Self-care is what keeps us feeling good, both mentally and physically. When you feel both physically healthy and mentally strong, you are able function at a level that wouldn’t be possible otherwise. I’ve written before about why self-care and self-advocacy are not selfish. It allows you to effectively and resiliently support all the people in your life who are counting on you.
How, then, do we introduce more self-advocacy and self-care into our busy everyday lives when we’re so often focused on everyone else?
Letting things go is HARD. There’s a mourning process that occurs when we experience pain and disappointment. Also, to clarify, letting go isn’t about spontaneously getting over something or stuffing down our suffering so we can pretend that everything is okay. That’s denial.
As the name Teaching Balance suggests, one of the primary themes of my work is to support educators in finding balance in their lives. Part of this is the idea of work-life balance, but I’ve increasingly observed that more and more people alternatively use terms like work-life integration.
The idea of work-life integration suggests that the work we do blurs into the other parts of our lives, and often by choice. This is certainly true for educators.
