Welcome to The Flourishing Teacher’s Field Guide. It’s time to put down your marking and pick up some life-changing content!

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This week we’re thinking about emotional awareness, and the value that learning to regulate our emotions can bring to our professional and personal lives.

Let’s jump in…

Don’t Talk About Your Emotions, You’ve Got A Class To Teach

If you’re a teacher, you probably feel like you have good days and bad days.

Hopefully more good than bad!

But actually, life isn’t that binary.

Every day has elements of the positive and negative, and our definition of a good or bad day is largely based on shortcuts in our decision-making and our use of language.

Not so much on what actually happened.

Good and bad are such stark terms that it’s impossible for a single day to be either one. Each day is a kaleidoscope of thousands of experiences, and we run them all through our emotional filter.

We give our experiences meaning based on the lens we use to interpret them, which is usually full to capacity with a million other more pressing issues.

The problem is, we’re trained by schools and society not to talk about our emotions, even though we encourage our students to do just that.

It’s considered unprofessional, selfish and burdensome.

We’re not even taught to give others the time and space they need to feel and share emotions.

Why’s that so unhelpful?

Because the more we use phrases like “Keep it to yourself”, “Suck it up” or “You’re too positive for a Monday”, the more we stop ourselves and others from expressing our emotions authentically.

And if we’re not living authentically, our emotional wellbeing will always be a dream.

As teachers and humans, we’re worth more than that.

The answer is to master emotional awareness.

To learn to recognise, embrace and communicate our feelings and channel them into responses that are of value to ourselves and the other awesome people we share our school communities with.

Here’s how…

Emotions Aren’t Feelings: Learning To Regulate Our Emotional Responses

To crack emotional awareness, we need to spend time sitting with our emotions objectively.

By definition, this can be challenging and contradictory, but it’s well worth doing.

Once you can analyse why you respond to things in a certain way, why you’re provoked to upset, frustration or denial, you can start to regulate your responses and stay a little more level.

Firstly, it’s worth realising the difference between your emotions and your feelings.

We often use these phrases interchangeably, but they’re actually two completely different things…

Emotions can be defined as your immediate physical, biological responses to stimuli. Your temper, your frustration, a raised heart rate, anxiety and so on. These are usually short-term, and then they pass. Someone takes your board rubber, it creates tension. You find it, you relax.

Your feelings can be considered as the words, values and meanings that you attach to the emotions. These are longer-lasting and often far more impactful. You’re furious, mortified, ashamed, overjoyed.

Our feelings are the meanings we attach to our experience of emotions.

It’s where we label things as good or bad.

Spend some time reflecting on your emotions (the outward manifestations of your feelings) without judgment. You can do this for 5 minutes in the middle of a busy teaching day.

Simply ask yourself three questions:

1. What’s the cause of my emotional responses to challenges during the teaching day?

2. What are the feelings that I am associating with those responses? Am I seeing things purely in terms of ‘good’ or ‘bad’? Am I assigning negative feelings to my emotions out of habit, or because it’s the right thing to do?

3. Are there better ways to define or label my emotions? Are there feelings that will serve me better than the ones I automatically apply?

Regulating your emotions like this - recognising their cause and learning to label them as feelings that are of benefit (like wisdom, courage, trust or excitement) leads to empathy, the practice of mindfulness and the ability to control your emotional responses.

And for a teacher with a high workload, daily behavioural challenges and the potential to encounter emotional exhaustion in the classroom, that’s an incredibly helpful way of looking at the world.

So, next time you lose a board rubber or your classroom becomes a mess in two minutes, think about your emotional response and then decide which positive, beneficial feelings to layer on top.

You’ll be amazed how much better you feel, I promise.

Don’t Miss Our Podcast

We’re great with teaching and teacher wellbeing.

But we’re struggling a bit with our podcast technology!

It’s very frustrating having lots to talk about and a poor WiFi signal, which has meant we’ve not been able to record new episodes for a couple of weeks. But there’s a plan in the works, and we’ll be back in the regular podcast flow soon.

In the meantime, you can catch our existing episodes here…

Thank You For Everything…

It’s dark and cold and January seems to be taking forever.

But for at least one child, you’re the bright warm light of inspiration.

Of safety, trust and respect.

In the depths of winter, your work is helping young people flourish and blossom, and if no one else says it this week, thank you for making a difference.

You’re amazing.

If you want to stay that way, here’s a reminder of our key takeaways from this issue:

In next week’s issue, we’ll look at how the process of reflecting on our teaching stories can help us grow as practitioners and people!

Until then, remember, you’re more than your marking, your lesson observations and your planning.

You’re you. And that’s all you need to be.