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.
