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.