5 ways boundaries help you to thrive in teaching
When you create clear boundaries, you are able to thrive, helping you to love teaching again.
Boundaries are the red tape that you put around yourself to protect and promote your health and wellbeing. In teaching, they are essential. Without them, you can soon fall prey to an unsustainable cycle of overworking, over-giving and neglecting your own needs.
The thing is though, when the sector is directed at student attainment to the extent that it is, teacher wellbeing is often overlooked as a nice-to-have but unlikely-to-get.
However, this approach is unsustainable and cruel.
This approach overlooks the needs of those who help to maintain the education sector. The sector would be nowhere without the staff, teaching and non-teaching, who run it.
Therefore, it is vital that education staff are able to thrive in education.
How is this achieved?
Through boundaries.
Here’s 5 ways that boundaries help you to thrive in teaching.
1. Boundaries protect your work-life blend
When you have clear boundaries, you are able to distinguish where teacher-you ends and you-you begins.
You are able to limit the amount of time and energy you give to teaching thus, creating a work-life blend that works for you. When this happens, you give yourself the opportunity to thrive in teaching because you have more energy available to you.
You are no longer wrung out like yesterday’s laundry.
Not only this, you introduce greater variety into your life.
With a work-life blend, you can spend your time doing things other than school. Perhaps you spend one evening at choir, another doing exercise. Suddenly, school isn’t the only thing going on in your world. It is one of several valuable aspects of your life.
This can reduce the feeling of monotony. School once again becomes a positive space of employment because it’s not where you spend all of your time and energy.
The added beauty of this is that you bring this variety and vitality back into school. Your anecdotes for the students help to bring their learning to life. They get to see a more human side to you although only what you are happy to share.
So, boundaries benefit not only you but your students as well.
2. Boundaries help you to switch off from teaching
So often as a teacher, your mind is constantly dredging up more and more thoughts about school.
You worry about your students, you have brilliant lesson ideas and you remember things that you haven’t yet done that aren’t on your to-do list.
Your mind feels like your very own school-centred snow globe.
Once you introduce boundaries, specifically mental boundaries, you begin to give yourself permission to switch off from teaching. You empower yourself to not only recognise the awesome work that you do but also the fact that you are worthy of having time off and crucially, allowing yourself to switch off and enjoy it.
If you would like to find out more about how to switch off from teaching and switch on in your life, check out this free resource.
3. Boundaries help you to prioritise your own needs
One of the least favourite things for a teacher to do is have a sick day and create cover. Not only is it annoying to be ill in bed and have to set cover before 7am (as an aside, isn’t there a kinder way to do this for our ill colleagues??), but also you then fret that the work might not get done. And when you do return to school, your classroom may be a state with resources strewn all over the place.
Instead, when you have clear boundaries, you are more likely to prioritise your own needs first. You will prioritise those habits that benefit your health and wellbeing such as, enough regular sleep, eating healthily and doing things that nourish and replenish you.
The result of this is that you are less likely to become rundown and ill and so you are able to be more consistently present and thrive in school.
The result? Your students continue to progress, your classroom remains in the tidy state you love and you are able to enjoy being in your place of work more.
4. Boundaries help you to say no with confidence
When you say no, you are clearly setting out your boundaries. You are choosing to protect and promote your own wellbeing in order to thrive in teaching.
For instance, when a student comes to you at lunchtime asking for help with their homework, and you haven’t yet eaten your own lunch, you can choose to say no.
By saying no, you are choosing your own physical boundary defining that you have a need for sustenance and that this is your priority in this moment.
From a utilitarian perspective, it is more important for you to rest and feed yourself at lunchtime in order to effectively teach your afternoon classes than it is to help one student and be in a tired, hungry state for the afternoon.
Saying no is ultimately about creating priorities and sticking to them. You cannot do everything but you can choose to focus on what will benefit your students the most and help you to thrive in teaching.
5. Boundaries help you to have realistic expectations
One of the key issues with teaching is that it has an unrealistically high workload.
In fact, 68% of teachers report that workload is the main reason for thinking about leaving the profession.
When the workload is so high, it is unrealistic to expect yourself to complete it.
Yet, teachers continue to drive themselves into the ground in an attempt to get everything done.
When you have clear boundaries, you recognise that you can only do so much to the best of your ability.
And crucially, that is enough.
Teachers with clear boundaries let go of unrealistically high expectations of themselves. They let go of notions of perfectionism and people-pleasing.
Rather, they prioritise their workload, use timers to keep themselves on track and give themselves a well-deserved rest at the end of the day.
They maintain a clear perspective that teaching is, at the end of the day, a job and that it needs to be treated like so.
With this perspective, you are able to thrive every day of term.
If you would like to find out more about how boundaries can help you thrive in teaching, why not sign up for my Teacher Boundaries Challenge? Each day you will receive a mini challenge that will help you to take active steps towards thriving in teaching. Sign up here.
Gemma Drinkall is an Educational Wellbeing Coach, helping middle leaders in education to create clear boundaries so that they can love teaching, and their lives, again.