Description: This week, Dr. Boogren inspires the Self-Care Squad to rejoice in the teeny, tiny, little good things.
Listen Now:
The Self-Care for Educators team cares about the content-accessibility for all educators. If you have trouble accessing the audio for the podcast, the transcription has been provided below.
Transcription: Hi, and welcome to episode 44 of Self-Care for Educators. I am your host, Tina Boogren, and this week's invitation is to create something to look forward to each day this week. Originally, I was thinking about ways to make Mondays specifically fantastic. Mondays are hard, right? We get the Sunday Scaries. We start thinking ahead to Monday. We get that dread, especially as we think through this, the rest of this really hard school year.
And so, originally my invitation was going to be to create something to look forward to a Monday. But then I thought, why just do that on a Monday? Let's do that every single day. So this week, what I want you to think about ... I want you to design your days so that you have at least one thing to look forward to, and we're talking teeny tiny little things.
I know we're so busy. I don't want this to be anything that necessarily costs money or takes too much time. I mean, teeny, tiny things that you can look forward to. So, perhaps you're going to take last week's invitation, and you're going to look forward to eating lunch outside. Maybe you're going to look forward to having a phone call conversation with a friend that's far away on your way home from work. One day, maybe something you're going to look forward to is you are going to go out to dinner or get takeout on one of the nights of the week. This week, maybe something to look forward to is meeting up with a friend to go for a walk. Maybe something to look forward to is something fun that you're going to do at school. Like some sort of random act of kindness that you're going to do or some celebration. Yeah. Nothing too small here and nothing too big here, either. It just thinking about what's something that you can look forward to. So that, here's the goal, when you wake up in the morning, instead of being filled with kind of that dread of, Oh boy, here we go. Another long day and another long school year. I want us to start training our brain for something to look forward to.
We know that what that does is it gets those positive emotions going. Those feel good emotions that endorphins, that dopamine hit. It's sets us up for the positive feelings. And, we know there's a lot of research that supports the fact that when we get those positive emotions and feelings going, what we're doing is we're actually changing our brain.
It allows us to change our thinking. Our thinking becomes more creative and flexible, inclusive, and integrative when we get those positive emotions going. And so, one way to do that is to have something to look forward to. So, maybe you want to create a list, write down what would be a whole bunch of things in general that you look forward to, and then you can start pulling those and pinpointing them to a specific day. Maybe you want to actually want to write this in your agenda or your planner, or put it in your phone notes for each day. Maybe you want to write it down. Take a picture of it, and have it as your screensaver when you open up your phones so that you can look forward to that. As always, this is something that might be really great to do as students an activity that could carry you through this week.
Like as a class, what's something you could do together? It doesn't take a lot of time, not a lot of energy that you could all look forward to just something. Gosh, just something on the books, right? I was thinking about this, because as I've been working with groups and workshops, we've been one thing that I've been asking them is something that they're looking forward to this summer or something that's on their summer bucket list is we talked about a couple of weeks ago and I love the sharing. So, many people are really looking forward to like vacations and live music and hugs and visiting people that we haven't seen in a while and the beach and all sorts of things. And, I thought, Man, doesn't that just feel good to have something to look forward to? And, of course it feels great to have something to look forward to this summer, but I don't want us to wait that long.
I don't think it has to be something that big and that kind of major to look for too. I think we can start to look forward to the little, tiny things, as well. So, that's the invitation for this week. Invitations actually, I don't want you to do this just once. My hope is that you actually have something to look forward to every single day. I think it'd be fantastic. If we could share over in the Facebook group ... As always, please, please join that Facebook group. It's just, you can find us at facebook.com/selfcareforeducators. All one word. Oh, what an incredible group over there. Right? I call that truly my bad-ass Self-Care Squad. And so, every single day, I'm going to kind of post a little prompt of what's, what is it that you're looking forward to today? Because, I think it can be so inspiring to share ideas with each other. If you're feeling kind of stuck, jump over there, see what other people are recording and looking forward to, and we can pilfer and steal and share ideas over there.
As always, oh man, a huge thank you to Brooke for making this happen. You guys, Brooke is behind the scenes, truly putting this all together. She finds the amazing images that go with this. She gets the show notes set up. Like, a huge, huge shout out to Brooke for this. A huge shout out to Marzano Resources and Solution Tree for this amazing job that I get to do every single day. I am so grateful for it, and as always a huge, huge thank you to you, this incredible bad-ass Self-Care Squad. I am so grateful for you. I look forward to interacting with you guys over on the Facebook page. Have an amazing week.