33. This is The #1 Thing That Will Destroy Your Love for Teaching!

Don't love teaching anymore? The stress and demands of the classroom can lead any overworked teacher down the road to burnout. In this episode, we not only celebrate that Teachaholic: The 7-Day MindSET Shift to Conquer Burnout, Set Life-Changing Boundaries, and Reignite Your Love for Teaching is a #1 BEST SELLER (!!!), but we also dive into the #1 thing that will destroy your love for teaching and the desire to stay in the classroom. Once we name what that is, you'll be able to start thinking about how your mindset and boundaries contribute to how we feel about teaching - and how you have the power to change the narrative. 

Teachaholic: The 7-Day MindSET Shift to Conquer Burnout, Build Life-Changing Boundaries, and Reignite Your Love for Teaching, is a #1 Best Seller and a #1 Top Release on Amazon. Get your copy at www.erinsponaugle.com/book. 

If you want more guidance as you read Teachaholic, download the 20+ page Teachaholic Action Guide to begin your journey back from burnout here. You'll receive reflection questions, graphic organizers, and guidance to help you put the information from Teachaholic into immediate use.

Get your copy of Teachaholic: The 7-Day MindSET Shift to Conquer Burnout, Build Life-Changing Boundaries, and Reignite Your Love for Teaching at www.erinsponaugle.com/book.

You can download the Teachaholic Action Guide to begin your journey back from burnout here.

Download your FREE checklist, The Great 88: Rules, Routines, and Expectations to Go Over and Over, and feel confident establishing classroom management.

For more resources on classroom management, time management, and preserving mental well-being to avoid teacher burnout, visit www.erinsponaugle.com.

Find more upper elementary classroom resources by visiting Next Chapter Press on Teachers Pay Teachers.

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Transcript

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The future isn't what it used to be. The good news is you don't have to figure it out on your own. If you're looking for truth, inspiration, and tips for success, in the classroom and beyond, you're in the right place. It's time to turn the page to the future of the profession. This is the next chapter for teachers podcast. Hello everyone. Welcome to episode 33 of the next chapter for teachers podcast. I'm Erin Spinagle, and it's been an exciting couple of days. Teach a Holic, my book, launched on Wednesday, and by the time it launched, I was extremely tired and just kind of ready for it to happen. But what happened was pretty uh amazing. So I w ended up waking up 3.30 the next morning, and I'd been so tired I fell asleep with my phone beside of me. So I just happened to check to see how my book did or was doing, and I saw three number ones down where it said, you know, where it was doing in the categories on Amazon, and I thought, am I awake? Is this is this real? Uh so I ran downstairs and got on the computer. Well, I don't know about run. It was in the middle of the night and I wasn't quite fully awake yet. But I checked it on the computer as well, and and yeah, um teach a holic is a number one bestseller, and it's I can't believe I'm I can't believe I'm saying that. Uh it's top new release in several categories as well. So I I am really glad that it's being well received. As I have said in other places, it's a sad thing that we need a book on teacher burnout, that so many people are interested in in need of a book on such a topic, but it is where we are, and luckily there are things we can do to take back the narrative, which is what Teach a Holic is all about, changing how we think, how we view our jobs and ourselves, and making decisions that will make teaching a more sustainable career so that we can continue in the classroom and we can continue to be good teachers and model for our students a healthy relationship with teaching so those that are interested in teaching can see it as a sustainable career as well. But I want to thank you deeply thank you for your support and for choosing to read Teach Aholic. Uh, I do have a little favor to ask, and I don't like asking for favors or asking for for help. But if you love the book, and I sure hope you do, I would absolutely be very appreciative if you would leave a review on Amazon of Teachaholic. That would very much help me out or help get the book shown to other people so that it can help other teachers as well. And while we're talking about reviews, if you would like to do so, I would love it if you would review this podcast on Apple. Uh down at the bottom, I believe there's a place where you can give a rating. I would love it if you would review the podcast as well. So if you could leave some reviews, I'm so glad I help you or so glad that you are interested in what I have to talk about. But if you could give me a rating and hopefully it's a nice, a nice rating and a nice comment to help boost the visibility of those two things, the book and the podcast, it would certainly be appreciated. So yeah, it's been an exciting week. Peachahollock is number one. Who'd have thought? I never thought it would be. I knew it would I knew it would probably be a good topic, but I didn't think it would be be quite like this. But anyway, we're going to talk about something today. Uh, we're gonna talk about the number one thing that will cause you to lose your love for teaching. This is the number one thing that is gonna make you lose your spark for the classroom. And it's not what you would think. Like you're probably thinking, oh, student behavior, because you've probably had to deal with a lot of that this pre past week with the super moon. Um, it's not necessarily that. Or testing, and I am all there, friend. I think testing definitely impacts our love for teaching and for the teaching profession because it becomes all consuming and it becomes such an uh oppressive force in our teaching style and what we get to do with our students, but that's for another time. It's not that either. Uh, this is something that has to do a little bit more with how you feel and your perspective or the lens you view things through. And that is, we're just gonna get right to it. The number one thing that will cause you to lose your love for teaching is resentment. Yes, resentment. So if they were like, oh, that's not what I thought she was gonna say, but no, listen, let me hear me out here. So, resentment, if you had to put it in layman's terms, resentment is that feeling like something is causing you to miss out on life or to lose out on something or get slighted in some way. When teaching starts to make you feel resentful, that's killing your love for the classroom. That's killing the joy and the spark you had when you came into the to the classroom, and it's really hard to get that back unless you reteach Holik and you learn a little bit more about setting boundaries and changing your mindset. So, how does this start? Well, I'll talk about how it affected me, how I started to feel resentful of the classroom. And it started out by my colleagues. Now, very unintentionally. So I would notice my colleagues going home on time or coming in on time, and I noticed that they would have less responsibilities, they'd be in a better mood, they were happier, they were talking in the hallway about things, they were just they just feel like they had a lighter load. And that started to make me feel resentful of all the things that I was doing, and well, I'm coming in early to work on this, and they're just sauntered in here at 10 10 till and or I was still in my classroom, they were leaving and talking as they left, like, well, they get to leave on time. It's here I am doing all this extra stuff, and you know, who took on the extra stuff? Mm-hmm. Yeah. So I wasn't quite putting two and two together back then, but I started to get that resentment when I saw my colleagues were not as impacted by the classroom as I was, and that could be because they had better boundaries, they had a better relationship with their classroom with their classroom responsibilities. That all could have factored in to why they were in a better mood and leaving on time and not taking so many things with them, which goes into the next thing I'm going to talk about. Resentment builds when you all those little extra tasks and assignments and committees and things that you're given to do because you're a good teacher and because you show responsibility or because you have good ideas, you might start to get resentful of the time that that's eating up in your life. And though, although those might be great things to do and show that you are a well-respected professional, it's taking away from time that maybe you wanted to spend doing something for fun or time with your family, or just taking care of yourself, or maybe you just wanted to sit and watch your favorite show without having to have the computer on your lap and be working on something for months. So all those little things that are meant to feel prestigious start to make you feel resentful instead. And then to go right into that, the grading, the planning, the things you take home that you would love to get done at school, but it just doesn't seem with all the little extra things you need to do or add or take care of, it doesn't seem to ever get done at school, and you will not be happy with yourself unless it's done and done right. So you take it home with you, and there it sits, and you're working on it, and it's late at night, and maybe you do want to watch something on TV, but you can't because you gotta finish your planning, or you wanna put your kids to bed and you have to have someone else do it because you need to finish your lesson plans for the next week, you start to feel resentful of all that extra time you're putting in to your job that you can't put in to your personal life. And it builds and it starts to really pull you down and make you feel uh yucky inside. And then along with how you're feeling, let's talk about feelings for a minute. Let's talk about energy more than anything. You become resentful when you don't have the energy to put into anything. Maybe you do go home on time or you make an effort to get home high on home on time on certain certain days, but you're so zapped from everything you pour in to your job that you can't pour anything into yourself once you finally have the chance to. And that also builds resentment when you can't feel well enough when you do have the time on the weekends or when there's a holiday to put into the things that you love besides teaching. When we're allowed to love things or have hobbies and interests besides teaching. You are. It does not need to be all-encompassing. And then you really start to feel resentful when you realize what you've given up or what you're giving up to do your job and do your job well and to be respected. And it seems like all those good things suddenly seem not so great after all. It doesn't feel like uh reward or recognition or responsibility or prestige, it just feels like it's weighing you down and you become resentful of it. So what happens when you are resentful and when you're feeling like you're being gypped out of having a normal, happy, balanced life, you lose your joy. It's almost like you go to work and it's like a rain cloud is following you. And then when you lose that joy for the classroom, you're on the fast track to burnout. Once that spark goes, once you don't have that happy feeling when you enter your classroom, you get to see the kids to start out the day, you're on the fast track to burnout, Bill. And that's not good either because once we're in burnout, we start to think that we need to leave or we get into a rut. This is what happened to me. You get into a rut and you don't feel like there's any way out or any hope. It everything just seems like you're going to be stuck in a deep, dark pit doing the same thing forever and ever, and that you just can't get out of it and you feel ashamed because of how you feel, because of the resentment, and because you're not the person that you used to be in the classroom or out of the classroom as well. So this is where changing your mindset, setting boundaries, and learning to say no really comes in. We can prevent resentment if we have those things in place. If we think in a healthy way about our work, our jobs, uh what we see on social media, all of those things, if we view them through the right lens, it can prevent us from having resentment and for building up those feelings that will cause us to not love teaching as much as we used to. So when you allow yourself to choose yourself, you are able to keep your joy and your love for teaching and keep resentment at bay. So if teaching feels like it's taking less away from you, you're going to be more excited and more happy to be there. That might seem very elementary, but I I am an elementary teacher. But when things don't seem to be taking things away from you, like your job, you tend to be a little bit more optimistic and uh excited to be there. So you can still be demanding and you can still have professional responsibilities and you can still be the person that's the go-to gal or guy, if there's any guys that listen to me, uh, for taking on different committees or doing things out extra and above and beyond. But you don't have to take on everything and it doesn't have to rule your life so that you don't have resentment. And also it will allow you to remember why you chose going into teaching if you don't let if you don't let the resentment bug debite you, and why it's given you purpose in life. So all the things I just mentioned, your mindset, boundaries, saying no, not being a people pleaser, those are all things that we cover in Teach Aholic, and those are all things that will stop us from having the careers and education that we want to have, from being the teachers that we want to be, and from being the person that our kids need uh in our classrooms and in your lives too, in your home life too, if you have children of your own. But it's all the things that those are all the things that are covered so that you can be who you were meant to be in this world because you matter, you do good things. I know that the not so great things in education always make the news, but every day you're working miracles and doing great things that are impacting the future of the kids in our country. So we want that to take prominence, and if we keep resentment at bay, if we make the healthy choices that will allow us to set boundaries and live a professional life at school, but also allow us to have a personal life outside of it, we can change the narrative. So thank you, friends, and if you haven't gotten it yet, please grab your copy of Teach Aholic. It's only 99 cents on Kindle right now. It's also available in paperback if that's what you prefer. And if you go to airenspinagle.book, you can also get a free Teach Aholic Action Guide. It's reflection questions and graphic organizers and different ways to guide you through the different chapters in the book so that you can quickly implement the strategies and be on your way to a better teaching life. Thank you, and I'll talk to you next time. That's all for this episode of the next chapter of Teachers Podcast. If you like what you heard, be sure to like, subscribe, and leave a review. Join us next time we are page of the future of the profession. Until to be different, but more importantly, be the difference. And I'll see you in the next one.