Self-Care 101: Resiliency and Health in the World's Most Noble Profession

Presenters: Ray McNulty, Windham Southeast Supervisory Union, Brattleboro, VT; Ellen Harris, Plymouth State College, NH

This session is presented in separate parts. Use the buttons at the end of the transcription to navigate between each part.

II. Is Stress a Good Thing or a Bad Thing?

RAY MCNULTY: No matter what we do in life we cannot avoid stress and hardships. What puzzles me about this is that we're surprised when we face that. What I want to share with you is what people in this room will consider pretty obvious and simple-to-understand stuff. But we seem to forget about it, especially in the race lately to perform at higher and higher levels and to incorporate testing and what we know the profession of education is about these days. We are forgetting some absolutely critically important information. Stress should not be a surprise to anybody.

The question here is whether stress is a good thing or a bad thing. Researchers agree that a certain amount of stress is necessary to maintain a level of vitality. In fact, Michael Fullen, he's one of my heros, will suggest that if you don't feel some stress in some of the activities, then you're not doing anything different — you're doing the same old stuff. That's an important piece of what we want to talk about. How do you control that? What are some of the answers around that?

Too much stress causes problems. That's not rocket science. This is pretty simple to understand. It can cause health problems, impair performance. Yet we as educators need to stand in front of students every day, or principals in front of faculty, and we need to set an example of how to deal with the stresses of life.

So what's your typical day like? What I'd like you to do is to take a minute or two with the person next you, introduce yourself and start off by saying something like "Here's what my typical day is like." Can you do that?

[PAUSE FOR PARTICIPANT ACTIVITY]

I just sketched out some things: get up early, get kids ready to school, take care of spousal duties — I threw that in. I thought that there are all kinds of those things that have to happen — get yourself ready for work, skip lunch so you can do more work. Why would you eat lunch? It's more important to keep doing work. Then attend late afternoon meetings, pick the kids up after school, make dinner, take care of household duties, volunteer, and on, and on, and on … Did I leave out anything else? Fitness. Squeeze fitness in. You get 24 hours in a day; make sure you make the best use of them. That's what it's all about.

It's amazing. I know that when Ellen on Thursday mornings meets with her Thursday morning breakfast crew — they'll gather at this restaurant to have a coffee or tea before they go to work. All the mom's are in the restaurant asking each other, "Are you going there? Are you going to that other place?" The whole shuttling routine is just phenomenal, isn't it? That's just a sense of the levels of stress that we have. In between all of those things I listed, you had to do your job. You had to deliver the goods. You had to make good decisions, be a role model. What's really important is that you need to do that and as a role model not let the stress go right over the top.

Before we can really do anything about too much stress you have to first understand it. This is not rocket science, either. This is pretty simple: Stress response is triggered by your perception of the environment. What I mean by that is what I call a BFO, a "Blinding Flash of the Obvious." That is, stress isn't something way outside yourself — like leeches that drop down from trees onto your shoulders. Stress is a perception; it's what you turn it into. It's your perception of something. It can be fact or fancy. Your body, by the way, doesn't know whether it's real or not. You decide in your head that it's real. Your body treats as reality whatever your mind gives it. Each time you perceive a potential threat, loss, harm, or injustice, your body gears up to produce stress hormones. It's what you perceive it to be.

I was listening to Stacy Allison this morning talk about her time in the snow caves. Now that's real stress. At least I don't think any of us here are living in a snow cave on Mt. Everest. But stress is what we end up making it. Here is a typical stress trigger: The perception that your coping skills are inadequate for the demands that you're facing. For example, a new program comes into the school and everyone says, "I don't want to do that. I've been doing this all my life. I do good stuff. I'm not changing. I'm not going to do it." The perception is that that you don't have the ability to deal with that change, and your stress gears up instantly.

We are trying at the same time to ensure that our children, in the stresses that they are going to be facing in their life, are going to be able to cope with everything they are going to be facing. We need to be able to be the role model, the balancer of all of that. We need to set that as our agenda. So we need to figure out a way to deal with all of that. And we're going to give you all the answers shortly, right?

ELLEN HARRIS: Stress overload is burnout. Have you been there? Can you relate? How much stress have you experienced in the past few months? Take a few minutes and reflect about all the changes you may have gone through — whether that be in your family, in your work environment. What did that do to your stress level? How many balls are you juggling? How many possibly have fallen? I think that we've all felt the overabundance of stress and felt overwhelmed so that we want to run away and hide some time. I know some time I just run in my office and close the door and hope that my students don't know that I'm there — just give myself a few minutes of quiet solitude.

We've given you a worksheet in your packet. If everyone could turn to the worksheet. It has the rubrics at the bottom. "Productivity: Does producing high quality results still come as second nature to you? Are you working harder to get less done?" The rubrics are (1) Is it little or no change? (2) Some change? (3) Moderate change? (4) Quite a bit of change? (5) A great deal of change? I filled out my worksheet, and it's enlightening to reflect upon the things that you're going through and what is causing you stress. Take a few minutes to run through this worksheet and see how you come out in your final total.

[PAUSE FOR PARTICIPANT ACTIVITY]

How are your scores coming out? Anyone in the high-burnout range? Be honest, I tell my students. How about a score that reflects a likely candidate for burnout? I see a head shaking. Thank you for your honesty. I see a few hands going up. Now you've got to start to identify those stresses in your life. If you feel yourself being stressed out, now it's time to step back and ask, what exactly are the factors that are making me stressed out?

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