It's alright to be afraid

Be honest, do you ever get that sick feeling in the pit of your stomach as you travel to school, as you enter the building, as you enter your office or classroom, as you turn on your computer, when the phone rings or as pupils come through the door? Those who don't find something else to read, those who do keep going. It does not matter whether you are training to be a teacher or an experienced head, this applies to you. This is about personal courage, about accepting  and overcoming demons, and finding ways to improve your quality of life and in so doing becoming a more content teacher.

To begin with you need to realise you are not on your own, whether you are a trainee teacher or a headteacher it is likely that we have all experienced this at sometime in our career and that at this moment in time several of your colleagues share your experiences. Our profession is laden with expectations about conduct and professionalism, about leaving emotions at the school gate, about it being a "vocation", but all of these ignores one crucial point, we are sentient, emotional humans who will react to and reflect our experiences. We are all different and importantly have different perceptions (see an earlier article on 2+2=5! on my "Teachers' Minds Matter" blog) of events and so our reactions are also unique. Events that cause fear in one person will not cause fear in another but it does not make it anymore real.

Our outward persona, which we maintain for our pupils and more often than not our own self-esteem, will rarely reflect inner turmoil and so we can all be forgiven for not knowing that someone else is going through difficulties. However this is the danger, internalising our fears will only make them worse and so we have to find ways of making fears and stresses manageable. Now I could write a book on the issue but here I only ever write a few hundred words, so I will keep it brief. Central to dealing with our fears is emotional literacy. Claude Steiner coined the term "Emotional Literacy" in 1997 and he breaks the idea down into 5 parts:

1. Knowing your feelings.
2. Having a sense of empathy.
3. Learning to manage our emotions.
4. Repairing emotional problems.
5. Putting it all together: emotional interactivity.

Many of the suggestions I am about to make are based on these 5 parts. Please note that these are simply my opinions and that I do not have an answer for how to make fears go away, all I can do is share with you some ideas I have, some of the coping strategies I have used over the years when I have experienced these demons.

1. Sharing. Do you have a trusted friend or colleague, someone who is not judgemental, someone who will listen? I know it is almost statin the bleeding obvious but the cathartic act of verbalising your fears is incredibly important. It helps you unburden yourself and importantly forces you to "name" your fears. You need to know what it is you are afraid of before you stand any chance of dealing with it.
2. Whether you've shared them with someone else or not, naming your fears is very important. You can have the conversation with yourself; the other participant in the dialogue is paper. Write down your fears, write down everything and see if they have a common root or whether they are all different. Either way it takes courage to do this but will help you in coming to terms with things that cause you distress.
3. Taking a break. At school you need down time, you need time to take stock and press a personal reset button. By all means go to the staffroom, have lunch with your colleagues, but you need to make for yourself. You need time on your own to take a breath and to be yourself (even if it means having a cry or a shout!); it is time for you to press the reset button.
4. Give yourself time. Whenever possible I like to walk to school, it gives me time to think through my issues, both before the school day starts and once it has finished. Clearly not everyone can walk to work but if you can find an equivalent activity it will help. It also means that by the time you get home you have already dealt with some issues and you don't transfer them to your partner, pet or whoever.
5. Work-life balance. This is often the hardest due to the pressures and demands of work, but if you can leave work behind then many of the fear triggers will stay there as well. Here are a few things I do (but I realise these are personal and impractical for many). I only work at work, if I need to do work at the weekend I do it in the office; home has become a sanctuary (when my children were young this was impossible but now it has become practical. I don't do work emails at home; emails are often the messengers of doom and I don't want doom in my personal sanctuary! In my house talk of school is banned after a certain time; that is unless I need an outburst. This returns normality to life.


Teaching is hard, leadership is hard, and both require tremendous courage. But remember you are not alone.