Chapter 2: The Beauty of and Problems with Self-care
Beyond Self Care
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Book Club Notes & Take-aways
How to make self-care feel authentic
Acknowledging the limitations of the system
Self Awareness is key
Tuning in is a practice
It takes courage and integrity, not perfection
The role of creativity and play
Caring for ourselves and creating space to change the system
Guests
Morgane Michael: Morgane is an author, speaker, podcast host, and primary educator in Victoria, BC. She is the author of From Burnt Out to Fired Up: Reigniting your Passion for Teaching with Solution Tree Publishers. Morgane is also the producer and host of KindSight 101, a leading educational podcast.
Lisa Baylis: Lisa has been sharing wellbeing strategies for the last 20 years. A natural born connector with an innate ability to make people feel valued and heard, she is an instructor, a counsellor, a facilitator, and a mother. Lisa is a published author of Self-Compassion for Educators and the creator of the AWE Method — Awakening the Wellbeing for Educators — which merges self-care, mindfulness, and self-compassion. Lisa is also a certified Mindful Self-Compassion teacher.
The conversation was sparked by one simple question: Where did you highlight or put sticky notes?
How to make self-care feel authentic
Lisa Baylis: One of the things that I really loved, especially about chapter two, is how you talked about the Band-Aid on the elephant. We can't just talk about self-care because self-care often feels like a blame for many people or it feels like a quick fix. It doesn't always feel authentic and I love how you brought in the reminder of authenticity around that, giving people permission to really care for themselves.
My favourite part of the three action options that you offered were the lean in, the let go, and then the solve the problem. Page 32 friends if you're following along in the book! It was my favourite because I think it is a beautiful permission to action self-care and to actually do what you need to do in the world of self-compassion. One of the key questions we ask is: what do I need right now? When we ask that question, we can sometimes figure out how to lean into what feels good. I loved how I could relate this work together.
Do I need to reflect and go into what's important to me?
Do I need to let go of something like a thought, a feeling, a relationship, a connection?
Is there something I need to solve?
When we give ourselves this permission to really care for ourselves in a deep way we're offering a really loving framework.
Gail Markin: I like the fact that it gives you that opportunity to have some control. We're not at the mercy of whatever's happening but we can't ignore it either. I think that was part of the idea, breaking it out a little bit. You know, sometimes all you need is to say, “oh, that's interesting.”
Acknowledging the limitations of the system
Morgane Michael: I think what struck me is the idea of letting it go. In education, it's easy to be frustrated by the context of what's happening - the limitation and the resources. To understand that there is no quick fix it feels like we're falling short and sometimes that falls on our shoulders. You allude to in the book that it's oftentimes a systemic issue. Within the context of what we have at our fingertips, you talk about Letting Go as an important piece and I think that is also the key. Not hanging on to the limitations and the frustrations of the system but allowing ourselves to have curiosity with a sense of acceptance - surrender even. If you don't find a way to solve the problem then you get stuck and when I think about burnout or we think about that feeling of inefficacy or frustration that we have sometimes with our jobs, it stems from that feeling of lack of control.
I like that you acknowledge that there are limitations to our system. I'm hearing from folks in North America that they're so tired of leaders piling on stressors and to-do lists and then, as an add-on say, “oh right and take care of yourselves too.” It just feels like a slap in the face. There are things that are beyond our control that are not ideal and we work in this imperfect system.
Lisa Baylis: I love that you give people permission to recognize the systemic problem in the challenges that we face. We know the bottom line is that our own care practice is the foundation to be able to creating the change that needs to happen. If we don't have that practice of deeply caring for ourselves, then we don't have capacity to continue to do the other work.
Self-awareness is key
Lisa Baylis: The other thing that I pulled out is that connection to self-awareness and how important it is. Self-awareness is a lifelong journey and it's truly the foundation. If we want to create the systemic changes, the connections with our colleagues has to start with us too. If we don't include the self then the other ones aren't going to happen. I really love how you give a lot of attention and energy to that foundation of self-awareness because if we are going to make any other changes that self-awareness has got to be one of those things that we grow and pay attention to. I know in my teaching degree, not once was there any information around how to talk about and reflect on ourselves. It was always about the kids and how were we bringing that information to them. Education is truly a different place from when I started and there are a lot of educators like me who have been in the business for well over 20 years and are still doing things the way they did them 20 years ago. That foundation of self-awareness wasn't something we brought into our own practice. We are in a new world where we have to learn to reflect, we have to learn to pay attention, we have to be aware and purposeful into how we are showing up in our schools and in our systems. If we're not, then we're actually can do more harm than we can do good.
Morgane Michael: I think there is so much to to be said for that oxygen mask analogy - we have to look inward and really take stock of what it is that we need. Our needs are so important and I think meeting those needs or at least being aware of them is such an important piece. Quite often I find myself, as a kindergarten teacher, at that bell of recess time saying, “okay, I've got 15 minutes… do I pee? do I photocopy? what am I doing with my time?” Just being aware of what our needs are is a really important piece of the puzzle. We don't always give ourselves permission. Actually tuning in is essential to my ability to be a full-hearted, present educator. Most of my prep time now is not actually about marking and it's not about preparing lessons, it's shifted to how I can bolster that energy within me so that I can be fully present in the classroom. That's where my energy goes. Give yourself permission to recharge, to tune in and, to be mindfully aware of what it is that you need.
‘Tuning in’ is a practice
Lisa Baylis: I'll just add that “tuning in” - that's a practice. But knowing and being are very, very different things. I appreciate that you have a checklist you can go through and fill in but it's a lifelong journey. I think that is where people struggle with a check box - “I did my self-care, check I'm finished!” Yet self-awareness; mindful presence; being connected to ourself; having those needs met isn’t something that you can just have a goal and check the list off. It's hard for many people. And that's why self-care gets a bad rap. When we actually talk about mindful presence and compassionate connection to self and others, it is not something that we can do on a checklist. It's not something that you can do once. It's a lifelong journey of checking in:
what do I need?
what's important?
how am I bringing my joy to myself and into my classroom today?
what's important for me in this moment?
I have control over my reactions, my responses, how I show up in the day, where my mindset is, and that is a practice. We have a negativity bias and teachers like to go to the awful scenario - we like to find the bad, we're trained, as you said, to have a critical mindset to fix and solve.Yet we're in a world now and we're realizing people don't need fixing and the only thing we need to do is meet ourselves with care and kindness.
Gail Markin: Sometimes people have that idea of self-care as something that I go and do when I get home or after school. What I really love is the embedding of self-care in your actual work day: in those moments where you just need a minute to notice what's going on for you. When I go out and speak to groups of adults and ask where they feel feelings in their bodies, I continue to be amazed at how many people are not really quite sure what I'm talking about at first. It’s fair because nobody taught us to do that, it wasn't one of the things you start to do like exercise or a meditation or some mindfulness but it can be embedded in those moments in the work day. Noticing a moment - oh that's interesting, there's that tightness in my chest or there's that little clench in my stomach - I wonder what's going on for me? I also do a little exercise to encourage people to go talk to someone who can give honest feedback around how others perceive me. I found that so fascinating because I learned things about myself that I had no idea and yet the three or four people that were my caring friends all agreed. It was a little hard to hear, to be honest, but also powerful to be able to say - oh is that how I'm coming across sometimes, okay, well this is how I want to come across so I'm going to change my practice. It was such a game changer for me.
Lisa Baylis: Sometimes we can get the feedback and we resist it or we don't want to hear it and so we blame or shame others because of it. I love that you trusted these loving people to be able to hear that. Your mindset around growth and change and showing up and what's important to you made it so that you could reflect and have that bit of awareness. A lot of us aren't ready for that, we don't have enough of a foundation to be able to say - okay I can take this difficult piece of information and then I can sit with it and then I can show up in a different way. We're not really good at sitting in difficult emotions we're not really good at hearing feedback that's not always positive and we have a society that is is afraid of the hard. I think that it's not just going for a run or having a bubble bath - it's not just the care practices. It's the deeply caring for self so we can care for others and that's a different type of ongoing practice because it has that concept of reflection.
It Takes Courage & Integrity, not Perfection
Morgane Michael: I think there's that element of courage too. It's the same thing in any kind of relationship whether it's with yourself or with others or with your family or romantic relationship - "that whole concept of checking in and then that authentic check-in of “am I showing up as the person that I intend to be?” And if I'm not, what are the small one percent shifts that I can make? I think sometimes people attach themselves to this outcome that feels completely insurmountable and unrealistic, maybe even inauthentic but they want such a massive shift especially if they're not super satisfied with the outcome of those check-ins. It takes a tremendous amount of courage to ask other people to provide that feedback about you. I've had conversations with my sister and people very very close to me and it can be a bit off-putting because I think a lot of us are obligers or pleasers and we have this desire to be right or to be good. What that does is dismantle that pressure to be perfect and to be good and you can just shoot for that objective of who you'd like to be. I think intentionality and courage is is sort of at the heart of that.
Lisa Baylis: I think a lot of educators are perfectionists. I love how you gave yourself permission to be a work in progress many people would be afraid to ask these questions because that perfectionist tendency is too strong. Self-awareness and self-compassion are the antidote to perfection. It's that permission to be a work in progress, to be a human who struggles and goes through things. It gives us permission to go through the hard, to be in the difficult. I believe that's truly where self-care lies. It is when we give ourselves that permission to so - yes it's hard and yes I'm not perfect and yes I'm growing and then I can help with all the other pieces in our education system. What a beautiful thing to model for our kids . My belief these days is the more we can show up and be imperfect, the more we can give our next generation permission to not have to show up all the time in a perfect way.
Gail Markin: I think in every one of the book club recordings that I've done already, I'm always amazed at how well we are raising up a generation of kids that are not going to be perfectionists. I think we do a darn good job of teaching them that mistakes are okay and that it's a little messy and learning is like that. I think it is really a gift that we can now say to the adults - actually that's for you too! Then they can model it for the next generation but they also can experience it.
Morgane Michael: I think also within perfection there's that feeling that you can't play and I think if you can't play then you really can't learn. I think that a happy, wholehearted educator is somebody who feels like they can take risks and kind of jump off the cliff. We did a salmon mural in my class and it sort of just came together and it could be really bad or it could be really good. I think being able to jump into those moments and be willing to risk however it might look when a principal walks in and overcoming that sense of perfectionism. Yes, it's going to be messy and yes I'm going to jump off the cliff and take a risk and do something that might feel challenging and it might not work. That's how life works too! We don't always have the guarantee that our ideas are going to pan out or that the lesson plan is going to be at slam dunk. If we can adopt that mindset, that's where joy is and play and creativity. When I can tap into that mindset, I feel like a happier version of myself and I feel like I'm able to give more of my heart to my students. We have to get brave and it comes from that sense of play.
The Role of Creativity and Play
Gail Markin: Translating that into the adult world, that same sense of play and learning needs to happen if we're going to make any kind of systems change because if you can't learn, you can't change, and you can't grow!
Morgane Michael: With the work that I do, creativity is a really big component. I wrote a book about burnout and reigniting that passion. A lot of it comes down to tapping into that flow and, I think you talk about that in your book too, that joyful state of creation where you're not even aware of time passing. I think a lot of the time people are in quest of passion or a purpose in their life. Elizabeth Gilbert says this so well, she says - don't worry about that, just follow your curiosity and be like that little hummingbird that kind of flits and engages in those curious moments. Whatever draws you to the things will bring you that sense of excitement and play and joy. It doesn't have to be work, sometimes going outside of Education and doing things like pottery or getting your hands dirty in the garden can fill us with a sense of curiosity and passion that we then pour back back into our students. I think it's important to look at that piece of our self-care too - what lights you up what makes you come alive?
Caring for ourselves and creating space to change the system
Lisa Baylis: I was just going to add when you were talking earlier too about being messy in your classroom, so much of your book Gail is about leaders and I think about having hard conversations and being messy as Leaders not you know that imperfect leader who shows up and still has hard conversations still goes in and connects with people. Gail you do such a beautiful job through this book of priming people to do hard things in a human way. I think that that's a really beautiful place of kindness and compassion. I'm so grateful you wrote this book and I think it's going to be something that leaders are really going to tune into as an approach and a support. Really help, not just themselves, but the collective. We're here talking about the individual care today but you've created a book that really gives us permission to not only care for ourselves but care for our community and then to create space to change the system. I'm so grateful that this is in our world right now.
Gail Markin: What a great conversation. I get inspired when I talk to you guys and honestly I could listen to either one of you speak for so long! Is there anything else that we've missed that you want to highlight or talk about or are you feeling pretty good about our conversation
Morgane Michael: For anyone who's listening I think it's important to remember that sometimes we come away from audiobooks that we listen to or the books that we read and we're inspired and then sometimes it can feel overwhelming to feel like we need to make such massive shifts in our life in order to achieve that sense of well-being. It just feels like the gap between point A and point B feels so distant. Just a reminder that accepting where you are right now is absolutely important with your whole heart. Loving where you are now and accepting with a deep sense of compassion where you find yourself at this moment. Then making the space for where you expansively want to go and looking at it as an opportunity not as a burden or a heavy weight to carry. Just as something to look forward to in the future. That's what makes it feel sustainable and within reach.
“Sometimes it’s just starting up the conversation that says - why do we do it like that? is that the way it has to work? We have a system that’s existed and a way of being that when we just start to talk about it through that lens of well-being we may make different decisions or at least try different things. ”
