4 Ways to Recover Your Well-Being
We’ve all experienced them: Meetings with parents that quickly turn sour, leaving you feeling stressed and questioning your effectiveness or even worse, your motives.
Perhaps it’s a meeting where you cop a mouthful of abuse, leaving you feeling hurt and let down. Perhaps, a parent gossips about you and you feel powerless to stop it. Perhaps you encounter a parent with an axe to grinde, who goes to a higher authority leaving you feeling aggrieved, even powerless. It doesn’t matter how experienced you are, there will always be situations where parents gets under your skin.
Recovering quickly from toxic events, which are on the rise in modern education, is important for your mental well-being. Allowing them to
fester away at you reduces your effectiveness as an educator and has a massive negative impact on your health. Here are four ideas that will
help you recover quickly from toxic events reducing stress and minimising the impact on your health.
1. Don’t hold it in. TALK about it.
It’s natural to want to bottle things up or keep these types of incidents under the radar due to embarrassment or a sense of failure. But this
reaction is unhealthy, as it will only allow the incident to fester and eat away at you over time. Sit down with a trusted colleague and talk about the incident and discuss the emotional impact. First, cue them that you want them to listen rather than offer advice. Choose someone whom you have a good relationship with, someone who has earned the right to be taken in your confidence. Such a person is a true colleague indeed.
2. Don’t catastrophise. REAPPRAISE the situation.
If you find yourself waking up in the middle of the night thinking about the worst case scenario, such as, “Every parent in the school will
now be bad-mouthing me following that run-in with Mrs. Smith,” then you are catastrophising. Suddenly your thoughts seem like facts. If your stomach is doing cartwheels, then your emotions are running hard and furious. Put a stop to the catastrophising. Take another look at the situation and see if your perception is valid. Talk to a colleague to get a reality check. A positive reappraisal will change your thinking and bring about an emotional change, which is better for your mental and physical health. Only then will you be ready to respond more effectively to the situation. Consider seeking professional assistance if you find you just can’t stop revisiting events in your head.
3. Don’t manage alone. TEAM up.
It’s not wise to approach parents or revisit toxic meetings with parents when you’ve been badly hurt or when negative emotions have festered for days. If you do so, two outcomes are likely. First, you may become too emotional to seek a rational conclusion. You run the risk of targeting the person, rather than seeking a true solution. Second, you may be so controlling that you end up being perceived as a bully. Rather, use a colleague or senior teacher to lead the meeting for you, allowing grievances to be aired in a calm environment and, if possible, searching for some type of resolution that is satisfactory to you and the parent. This may mean that you swallow some personal pride, which is the professional thing to do. Don’t try to lead the meeting on your own as it more than likely won’t end well.
4. Separate the professional from the personal.
So often the professional becomes personal and we take our worries and concerns home with us, rather than leave them behind at the end of the day. Worries and concerns left unchecked impact on your relationships with your family, your kids and your friends. They can also make you sick,
if left unchecked. It is better to find someone to talk to who can act as a wise friend and advisor or as a sounding board. If a meeting is needed to clear the air or repair a relationship, don’t go it alone. Enlist the help of a trusted colleague or an experienced teacher to take the lead. Don’t think
in terms of winning or losing when meeting with a parent. Think in terms of resolving the issue at hand in the best interests of the child involved. You need to get the mental clutter out of your head so you can feel good about yourself and emotionally healthy again.