Photo by Bruno Nascimento

Just over halfway through the year . . . how did that happen?

No doubt you have a few important things to do next week. If you shared your calendar, I’m pretty sure we’d see meetings, school events, PLD, class visits, strategic reviews, duty commitments, reports due, etc, etc.

But would we see important sustainability things?

Would we see scheduled exercise, blocked out time for reflection, lunch with a friend, a coffee catch-up with a colleague, time to prepare healthy food, a late start after a late finish?

If the answer is ‘no’, it’s very likely that some/all of those things won’t happen. You will be gambling that you can somehow just fit them in. The result is that next week will be a net drain on your personal well-being and capacity to do your job sustainably. If subsequent weeks are the same, in 9 weeks’ time you will probably be a bit ‘crispy’. Sustainability is a cumulative game, what you do/don’t do today adds or subtracts over time. 

If your answer is ‘yes’, then you win. You win more energy, more sustainability, and more capacity to lead with excellence.

This “Is it on your calendar?” question is something we’ve written about before. All the really important things are in your calendar/diary system. Why do you always remember a Board meeting? It’s on the calendar. What’s the last day to submit your Strategic Plan? Just check the calendar. What are you doing today? That’s right, have a quick look at the calendar.

And we’re talking about important things.

Any one of limited exercise, poor diet, lack of sleep, or social isolation has a tangible and deeply serious impact on your health over time. If you combine them . . .

So, today you can improve this situation in 5 minutes. Here’s the minimum amount of exercise to add to your calendar for next week –

Exercise:

From the World Health Organisations’ minimum guidelines for adults aged 18–64 years.

• Should do at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity physical activity throughout the week, or do at least 75 minutes of vigorous-intensity physical activity, or an equivalent combination of both.
• For additional health benefits, adults should increase their moderate-intensity physical activity to 300 minutes per week, or equivalent.
• Muscle-strengthening activities should be done involving major muscle groups on 2 or more days a week.

That’s 2.5 to 5 hours moderate activity for the week, and two muscle strengthening sessions. You’re got 7 days to play with and I know you can work this out!

Just for fun, click here and share your current reality.

You can do this.

Dave

Photo by Jan Kahánek

We do so much writing in our professional lives that whenever I hear the word “journaling” my mind kind of freezes over. We write reports, newsletters, strategic plans, opinions, instructions, curriculum documents, more reports – we’re constantly writing.

Turns out though that “journaling” is one of those things that can really help us with our well-being at work. Studies show that journaling can be a powerful tool for enhancing well-being by promoting emotional expression, self-reflection, stress reduction, problem-solving, goal setting, and gratitude. 

It has a versatility and adaptability about it that means you can almost do it anywhere and at any time.

I reckon we should make time to journal our thoughts at school – during our professional day.

Tapping away on your keyboard, or writing longhand into a book, no-one needs to know. Journaling has the advantage of making you appear to be “busy” to anyone who might poke their head through the door and make some sort of judgement about how you’re using your time!

Making time, just for you, to get your thoughts, concerns, wonders and ideas down daily sounds easy. You just need to make that time, and then get on to it.

So what could you write about? The great thing about journaling is that you don’t need to follow the same theme every day. Just getting your thoughts down onto paper is immensely beneficial to your well-being.

In fact I’m getting benefit from just writing about journaling – it’s helping me clarify my own thinking as my fingers bounce across the keyboard finding ways to turn words into ideas. 

So, as I said, what could you write about? Well, how about these ideas for a start: 

• Gratitude Journaling: Keeping a gratitude journal, where you regularly write about things that you are thankful for. This has been linked to increased happiness, reduced depression, and improved overall life satisfaction.
• Structured Thinking: Writing down your problems and finding potential solutions can help you greatly in building up problem-solving skills. By doing this it allows you to organise your thoughts logically and approach your professional challenges more systematically.
• Cathartic Release: How about just writing as a process to release pent-up emotions and stress. Write down exactly what you’re feeling – no-one else will ever read this. Go-to-town with how you’re feeling.  This act of releasing stress can lower physiological stress markers like cortisol levels .
• Cognitive Restructuring: Write about  the challenging situations that you find yourself in. By doing this you can help yourself  reframe negative thoughts and develop a more positive outlook, which in turn contributes to better mental health and resilience .
• Positive Emotion Amplification: How about focusing on some of the positive experiences and accomplishments that you’ve been through recently. Amplify these positive emotions and it’ll help you to foster a more optimistic outlook on what you’re going through.

As I said, there doesn’t need to be any rhyme or reason to your writing in terms of what you write about, it’s all up to you. But studies do show that regular journaling will make you feel better and will promote resilience, so why wouldn’t you find time in your “busy” day at work to put pen to paper?

All you need to do is start. Close the door of your office, set your timer for twenty minutes and write. Go on, do it! You won’t regret it.

Steve

It’s the beginning of a new Term. 

You find yourself standing in the staffroom looking at the Term planner. It’s full of rows and columns, numbers and days. 

At one point, very recently, the planner was pretty much empty. Now you look at it and you see the empty boxes made up by the intersecting lines (the days) filling up with stuff; special events, deadlines, meetings, discos, camps, school productions, more meetings, working bees, school reports and other meetings. 

Maybe it’s colour co-ordinated. Maybe you have a key to the side that tells everyone what the colours mean. Maybe there’s a friendly motivational quote adorning the top of the board just to soothe the busyness of it all. Maybe.

There’s something about the staffroom Term planner that seems to keep everyone on track. If it’s not on that planner then it may never ever happen. If you want something done, it needs to be somewhere on that piece of board.

If you’re lucky you’ll be looking at two or three weeks towards the end that aren’t quite filled in the same as the initial weeks. There’ll be a few blanks.

If you’re wise you’ll keep it that way.

If you want to help your team get through the term without feeling fried, frizzled, overworked, over stressed, burnt out, exhausted and crawling on all fours, then jealously guard over those blank spaces. And if you can’t do that, then write into the blanks imaginary “stuff” that only you know aren’t true – call them space savers. 

No one else needs to know.

Your future self will thank you.

Steve

Photo by amirali mirhashemian 

I used to like reminding my students, when they’d tell me that things were too hard or just simply too much, that the key to beating this sort of stuff is to think of it all as a hamburger.

Yup a hamburger. Stick with me here.

What I used to tell them is that when they (or anybody actually) bites into their favourite, huge, big, gigantic hamburger, that they never swallow it all in one big bite. Nope, they take little bites. And they take these little bites because their mouth is simply far too small to cram a whole big hamburger into their gob.

Unsurprisingly it’s the same for Leaders too. When we eat a hamburger – when we eat anything actually – we tend to chew off as much as we can, and no more. And if we’re really clever we’ll also take a little moment to savour what we’re eating while we’re at it.

This is the same for those times when the task in front of us is simply far too big, or far too much. There’s no way you can tackle the whole task in one big bite – so don’t even try. Break it down into “mouthful” pieces. And although the task might not necessarily be as tasty as your favourite hamburger, you can still take time to savour, or get some meaning, out of the situation.

There’s no challenge in front of us that can’t be tackled in bite sized chunks. So stop looking at a task and thinking it’s far too big, or onerous, and instead take a little bit of time to wonder where you’d be best to take that first bite.

Steve

People often comment on the financial difference between working in the public sector and working in a business. When contracts are being negotiated comparisons are made and we often end up bemoaning  the relative under pay.

But it’s not under payment that is causing me to age a little more quickly this week, it’s people. Specifically, some of the people we are mandated to serve – ‘difficult ’ parents.

.   .   .

There’s a fundamental difference between how you can deal with difficult people if you are running a business as opposed to running a school.

Imagine owning a bookshop where a particular customer is always rude to staff or publicly criticises the decisions you make – it wouldn’t be long before you asked them to leave. Or perhaps you run an irrigation supply business and one particular farmer is often awkward to deal with and abuses your sales rep – it’s likely that you would simply stop working with them.

Therein lies the problem for public servants, we can’t simply stop working with our most difficult people. And unlike a retail business where an unpleasant customer calls in once then goes away forever, difficult adults in our school communities stay with us – often for years.

So, both management and teachers have to continually work at maintaining relationships with people that for varying reasons do not reciprocate this responsibility. Its often an unequal dance with one party demanding/expecting something more akin to servitude than service!

So here’s a question – what standard of behaviour is acceptable for parents in your school? In effect, is there a ‘line’?

Many years ago, a principal of mine had a very clear personal view that there was a line, and that crossing it meant you either changed or left. In the top righthand drawer of his traditional old school desk was a stack of ‘transfer slips’. These small pieces of paper were for recording the basic details of a student’s enrolment and were used when a student was moving to another school.

When he felt all avenues had been exhausted, he would calmly open the drawer, pull out a slip and place it on the desk. He would then say something like, “I’m sorry that we can’t meet your needs, perhaps another school might”. An interesting effect was that often the parent would immediately start retracting some of their more unreasonable statements and demands. 

Putting the slip on the desk was effectively drawing a solid line in front of the behaviour.

As we sit here at the end of the Term, with pressure on everyone’s’ time and energy, perhaps we need to get more direct with some in our communities. Perhaps we need to rehearse a verbal version of the old transfer slip – “I’m sorry that you feel like that, but that’s all we can do.”

Fullstop, no more commentary.

While the almost universal implementation of ‘zoning’ has made shifting schools difficult for most, the well known saying that, “you’ll get what you are willing to accept”, is never truer than deep in Term 4 – service needed, not servitude.

Dave

If you would like a guaranteed way to feel mentally ‘lighter’ in less than an hour, try scheduling 60 minutes of work-based decluttering next week.

All you have to do is block out 1 hour in your diary and devote it to;

1. Deleting any openly displayed piles of paper in and around your office
2. Deleting any hidden piles of paper in cupboards/cabinets in and around your office
3. Tidying your computer desktop

Trust me, I’m not judging. My workspace has seen plenty of piles that have sat there mocking my efficiency for silly amounts of time. In my (and possibly your) defence, there’s probably a fine line between administrative perfection and the time spent achieving it. A perfectly clear desk/office might just suggest you have used more than a reasonable amount of your time on achieving that perfection.

Personality comes into it too – we all have different tolerance levels for ‘stuff’ lying around, but the universal truth is that clutter is exactly that, and plenty of research shows that working in a cluttered space adds mental load to the people doing it. And the last thing a school leader needs is more mental load.

When I started the teaching game, I well remember a wise, older teacher telling me that if I hadn’t used a particular resource in the previous 3 years, I should biff it. The reality back then was that almost all resources were paper based, and they took a lot of space to store – in your classroom, in your car, in your lounge at home . . . These days most of my clutter is electronic, but the bit that mocks me on a daily basis is sitting on the corner of my desk. Unresolved.

The old way of dealing with ‘the pile’ was to wait until the Christmas break then finally drop it all in an Otto. That symbolic action meant you had finally come to terms with the reality that the possibilities and opportunities buried in that pile would not be realised. And with this sub-conscious understanding, some mental load was also thrown away.

Why wait until Christmas when you can do it before lunchtime next Tuesday?

Dave

*You can read another post we wrote on this topic earlier here.