The Teacher Burnout Podcast

40 Simpler Ways to be Mindful
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[00:00:00] Hey, everyone. Welcome to the Teacher Burnout Podcast. Today on this episode, we have a guest with us, and her name is Danielle Newfer. And Danielle Newfer wrote the book, The Path of the Mindful Teacher, and she helps teachers fight burnout and find ways to be more mindful in their classroom so that they can Be more resilient and beat burnout overall.

She's experienced burnout in her own teaching career and now she helps others with it. So I think that you'll really enjoy this interview and I hope that you get some tips and strategies that you can take and try in your own classroom.

Welcome to the Teacher Burnout Podcast, where we explore the challenges of burnout for teachers and share practical strategies to support teacher well being. I'm your host Barb Flowers. If you're a teacher looking for ways to prevent burnout or an educational leader searching for strategies to support your team, this podcast is for you.

Let's dive in.[00:01:00] All right, everyone. Well, welcome to the Teacher Burnt Out podcast.

Today I'm really excited because we are here with Danielle Newfer, who is the author of the book. The Path of the Mindful Teacher and Founder of Teaching Well. So she's gonna be on today talking about her book and some strategies that you can use when you're feeling burnt out.

So I'm going to let Danielle come on and introduce herself.

Hi, thanks so much, Barbara. I really appreciate, um, you having me on the podcast today, and to talk about something that's near and dear to my heart, the reason why I wrote this book, The Path of the Mindful Teacher, um, you know, stress and burnout, and the reality of, you know, teachers, not a teacher. Knowing the best ways to care for themselves in an environment that's not always, um, conducive for that. So, um, I'm happy to, to talk about this topic at length. Yeah,

I think it's such an important topic. So if you want to start by just telling the listeners about yourself and what you've been up to [00:02:00] in your work.

Yeah, sure. So I, am a 20 plus, at this point, year educator, and I went through two bouts of burnout that almost made me leave the profession, and the first one was a pretty typical one, after about five years in the profession, and what I found and what helped me was a lot of stuff that I learned through my own trial and error.

And it helped to a point, but I, at that point in teaching, there wasn't a lot of, there was a lot of celebration of working all the time, of taking stuff home. And if you didn't take things home, you weren't doing your job. And there's probably, and I know that there's a lot of that. still going on, but there wasn't a lot of examples of, of that being like, okay to do.

and I found a lot of things that worked, a lot of practices that worked. but what happened was about 10 years after that, about [00:03:00] 15 years into my career, I ended up going through just as bad, if not worse, burnout. And it was for completely different reasons, and it was more for, um, you know, never knowing how to say no at school, never knowing how to say to have boundaries, like, I looked like I had things together because I had some practices and tools in my tool belt, but I still didn't know how to, um, have boundaries that actually supported my well being fully, and what ended up happening is I took a sabbatical, I took a half of, Happy your sabbatical two years in a row.

and that was when I really started to put these pieces together. Like, how could I bring some of these practices that worked outside of school back into my classroom so that I could fully live, like, an actual full life, not just like when teaching was good, teaching was good, and when [00:04:00] like the personal stuff was out of cont you know, like, I really it wasn't about balance necessarily, but more like rhythm.

I like that word better. Um, I don't know if there's really ever a balance that it's equal. It's more like ebbs and flows. And that's really where Teaching Well and this book came from, was really saying like, how can I support teachers and show them that these tools that I found can actually be implemented into a classroom setting, into a school setting.

It's not something that you just do outside of school, like take a bubble bath or things like that. Those are all the great things. All these things are great, but how can we make these more practical and more sustainable for our teachers?

Yeah. And I love in the book, you talk a lot about that and you talk about, um, practices that you can really use anywhere and then taking them into the classroom as well.

So I thought that that was really, really good. you talked to us a little bit already about the path of the mindful teacher and you talked to us [00:05:00] about what inspired you to write the book. What are some takeaways that you feel like listeners could get if they were to get the book?

So I think. One of the biggest things I want to get across to educators is when you do some of these practices, I'll just start with this, when you do some of these practices, and they can be, they're simple, like these are simple things, and I call it the path of the mindful teacher because mindfulness is a big piece of the puzzle for me, and what I hope teachers can take away from the book is that these practices are simple, they're simple things like, Take like scheduling out breaks for yourself and like be even if it's like a minute I know like sometimes we're just walking to our mailboxes.

Can you somehow get outside to take a breath? Can you? Mindfully walk down the hallway And, you know, even if you're rushing, can you feel that and try to really be focused on the way your body's feeling and see if there's something you can do to support [00:06:00] yourself when you get back to your classroom. So it's just about bringing more awareness to your actual school day.

And I think what I want to say more than anything is that These practices and this whole book isn't meant to excuse a toxic work culture. So I never want, I never want that to be the, the feeling that people get when they hear me like, oh, she wants me to take a deep breath. Well, that's really not going to be, not going to cut it.

I get that. I totally get that. But what I, what I want to do is to try to empower teachers more through working through this process and saying, what are the things that we do have control over? What are those things? And there are more of them than we maybe give ourselves, permission to find. So, again, some of these practices will be things like, breath work throughout your day, taking breaks, finding transition [00:07:00] points, even when the kids are in your classroom, what are transition points where you can just, like, touch something in your classroom and just breathe?

It's grounding exercises before you start teaching, all of these things are ways that we can bring some of this presence to our teaching and those things added up over time are really, really powerful.

Yeah, and I love how in the book you do really focus on helping teachers think about the areas that they can control, because I think that's what caused many teachers stress is the areas that they can't control.

And so that's one of the things in my coaching that I always talk about is. focusing on what we can control and what are our thoughts around that. I also do love how you talked about your thoughts create your feelings and your actions. I thought that that was really cool too to think about how your own thinking impacts the actions that you take.

So I love that part of the book as well. And so what is one [00:08:00] thing that you can share with us and our listeners from the book that they can try right now?

So, I think a really great tool, and I think you just mentioned it, is so don't change anything, and just observe yourself. So, this is, sometimes this is very humbling, and I'll admit it's very humbling to me, um, as well.

So, one thing they can do is just to keep what I call, I call it like a, an emotion journal or a mind body journal. So, tomorrow when you go into class, have just like a piece of paper out. And on your desk, write down when in your class time, like that you were teaching, this could be like done between classes or when the kids are doing something, that you felt some sort of emotion.

So whether it be anger or nervousness or fear. or happiness, um, or positive emotions, so write down what you felt like and what was happening during that time. And just [00:09:00] keeping track of your emotions for a day or two is so eye opening to discover. what's going on with you throughout a day and what really pushes your buttons and what actually really engages you.

and when we start to see what drains our, our emotional reserves and what fills our emotional reserves, we can start to make changes, but we can only make those changes when we're actually aware of what's happening.

I love that. I think awareness is so huge because it's the first key to changing anything, so. That's awesome. Is there anything else you want to share before we end, um, from the book?

I just want to leave teachers with the feeling of knowing that, number one, they're not alone. They are not alone. like I said, I went through these bouts of burnout and all of these things without really having a role model or without really having any support and I think that is changing.

So if you [00:10:00] really want to be a teacher, if you want this profession to be something that you do for the long, you know, next few years, to seek out those supports that want to help you do that same thing. because there's a lot of them popping up, and I feel like we will never not need teachers. Like we need.

incredible educators, but we also need to support educators. Um, and we can do that together. So, I just want to empower them to say, you know, we need teachers. So, the, the healthier we can be and the healthier they can be, the better. And

I always like to remind teachers that burnout doesn't go away on its own.

I think sometimes we have a break and we think, you know, with a break or with the summer. will feel better, but it doesn't go away on its own. So we always need to be finding strategies. So your book is a great strategy to help prevent burnout or if you are in that burnout to, you know, read through it and get some of those strategies.

Um, [00:11:00] I just wanted to share, I had a quote from your book that was one of my favorites at the end. I thought it was so good. So, and this is kind of long, but Danielle wrote, we can only change the things that have to do with us or our internal responses and our relationship to our experience. Nothing may change at first, but you will.

And because of the changes that take place in you, you will experience your classroom differently. It's such an empowering truth that you are both the problem and the solution. And I love that quote because It's so true that we might not see those changes or if we're in a toxic environment, but people will see them in us and we will change and we are both the problem and the solution.

So I thought that was such a good point to make.

Awesome. Thank you. Thank you.

Well, thank you so much for being here. Um, Danielle, can you let people know where they can find you if they want to reach out to you?

Sure, sure. So please reach out to me at Danielle at [00:12:00] teachingwell. life if you want to email me.

If you want to, um, check out any of the other resources I have, you can check out teachingwell. life, and I'd also like to invite your listeners to check out, um, this Thanks. Bye. Great bundle of resources I put together at teachingwell. life forward slash bundle that will have resources that they can print out, put in their classrooms as reminders.

Um, some of the practices we just talked about, there's lots of different things for, creating a 40 hour work week, and different things like that that will really support, the actual teacher journey, not just self care in general.

Awesome. Well, thank you so much for being here. It was so great talking with you.