94. How Losing Yourself in Teaching Fuels Burnout: 3 Ways to Detach Your Worth From Work and Find Balance

Feb 20, 2024

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Have you ever felt like your job as a teacher isn't just a part of your life, but somehow, it's started to be your life? You're not alone. Many of us teachers have find ourselves caught in a cycle where the lines between professional and personal blur—a phenomenon psychologists call "enmeshment." It's like our work has slowly woven itself into every fiber of our being, dictating not just how we spend our hours but also shaping our identity and worth.

While being passionate and dedicated is admirable, this enmeshment can steer us toward a dangerous cliff of exhaustion and burnout. It's a reality many of us face, yet struggle to navigate. The question then becomes, how do we untangle ourselves from this intricate web and reclaim our autonomy, ensuring our jobs enrich, not consume, our lives?

In this episode, we're diving headfirst into the heart of this challenge. We'll explore the subtle signs of job enmeshment so you’ll know how to spot it as well as the impact it has on our well-being. More importantly, we're talking solutions. How do we shift from merely surviving to thriving, both in and out of the classroom?

We'll discuss practical steps for setting boundaries that protect our time and energy, emphasizing the importance of cultivating a life outside our educational roles. This isn't about diminishing the love for what we do; it's about creating a balance that allows us to bring our best selves to every part of our lives—be it as educators, family members, or individuals with passions beyond the classroom walls.

So, if you've ever caught yourself postponing personal joy until "summer break" or questioning your effectiveness based on the hours you put in after the bell rings, this episode is for you. It's time to redefine what it means to be dedicated to our jobs without sacrificing our well-being.

TOPICS COVERED:

Signs of Job Enmeshment & Identity Loss
Teacher Identity and Work-Life Balance
Three things to do to stop identity loss and prevent burnout
Setting boundaries to reclaim time, joy, and life outside the classroom
Ten boundaries teachers need to stop abandoning themselves and reclaim their time, joy, and life
Strategies for prioritizing personal interests and hobbies

RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THE EPISODE:

FREE 10 minute Audit Your Work-Life Balance Training: Do you want to find that balance so that you can enjoy your career long-term and live a life outside of your profession? The 10 Minute Work-Life Balance Audit is a practical approach to examining energizing and energy draining teacher tasks. After working through 3 simple steps, you’ll have a clear view of what stays and what goes, leaving room for living your authentic life and setting boundaries that serve you and your students, while combatting teacher burnout.
Take the FREE Teacher Burnout Roadmap to Burnout Recovery Quiz - Take this short, fun, and informative quiz to discover what you need to sustain your teaching career and begin burnout recovery. This quiz will help you understand what support systems you need, how to prioritize your mental health to live a fulfilling and energized life as a teacher, and what drives your self-care.

RELATED RESOURCES:

Join the Waitlist for Automate Your Classroom Course - Learn the step-by-step roadmap TO creating a sustainable teacher task simplification and automation system to beat burnout, squash stress, get back YOUR time, and sustain your career in education
Request Professional Development from your Administrator
Interested in getting support for your school - Check out the For Schools Page
FREE Affirmations for Burned Out Teachers Workbook to help change your mindset

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MORE ABOUT THE RESILIENT TEACHER PODCAST:

The Resilient Teacher Podcast is the show that will give overwhelmed educators the support, tools, and mindset to reduce teacher burnout and keep teaching sustainable. Each week, Brittany Blackwell, M.Ed. & her guests will share inspiration and actionable steps to avoid or recover from the dreaded teacher burnout. You'll be inspired to individualize self-care and learn to prioritize your well-being and mental health, all while making a bigger impact on your classrooms and community.

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TRANSCRIPT:

[0:00] Okay, quiz time. Do you know how many days it is until spring break?
What about summer break? Are you counting them down until you can be you again?
I get it. I have been there and I know all too many teachers who fall into this trap too, where somehow your job as a teacher kind of takes over your life or it even becomes your life.
The thing that isn't being talked about enough enough is that actually having an identity outside of your work as a teacher is protective from burnout.
In this episode, we are going to be chatting about the term that psychotherapists call enmeshment, the very opposite of work-life balance.
We're going to talk about the signs to look for to determine if you're enmeshed with your job, the importance of having an identity outside of your work, and the three things that you can do today to ensure that you stop identity identity loss right in its tracks.
And be sure to stick around to the end because I'm going to give you 10 boundaries teachers need in order to stop abandoning yourself and reclaim your time, your joy, and your life outside the classroom.
That way, you don't have to wait till spring break or for summer to do it. So let's get into it.

[1:14] I asked that question at the beginning of this episode just to kind of see like if you knew how many days until spring break or summer break because no shame I I was the teacher I was the teacher that practically started the first day of school counting down until I could be me again 179 days left 178 days left and I kind of felt as if teaching I don't want to say it stole my life but I couldn't be me I couldn't enjoy life because because teaching took everything from me.
One, because even if I had the time and I didn't bring work home, I sure as heck didn't have the energy to do anything else. And I want to be very clear.
I did not hate it. I was obsessed with teaching.
I wanted to be the very best. I wanted every lesson to be top-notch, every IEP to be pristine.
I would find myself being off work, maybe eating eating dinner with my friends and thinking like, I should probably keep my receipts for my students so I can show them real examples of tacks and tips.
I would check my email from my phone and then I would respond to them even before doing the dishes after dinner.
And as much as I loved it, my identity as a teacher.

[2:29] Truly began to take over my life. I felt as if my value as a teacher was directly correlated to like how much time and how much energy I put into it.
I felt as if I didn't spend all this time thinking and doing for teaching, then maybe I wouldn't be the best teacher or even a good teacher, quote unquote, right?
But I truly never considered during this time period how the The amount of self-abandonment was not only unsustainable, but it was also counterproductive to the very essence of teaching.
That mindset and that behavior led me to resenting my job as a teacher, which I loved, led me to being burnt out.

[3:15] Psychotherapists use the term enmeshment to describe a situation where the boundaries between things are blurred, where we lose our autonomy and lose our independence.
And this term is typically used in the context of like families or romantic relationships, but we can also experience enmeshment with our jobs where the boundaries between work and between personal life, those are blurred.
So how do you know if you're enmeshed in your job? Well, let's ask some questions.
Does work eat up your time and your identity?
Does that leave less space for your hobbies and your interests?
You might say, like, I can't do that to summer because it's impossible to not work nights and weekends as a teacher.
Maybe you subscribe to the idea that if you don't work outside your contract hours, you're going to somehow not be as effective.
And maybe you put everything else on the back burner. You wait to do marathons. Maybe you're a runner.
I don't know why you would be a runner, but maybe you're a runner and you want to do a marathon.
And you wait until summer to do that. Or you wait until summer to start training for that. at.
So really just putting all of your wants and your needs on the back burner because your identity as a teacher is at the forefront.

[4:27] Maybe you think about work when you're not there.
Like, have you ever found yourself at dinner or out for a walk and your mind is like miles away, tangled and thinking about maybe a student who was a little off yesterday or one who shared a story about their home life with you that just made you really upset or really sad or made you think about them outside side of work.
Maybe it's even about lesson plans or maybe about grades that you need to input.
It's like your brain has this one channel and it is just tuned into teaching, right?

[5:00] Maybe you tend to bring up your job within minutes of talking to somebody.
So in conversations, no matter how hard you try, you like steer the topic right back to teaching.
It's like, funny you should mention gardening. I was just thinking about, you know, starting a plant growing project with my class.
Does that sound familiar? Maybe not plant gardening, but you get what I'm saying.
Maybe you find it hard to connect with people who aren't a part of your working life.
Like maybe you're on a different wavelength from your friends or your family members who aren't teachers.
You're trying to explain maybe why you're so invested in your job, but it feels like explaining like why the sky is blue.
It's just obvious to you, but somehow it's lost in translation to them.
There is no doubt, I will say this, there is no doubt that having a strong sense of connection to your job, it can definitely produce some positive results.
But the problem with becoming so enmeshed in your job is that it can begin to define you to the point where you let it define your own value.

[6:03] People totally enmeshed, I was this person, people totally enmeshed in their roles, they tend to have poor work boundaries.
Maybe they send emails at all times of the day or they don't take, you know, their allocated holiday days or their sick days, those types of things.
This can lead to a self-perpetuating cycle of exhaustion and burnout. out.
Doing work that you love, that's a wonderful thing. And it is natural for what you do for a living to form part of your identity.
But when we define ourselves exclusively by our job, we slide into some slippery territory.
And I know, I know I have thought to myself, you know, what will my colleagues think? What will my boss think if I don't do everything?

[6:49] So if you're in that boat too, just let me say this loud and proud to help you kind of shift out of that mindset real quick.
If anyone measures your effectiveness as an educator by the level of self-abandonment or even if they perceive your boundaries or your resistance to do unpaid work as selfish, that is a perception they have that is stemming from their belief system.
It has nothing to do with you.
Okay? Let me say that again. Again, if anybody measures your effectiveness as an educator by your level of self-abandonment or if they perceive your boundaries or your resistance to do unpaid work as selfish, that is a perception that they have that is stemming from their belief system.
It has nothing to do with you.
So if you think you need to untangle yourself from your job, I want you to start with the The first thing, which is mindset and perspective.
One of the biggest things that I did to start preventing that identity loss and avoid heading back into the burnout cycle was I changed my perspective.
Now, that sounds really fluffy, I'm sure.
But in order for us to experience better work-life balance, better work-life alignment, as I like to call it, to prevent that burnout, it's really 80% about shifting your mindset and perspective, and 20% about the actions that you take based on that mindset.

[8:15] The perspective shift that I took was teaching is just one small part of my life.
Now, that might sound like, well, okay, Brittany, yeah, how did that work? It sounds pretty basic.
Let's be real, though. It feels bigger. Teaching feels bigger. We make it bigger.
We're pressured from ourselves and from others to give our job more space and more weight in our life than we really need to.
And the fact is, teaching is just our job. There is so much more life to live outside of our careers.
When I made that small, minute little mindset shift, I was essentially taking back my power.
Like I was able to detach my worth from my work. I was able to find my way back to joy and to happiness and to living my life on my own terms because it wasn't everything anymore.
It was just one small component.

[9:12] I was more than teacher, and that mindset shift led me to being able to take better actions, actually prioritizing the things that I enjoy, the things that I love, the things that I wanted to do outside of my job.
I expanded that, and I want you to be able to do that too, to be able to put the most important pieces of yourself first before your job as a teacher without feeling guilty.
To me, it was being a mom and a wife.
Those things are more important pieces.
And oftentimes, I'm going to be honest, during that time period, I was putting those things on the back burner.
I feel as if many teachers don't prioritize themselves outside of their careers because they've made being a teacher a bigger part of themselves that is truly realistic, that is healthy or sustainable in the long run.
It is so easy to let teaching consume all aspects of your life, especially when the pressures to constantly be available and the endless cycle of planning and grading and professional development.

[10:21] But when teaching becomes your sole identity, it's not just your personal life that suffers.
By trying to be the best teacher possible at the expense of your own well-being, you're risking becoming less effective.
Perspective burnout doesn't breed inspiration it leads to exhaustion and disillusionment when someone asks you to tell you about yourself what's one of the first things you say is it hi my name is brad i'm a dad and i'm a teacher come on you're more than that so how do we start to take action towards embodying this perspective shift well we got to take some action so first it was about making personal time a non-negotiable part of my life.
This starts with just recognizing its value, not just in words, but deliberate actions.
So for me, that game changer was treating my personal interests with the same level of importance as my professional responsibilities.
This meant physically penciling in time for my hobbies, for exercise, for family, for friends right into my planner.
Yeah, right alongside my lesson planning, my grading, my staff meetings, there were entries for reading, for date night, for walking around the neighborhood, yoga.

[11:44] If you live and die by your planner like I do, this can really be transformative for how you perceive and for how you allocate your time.
By really seeing your personal activities scheduled in ink, they gain an air of importance and immovability.
It's a visual and psychological commitment to yourself that these moments are just as important, just as crucial as your work tasks.

[12:12] I'm not going to sugarcoat it. I'm not going to try to make it sound like it's super easy. This is not an easy task.
This shift doesn't just happen overnight.
It requires some intentional action and a bit of courage to start valuing your personal time as non-negotiable.
So one step I highly encourage you to do is start by identifying those activities that recharge you and that bring bring you joy.
I find that teachers often when they're in burnout, they kind of forget what actually energizes them, what brings them joy, because they lose that along the way.
And it's so gradual that it's not like an overnight thing.
So if you kind of need some help with maybe identifying your energizing tasks, reducing those energy draining tasks, I want you to know that I do have a free 15-minute Audit Your Work-Life Balance workshop.
You can find that at teachingmindbodyandsoul.com slash audit.
And it's only 15 minutes. It will help you identify those things.
And once you have a list, you start making some of those energizing tasks, those things that are important to you, make them non-negotiable, just like you would anything at work.
And the second action you've got to take is to protect that balance that you're striving for. Actually protect it.

[13:30] Protecting the balance you're striving for means taking definitive action to guard the time, to guard the space that you've dedicated to yourself outside of work.
And writing those things down in your planner, that is a form of a boundary for yourself, but it involves also communicating your availability to your colleagues, to your students, to yourself, and ensuring that work does not encroach on your personal time.
This could mean turning off work-related notifications after hours, being clear about your working hours, or just politely declining tasks that fall outside of your agreed responsibilities or work hours.
To effectively protect your balance, you have to identify what aspects of your life need more protection.
Okay? Is it your evenings? Is it your weekends?

[14:19] Is it a specific hobby time? And once you identify those, start to communicate communicate those boundaries.
For example, if you decide you don't want to answer emails after 6 p.m., let your colleagues know. Stick to that.
I highly recommend not answering emails after your work hours.
I like to put it in the footer of my emails. Like, I carried this strategy over to here, like to my, to teaching mind, body, and soul.
So if you ever send me an email and I respond, you will notice in the footer of my emails, it literally says, I do my best to respond to emails within 48 hours, excluding weekends and holidays.
So this means I'm being firm, but I'm being respectful in saying no to additional responsibilities that would infringe on my personal time, right?
And above all else, protecting your balance, that kind of requires some self-discipline.
Like I can put that in my footer easy, right? But it's all about.

[15:20] What I do. I could still easily just go to my phone and check my email.
So if you're a high achiever, a people pleaser, just super passionate, it can be super tempting to blur those lines.
But I want you to remember that respecting your own boundaries is just as important as expecting others to respect them. Did you hear that?

[15:42] Respecting your own boundaries is just as important as expecting other people to respect them.
It's about making a conscious decision every day to honor that separation between your work and your personal life so that you can do this for the long run.
When you're able to protect your wellbeing, your personal time, your life outside your job, you're gonna start filling your cup.
And I hate that term. I know you probably do too.
But inevitably, you're gonna be able to pour back into your students.
And that's what we need. We need energized, fulfilled, healthy teachers, not ones who are just obsessed with it and have lost their passion, right?
And so I want to give you 10 boundaries that I recommend to help you develop your own. Please know these are just suggestions.
This is not comprehensive. This is not extensive.
What one person's boundaries are may not work for other people.
And so really just taking an individualized approach to this is truly the key.
So first, it's simply just communication hours.
Set those clear expectations for when you're going to respond to emails, to messages from students, parents, colleagues.
For instance, have a no communication after a certain hour in the evening or during the weekends. And if right now you are still checking your email, it's still on your phone, try one small step.

[17:04] Maybe you're trying to get to not checking your email after work hours, but right now you're still doing it all the way until you go to bed, right? 10 p.m. is your bedtime.
You're still checking your email. How about setting a limit that you're not going to check your email after 6 p.m.? That's a little bit easier, right, for you to do instead of saying, I'm not answering or looking at my email after 3.
It may feel a little bit difficult to accomplish.
And so taking those little bitty steps is going to make a big difference.
Number two, your physical workspace.
If possible, okay, designate a specific area for work. This kind of helps in mentally separating your work from your personal life, and it makes it easier to leave work.
Okay, if you are taking your work home, if you are grading from your couch, okay?
This might mean you're not taking your work bag home, okay? You're leaving your work bag at work.
So that way, that's not encroaching on your personal space, but you're only doing your work at work, right?
Number three, emotional boundaries.

[18:14] Teaching, let's be real, is emotionally demanding, right?
You want to establish some limits to protect your emotional well-being.
It's harder than it sounds. This one's probably one of the harder ones for me as an empath, but not taking students' problems home or finding strategies to decompress after a challenging day.
One of the things that I did was I would sit in a parking lot, and I've talked about this on the podcast before, but I would sit in a parking lot.
I would call my mom, and that was my transition ritual. ritual.
It allowed me to remove my teacher hat and move into my Britney hat, right?
And so that was just my transition ritual that told my brain, hey, we're no longer working.
We're in personal time, right? And it sounds super simple, but that's what my body needed. That's what my brain needed in order to transition.
Number four, homework and grading. Set some boundaries about when and where you're going to do grading and planning, okay?
We kind of already covered this a little bit, but it means deciding not to bring work home or dedicating maybe specific days for these tasks to avoid spilling them over into your personal time.

[19:31] Like I said before, if you're taking your bag home every day of the week and you are grading every day of the week with, you know, on your couch or at your kitchen table, it's going to make more sense for you to say, I'm only taking my bag home on Tuesdays and Thursdays or Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays.
And notice I did not say Fridays because Fridays go over into the weekend.

[19:59] And so making those small adjustments to a point where you can actually keep that a sustainable boundary is going to make more sense.
And just watching that as you can gradually come out of taking your bag home and doing work every day, right?
Number five is saying no. Be prepared to decline additional responsibilities that don't really fit into your schedule, that don't align with your professional development goals.
So if there's an extracurricular activity, a committee, or a.

[20:32] Just say no. You can't do it. I think my favorite way of saying no, especially maybe to like an administrator who's like, hey, can you take over this club or whatever extracurricular activity, is to say, you know, I only have this amount of time and I really want to focus on the students in my classroom and I am unable to give that energy and that time to this commitment at this time.
And I like to say at this time because maybe in the future, maybe I want to do that, right? Maybe I can give that to the school or I want to do that.
So I like to leave the door open, but I like to express that what I'm doing is in the best interest of the students in my classroom and their growth always first and foremost.
Number six, professional development. While it's important, I want you to decide how much of your personal time you're willing to dedicate to your professional development. Because here's what happens if you're anything like me.
You find yourself researching new ways.
Maybe you find workshops or courses or conferences, and that starts to eat up your time, right?
It is okay to limit the number of workshops, the number of courses, the conferences that you attend outside of work hours. Okay?

[21:50] Because you can't implement every strategy, right?
You're going to have to have time to soak that in and be able to implement it, right?
Number seven, this one should be no surprise to you, but social media and online presence.
We're going to talk about this in a future episode, I promise you.
But we often use social media for inspiration, for community.
And so setting boundaries on how much time you spend on these platforms and what you you share ensures that you don't overwhelm your personal life or compromise your privacy.
We're going to talk more about social media boundaries in a future episode, so be on the lookout for that.
But I just want to say, set some boundaries around the time you spend, the people you follow, and what you share, okay?
Number eight, mental health days. Y'all, if y'all don't know how I feel about mental health days and taking them, I don't know what to tell you because I post about social media at least every six months.

[22:50] But I want you to start recognizing when you need a day off for your mental health and don't feel guilty for taking it.
This is about taking care of your well-being.
Ultimately, that is what is going to make you a better educator.
And sometimes you need to have that separation.
It is better to rest and recuperate even if it feels difficult than to go Go into school and try to give from an empty tank. You don't have anything else to give.
Number nine is parent and teacher communication.
You want to establish some clear guidelines around how and when parents can contact you.
This might include setting up specific times for phone calls, for meetings, rather than being available at every hour.
For those of you who have Remind or Seesaw, take those notifications off of your phone.

[23:40] I'm serious, because it's not important. Number 10, your personal time.
Lastly, you want to make that personal time sacred, whether it's hobbies, whether it's exercise, whether it's time with loved ones.
You want to ensure that this time is protected and not easily given up for any work-related reasons.

[23:57] Penciling that in, swear to you, is a game changer.
So all in all, what I want this episode to do is to remind you of your worth, your value outside of the classroom.
Just as much as it is inside. Teaching is not all there is to you.
And if it's enmeshed in your life, in your work-life balance is non-existent, that's not doing anything for your burnout, but making it worse, continuing that cycle.
You deserve to empower yourself with the perspective that you are more than a teacher.
Your life outside of your career is just as important as your career.
And it's absolutely essential to nurture that life with the same passion, the same dedication that you bring into your classroom. room.
This episode is your nudge, your permission slip, if you will, to start setting those boundaries, to prioritize yourself and to reclaim those pieces of your identity that might have been sidelined in the hustle of teaching.
It doesn't have to be all at once. It doesn't have to be one big lump sum.
It just has to be one baby step at a time to reclaiming you and your students are going to be better for it. You're not giving up on being a great teacher.
You're putting more weight into sustaining this career long-term.
Don't forget, you are a resilient teacher. We're in this together. You got this.

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