Description: Welcome back for Season 3! This week we're diving right back into our important work for our bodies and our minds. Dr. Boogren asks, "how do you want to feel?"
Resources:
1. We highly recommend you purchase your copy of Burnout here!
2. If you're listening to this show, you should also be listening to Happier with Gretchen Rubin!
Listen Now:
Transcription: Hi, everyone. I am so excited to welcome you back to season three of the podcast. I can hardly believe it. I am Tina Boogren, and I am your host of Self-Care for Educators. I wanna start off by saying happy new year. I know many of you have already been in school for quite a while. You're kind of settling into your routine, and some of you are just getting started, but at the very least I wanna pause and just say happy new year. Can you believe we are starting a brand new school year? I know summer probably felt way too short. Ooh. But, here we. And, we're jumping in, and you are still here, and I am so stinking grateful for you. And, for that. So, this week's invitation is to spend a little bit of time getting really clear about how you want to feel this year.
I want you to actually write it down, and want you to think about as the school year gets underway and think further ahead, like on down the year, like when the, when this anticipation phase kind of starts to ... this shiny newness kind of starts to wear off, and we start to slide into that survival phase and, oh my gosh. We're not even gonna talk about it yet, but that dreaded D word, the disillusionment phase. I want you to think about moving through all of these phases. How do you want to feel? One of the things that I learned from Emily and Amelia Nagoski and their fantastic book Burnout is that there's something really powerful about determining how it is we want to feel rather than spending our time thinking about how we don't want to feel. So, that's what I want you to play around with this week. I want you to get really specific. In fact, I encourage you to get out your notebook or maybe open up a new Word document or Google Doc on your computer and just start brainstorming.
How do you want to feel this year? I think a lot of us move into the new school year, particularly this school year, a little bit worried and nervous and not feeling totally ready and feeling frustrated because summer was so short because, oh my gosh, the difficulties of last year. It's like we needed a really much longer summer break. And so, we might have moved into the new school year actually feeling already tired and anxious and feeling behind before we ever really got started. And, those are all vital, valid, important feelings to recognize them, and know that we know that our emotions are not good or bad. It's how we respond to them that matters. And so, this week, I want you to think about kind of turning the tide here rather than thinking about how we actually maybe feel, which might not be totally positive. I want us to shift our thinking into how do we want to feel? Do we wanna feel energized? Do we wanna feel organized? Do we wanna feel calm? Do we wanna feel happy? Do we wanna feel grateful? Ooh. On and on and on.
Just start listing all of those emotions and feelings and desires. And then, the follow up to this is to act the way you want to feel. Gretchen Ruben, as many of you know, I, I mentioned her quite often, her fantastic podcast, Happier with Gretchen Ruben a long time ago ... She mentioned this idea, and I'm sure I've even talked about it on the podcast of acting the way we want to feel, which is very similar to fake it till you make it right? So, if you decide that you want to feel energized, I want you to experiment with acting energized. If you wanna feel confident, I want you to play around with acting confident, you know, what our brain tells us and what logic tells us is that we act how we feel, and this change acting how we want to feel is actually so powerful. I play around with this all the time.
The example that I tend to give, because it's the one that stands out the most to me is oftentimes, especially when I'm traveling, if you were to ask me how I feel, oftentimes I feel tired. It takes a lot of energy, as you guys know better than anyone, to present and to be on all day. And, oh, my sleep varies. Sometimes I get good sleep. Oftentimes it don't get great sleep and oh, time zone changes and travel and airplanes and hotel rooms and blah, blah, on and on and on. Sometimes I don't get the sleep that I need, even, even with my best efforts. And so, if you were to ask me legitimately, how do I feel? Oftentimes my first response is I feel tired. That's not how I want to feel though. So, how I want to feel. I wanna feel confident and energized and excited. When I think about my job as leading these workshops for you all, which is the greatest gift, I don't wanna show up tired. You don't want me to show up tired. So, instead I fake it till I make it. This is where I put on my playlist in the morning, and I get myself all pumped up on my drive to my location, and I arrive faking it till I actually make it.
And, the so interesting part of all of this is it doesn't take very long to actually feel that way. And then, I am energized. We know our brain is so powerful and oftentimes we give it assignments. Right? So, if we say I'm tired, your brain says okay. Let's make you feel really tired. And, if instead you switch it around to that positive of, I feel energized, then your brain will say, okay, that's great. Let's make you feel energized. Just a powerful switch. So, that's what I want you to play with this week. I want you to get real specific list, all those feelings and emotions of how you want to feel in an ideal world. How do you want to feel? And then, right underneath that brainstorming start getting really specific as if, okay, if you did feel that way, how would you act? How would you see that in your behavior, in your body language, in the words that you say in your actions? And, I want you to become that great actor or great actress, and I want you to act that way. And then, I want you to check in at the end of the day and see if it made a difference.
Another way to think about this is you might ask yourself, how do you want your students to feel? And, we know we model those emotions--that our emotions are contagious. And so, so you can start showing up that way. If you want your kids to be engaged and energized and excited, same idea here is start acting that way and showing up that way and see if it actually works. Oh, I am so excited to be back with all of you. Thank you for your positive response and for sticking with me. I can't believe we're here in season three. I'm just so excited. As always, you guys, if you've got ideas or suggestions or questions, post them over on that Facebook group. That's the, the best way to kind of keep communication going. We've got that Facebook which is Self-Care for Educators with Tina Boogren. So, you can search for us and find us. I think most of you, you have already joined us, which we're so happy about, and I can't wait to go on this journey with you again.
As always, thank you to Brooke for making this happen. Thank you to Solution Tree and Marzano Resources for this job I get to do. And, to you, my badass Self-Care Squad. I'm so happy to be back with all of you. Happy new year.
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