🌿 Your Tuesday Email: Restore Your Joy

Hello Reader!

You had a life before you became an educator. Find it again this summer.

Here is a question most educators don't get asked enough:

What do you love outside of your job?

Not - what are you good at? Or, what energizes you professionally? No! What do you genuinely, simply, personally love?

For many educators, the honest answer requires some excavation. Somewhere in the years of building a professional identity around caring, serving, and showing up for others, the things that belong only to you quietly got deprioritized. Your hobbies, interests, and silly joys no longer make it to your priority list.

Now is the to find them again.

Why Professional Identity Can Crowd Out Personal Identity

Teaching is a vocation in the old sense of the word: a calling. It's hard to keep that kind of work contained to "just a job." It asks for your whole self, and most dedicated educators give it.

The risk is what happens when the vocation becomes the identity. When "educator" is not just what you do but entirely who you are.

Because if the work is “you” … and the work is exhausting, then - you got it - you are exhausted!

Joy, that has nothing to do with school, is not a distraction from your professional purpose. It is the source of the energy that makes your professional purpose sustainable! It’s how you keep going!

Finding What You Love (Again)

You may need to try a few things before one lands, and that's okay, and can be really fun! The point isn't to immediately discover a new passion or hobby, it's to give yourself permission to be curious, playful, and unproductive in the best sense of the word.

Consider:

A creative practice you abandoned years ago: writing, drawing, cooking, playing an instrument
Something physical that feels more like play than exercise
Time with people who knew you before you were a teacher
Reading books that have absolutely nothing to do with education
Doing something you're genuinely bad at, with no pressure to improve

These things restore something that professional development cannot reach, the part of you that exists outside of your role.

That part matters because it is where your best teaching comes from.

Podcast:

This week: Summer Series Ep 2 - Keeping Stuff Will Not Making Teaching Easier is a response to a question we got from James!
Next week: Summer Series Ep 3 - Sarah, a literacy coach asked: How can teachers be more efficient?
Last week: Summer Series Ep 1 - Our friend, Jessica asks: How do you handle the conference email flurry after an event!

Listen to the pod on all the platforms like Apple, Spotify, iHeart Radio and YouTube. Now you can follow us on Instagram.

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