The importance of looking after your own well being
2020 has certainly proven to be a challenging year, actually, I think this is an understatement!!
What started out to be another challenging year at St Luke’s Catholic College has turned into the challenge of my life so far!
With the challenges that COVID 19 has thrown at the world, we have had to address and be flexible and take into consideration our own context, that of a K-9 setting with an onsite Catholic Early Learning Centre for 3-5 year olds. Always our first concern is to our students and ensuring their safety and well-being, but as we are about to enter into term 4 of 2020 I now reflect and think about the staff and my own well-being.
There have been many changes made to timetable/lesson formats since March. We started the year with 100-minute lessons, which with the onset of COVID became Connected Learning (using Zoom), to Daily Flow Weekly Routine (90 and 30 min sessions) with Wellbeing, to term 4 where we still have the Daily Flow and Weekly Routine (90 and 45 min sessions) with Wellbeing. At all points along the journey, Teachers have been given additional time to assist them in the process. As you can imagine a lot of change, a lot of flexibility, and a lot of potential stress due to these changes have been the result of a very hard year of teaching.
As a leader in this school, I believe I have needed to be an active listener to those around me, some colleagues have needed someone to listen to concerns, struggles and just to be used as a sounding board and a positive voice to prop them up. With our strong focus on coaching within our school, we have been able to reach out to many staff members to ensure they feel connected and supported throughout this year and ongoing into the future. I found initially that this was quite a positive experience but as time progressed I found it extremely necessary to ensure that I was consciously and proactively looking after myself as I started to feel stressed by different facets of my work while striking or attempting to strike the balance between work and home.
Some great ideas to ensure you look after your own well-being may be basic and straightforward but when facing many challenges they may seem to escape you. Simple things like ensuring you eat well and get enough sleep, and having a hobby something you are comfortable with that can distract you from your work when you need it (mine is crochet and knitting) helps to distract your mind. Always ensure you do things you enjoy, learn something new, connect with friends, and help others. All of these things help to distract you from the challenges and work to the positive to help so that when you need to focus directly on work this is able to be done with greater efficiency.