Description: Can you believe the new school year is here? This week, Dr. Boogren encourages the Squad to enter the new year with intention.
Resources:
1. Order your copy of The Educator Wellness Plan Book and Journal: Continuous Growth for Each Season of Your Professional Life here!
Listen Now:
Transcription: Hi, and welcome to season four of Self-Care for Educators. I'm your host, Tina Boogren. Happy New Year. Oh my gosh. I can't believe the new school year is getting underway. I know some of you have been in school for a few weeks. Some of you are starting to come back now, but the time this podcast comes out, pretty much everyone is going to be into the new school year, the 2023, 2024 school year, and I can't believe it. I hope you were able to sink into your summer, find your footing again, and maybe reestablish some habits that will lead you into the new year, which leads me to this week's invitation this week. I want you to just spend a little time thinking about how you want to feel this year.
How do you want to feel this year? And, to do this, you might spend a little time first reflecting on how you felt last year, and I know it depends. Are you asking in February or are you asking in May? Are you asking on a Monday or are you asking on a Friday? But, just in a general sense, how did you feel last year? Did you feel like you were constantly overwhelmed and stressed and exhausted and couldn't quite keep up? Did you feel awesome? Do you feel like you had one of your best years, you made deep connections with students, and you were able to stay true to your own goals? Or, maybe like a lot of us, you were somewhere in between.
And so, as you reflect on that, then thinking ahead to this new school year, how do you wanna feel as you move into this year? Maybe you start to identify getting really specific with those emotions. Do you want to feel calm? Do you want to feel energized? Do you want to feel capable? Whatever that is, I just want you to jot it down and spend some time this week trying on those. Emotions and feelings and see how you are setting yourself up for this new school year with those in mind. And, that's it. I don't wanna add more to your plate. I want you to just pause right there this week and just ask yourself, As I start this new school year, how is it that I wanna feel? And, I want you to jot that down so you've got it somewhere. We can add to that.
We can think about different strategies to help us attain those feelings that we're looking for. But for this week, I just want you to identify 'em, to jot 'em down, and I can't help but share a great resource that might prove to be valuable. As you do this and as you move into the new school year, so some of you know that our educator wellness plan book and journal was recently published, and I wanna tell you a little bit about it just because I feel like this resource is just gonna change lives. I love it so much. You know, when we worked on writing the book, it's always so tricky because until you actually see it in your hands, particularly this book, it just kind of can't get our head around what it's gonna look like. And you guys, when I got it in my hands, it looks better than I ever anticipated. I love it so much.
So, I wanna just tell you a little bit about it. It's first and foremost, it's a planner. It is a paper planner, you know, as educators, we tend to love paper planners. The girls in my, in my book club, most of whom are not educators, don't, don't understand my obsession with a paper planner. It's funny 'cause when we're choosing dates, we're always like, Oh, Tina, bring your paper planner. And, then when I get around educators, we're always comparing planners and showing each other and our organizational system. So, it is a planner, it's a paper planner. It starts in the summer. So, the beginning of it would be the very first month when we open it up and take a look at it, I've got it right here in front of me. It starts in June, and I realized that it's not June, and that's okay. We're gonna start it right where it is. So, when I got it, I've had it in my hands for a few weeks, so I started at the beginning of August and I just started filling in the dates.
The cool part is, is that we can use this planner again and again because the dates aren't filled in, it just has the month, so it'll say August. It'll say September. We'll fill in the date. So, it's got a full two page month spread so that you can fill in all your, all your stuff for the month, and then it has a two page weekly spread. And so, you've got plenty of room to write down your meetings, your to-do lists, all of those things. But, the cool part, what makes us a little bit different than a typical planner is that we nudge you towards different wellness practices. So, how we have it set up is we follow the plan of the educator wellness book in the planner. So, we start off, and we start in summer is where our planner starts, and that focus for the months of June, July, and August are all in our physical wellness. So, in June, we think a lot about our food choices in July. It's about movement, and August is about sleep and rest. And then, as we move into this month, September, when we start thinking about the fall, actually September, October, and November, this is where we really focus on our mental wellness.
So, September is about decisions, October is about balance, and November is about efficacy. In the winter, then we move to emotional wellness, and then in the spring we think about our social wellness. And so, for each of the weeks, we just give you a little nudge of something to keep track of and to think about in terms of your wellness as it relates to that overarching dimension. So, for ... Let me just pull up an example here. So, in August, as I said, we were thinking about sleep and rest, and so week one we ask you to track how much your sleep you're getting. Week two is about incorporating a wind down routine. Week three is incorporating a new sleep strategy. Week four is about tracking your rest time. And then, week five, we always have a fifth week 'cause you never quite know how the month shakes out. We have an invitation and a nudge towards incorporating purposeful rest, and we've got all sorts of end of the month reflections. In the back of the book and the appendix is all these trackers, so you can actually keep track.
For those of you that like that, it's just this incredible resource, and as I tie it into thinking about this week's invitation of how we want to feel, so maybe as I am, I am thinking ahead to when this comes out, when we're thinking about September, we, if we wanna feel calm, well let's focus on kind of getting control of all the decisions we have to make. So, I want you to explore that resource. If this is something that feels like, Ooh, I think that that would be really helpful, and to just jump in at any time. I got a couple of direct messages kind of asking, well, I, I got the planner in August. Do I just start it in August? What about, I missed June and July and I say, Don't worry about June and July, jump in where you are. You can catch June and July on the other end. So, that resource is available on Amazon. It's available via Solution Tree or Marzano Resources. We'll definitely put a link in the show notes so you can go and kind of take a look at that. There's some sample pages on the websites. So, you can see it, and I hope that you love it as much as we do. I wrote it with with my co-authors, Tim Kanold and Jasmine Kullar, and we're just really proud of this and think it's gonna help set us all up for a wonderful school year.
As always, we are so grateful that Brooke is back with us for season four. Thank you so much for making this happen. Thank you so much to Solution Tree and Marzano Resources for this incredible job that I get to do. And, to all of you, my bad-ass Self-Care Squad. Welcome back. Happy New Year. This is going to be our best year yet!
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