Now that most schools are closed for the summer, it's time for teachers to recharge and rejuvenate themselves. Teachers need to use this summer to engage in self-care. I offer a free cheat sheet on stress management strategies for teachers at https://kittyboitnott.lpages.co/cheat-sheet-on-stress-management/.
This is a great time to take for yourself to get the rest you need and to reconnect with your Higher Power as well as to concentrate on having fun and unplugging from the activities of the school year.
Rest up. This fall when school starts again, students will need you to help them navigate getting back to school in person. Everyone needs to be gentle with themselves as we recover from this past year of the pandemic.
For more assistance, check the website at https://teachersintransition.com for more resources on how to manage teacher stress.
Now that most schools are closed for the summer, it's time for teachers to recharge and rejuvenate themselves. Teachers need to use this summer to engage in self-care. I offer a free cheat sheet on stress management strategies for teachers at https://kittyboitnott.lpages.co/cheat-sheet-on-stress-management/.
This is a great time to take for yourself to get the rest you need and to reconnect with your Higher Power as well as to concentrate on having fun and unplugging from the activities of the school year.
Rest up. This fall when school starts again, students will need you to help them navigate getting back to school in person. Everyone needs to be gentle with themselves as we recover from this past year of the pandemic.
For more assistance, check the website at https://teachersintransition.com for more resources on how to manage teacher stress.
It's feeling stressed out and overwhelmed. Do you worry that you're feeling symptoms of burnout or are you sure you've already gotten there? Have you started to dream of doing some other kind of job or perhaps pursuing a whole different career, but you don't know what else you're even qualified to do? You don't know how to start a job search. You just feel stuck. If that sounds like you, I promise you're not alone. My name is Katie Boitnott. I'm a career transition and job search coach. And I specialize in helping burn out teachers disliking deal, not only with the stress and overwhelm of your day-to-day job, but to consider what other careers might be out there waiting for you. Join me for teachers in transition. In some episodes, I'll be speaking to stress management techniques and how you can manage your stress on a day to day basis. In other episodes, I'll be talking about career transition. What tools do you need to be successful in a job search when you're moving from one career into a totally different track. These are questions that you need answers to, and I can help you find those answers. My name is kitty. Boitnott welcome to teachers and transition.
Speaker 2:Welcome back to episode 118 of teachers in transition the podcast and the YouTube channel. My name is Katie boy, not. I am the owner of Boitnott coaching and the founder of teachers in transition. The company that specializes in working with teachers who were burned out and ready for a career change. If you've listened to the podcast in the past, you know that I alternate topics each week, one week talking about stress management strategies for teachers, and then on alternating weeks, talking about career transition and ways that you can go about looking for a new career. If that's what you choose to do this week, the subject matter is stress and it is summertime. So I want to talk about how you can use the summer to recharge reinvigorate and, and if you need to reinvent yourself so that you're ready to go back in the fall. If that's what you choose to do to teach full capacity and feeling a hundred percent yourself again. Now let's not sugar coat. Anything this past year for teachers was awful. It was, as I have characterized it on a number of occasions as though you, as a teacher were asked to build an airplane while you were flying it and doing so without any assistance from any could assist you or tell you what to do, right, and what to avoid to do wrong. It was all on you. Your school division gave you marching orders. In most cases, they told you what you were expected to do of many of them attempted in their own way to give you tools and strategies that would help you, but it was all on the fly. And sometimes frankly rules were changed and strategies were changed up at the last minute. You were asked to change everything on a moment's notice, and it was stressful beyond anything you've ever experienced to before. Some of you enjoyed the virtual learning capacity that you were able to provide to your students and others of you hated it. Some of you are worried about going back full-time into the classroom. If you were teaching virtually this past year, some I know have decided not to go back and whatever you've decided it's okay, you'll be fine, whatever it is that you've decided to do the, the issue at the moment. The thing that I want to emphasize for you for right this minute is taking care of yourself and detoxing, relaxing, rejuvenating yourself. Getting back to who you were before the pandemic, which may be a challenge because it may be that you don't even remember what you were like before the pandemic, the pandemic dragged on longer than anybody anticipated. Frankly, other than the doctors at the highest levels, I certainly didn't anticipate that it would last 15 months and I've been slow to get back into a regular routine simply because you know, there's a lot of variables variance out there. So wherever you want, I happened to be on the continuum of getting back to normal. Be easy with yourself. That's the number one thing to be gentle with yourself? No matter what it is that you are attempting to, to undertake or take on this summer, I want to remind you of the basic things that you need to do. Basic strategies for taking care of yourself. That I offer in my cheat sheet, on my work, on my website. If you'd like to go to the website, there are several freebies for, to download. If you're interested, there's a quiz on burnout. There's a cheat sheet on how to manage your stress. I offer my free book ebook on how to manage your stress, that you might not care about a whole ebook. Maybe you just enjoy it, just it in the cheat sheet. So let me share with you what you will find when you download the cheat. And that is a reminder that you need to stay hydrated, especially in the summer months, you need to pay attention to how much you're taking in. You don't want to overdo it. You don't want to become waterlogged, so you don't want to be drinking too much fluid, but you also need to be keeping an eye on how much you're sweating in a day at the beach is going to require that you drink more than a day of lounging in front of the TV. So be mindful of the amount of water that you may need based on what it is that's going on in there in your day-to-day activity. If you're, if you're exercising, you need more water than you need. If you're just lounging around. And if you are indulging in more wine or alcohol beverages than normal, you also need water to counteract that, keep your body from becoming too intoxicated or, you know, toxic frankly, drink water. No matter what else you may be doing, summertime is a time for fun. So you're probably relaxing a little bit on your diet. Don't overdo that either stick with whole foods, whole grains, whole fruits, vegetables, foods that will feed your body. That will give you the nutrients and minerals that you need. Don't skimp on your sleep. You need everybody. Every adult needs somewhere between six and a half and eight hours of sleep. And frankly, the summertime is a good time for you to calibrate how much sleep you actually do need to be at peak function. I guess I need eight hours. I don't know about anybody else, but for me a eight and a half sometimes. And yeah, irony is that when I was working, I hardly ever got that much. So no wonder. I felt tired. A lot of the time, I would often come home from work and, you know, just collapse on the couch and, and take a nap 20, 30 minutes, because I hadn't gotten enough sleep the night before, keep me going through the day. So don't skimp on your sleep. You need a certain amount of sleep. Everybody has their particular set point that they need that number of hours. So this summer give yourself the luxury of finding out how much sleep you actually need. Go to bed when you're tired and wake up. When you feel good, you're ready to get up. You're energized. You're ready to take on the day. And then look at the clock. How many hours elapsed between the time you fell asleep and the time you woke up and that's the number of hours you need, don't forget to breathe. And if you can find a gentle yoga class or exercise class that helps you to learn how to breathe properly, do that because the sales in your body need oxygen. And you need to remind yourself periodically throughout the day to breathe deeply so that you get the oxygen that you need. Don't forget that you also need exercise 30 minutes a day, at least five days a week, do something that will accelerate your heart rate, cause you to sweat just a little bit, and that will help your cardiac health as well as your overall health and sense of wellbeing. Not to mention that it will help you to sleep. And when you're exercising, don't forget that you also need to drink a little more meditate or pray or both. I am a huge proponent of the idea that we are all individual expressions of a higher power. And frankly, when we get stressed out, we tend to feel disconnected from our higher power. We need to reconnect. So take some time during the summer to reconnect with whatever it is that you identify as your higher power, whether it's God, the universe, the creator, or some other entity, because it may be different for you, but reconnect with whatever it is for you. I liken it to sometimes a lamp will become unplugged from the power source in the wall. And when it's unplugged, it won't turn on. You can't, you can't get the light to turn on. You can flip the switch as many times as you want, but the light's not going to come on because it's unplugged from the source of the energy, which comes from the electricity. That's in the wall, in the, in the power outlet in the wall. So you have to plug the lamp back in to the wall to get the energy that you need so that when you flick the switch, the light comes on. We are very much like that lamp. If we become unplugged from our source, our power source, if you will, because we've become overstressed, then it's hard to get recharged. So be aware that if you are feeling disconnected from your higher power, now's a good time to reconnect. Whether it's through going to a religious service or tuning into a, a virtual class of some sort or reconnecting with folks from your home church or whatever it is for you. And you may find it by meditating daily or engaging in a prayer practice daily or doing both. There's nothing that says that you can't do both. And then finally at the end of the day, it's critically important that you figure out what you need to do for yourself to have fun. Summertime is fun time, right? I think there's a thing out there. Summertime is fun time go to the beach where lots of people find their source, their opportunity to recharge by doing as little as possible, reading the good book, taking your mind off of school for now. You get back to it when the time comes. But for right now, if you can disengage from anything related to school so that you can completely recharge yourself. And then when it's time to get ready to go back to school in the fall, you'll be fully charged and you'll be ready to take on the new challenges of going back after a year of a pandemic intending to your students, who frankly, I think we can all agree are going to be a little more fragile than usual. Many of them have had a really hard year regardless of their age, whether they were kindergarten babies who missed out on their kindergarten year because of the pandemic or whether because they're eighth graders who missed out on a year with their friends and the social development that they needed in middle school, or whether they're high school, seniors who are looking forward to having a normal quote unquote normal graduation this year. And then the college kids. You know, I, I teach adjunct at a university. My students are teachers who will be going back in the fall to a full-time classroom. Many of them have been teaching hybrid this year. So whatever it is, wherever you are, wherever your kids happen to be on the continuum, be gentle with yourself. As you recover from this past year, forget about any mistakes you think you made forget about any of the stuff that didn't go as well as you wanted it to that's over there, that's water over the dam. That's an unfixable stuff that you can't go back in time and fix any of it. Deal with the present and plan for the future so that you can avoid making those same mistakes. Not to say you won't make new ones because with a new new year, there are always new opportunities to learn bite. Now then concentrate on relaxing, engaging in some fundamental self-care so that you can recharge yourself, recalibrate and feel more normal again. That's what we're all striving for right after a pandemic year. That's it for this week. I hope some of that will have been useful for you as always stay safe. Take care. I'll see you next week. This is Katie Boitnott of teachers and transition bye for now.
Speaker 1:So there you have it. An episode of teachers in transition. I hope you enjoyed the information and I hope you'll plan to come back. Please subscribe to teachers in transition so that you can be alerted of future episodes. And let me know if you have any questions or topics that you would like me to specifically cover in a future episode, I'm more than happy to help with individual questions as well. So email me at kitty boy, not at boys, not coaching.com. If you are interested in finding a new career or just enjoying your life more, this is the place to start. I'm Katie Boitnott and this is teachers and transition.