2016 · Page 2 of 45 · Sensory Intelligence Consulting

With just over 8 weeks to go to the end of the school year, teachers are heading into a very stressful and emotional time. Teacher burnout, which happens due to stress and mental fatigue happening more often than not, hits many teachers yearly. Stress and burnout drain the very joy and essence of teaching, and makes it very hard for teachers to manage and accomplish goals set for the classroom. Stepping into a teacher’s shoes is not for the faint-hearted; a teacher’s role moves from being educators to surrogate parents and from being mentors to being disciplinarians in a short space of time. Along with these expectations come paperwork, conferences, meetings, lesson planning, sport obligations and their own home obligations.

Statistics from around the world show that many teachers leave the profession within their first five years of teaching due to stress and burnout. Here are some tips and strategies to help teachers combat stress and burnout, and therefore help them stay in a vocation that they so love.

Know your limits and set them
Pushing yourself to do too much will set you up for failure. When you start feeling out of sync, when confusion or chaos begins to infiltrate into your daily tasks, then that is the time to learn to say “NO” when you have too much on your plate already.

Take time for yourself
This is hard to do if you are a parent too. Being able to take a minimum of 30 minutes of me-time daily to do something for yourself, will help rejuvenate your day. Read a book, listen to music or play a musical instrument, do some shopping or take a short walk. Spend time on a hobby, especially over weekends and school holidays.

Limit the amount of work you take home
Teachers are often overwhelmed with the amount of planning, marking and organizing that needs to be done, so they take it home. Don’t! There will always be work to do. Take the time to do some of this work after school before going home, and if it is not done today, you can finish it before or after school the next day. If you want to do internet research, limit yourself to two hours at the most, and set aside a day every week to do this at home.

Create a small sanctuary
Your sanctuary can be anywhere you want it to be, except for your office or your bedroom. Go to that special place that allows you to be quiet and relaxed, away from the mayhem that is created during your workday. Just sit for 10 minutes, listen to music through earphones, meditate or read something.

Practice healthy habits
Eat for energy – have small snacks to get you through the day. Missing breakfast or lunch is never a good idea. Exercise as often as you can – walk, run, swim, gym, cycle, do yoga – burnout won’t happen if you are busy taking care of your emotional and physical wellbeing. Exercise will also help you to sleep better.
Remember why you became a teacher
The reason you started teaching in the first place was that you love it. Being passionate about your work keeps you focused and energetic for yourself and for the scholars in your class. Teach in the moment, because it allows you to be more proactive and controlled in difficult situations. Laugh because it lightens the mood and gives you time to put things into perspective. Avoid conflict where possible, as it will save you lots of time and energy.

There are so many things that one could add to reduce stress, but at the end of the day, it is all about you. Teacher burnout is not always about the situations we find ourselves in, it is about how we can avoid stress and fatigue. It is okay to leave your classroom for a few minutes when you are overwhelmed. Take 5 – breathe deeply and take a short walk to compose yourself, and then return to your class. If you want to make your stress management personal that works for you in particular, do your Sensory Matrix™ to get your wellness blueprint.

The ability to grab hold of the rewarding and energizing career that you really want is in your hands – grab that power and never let it go.

Annabella Sequeira holds a BSc (Occupational Therapy) degree from the University of Cape Town, backed by 22 years of experience in both the public and private sectors. She has extensive practical experience in the area of Sensory Integrative Dysfunction in children and is passionate about empowering others to improve functionality and quality of life.

Have you ever felt as if managing your team is like trying to herd cats? Each with their own personalities, ideas, work styles, ambitions …. and flashpoints?

Being a manager these days can sometimes feel more like being something between a diplomat and a firefighter – spending all your energies on keeping the team together and simply functioning, rather than developing and being truly productive. Or to put it another way, putting out fires rather than igniting the potential within the team.

Don’t worry, you’re not alone. Pressures on time and resources are commonplace and everyone is working flat out, so it’s hardly surprising that managers often sense that their team is just about coping rather than being truly effective as if the cogs never quite kick into alignment. The problem is, if ‘just about coping’ is the norm, then you’re only a short step away from flare-ups, avoidable errors … or worse.

The problem of course is knowing what to do about it. You want to be a manager, not a mediator. If only there was a way of getting everyone to take more control over their own behaviours and emotions, some kind of fresh approach that gets to potential flashpoints before they have a chance to build.

Stress is often used as a catch-all diagnosis for these sorts of situations. ‘Everyone is so stressed’ can become a common refrain and one that can, over time, become self-reinforcing: if everyone is stressed, this can legitimise exhibiting the symptoms of stress, and even absence. It can also act as a convenient scapegoat, allowing individuals to abrogate responsibility for taking control of their own lives: ‘it’s not me, it’s the environment we work in. Stress is real, but accepting it as a given can translate as an admission of failure of a situation that has gotten out of control; which begs the question of how to regain that control before problems occur.

Sensory Intelligence® Consulting works with teams to help them do just that. Our approach is based on enabling individuals to regain some equilibrium in their lives by getting in sync with their senses. This will result in:

Improved teamwork and productivity
Improved staff loyalty and retention
Reduced absenteeism and sick leave

Most stress management techniques ask people to learn new skills, often just at the very time when they have little capacity to do so. Our highly practical approach is rooted in making small, day to day, changes which together can add up to significant shifts in how people manage their outlook and stress levels. Our approach is based on building greater awareness of the seven senses (sight, smell, taste, touch, hearing, plus two others, balance and body position) and showing people to tweak what they do already to achieve step-change, rather than introduce new techniques and demands on their time.

Wouldn’t you prefer to have your cats purring rather than fighting?

If you want your team to be in sync and working together harmoniously, join our Sensory Matrix™ workshop to make it happen!

By Tania Barney, a registered Occupational Therapist with the Health and Care Professionals Council (HCPC), UK. Professional qualifications: B App Sc (OT), M App Sc (Health Sciences), University of South Australia.

Year: 2016

Reducing teacher stress and burnout

High-performance teams through syncing the senses

Who has benefited