Welcome to the latest issue of The Flourishing Teacher’s Field Guide.

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This week we’re thinking about why many teachers struggle with a work/life balance, how it affected us, and what we can all do to change the way we work for the better.

I Lost Myself To Teaching

I was a stressed-out teacher for a long, long time.

And I’m confident that I’m not alone in having lost track of how to balance my ever-growing workload and my personal life.

In fact, I kind of got the the stage where I genuinely didn’t really feel like I had a personal life any more.

I was teaching a demanding timetable, managing pastoral and organisational responsibilities as a member of my school’s Senior Management Team, and my subject specialism meant that I was committed to planning and delivering a challenging co-curricular programme too.

Those were long, long days.

Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed them.

But that enjoyment came at a cost that I was blind to while I was in the teaching whirlwind.

After all, when each day is extraordinary, it doesn’t leave much room for the ordinary.

And it’s the ordinary things that make life worth living.

There’s No Such Thing As Time Off For A Teacher

It got to the point where my time off wasn’t really time off.

Here’s why…

• There’s always something else to do. I lost the ability to switch off and put my job aside.

• I’m a creative soul with a bit of a perfectionist streak, so I would tinker with cosmetic stuff rather than get to grips with the difficult things. I’d play with fonts for hours instead of designing a new curriculum.

• I built an expectation for myself, my friends and family and my school community. Working unsustainably became the accepted norm, even when it shouldn’t have been.

I just forgot how to be me.

How Did I Learn To Teach Sustainably?

A pretty significant intervention snapped me out of it.

My mum became very ill, to the point where I had to take some leave from my job to care for her.

In those months away from marking, from meetings and from managing so many different expectations, something transformative happened.

I learned more about wellbeing, about myself and about how to build some professional perspective.

And I took the time to develop habits that made me a happier teacher…

3 Practical Strategies That Will Transform Your Work/Life Balance

Let’s start with a dose of reality.

I’m going to share three great strategies for achieving a life/work balance (which is a much better way to think of it than a work/life balance).

But…

For these to work, you’ve got to practice them regularly, as part of a more fundamental intention to change the way you live and work.

They’ve got to become daily habits, not occasional sticking plasters for when things get tough.

Commit to them, and everything changes…

1. Manage Your Mindset

Teachers face struggles, challenges and intense demands every day. We face situations that have the potential to cause us anxiety, frustration and exhaustion.

Much as we all want them to, those situations are unlikely to change.

There are a million things outside of our control, and trying to control or change them is pretty futile for most of us.

So remember this when you’re faced with a situation not of your making…

You can’t change the situation. You can only change your response to the situation.

You’ve got great things to do. You’re a wonderful teacher, and you’re in it for the long term. So you’ve got to pace yourself.

Changing the way you think about the world around you is one of the most immediate ways of doing that.

Here are three examples of how you might use this strategy in practice. They might sound simplistic, but they really do work:

1. There’s some compulsory INSET training after school one evening, and you’d planned to use the free time for marking. You could feel frustrated by the loss of your time for yet another ‘pointless’ twilight session, or you can choose to approach the INSET more positively. Commit to finding three positives from the training and to share them with colleagues in other schools. You’ll find other time to do the marking, develop your skills and inspire others to do the same.

2. You’ve been asked to buddy another member of staff, in addition to your current workload. You could feel as though you are being taken advantage of and refuse, or you can choose to see this as an opportunity to develop a professional relationship. Commit to actively supporting your colleague and to learning three new skills or strategies from them to enhance your teaching. By viewing the task positively, you’ll gain value from the experience and add value to the wider school community.

3. You have lots of reports to write, at a busy time of year. You could decide that these are a huge burden, and get anxious about how much time they’ll take, or you can see them as a valuable opportunity to celebrate each student’s achievements and offer informed strategies for improvement. By choosing to see the report writing process as a valuable one for each student, you can remove the resentment and frustration that often comes with this kind of task and gain fulfilment from empowering others.

2. Define Your Priorities

The thing is, when you’re a teacher, it’s easy to see every single task as urgent.

That’s because we tend to prioritise tasks based on external factors rather than personal ones. A manager needs a report, a parent needs a call, a lesson needs planning, and a child needs a 1:1.

All urgent in different ways.

We don’t tend to prioritise based on what we need because it’s not always possible.

But we can learn to strike a balance.

You might have come across something called the Eisenhower Matrix. It’s a time management tool that helps you prioritize tasks based on their urgency and importance. The matrix is divided into four quadrants:

• Quadrant 1: Important and urgent tasks

• Quadrant 2: Important but not urgent tasks

• Quadrant 3: Urgent but not important tasks

• Quadrant 4: Not important and not urgent tasks (I adapt this to wellbeing and community)

To use the Eisenhower Matrix, simply list all of your tasks in the appropriate quadrant. Then, focus on completing the tasks in Quadrant 1 first. These are the most important and urgent tasks, and they should be given your top priority.

How do you decide what’s urgent?

I use this great definition:

The matrix helps me keep my stress levels low, as I know I’m scheduling the important things, and it also helps me keep a sense of balance in my life, as I’ve learned that it’s OK to let some tasks fall away if necessary.

It’s alright not to get everything done. Just get the urgent and important things done.

Here’s how I use the Eisenhower Matrix:

3. Become Accountable

This last strategy is the one that helped me the most.

And it’s pretty simple.

If you want to see real change in your life/work balance, you need to share your goals with at least one other person and become accountable to them.

That way, you’re far more incentivised to maintain your positive habits.

I found that teaming up with another member of staff, establishing goals and then having a regular get-together (usually with tea and cake) to reflect on the previous week and set goals for the week to come was, quite literally, life-changing.

It meant that when I felt hopeless, or as though there was just no way to get that balance right, I kept on looking for new approaches because I knew I’d have to justify my actions.

Not only did that help me manage the balance between my personal and professional responsibilities, but I became my colleague’s mentor and learned new strategies from them.

Win-win.

Once you share your goals and have to take responsibility for reaching them, they begin to become habitual.

And that’s when real, lasting change can happen.

It’s Time To Flourish

We’re called Marigold Teachers for a darn good reason.

Just like marigolds sustain and nurture the planets around them, great colleagues and managers support and inspire the staff around them to thrive.

They’re your staff room marigolds.

They’re the colleagues you turn to for advice. For positivity. For solutions rather than problems. For a shoulder to cry on. For cake.

And they’re the kinds of colleagues we always aspire to be.

It’s Time For Some Autumn Wellbeing!

We love the work that our friends at Education Support do for teachers, and this Autumn Self-Care Challenge was just fantastic. How many of these can you tick off?

Here’s Your Lightbulb Moment!

We had a great response to this post over on Facebook, too. It’s such a powerful message, and it really does keep us motivated - sounds like lots of you agree!

Thank You For Everything

We feel like we know you.

And so we wanted to say thank you.

Thank you for making a difference.

Thank you for all the things you do that no one sees.

Thank you for the time and energy you give to other people.

They value it, even if they don’t have the words to express it.

Do go back and give our three life/work hacks another read, and just remember:

In the next issue, we’ll be developing the theme of mindset with a deep dive into compartmentalising your thought processes, and giving you some practical, actionable strategies for a more balanced mental state.

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.