Why You Need a Reset Before School Starts
Why You Need a Reset Before School Starts
[00:00:00] Welcome to the eight to four teacher where we tackle the habits, routines, and mindset shifts that help teachers leave school at four without guilt. This is a space for teachers who wanna do meaningful work without working around the clock. I'm your host, Barb Flowers, and I believe you can be an amazing teacher and have a life outside of school.
Let's build a teaching life that feels sustainable and fulfilling. Let's make eight to four your new normal.
welcome everyone to the eight to four teacher. Today we're talking about why you need a reset before school starts, and I love this topic. I think this is a great topic for summer because often we think summer is enough to recover from burnout. If you're feeling burnt out or maybe you just overdid it during the school year, you love teaching still, but you know, you work 60 hour weeks all the time and you just think I need.
Summer break. I laugh because I look at TikTok and I see all kinds of great tiktoks of teachers [00:01:00] just sleeping and taking this time to really rest and recover. And I think that that is such an important thing. And I love the jokes and things that people have posted on TikTok about it. , But I think that the important thing here is if you really are burnt out, whether it's you're working 60 hours a week or you need a different purpose, or you're not sure if teaching's right for you anymore.
This is the time you really need to reset. I always say burnout doesn't go away on its own if you're feeling burnt out or overwhelmed because you know from experience, if you've been teaching for more than a couple years, that when you leave summer break and you go back in August or September, I. It really feels like you never left.
And that's how it felt. , As a principal, as a teacher, if we had a break, whether it was a two week break, spring break, a summer break, it seemed like you would leave on that Friday and you would come back and it's like, where did time even go? Which is fine if you have good systems in place.
But if you're overworking, you're overwhelmed and [00:02:00] you're just feeling burnout. Now in summer is the time where you need to, you. Summer is the time where you need to reset and get these things in place. And so in the next few episodes of the eight to four teacher, we're going to talk about habits and routines and things to get.
In place before the school year starts so that you can go back and this school year will actually be different for you if you are overworking or feeling overwhelmed. But right now what I wanna talk about in this episode is why we need the reset, and we're just going to dig into why you need a true reset, not just rest before heading into the school year.
Let's start by talking about the causes of burnout and why people feel burnout and overwhelmed. To start with, it could be from a high workload. Or maybe you had difficult classroom behaviors. Some years we just have a difficult class as a teacher. I remember my second year was the hardest year.
There were a lot of behaviors and a lot of things that I dealt with. , Maybe you have unrealistic expectations if you're a [00:03:00] perfectionist and. You're constantly setting these expectations that you're never going to meet because they're unrealistic. That could cause burnout for you, or just overwhelm.
Maybe you feel like there's a lack of support. The year that I had , you know, high needs class, I had a lot of support, but it was the year that my principal was actually running two buildings. So it, , all of those things can, , can compound on itself. And create burnout. Also, the emotional demands.
It's emotionally draining when every day you're dealing with discipline. And then if may when every day you're dealing with behaviors and then maybe you have your own things going on in your life. I remember I felt, , burnout and had to recover when I was a principal and it was good things in my life, but I had a lot of emotional demands.
I was, you know, running the building. And then also I had just gotten remarried and was going on my honeymoon. And so just a lot of new things. And those weren't bad things, it's just, that's an emotional [00:04:00] demand, right? That causes a lot of emotions that can be really draining. And then also, maybe you just don't have time for that work life balance that you want to have.
, You're focused on working all the time, you're working 60 hours, and that's not what you wanna have. And so. This is where you can't just say, okay, I'm gonna sleep all summer, or take this break, really disconnect and then go back and do it all again. The same. This is where you have to create new systems to make things different.
And then the consequences to burnout and feeling overwhelmed is really physical and mental health issues. Our bodies really are dictated by our minds, and so you'll notice physically that's there's so many diseases and things that are caused. By stress. Stress does so many things to our bodies, and so making sure that we're taking care of ourselves is super important for our physical health and making sure we're feeling our best.
Also, mental health. It's easy to start feeling depressed, anxious, all of those things if you're not taking care of yourself and if you're [00:05:00] working all the time. We as humans, we are not meant to be in this stress cycle nonstop. We need to get out of our bodies. Were made to. Feel that stress to protect ourselves.
But then once we got out of that situation to stop and alleviate the stress, and so that's what we need to be doing throughout the school year, not just in the summer. We can't be stressed for nine months of the year and then not stressed for the summer. We have to alleviate that through the school year.
. Also, burnout will, you know, reduce job satisfaction. You're not going to wanna stay and be a teacher if you're working all the time. That's why I'm so passionate about the eight to four teacher, the idea that. You need to find ways to have a 40 hour work week as a teacher, and then it reduces your motivation at work and you've just stopped caring really about the job.
And so you have poor job performance as well. And so if we don't deal with what has caused the prolonged stress and exhaustion, it's going to come right back. When we're faced with that same situation, so if we don't deal with the cause, the root [00:06:00] cause of all of this, when we go back to school, we're gonna be dealing with it again.
So we need to treat burnout, overwhelm, stress, all of it, and build resilience in ourselves so that we don't face the same issues year to year and summer break alone is not going to treat your burnout or the stress of education, it's systems, it's putting systems in place and taking care of ourselves that's really going to help treat that.
So that's what we're gonna be focusing on.
So now I wanna talk about. What is your plan for this summer? You know, are you reentering school with a plan or do you have just the hope that next year's better? Do you just have the hope or the expectation that with a different class it'll be better with a different colleague, it'll be better.
What are you hoping for? What are you thinking for next year? Because. Without a reset, the same issues will resurface. And then what really happens when we have these expectations that a different class is going to change things, or different [00:07:00] kids or a different curriculum or whatever it is, then when that expectation is not met, then we're even more upset and feeling more stressed out than we were to begin with.
Okay, so that's something else to think about when we're talking about that reset. So. What does that true reset look like? Well, it's not just taking bubble baths. I always say that, , taking a bubble bath is amazing, but that is not the only way for self-care. Self-care is really about getting to the root cause, understanding why you're burnout.
I. Setting boundaries and creating systems that actually support you and are sustainable. You wanna build systems and routines that protect your time and energy. Okay, so this reset that I'm talking about is this intentional pause to reflect and rebuild. And as educators, we were taught in our education programs to reflect, reflect, reflect on teaching on.
You know, our teaching lessons and what we're teaching kids, but we don't take enough time to reflect on [00:08:00] ourselves and reflect on our own wellbeing and why we are where we are. And I think the biggest thing here that I tell people in coaching is when we reflect, it's more about getting curious. It's not about judgment.
It's not about judging ourselves. If, let's say in the stress of work we've gained weight or we stopped working out and we're not taking care of ourself, it's not about judgment. It's getting curious. Why did I gain weight? Why did I stop taking care of myself? Why did I decide that I have to work all of this time?
Is it that you're grading papers and you're grading them in such a detailed way that it's taking you hours and hours? Is it that you're getting caught up talking to colleagues and then you feel like you don't have enough time at school? Is it that you truly feel like you can't get ahead? , What is it that is taking up your time and you really have to get curious about that.
, I do that all the time. I've done that as a principal, thinking about what are the things that keep me from being the instructional leader I wanna be, what are the things in teaching that take up my time? Because I wanna be really good with time [00:09:00] management. All of those things, the best teachers that I've seen in my experience of being a principal are really reflective and they're constantly reflecting on their teaching practices.
But what I want you to think about this summer is reflect on yourself, reflect on your own wellbeing. What do you need to do to be the best version of yourself? Who do you want to be as a teacher as you go into the next school year? What kind of teacher do you wanna be?
Do you wanna be somebody who doesn't take care of yourself? Do you wanna be somebody who doesn't have time for your family? . What do you want next year to be? Get curious about what this year looked like, what you liked, what you didn't like, and what does that reset need to be? Where do you need to set boundaries?
Where do you need to create systems? And where do you need to build routines? And like I said, we're gonna touch on all of these areas in depth so you can think about it a little bit more. But one thing I wanna invite you to do is I have a course called the Burnout Breakthrough, and this course was originally created as a summer reset.
And it's a short five module course that's going to walk you [00:10:00] through a four step process to reflect, reset, and rebuild your energy. And normally this course is $27, but I'm offering it right now for 50% off to my podcast listeners. So if you type in at the checkout code podcast, it's only going to be 1350.
And so inside module one, we talk about the importance of a reset, but. What we really do in this course is you're going to create an action plan for the summer of how you're going to reset you're, it's going to guide you through that reflection and really help you make the best of your summer so that you go back next year.
Feeling like you're rested, feeling like you got to the root of why you were overwhelmed, stressed, burnout, and a plan moving forward so it doesn't happen again. So you can go to barbed flowers.com/courses , or look for the link in the show notes. But I really encourage you to check out this course.
It's a short course. You need to take the time to really reflect and figure out what worked for you this year, [00:11:00] what didn't, and what are you going to do different so that next year looks the way you want it to look. Thanks everyone for joining the podcast. Remember.
Thanks everyone today for joining the podcast. Our goal here is to help you be the eight to four teacher so that you can be out the door by four.
