Hello Teachers!

I am back! Happy New Year 2023! What have you been up to? I have been doing a lot since I last posted and I wanted to share a little bit with you.

This school year I decided to do a shared contract and move from Special Education to General Education, so that I could spend more time on my passion building my Life Coaching Practice for Teachers.

So over the past several months I have been working on creating The Art of Emotional Freedom for Teachers. It took me a long time to finally choose a name to describe what it is I do for Teachers, but at the end of the day I help Teachers become emotionally free, I help them no longer be held captive of their emotions, I teach them everything they wish they learned in the credential program: how to manage and maintain healthy mental health, how to manage stress and overwhelm, and how to develop a secure sense of Self Worth, so that they can stop people pleasing and stop comparing themselves to others.

Do you find that you take everything personally? That email from a parent? That conversation with a colleague, that note from the admin?

Do you find yourself comparing yourself to other teachers? Comparing your lessons to the pinterest lessons?

Do you find yourself working tirelessly and staying late, putting YOUR ALL into your classroom and then having nothing left for you, your family or your hobbies?

Do you take your students' behavior, students' success or failures and make it mean something about you as a teacher? Do you take it personally and make it mean you aren’t good enough?

Then this podcast is for you, better yet come work with me so that I can help you stop taking it all personally and stop allowing outside circumstances affect your Self Worth. Let me teach you how to do your job AND still feel good enough. You can find me on IG at The Life Coach the number 4 Teachers. TheLifeCoach4Teachers or email me at coachamber@iamtheteachersbraincoach.com

On today's Episode I am going to be talking about one of the Core Components of Emotional Freedom.

Developing a Secure Self Worth: I define a Secure Self Worth as: internally knowing that you are inherently worthy regardless of what happens outside of you or what your brain tells you.

A Secure Self Worth does not let situations, people or anything outside of them determine whether You are good enough.

A Secure Self Worth is the understanding that no one can give you ‘good enoughness’ title- it can’t be earned, bought, sold or given to you from other people or situations. It is the understanding that You decide that you are worthy, you believe that you are of value, and that you ARE ENOUGH.

If you would like to work with me 1:1 email me or dm me on IG. Soon I will be starting a group program for teachers so join my wait list for my group coaching program. Like you, I LOVE TO TEACH, so I can’t wait to teach you all things brain, mind, soul- Art of Emotional Freedom, I can't wait to teach Teachers these concepts in Master Mind Classes and Answer any questions that you may have. So if you haven’t already followed me on IG my handle is The Life Coach 4 Teachers: The Life Coach (the number) 4 Teachers.

Story Time: Anxiety

Hey Teachers, today is going to be a story time edition. I promise there will be nuggets to relate to and show you how thought work has helped me manage my thoughts and feelings.

So I started asking myself the hard questions, like what if it wasn’t a problem that this time it does feel hard and overwhelming. See because it felt hard to me I was making it mean that I wasn’t good at my job anymore. I was making my feeling of overwhelm mean that I couldn’t handle these situations. So I started rewriting my narrative. What if it being hard and overwhelming didn’t mean I wasn’t adequate or I wasn’t able to handle it.

I was so frustrated with myself that right before a dysregulation I felt my body get tight, and tense and I started feeling anxious. (no one outside of me ever knew, but I could feel it, and I hated it: I made it mean that I was no longer fit for this job) But what if it's okay that I feel anxious right before a dysregulation? What if I just allowed myself to be human and have human reactions to aggressive behaviors. You see your brain knows what is going to happen during this dysregulation, so your brain knows what you will have to endure so it is normal for it to send protective nervous responses throughout your body. Instead of making it mean that I wasn’t meant for this job anymore, or that this situation was different. I talked back to my brain and said no this is just a normal human response, I learned to allow my anxiety instead of fighting it, I allowed my body to feel the anxiety sensations: my body would tighten, my heart rate would increase, and I would talk to myself: You are allowed to feel anxious, this is part of the human brain response it doesn’t mean anything about you or your ability to be the Teacher this student needs.

Learning to not be mad at myself or frustrated with myself for feeling anxiety was my mountain last year, and it allowed me to learn how to build a stronger relationship with myself. I learned that I was making my human reactions mean things about me that just were not true. I was making it mean that I wasn’t being the Teacher my students deserved (You can ask everyone I work with and they would completely disagree! I even told one of my colleagues what I was going through and she reminded me your brain is telling you a story and you would tell me, is it even true. She’s like you are allowed to be human, something I so often tried to remind her. I love Teacher friends, always there ready to ground you from the high expectations that cause so much unnecessary overwhelm)

Kick the Feeling of Never Feeling Good Enough

Do you never feel good enough? Are you constantly beating yourself up over things you “should do”? Are you always comparing yourself to other teachers? Do you feel like you can’t get “IT ALL DONE” ? Then this episode is for you.

I have been there! I remember at the beginning of my career up until three years ago that I never felt good enough. I felt like I was always trying to prove my worth, my value as a Teacher (which I eventually realized was because I was trying to prove my worth as a human too). How do you earn your worth or your value? Well society has taught us that our value is in production, it's in our grades, it's in quote “how well we do”. So how do we know how well we are doing- we mentally create all these expectations of what it means to be “good enough”.

So these mental expectations turn into our Brains Manual for Measuring UP, and guess what, the bar is always changing, and growing so we are NEVER measuring up.

We are taught to look outside of ourselves for validation for our worth. We are taught that we have to do ALL the things, and do them all WELL ( A++) for us to be or feel good enough.

As a teacher this means:

We feel like we have to meet EVERY STUDENT NEEDS, every day all day, or we feel like we let our students down.

It means that we have to have quote do what we THINK our students parents want of us “design a class website, email parents daily, communicate with them all the time about all the things”

It means mastering and implementing all curriculum with fidelity. ALL the time.

It means if so and so is doing this project with their class that I should too

It means that if so and so can always be upbeat and positive I should be able to too.

You see what slowly begins to happen? We create no space for US to listen and hear what we want to do as Teachers. We create no space for us to be human. We create space where we are constantly shoulding ourselves instead of listening to where we are and where our class is and what we want to do.

What if you decided today, that instead of these built for you expectations, instead of looking outside of yourself for value and worth, you decided that you are already INHERENTLY worthy, you are already VALUEABLE.

What if you could decide today to FEEL Good ENOUGH, no matter what? What if feeling Good Enough was available for you today right now?

All you had to do was make the decision that you are Good Enough and that you don’t have to hustle for your worth.

What about your teaching? What about your schedule? What about your time? What about your time comparing yourself to others or to your perfect self... Would you change?

What if you practiced feeling good enough from within. When we do things from feeling good enough, from self love, it creates different feelings.

If we are doing things out of feeling “ not enough” it will create shame, desperation, graspy.. And feelings that drive actions of urgency, and a little bit of chaos… leaving us never feeling good enough, because we don’t actually take the action we wanted to, due to the heavy feelings created.

BUT if we learned how to FEEL worthy and good enough NO matter what action we take or don’t take. Then we learn to take action from a place of SELF LOVE and SELF CONFIDENCE which creates different kinds of actions and different kinds of results.

What would you let go of, or take off your plate if you Already Felt Good Enough? What thoughts or self beliefs would you change or let go of IF YOU ALREADY FELT WORTHY?

If you are feeling overwhelmed because you don’t feel like you are good enough, that is an inside job. You have to work on your thoughts surrounding you, you have to clean up those thought errors. Your brain is keeping you in a cycle it is used to, so you have to break the cycle and when your brain offers you thoughts around your worth, around you not doing enough, stop it. Talk back to it, look for evidence that you are adequate, that you are doing enough.

I would recommend that you do what we call a thought download, that's when you write down all of your thoughts unfiltered. Just for three to five minutes. Look at your thoughts surrounding what you are expecting yourself to do as a teacher, what you think a good teacher does and doesn’t do, and ask yourself are these thoughts serving me.

If you are feeling overwhelmed because of your class/ your students. Then I would suggest you do a thought download around what is going on, why is what is happening a problem.

Some of my clients feel like they aren’t in control of their student’s behaviors so that creates feelings of overwhelm/ or anxiety and this causes them to be impatient, snap at their students, get into control battles with their students, and they are not showing up the way they want to. I remind them that it is not them and it is not their student’s behavior. It is the thought that I am not incontrol of my class or my students' behaviors.

You could have numerous thoughts that create overwhelm, the most important thing you learn is that your feelings of overwhelm is not caused my your circumstances, your students, or even politics. Your thoughts about these things causes your feelings of overwhelm. So you have to learn to become aware of your thoughts.

If you are feeling overwhelmed because you don’t have enough time, then that is a different aspect, that means we have to work on learning to focus our mind and attention on purpose and follow the schedules that we create for ourselves and that takes managing your mind through things that you don’t really want to do. I will do another podcast on time management.

If you are feeling overwhelmed because there are a lot of things going on right now in the world and it feels like it is out of your control and so you are overwhelmed. Then we need to work on managing our mind around learning to accept what is in our control and what isn’t. The only thing you do have control over is how you are choosing to think about what is taking place, and sometimes I choose to be sad, or disappointed in different situations that are happening in the world. I allow my feelings, but I don’t allow my feelings to manage me or control me, or stop me from doing what it is that I want to do. This is probably another podcast topic.

You are human, you are allowed to feel frustrated, tired,

We need to start being aware of our thoughts surrounding ourselves, ourselves as teachers.

• Feeling our feelings

  • Learn to Feel all the Feelings

    • Take off the label

    • Even in the classroom

• Managed Mind

  • Circumstances: all are neutral

  • Thoughts: Create our feelings

  • Feelings: created by our thoughts

  • Actions: Feelings drive our actions and our inaction

  • Results: Our thoughts create feelings, our feelings drive our actions that create our results in our life.

• Manual Check

  • Manual for “Good Teacher”

  • Manual for “Good Student”

  • “Colleague /Boss / Parents”

  • Check expectations

• Holding Space for Students

  • Personality

  • Ability

  • Needs

• Creating Time for Yourself

  • Scheduling joy, pleasure Wants/ Needs

It is sooo important for every human but especially teachers to step into awareness, to learn to recognize their emotions, to feel them and to observe what actions they take when they feel uncomfortable feelings and observe the way they are showing up for themselves and for their students. Once you start observing your emotions and the actions you take, start asking yourself out of curiosity, are these emotions and actions I am taking serving me as a teacher and is it serving my students

When we as humans feel a certain way- we take certain actions, or don’t take certain actions

I encourage all teachers to spend a good week observing the top three emotions they feel every day inside their classroom and write down their actions when they feel that way and see what results they are creating.

When we are willing to feel any feeling, when we are open to feeling all of the sensations in our body that feelings cause, we slowly teach our brain that we can feel: disrespect, we can feel impatience, we can feel frustration, we can feel unheard, we can feel out of control and it is OK nothing has gone wrong- then that will allow us enough time to pause just long enough to engage our prefrontal cortex and think how we want to react. Instead of being reactive role models for our students. We show them that Yes we know our thoughts cause our feelings, and yes we know some feelings are harder to sit with, allow and feel. Then we also model how we can feel any feeling and be okay and we can choose how we want to react.

If teachers are to be open and willing to feel all emotions especially inside the classroom.

You know open to feeling annoyed, frustrated, impatient, disrespected, and so on, if a teacher was open to feeling these feels without responding to their primitive brain that is shouting- this is a threat- we are in danger- react -react, then that teacher would be able to show up for their students

Any feeling that a teacher perceives to be uncomfortable - if a teacher is willing to feel it- allow it- and not find the need to react instantly- they will be able to manage students from a place of indifference, and I mean indifference in a calm peaceful way not indifference as in not caring. If a teacher practices being OKAY to feel annoyed, unheard, impatient, this would give them back so much power and energy within their body and mind that would allow them to be able to show up for their students and create meaningful connection, meaningful teacher-student relationship and a compassionate classroom climate.

You can also see my video presentations on Youtube @ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7DItg03XzyOg2Ttb0dhqYA

So important knowing and understanding how the brain works!

Our thoughts matter, and the thoughts we constantly think turn into thought beliefs. Our thoughts about our students matter, because then they turn into thought beliefs about that student or about you as a teacher. Learning to step into awareness out of a place of curiosity instead of judgement and show yourself compassion