Teacher Wellbeing

Happy New Year! You did it, you made it through 2020, the weirdest, hardest year yet. Wherever you are in the world, I want to acknowledge the huge challenges and upheaval 2020 brought and give you a big pat on the back. Well done, it is no mean feat.
So we find ourselves in 2021 and I wonder if perhaps your social media newsfeed and email inbox is filled with messages about how unworthy you are, how you need to punish yourself for any pleasures or indulgences over Christmas and the holidays, and overhaul you entire life by January 14 to be enough.
Well, this isn’t one of those messages. Those messages are utterly wrong and completely crap. You are SO worthy, already and always. You do not have to punish yourself for enjoying yourself, even if perhaps you feel you over did it a bit. And you most certainly do not need to overhaul any part of your life by January 14 to be enough. You are enough. Already. Always.
If you’d like some gentle support in being proactive about your health, wellbeing and resilience this year then I invite you to enrol in the Self-Care System Mini-Course and Healthy Habits Planner. We’re having a live 2021 Vision Workshop tomorrow, Tuesday 5th January at 10am QLD time.
Enrol here: http://selfcareforteachers.com.au/self-care-system
Whether you’re into resolutions and goal setting like me, or whether you think the New Year is just an arbitrary date, please take some time to encourage and nourish yourself this month.
And as always, remember that you are a person first and a teacher second and you are SO worthy of your own care x

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In this episode I'm sharing my predictions for the 2021 trends in the teacher health, wellbeing and resilience space in Australia (and beyond). This is also the last episode of Season 7 and for 2020. I will take a little break and see you in 2021!
My predictions are:
1. Schools are taking on board the wellbeing message and doing SOMETHING but it will continue to be hit and miss.2. Wellbeing Champions continue to grow and be driven by staff instead of leaders. Individuals are making impacts in the schools and communities where they live.3. Education policy and Department expectations will continue to be problematic but also continue to acknowledge the need for teacher wellbeing. At least they're paying lip service now?4. Unions will continue to be necessary but as we saw with Qld this year, people are unhappy with the result. We can acknowledge things would be worse without the unions fighting for us and still be unsatisfied5. Teacher Wellbeing/Wellness businesses are increasing in quantity. It's great that there are more options for teachers, some are more rigorous than others so just make sure you do your homework.6. Positive Psychology/Positive Education will continue to dominate the teacher wellbeing conversation, and complementary approaches are still very small percentage of the landscape but growing I think.7. Student Welfare/Wellbeing will continue to be given more attention at the national level which means it’s up to us to keep reinforcing the message that student wellbeing and teacher wellbeing are intricately linked. Hence the increase in School Wellbeing Champions!8. The overall school staff health and wellbeing movement is well under way. It is mainstream now even if still a long way to go. It will continue to grow and be driven from the bottom up by individuals out of necessity.9. Teachers are taking their own health and wellbeing into their own hands and investing their own money, energy, time, resources. This doesn't replace the need for the school-wide, state-wide and national initiatives, however it is excellent that teachers are no longer waiting for others to do something about it and prioritising themselves.
Make sure you’re following me @selfcareforteachers on IG and subscribed to the #teacherwellbeingpodcast in your favourite podcast app because I have some exciting things coming in January.
Grab the Self-Care System Mini-Course and Self-Care Planner/Habits Tracker via the link below to help support yourself over the school holidays to have a more wellbeing and less fatigue, more resilience and less burnout in 2021.
Enrol here: https://selfcareforteachers.com.au/self-care-system
It’s not a quick fix, it’s a system that will teach you to make micro-changes each week and each month so you can make a big difference to your life, health and wellbeing over the course of the year (not just on the school holidays.)
As always, remember you’re a person first and a teacher second and you are allowed to look after you x

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Who benefits from individual teachers and schools being caught up in and measured by the way things look and appear as opposed to what difference is really being made academically, socially, emotionally?
Links mentioned:

• Instagram @selfcareforteachers
• Resilient Teacher Program Wait List
• Rethinking Resilience podcast ep
• Invisible work of teaching podcast ep
• BOOK: Changing Australian Education: How policy is taking us backwards and what can be done about it by Alan Reid
• AEU FB page webinars about funding inequality in Australian schools
• Feminist Coach Academy podcast https://feministcoachacademy.com/podcast/
• Feminist Coach Academy Certification Training https://feministcoachacademycourses.com

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Part 2 of my conversation with Stuart Keene, Clinical Exercise Physiologist. If you haven't yet listened to last week, please do so first.
Early bird Prices until 11th December:2021 Self-Care System

• 2021 Self-Care System

https://selfcareforteachers.thinkific.com/courses/selfcaresystem2021

• Fatigue Resilience Masterclass Series

https://selfcareforteachers.thinkific.com/courses/fatigueresilience
Other Links Mentioned:

• Symptom Tracker Sheet in Freebies Library
• Book a call with Stuart
• HRV sensor Whoop
• HRV sensor EliteHRV

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I speak with my husband, Stuart Keene, Clinical Exercise Physiologist, about movement as medicine and the science of exercise and HRV as fatigue management and mitigation.

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I really love this time of year, because it’s the time I start looking at planners and calendars and thinking about all the possibilities of a new year. It’s exciting!
That being said, the flip side of excitement is often anxiety. And this can be a really anxiety-filled time of year for many! I share what I've learned from Hagrid about managing this anxiety, and the very powerful language shift to get rid of What Ifs once and for all!
PS Remember, there's still time to come to the Wellbeing Champions Meetup on Saturday: http://selfcareforteachers.com.au/wellbeingchampion

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I’m sharing 3 reasons why your school needs to have a wellbeing champion role that is focused on teacher and staff wellbeing. First, I acknowledge the Gaibul people of the Toowoomba area who are the traditional custodians of the land on which I am recording this today, where I live and work, and where Self-Care for Teachers operates. I acknowledge their elders past present and emerging and that sovereignty was never ceded. So I invite you to take a moment to acknowledge the First Nations people of the land on which you are standing right now too.
So right now I acknowledge this idea of having an official Wellbeing Champion position in schools is aspirational. We don’t currently have an official role of Wellbeing Champion or Wellbeing Coordinator or Head of Wellbeing in most schools. Therefore this episode is really more about my vision of what these roles could be in schools, rather than necessarily what we currently have. I’d love for it to be something to spark your imagination and hopefully some conversation in your staffroom.
Links mentioned in this episode:

• Sign up to The Advocate Newsletter http://eepurl.com/dqyp2n
• Book a Free Discovery Call https://selfcareforteachers.as.me/?appointmentType=5675726
• The Freebies Library at www.selfcareforteachers.com.au/library
• Cultivating Extraordinary Wellbeing Video Training www.selfcareforteachers.com.au/cultivating
• Wellbeing Champions Meetup www.selfcareforteachers.com.au/wellbeingchampion
• School Staff Wellbeing & Resilience Sessions: taking bookings for 2021 now! Email [email protected]
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I have a beautiful conversation with Beth Cregan from Write Away With Me. Beth is a teacher and a writer and runs professional development on writing and creativity for teachers as well as teaching writing to students. We talk about how teachers can use writing to support their wellbeing, both individually but also collectively in staff groups, as well as how writing can be a powerful self-care practice. We also discuss how self-care practices really come to the forefront when we’re already depleted but that we need to be extra gentle in starting up new practices in challenging times, plus the power of poetry and journalling.
Beth also shares some great tips, one of which is called ‘The Book of Wonderings’, which is really all about how impactful it can be to ask ourselves and ponder on questions. So if you haven’t yet listened to last week’s episode about Self-coaching Questions for Teachers, I recommend that as a follow up. Also remember you can get the accompanying workbook in the freebies library at selfcareforteachers.com.au/library I recommend doing that soon too because when you sign up for the Freebies Library you also get to then receive ‘The Advocate’ which is the Self-Care for Teachers newsletter. I have some exciting things coming up in the next few months and early 2021 and I’ll be announcing them first to readers of The Advocate, and they’ll also get some special early bird options too!
Now this episode was recorded late 2019, so when Beth says ‘last week she went to rural Victoria’, it wasn’t actually last week at the time of releasing this in November 2020! And as with Bek’s episode a couple of weeks back, there will be no mention of the pandemic in this episode because when we recorded this it hadn’t happened yet. Beth tells me that since the pandemic some of the writing programs have moved online. I believe the writing program for students in already online and others are coming soon. The best place to connect with Beth these days is on Instagram @write.away.with.me and there’s a Facebook page to follow also.
Quick reminder about the Wellbeing Champions Meetups happening in a few weeks time, on the 18th and 21st November. These are for anyone who feels like they are the ‘wellbeing person’ at their school or who cares a lot about staff wellbeing at work, and so if you’re listening to this podcast, that’s probably you! So you are invited to this virtual networking event to Connect with others like you from around Australia, go to selfcareforteachers.com.au/wellbeingchampion for more info. If you’re listening to this after November 2020 go to that link anyway because there will be more of these events and details will be there.
Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Teaching with Fire: Poetry that Sustains the Courage to Teach, edited by Sam Intrator and Megan Scribner
• Poems by Mary Oliver, including Wild Geese
• Poems by David White
• The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron
• Eat Pray Love and Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert

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Today I'm sharing with you 29 questions you can ask as part of a process of self-coaching. Coaching is just a conversation where one person takes on the role of asking questions that help the person being coached to uncover the answers for themselves and sometimes to break out of the thinking patterns and habits and mindsets that they might not have even realised was holding them back or getting in the way of getting what they want. Coaching takes many forms but essentially it’s just asking better questions, and you can do this for yourself. It’s obviously helpful to have an external person go through this process with you but it is a skill you can practice and improve on, and self-coaching can be a great tool in your wellbeing toolkit that can help you when you feel stuck, when you feel like something has to change, or when you come against a challenge and need to make some decisions.
So today I’m going to take you through 29 Questions that you can ask yourself as part of a self-coaching process, or you can also use these with a buddy and coach each other. These are questions that I commonly ask my clients. This is not an exhaustive list of questions you can ask as part of coaching or self-coaching, and of course you don’t need to ask all of these either—this is NOT an all or nothing activity. You might even just pick one or two of these questions that really feel like the best fit in the situation and just try them on for size. Some of the questions are in a set that help you look at a situation or topic from multiple angles and the questions go together in a series.
There are no right or wrong answers here. This is an exercise is imagination and creativity, in self-discovery, self-awareness and . There’s no perfection needed in the way you answer these questions. The way you answer them today might be different to how you answer them tomorrow and that’s fine. These questions are about helping you get out of the regular habits of thinking that we often fall into, the stories that we tell ourselves, and the narratives that we’re deciding and believing are true. However, these stories or narratives or beliefs are not necessarily reality or how other people involved perceive the situation. So by challenging our habits of thinking we’re actually able to see more possibilities than we already can and perhaps to make better or different choices.
Links mentioned in this episode:

• The book ‘The Dance of Anger’ by Harriet Lerner
• The Freebies Library at www.selfcareforteachers.com.au/library
• Cultivating Extraordinary Wellbeing Video Training www.selfcareforteachers.com.au/cultivating
• Wellbeing Champions Meetup www.selfcareforteachers.com.au/wellbeingchampion
• School Staff Wellbeing & Resilience Sessions: taking bookings for 2021 now! Email [email protected]

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A follow up chat with Bek, who is a teacher you may remember from Episode Three of the very first season of the podcast. Way back in the beginning of 2017, I spoke to Bek about her journey of finding more personal wellbeing as a teacher and treating herself like a person first and a teacher second. And at the end of 2019, we caught up with a bit of an update.
Bek shares her story of how her journey progressed and how her wellbeing and health habits had to shift and tweak after she became a mum and also got a promotion at work. And she is now a mum to two little boys. So at the time we recorded this, she was just about to go off on her second lot of maternity leave. And at the time this episode is released she has just finished that second lot of maternity leave.
Exciting things:

• Cultivating Extraordinary Wellbeing Video Training www.selfcareforteachers.com.au/cultivating
• Wellbeing Champions Meetup www.selfcareforteachers.com.au/wellbeingchampion
• School Staff Wellbeing & Resilience Sessions: taking bookings for 2021 now! Email [email protected]

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