Part 1: Self-care is vital for teachers and leaders
The terms “self-care” and “well-being” are often narrowly understood or simply misconceived. Myths like these abound: Self-care is selfish. Self-care means pampering and relaxation. Wellbeing is about lunchtime yoga and morning teas at work.
Being reductive or mocking about self-care and wellbeing misses the point: we can’t work well if we are not well ourselves. For important personal and professional reasons, we have to pay attention to self-care and well-being. Once we have made that commitment, we can then work out what changes we want to make and how to do it.
This article looks beyond the myths and misconceptions to show why self-care and well-being are an integral part of work for teachers and school leaders and then examines how individuals can begin to craft a personal action plan to support any changes they want to make.
Defining self-care and wellbeing
Self-caremeans attending to the state of your physical, mental, social, and emotional health.
In practice, self-care means recognising your needs and actively tending to them to prevent burnout and manage stress. Self-care makes a difference to your:
Health and happiness
Protection from stress, burnout, and illness
Ability to care for others
Wellbeing is another term for health and happiness, which involves your emotional, physical, social, and professional states of being. We examine these further below.
Why are self-care and wellbeing important professionally?
Self-care and well-being are essential for us as individuals, but we also have collective professional responsibility to be and stay well for students of today and tomorrow. That is, it’s not only about the health aspect at any one point in time, but also the sustainability of this over time – whether that be across a week, a year and one’s whole career.
Part of being an effective teacher and leader means having a duty of care for both colleagues and students. All educators are very visible to their students and colleagues, and so are a role model for others. To encourage others to look after themselves, you need to show that you can walk the walk! Taking care of yourself and talking and sharing some of the ways you do this with colleagues, is part of our work as colleagues.
Debunking myths around self-care
Making a professional commitment to self-care might be easier if we call out some of the myths and persistent stereotypes associated with it in our culture, myths that misrepresent and can minimise the importance of self-care as part of a healthy and sustainable professional life.
Our culture strongly associates self-care with things you might do to ‘spoil yourself’ -- like lighting candles, taking a bath, booking in a spa day. Similarly, wellbeing is often associated with yoga or morning teas at work.
Each of these activities can absolutely be of value to an individual’s self-care and wellbeing. That is not in dispute. The issue is that these cultural associations can also contribute to a narrow perception of what self-care and wellbeing is and can make it sound removed from our professional life. Self-care and wellbeing are not only important for being healthy and adaptive in our personal lives, but in our professional lives as well. Let’s now take a deeper dive into self-care and wellbeing and the breadth and depth of these concepts.
Domains of wellbeing and self-care
Self-care and wellbeing relate to various domains:
Physical – engage and sustain your body and physical health, including
Food and nutrition
Physical activity and exercise
Sleep and rest
Mental and emotional – to build and maintain your mental focus and protect your mental health, including
Emotional self-regulation and ability to manage stress and anxiety
Regulation of negative thoughts, worries and self-talk
Taking control of news and social media feeds
Social – to connect with family, friends and others, including time for:
Friends and family
Interest groups or clubs outside work
Everyday social connections and interactions
Spiritual – to find meaning and purpose, happiness and joy. Though this will vary for everyone, it would include:
A faith or cultural practice, music, dance, a passion or a hobby
Being in nature
Workplace and professional self-care – to develop your professional expertise, effectiveness and satisfaction with your work, including:
Professional development in areas of interest and specialisation
Peer and collegial groups around common interests
Professional mentoring or supervision
Time with a trusted colleague to talk over issues and concerns
The extent to which each domain resonates or feels meaningful to each of us will vary. For one-person, physical wellbeing may be important, while someone else may gravitate to mental and emotional wellbeing as providing a domain where more attention and energy would be supportive.
Self-care means different things to different people.
There is no definitive list of what is good or ‘right’ for each person – the most important thing is to find out what most increases your feelings of wellbeing and happiness, and to stay mindful of the breadth of the domains and not ignore any aspect completely.
What we do have in common is the challenge of finding time to pay attention to self-care in an already busy and often overloaded schedule. Behaviour change research suggests that creating personalised action plans, starting with a personal and meaningful goal is good way to start. The next step is to move from goal setting to implementation. What works here is to plan small steps toward the goal. That is, realistic and achievable steps that you can fit into your existing schedule. Changing habits and creating new ones is hard.
If you want to think more about how to include a bit more self-care into your week, check out our article Creating a personalised self-care plan.
Resources
https://www.blackdoginstitute.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Importance-of-selfcare-planning.pdf
Next in this series: Part 2: Creating a self-care plan
