned.
The first step to making teaching feel like a more sustainable career is to start actively showing yourself more self-compassion in all areas of your life.
Acknowledging that you’re human and feeling genuine compassion for all you’re trying to do for yourself and everyone else - that’s where you can start.
It’s all about uncovering your mindset stuff and stories (so you can start to deal with them). My main mindset issue? Perfectionism.
