While waiting outside the boardroom for a parent/teacher meeting, I was drawn to a photocopied picture of an angelic Tweedy Bird adorned with halo, harp, and wings taped to the wall near my secretary’s desk. My parents endearingly called me Tweedy because of my resemblance to the Looney Tunes’ cartoon bird. I, too, was bald and round-faced with just a few wispy hairs that stood from the crown of my head like feathers. I remember my parents hanging my Christmas stocking from a nail in our wood-paneled apartment wall. It was a traditional red stocking with white fluffy trim, but mine was customized with a puffy decal of Tweedy Bird sewn into it. So when I saw an image that brought about these comforting memories, I had to explore a bit more.
I noticed adjacent to the drawing of Tweedy Bird, on the same paper, a short prayer that read:
“Dear Lord,
So far today, I’m doing a alright.
I have not gossiped, lost my temper, been greedy, grumpy, nasty, selfish, or self-indulgent. I have not whined, complained, cursed, or eaten any chocolate. I have charged nothing on my credit card.
But I’ll be getting out of bed in a minute, and I think I really need your help then.”
Not only did I think this little prayer was extremely funny, I found it tremendously relatable on so many levels. We laugh, because we can connect with its message. We have the best intentions for our day when we wake in the morning, but as soon as we pull the covers off and our warm feet hit the cold floor, we are reminded that life’s challenges are just outside our bedroom door. And with our best intentions in tow, we set out about our days hoping to accomplish all that we set out to accomplish.
This site, Stress Management for Educators, is focused on empowering and inspiring school teachers, counselors, psychologists, administrators, and other school personnel by offering effective strategies, tools, and principles for managing the unique challenges educators face. However, I acknowledge that a comprehensive approach to managing stress in our lives cannot only be focused on what happens within the school day or year or between its walls, but also what impacts us outside of school, as well. I also understand that it is important that we don’t just try to put out wild fires with Dixie cups of water or put Band-Aids on gaping wounds to address the daily stressors in our life. We tend to fall into this trend as educators, because there is so much to do in such little time.
I could easily provide 1001 ways to escape stress, but that will never address the real issue that’s creating the tension or anxiety we experience. We can attempt to overcome the inevitabilities of life by taking temporary measures to escape the strenuous feelings that accompany stress, but the issues still remain and can be exacerbated by our attempts. Let me give you a quick illustration of how this approach to alleviating stress can leave us “cold and waterlogged”. Like most measures to escape our reality (i.e., spending money, eating, dependent relationships, sex, drugs, and alcohol) many of us indulge in behaviors that are highly appealing, fun, and effective for the moment, like taking a nice hot bubble bath. We may decide to add a few drops of aromatic oils or a handful of bath salt, turn on some soft relaxing music, light a couple candles, and pour ourselves a glass of wine while we slip away into another world in our mind. But after about 20 minutes, the bubbles dissipate, the water gets cold, the wax from the candles melt onto your hardwood floors, and your glass (or bottle) of wine is empty. We are left with prune hands and feet shivering as we dry off our waterlogged bodies. The experience of escaping the stresses of life swirl down the drain with the cold bath water and we are left with the same circumstances as we did before we drifted away in momentary ecstasy. There is certainly nothing wrong with enjoying an occasional indulgence. It is when this becomes the means to regularly escape the stresses of life and the impact of our avoidance greatly affects the quality of our life and those around us. We cannot remove a coping strategy without replacing it with another. I would like to show you another way that won’t leave you waterlogged, but instead empower you to embrace adversity rather than attempting to escape it.
What I propose is a much more in depth, healthier, and more effective approach to stress management. Although I don’t necessarily like the term “stress management”, because it insinuates dealing with issues on the surface and micromanaging individual events, I use the term because it is most identifiable when it comes to the topic of, you guessed it, managing stress. I prefer the expression, “lifestyle management”, suggesting a deeper more holistic perspective and method of addressing life challenges. How we approach our work, how we parent, how we manage our relationships is all influenced by our past experiences and how we have interpreted them and placed them in the context of our life story. By understanding the origins of our stress and what causes us to respond in the way that we do, we can begin to not only confront the specific challenges we face, but become empowered to resolve a greater number of issues that continue to bring about tension, fear and anxiety in our life.
Like the many students we work with with, we cannot perform at our best when we are not at our best. Through this blog site, I will provide you free insight, information, and resources that I’ve developed over 12 years of working in and with schools. As a school counselor, case worker for treatment foster care, mental health technician on the children and adolescent mental health unit, and as a program director for children and adults with special needs, I have personally experienced the challenge of balancing the demands of a high needs profession and managing the obligations outside the workplace. And now I want to share my framework for lifestyle and stress management and relationship building principles with you!
It is my life’s purpose and passion to help others become empowered and inspired to achieve a life of self-fulfillment and balance. My hope for you is that you achieve this life and share it with those you come in contact. I have presented these concepts and tools to all types of professional industries, but I could think of no better place to do this than within a school environment where we can directly impact a whole community of people, children, families, co-workers, as well as the people we come in contact with outside of school. Although what I am offering here can be used by any industry and across many demographics, this is why I chose educators as my main focus for providing these resources, tools, and services.
You can learn more about me, my background, and my philosophy by going to my personal website, www.ThomasJBull.com. Please sign-up for my newsletters, blog notifications, and resource links by entering your name and email on the top of the right-hand panel. I will be updating my blogs multiple times throughout each week. I hope you find them helpful and inspiring! I like to close my presentations, keynotes, and articles with my following encouragement:
“Inspire and be inspired. Love and be loved. Teach, so that you may continue to learn.”
Yours gratefully,
Tom Bull