What if teaching could stop feeling like it was stealing your life?

Burnout should not be your “reward” for being a great teacher!


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You want to love your job – but it’s draining the life out of you!

Are you spending more time at school than you are at home?

- Is your car the last car in the parking lot?

- You feel buried in marking.

- Overwhelmed with policies.

- Languishing in lesson planning.

- Consumed by all the kids who need help.

- Excited by all the possibilities for making a difference, but overwhelmed by the enormity of everyone’s needs, the deep social issues and the multitude of problems there are to deal with?

- Exhausted by the expectations to be not just a teacher… but also a Mother, Nurse, Therapist, Guide, Tutor, Curriculum instructor, Sports Coach, Friend, Librarian, Event Planner, Parenting mentor, Advocate, Resource Finder , Rule minder , Food provider, Cleaner , Decorator, Career coach , Protector, Surrogate parent, Motivator, Community organizer, Ministry Liaison, Teacher Mentor, Curriculum Developer, Arts director, Social planner, Social worker…

No wonder you are exhausted!


- You are put upon.

- You don’t feel respected or understood.

- You feel like you’re trying to glue together a broken system.

- You are upset too often.

- Feel guilty too frequently.

- Exhausted from late nights and not enough sleep.

Here’s what makes it even worse:

You are passionate and dedicated! You are great at what you do! Your kids love you!

You’ve been doing everything right. Superlatively well, in fact!

Then why does everything feel wrong?

Is burnout the reward for being a great teacher?!?

You know what the problem is?


What if I told you that everything you ever learned about how to be a teacher set you up to burnout?

Read that again. Yes – it’s true!
 
See, you might have tried lots of things to ease the feelings of stress. Things like:

- Meditation
- Yoga
- New hobbies
- Exercise
- More nutritious food
- Listening to music
- Time in nature
- Sports
 
…And while all those things helped some and made you feel a bit better…

You still end up back in the same place

As a successful teacher, you are finding yourself stressed out over school and students struggling with a huge workload – all the while your life, your family, and your social life gets put on the back burner. And it doesn’t feel good. It feels like teaching is stealing your life from you.

And to make it worse – you feel like you’re the only one struggling!

You’re not.

Teacher burnout has been documented since 1865!

So what’s going on?

Burnout isn’t personal (even though it feels that way!)


Burnout is a by-product of a dysfunctional system.

Teachers are expected to make up for the inadequacies of the underfunded school system, to make up for bad parenting, to make up for cut social programs – and no one questions this.

If a psychologist had a client with the level of work, stress, responsibility, and commitment expected of teachers – they’d tell them they need to slow down and re-think what they’re doing.

In teaching, it’s encouraged and rewarded! You might even get the teacher of the year award!

In the education field, burnout is masquerading as a virtue.

Like a code of honour. It’s not.

It harms teachers. It harms families. It harms students. It harms schools.

It’s a code of stress

​​​​​​​And you don’t need to abide by it anymore.


Joanna’s workshops were engaging and thoughtful, but perhaps most importantly, practical for both the new and experienced classroom teachers. She brings a wealth of research and insight into the field of teacher’s mental and emotional health, and her suggested strategies are useful and necessary! During our series of 3 workshops, teachers shared experiences, nodded their heads in agreement, and many of us had “light bulb” moments of realization in how to continue to teach meaningfully throughout our career, but in way that helps sustain our energy and enthusiasm without depleting our own reserves of well-being.

- Pamela Perera,  Status of Women Committee, OECTA, Dufferin Peel Separate School Board

You see I was where you are...

I loved my teaching job (Grade 7&8! Woohoo – I love that age group!) and was stressed to the max. I did meditation for 4 years to try to relax – but I ended up burning out and going on stress leave – right in the middle of a meditation retreat!!

I recovered – mostly by taking 2 years to study healing modalities, energy therapies, mindset work, belief engineering.  Then I went back into teaching - and that’s when I saw it. With clarity. The beliefs, mindset, and ways of being of what's expected of teachers – were the same ones I’d just spent 2 years healing myself from.




I went to do my masters in education to research this further. And I discovered that, in fact, the culture of teaching is full of prior beliefs, mandates, and identities that create harm.


Was this some hidden knowledge – why was no one teaching this? So much suffering could be alleviated!

So I created a system to interrupt the toxic culture of burnout in teaching – so no teachers have to suffer the pain of stress and burnout anymore.

“Joanna’s Stress and Burnout Program was an incredibly grounding and empowering experience. Through it, I learned a variety of practical strategies to unpack personal challenges and to build on personal and professional strengths. Joanna’s personal stories and wisdom grounded in experience was enlightening and instinctive. Thanks Joanna for an amazing experience.” - Yaya Yu

“After each session I was filled with positive energy. The program looks at the teacher as a whole person and cares for their spiritual, physical emotional and mental wellbeing. It provides excellent skills, strategies and tools for coping with stress and provides useful and honest information on situations that teachers will likely experience and how to handle them in a healthy way.” - Sophie W.

“Joanna Krop is an innovative educator and expert on teacher stress and burnout.   She has also done important work on Feminine Wellbeing. Joanna is an outstanding presenter and workshop leader in these areas. Her work touches the core issues that impact teacher stress and wellbeing.  It is not just information to digest, but a transformative process of re-framing teacher mindsets and professional growth.” - John (Jack) P Miller, Professor in Curriculum, Teaching and Learning at the University of Toronto, author of The Holistic Curriculum.


A teacher-centric system that is designed to:


- rethink everything you were told makes a good teacher

- replace overwhelm with security

- finally have time to serve your needs, instead of not having enough of it

- release the guilt so you stop feeling hounded by bad feelings

- protect your energy and time

- work without compassion fatigue

- reclaim your needs – even the ones you didn’t know you had

- break free from the stressful influences that sabotage your wellbeing

- release self-sacrifice and get unstuck from survival mode

You might be thinking – well that’s great Joanna, but how are you going to teach me to do all this – without getting overwhelmed and adding to my to-do list?

I’m so glad you asked!

The Teacher Wellness Code is the name of the system I created – it’s the teacher training you should’ve received in teacher’s college!

In fact, the very content of this course I’ve created for you was curated, developed and tested at education conferences throughout North America and when I was teaching pre-service teachers at the University of Toronto – workshops and classes always filled to capacity!

What is the Teacher Wellness Code?

It’s a 5 step system that guides you to banish burnout – once and for all.


The 5 steps help you to:

- Release the hold of the ideal teacher that drives burnout

- Make it easier to function in a broken system

- Care without burning out Break free from the past that holds you hostage to stress

- Connect to your real needs and get unstuck from survival mode

"This course was very useful for helping me be more mindful and balanced when I felt overwhelmed with stress and busyness. Joanna gave us really practical tools, and worksheets and created a safe and reflective space, and really helped me find ways to relieve my stress.” - Diana

My Invitation:

I want to invite you to my group program, Teacher Wellness Code Mentoring Circle.

I want you to experience the truth that you can be rid of burnout in teaching for yourself.

No one should be burning out – you’re too important to your students and to yourself to burnout!

Here’s what will turn your teaching life around:


Module 1: The Code of the Ideal Teacher
  • Decode the training that has set you up to burn-out so that you can break-free of stress
  • Challenge the story of doing and being everything and reclaim your professional agency
  • Unpack the 4 roles that create massive stress and get unstuck from the same old patterns
  • Set over 40 mindset-switches to clear the beliefs, thoughts, and actions that are sabotaging your time, energy and wellbeing
Module 2: The Code of the Front Line
  • Decode the system you teach in and never feel taken advantage of again
  • Challenge the story of serving the system, and reclaim your power
  • Learn to create teacher-centric planning strategies so your needs aren’t put on the back-burner
  • Discover how to manage a toxic work environment and stop dreading Monday mornings
  • Create Principles of Practice that determine healthy boundaries for time and energy expenditure and make it easy to say no – even if saying no feels like the hardest thing to do
  • Use the magic of reciprocity get your class on your side to relieve stress
Module 3: The Code of Love
  • Decode the messages of toxic compassion – so you can care without feeling burdened
  • Challenge the story of self-denial and reclaim your needs to feel fulfilled
  • Learn how to release guilt and get that heavy feeling off your chest
  • Learn to create boundaries that protect you from compassion fatigue and create compassion for yourself
  • Use the same tool psychologists use when dealing with complex emotional situations – and protect your mental health and ability to do your job.
  • Discover why vicarious trauma affects you so deeply so you can to help yourself have a healthy distance
Module 4: The Code of Influence
  • Decode the past – and be free of well-meaning advice that doesn’t work
  • Challenge the story of your mentors and reclaim your own voice
  • Discover the 6 patterns that shaped your teaching so you can release that doesn’t serve you and make your teaching work for you
  • Unpack the messages of worthiness that drain your teacher energy and feel good about what you do and who you are
  • Break free from the educational mindset of lack that keeps you in a perpetual cycle of striving – and start to feel like you are able to get on top of your work and thrive
  • Understand how answering one question unravels they puzzle of stress and gives you a fresh start
Module 5: The Code of the Inner Teacher
  • Decode your core essence and return to the wisdom of your authentic self – where all healing happens
  • Challenge the story of sacrifice and reclaim self-love so that you are never put last again
  • Discover the 3 Rs that are the antidote to the productivity-focused energy that drives workplace stress
  • Tune into the intuitive guidance that supports you and never leave work crying again
  • Discover the unmet needs and motivations that secretly drive your teaching to be stuck in survival mode so that you can start living fully and thriving
  • Tap into hidden sources of power and seal off energy leakages to eliminate feeling exhausted
  • Tune into the soul qualities that help connect you to what matters so that you don’t have to feel like your life is being trampled by teaching.