Creating Resilience in Teaching

How to use Mindshifting to transform teaching from a road to burnout into a meaningful journey.

Photo by Matt Foxx on Unsplash

How I Happened Upon Mindshifting

I taught elementary special education in public schools for ten years. I went into it because I loved the kids. As soon as I began volunteering in schools as a college student, I gravitated toward kids with disabilities, usually without realizing it. I sensed when kids needed extra help, and I instantly identified with them. They seemed to understand me, too, and we created genuine, warm connections. They were my people, and I knew I’d found my niche.

My first year, I was so excited to be able to work with special education kids that the excitement decreased my fatigue and new-teacher anxiety. But as the years wore on, the workload increased, the fatigue intensified, and my attitude tanked. During my tenth year, I realized I had forgotten how excited I once was about working with my students. I knew it was time to make a change to preserve my mental and physical health. That’s when I quit and decided to start my business.

But what if you don’t have the luxury of starting your own business? What if teaching in public schools is your calling and you feel strongly about sticking it out for the sake of the kids? I don’t have all the answers (and I don’t believe that there is ‘an answer’) to teacher burnout, but I do know some strategies to increase your resilience.

Last year, about six weeks before my teaching certificate was set to expire, I realized in a moment of panic (at 11:00 pm) that I was seven clock hours shy of being able to renew. What could I take on such short notice to fulfill this requirement?? I found a course on Mindshifting, a method developed by Mitch Weisburgh, that teaches participants how to build resilience and flexibility. It’s a technique designed to teach you how to rewire your brain to get you out of cycles of reactivity so that you can build a positive mindset and work collaboratively. It was so good, I’m taking another Mindshifting course now.

In this article, I want to show you three things you can do to build resilience and protect your mental health.

1. Learn to recognize when you’re in fight or flight and have a strategy for calming yourself.

2. Build redundancy into your classroom.

3. Put love into your life.

Numbers one and two, I learned in Mindshifting. The last one I learned from my training in neuroplasticity.

1. Recognizing Fight or Flight and Returning to Rational Thinking

Photo by madison lavern on Unsplash

We all go into fight or flight from time to time. Sometimes, it’s something major that puts us there, such as a car accident or a natural disaster. But it can also be small things, like the copier being out of paper or getting a phone call at an unexpected time. Whatever the event is, anything that your nervous system finds alarming will trigger certain responses in your limbic brain.

Your limbic brain responds to events in your life in under a second. It uses past events to determine whether something is a potential threat to you. Let’s say the situation is that you have thirty copies to make during your planning time, and the copier jams. I’m sure you’ve been there. When the copier jams and your limbic brain is activated, you may respond in a variety of ways: