Active@Home: How Are You Doing? [Interactive]

This podcast shares two ways to focus on self-care: giving yourself a break and helping someone else.

[0:02] These unprecedented in times that we’re in right now are going to require unprecedented self care for what I consider the most giving profession on Earth, teachers.

[0:37] How you doing? We say this a lot, but in recent times as you go through COVID-19, have you really paused to think how you are really doing? During this time, how many of you have had an email that described what was going to happen in your district followed by another one from someone else that contradicted the first one? Or in a line at the grocery store that was worse. than the night before Thanksgiving, or experience countless other stressors that you’ve never experienced before. And this is a difficult time, there’s no getting around that. And we have to be careful during this time to not burn ourselves out.

I’m always proud to be a Physical Educator. But in the last few weeks, I’ve been extremely proud and I’ve seen some of the incredible work by PE teachers around the globe, lots of sharing, teachers are working to change the entire education system in a week and it’s getting done. I think that’s something to be proud of, but like I said, these are unprecedented times that are will require unprecedented self care, or that work will stop because of teachers being burnt out.

[1:40] So for some of you, it’s been a month and some of you it’s been a week, depending on where you are in the world and I’m guessing you’re getting tired, and it’s early on in this process. So as we move forward in this over the next weeks and months, I’m going to encourage you to keep a couple things in mind and the big overarching picture here is just take your foot off the accelerator and be cognisive of the speed that you’re going.

Avoid Burnout by Giving Yourself a Break

[2:04] One way to do that is give yourself a break. It’s not going to be perfect. You can’t be working 75 hours a day, you can’t replace you in the gymnasium with your students. So we just have to stop that perspective. And there are lots of resources available online. My only suggestion if you’re going to create resources is make sure your face is in the resource. Make sure your face and your voice I was just on a conversation with a teacher and he said he was getting emails from students and all they wanted to hear was their voice and see their face and ask them to Zoom or FaceTime. That’s what our students need right now and the content is great that’s being generated. It’s awesome, but just keep that in mind and give yourself a break from thinking it’s going to be perfect and give yourself a break from working so long and so hard like you’re used to.

Do Something for Others

[2:49] My other strategy I want to talk about which might not be as easy to accomplish is to get out and do the nicest thing you’ve ever done for someone else and I think this idea of a it’ll do you some good, a lot of good and it also do someone else some good that in a difficult time like this, we’re so bogged down and focusing on 10 more lesson plans or eight more lesson plans or whatever our principals email says this week and we’re losing sight of the idea that we need to help others and that there are others and extremely difficult situations right now that we can impact their lives. It could be your student, it could be your neighbor, it could be someone else, just reaching out to do something nice to someone else, I think is great for our own self care as well as the care of those around us.

[3:33] So in the coming weeks, I just encourage you to take care of yourself, take a break, take it easy on yourself, not have to be a perfectionist, and then go out and do something for someone else and I think those are two great ways that we can take self care. It helps us keep perspective in these coming weeks as we go and remember this too shall pass and I think we’re going to come out of this even stronger as a field and as better educators.

THRIVE.