Description: We're back, baby! This week, Dr. Boogren kicks off season two with a gentle reminder to LYBL—Live Your Best Life.
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Transcription: Hi, and welcome to season two episode one of Self-Care for Educators. I am your host, Tina Boogren. Oh, you guys, I'm so happy to be back. I've missed you all, but I will say this: it was really nice to just take a beat for a minute. I think all of us felt that at some point over the summer of just needing to take a beat and kind of regroup and just catch our breath.
I'm so happy to be back though for season two. Here's what I know. As we move into this new school year, it's going to be hard. We're not going to sugarcoat it. We're just going to put the elephant in the room. Right? I think we held onto so much hope at the end of last year. That next year would be different, right? That, oh, if we can just hang on next year will be different, and it is different. But, it's not necessarily great in some places. I know it's terrifying. We've got mask debates. Oh, we've got angry parents and angry school boards and on and on and on. And, we ourselves have very, very mixed feelings. I know.
And, underneath it all, we just want to create this incredible environment of belonging for our students, and it's hard. So again, more than ever, we really need to think about our own wellness and our own self-care and how do we show up as our very best selves for our students. And so, we're going to dig back in this season. We're going to revisit some of the same things, the themes and things that we visited last year, because it's important to do them again, to think about them again.
And, something I know is that we go through different seasons of our life. One year can look so different from the next, I mean, one week can look so different from the next, and so different things hit us in different ways. So, there's going to be some common things that I'm going to pull back, and we're going to talk about again. There's going to be some new things that we're going to explore. Ah, I've got a whole new framework of thinking about our own professional educator wellness that I want to present to you that we're going to get to really soon. I've got some really exciting news and big things in the works and all this big stuff, coupled with all this teeny, tiny, little stuff ... These, these small reminders that the small things matter.
So, before we dig into other content, as we sink back in to this podcast and to this community and being together, what I want to present to you as a starting place is I want you to do a little reflection on what it means to live your best life. To live your best life--LYBL. Over in the Facebook group, has seen that this has kind of become my mantra as I'm in the midst of my season of sacrifice.
And, my season of sacrifice is nothing compared to you guys. It's just. It's mine. It's just hard. I've got a lot of hotel rooms. I got a lot of travel. I got a lot of delayed flights. If you've been in an airport recently, who, you know, it's not a ... It's not a super positive place to be. I got a lot of demands. I've got a ton of workshops, which I'm so grateful for. I got three book deadlines. It's a lot. It's my season of sacrifice. And, I found myself getting stuck in some old habits as we do. I wasn't making great food choices on the road. I was skipping more workouts than I usually do. My sleep has been a mess. And, I felt physically just I felt awful, and I recognized it, and I recognized I didn't feel good. I wasn't treating others the way that I intend to treat others. My interactions with strangers in particular, that I was just snappy, crabby, annoyed, frustrated, and that's not who I want to be. That's not what ... how I want to show up.
And so, in the midst of just a bunch of really hard crap at the airport, I just stopped. And, I just had this glaring notion that it was time for me to regroup. And, I pulled a pin out of my backpack, and I wrote on my wrist right above my watch. I wrote LYBL--live your best life. Because, I wanted the reminder that in order to live my best life, I got to show up for myself.
And so, every time I looked down at my wrist, it was just a constant reminder of the question that I kept asking myself, what does it mean to live my best life right now? When things are really hard ... When my flight has gotten delayed, delayed, delayed ... When people are yelling around me ... When there's no rental cars ... When my hotel doesn't have any soap. When I can't get caught up ...
When the work doesn't end ... When I have 250 emails to respond to ... When my body is so, so, so tired on and on and on ... In the midst of the hard stuff, what does it mean to live my best life? Like it almost for a second, it just feels like the worst question, because there's a feeling of like, this is not my best life.
Like, we have this vision in our head that our best life is like, sitting in a beach chair, holding a cold drink and, you know, eating chocolate and the whole thing, which, yeah, that is, that's a great life, But, you know what, that isn't at our fingertips all the time. And, and my, my tagline for the podcast has always been, you know, let's create lives that we don't need to escape from. So, what does it look like to live our very best life in the middle of the hard stuff? And, as we move into this new school year, it's going to be hard. And so, what does it mean to show up as our best selves? What does it mean to live our best lives in the middle of the hard? And, here's what I discovered.
For me when I had that moment where I wrote it on my wrist, I drank the stupid water, filled up my water bottle, and I drank the stupid water. I had an actual meal with some green stuff in it. I put myself to bed that night. I stopped scrolling. I didn't turn on the TV. Like, I just put myself to bed, and I got up, and I went for a walk, and I just got back to all the basics, and I reached out, and checked in with some girls and admitted that I was struggling, and I turned to my husband and again, I asked for some things that I needed and some ways that he could help and these small little things that we know but that we sometimes lose when things get hard. I just had to reground myself.
So, my invitation for you for ... This one is to literally write it on your wrist. LYBL. And. I want you to ask yourself every day, what does it look like to live my best life today? And, every time you look down and you see that on your wrist, I want you to think, what does it look like to live my best life right now? What does it look like to show up as my very best self for myself, for my family, for my students, for my colleagues? What does it look like? And, maybe you start a list of what are those small things. What does it look like to live your best life? Does it look like moving your body more? Does it look like pausing to take a deep breath? Is living your best life having a dance party in the morning to get you going? Is it making sure that you write your gratitude? Is it reaching out and asking for help?
Like, there's a gazillion things that can help us live our best lives and only, you know, I mean the key, you know ... Maybe you, you make it really, really bold on your wrist is the why, What is your best life? It's not what your, what your partner's best life is or what you see who on social media or on the commercial, or that consumer self-care. What does it look like for you to live your best life?
I can't wait. I want to see pictures of it on your wrist. Jump on over to the Facebook group. Share. Let's get this conversation going and started. I have a feeling this is going to be something we're going to revisit again and again.
Oh, as always, you guys Brooke is back. I am so grateful that she is back to help us with this. Oh, you guys, she is like our behind the scenes cheerleader. If you only knew all the work that she does to help support this community. So thank you to Brooke. Huge, huge, huge, thank you to Solution Tree and Marzano Resources for this job I get to do. And again, it brings me such joy to say this. Thank you to you, my bad-ass Self-Care Squad. Here we go. Season two!