Create Better Work Life Balance: The Teacher Life Balance System

Introduction

Let’s face it….you’re stressed.

Whether it is finishing a full day at school only to go home and create more TPT products or running all the business admin no one told you about before starting a business, your cup overfloweth.

But it's not like you can stop doing things for your business or for your students or for your family or for your home or…you know, for yourself. So, things start slipping. As a teacher business owner, those loose boundaries from the classroom (where I overworked myself for the sake of the students and the school) tend to transfer to my business. 

We accept that we are stressed. We know that there are still all those looming responsibilities. 

But what can we actually do about it? How can we achieve that coveted work life balance we have heard so much about during staff meetings?

The answer is the Teacher Life Balance System.

A system I created after so much trial and error over the last several years. The TLB System has helped me manage my stress, be more efficient with my work, and make myself a priority. I can shut my office door at the end of the day and know that I am going to be okay. I know that once that door is shut, I can move onto my other responsibilities to myself, my home, and my family.

This article will break down the 5-Step Teacher Life Balance System and give you an action plan for curating your own stress management system. Remember that these systems need to be unique to you, because you are unique too and your lifestyle is going to be different than the person next to you. Take your time moving through each step; the foundations are the most important part. 

Context

The Teacher Life Balance System came out of a time in my life when I was trying not only to get over the burnout I experienced in the classroom, but also balance three different jobs: teaching at a local university full time, tutoring individually online, and start my own business with Jewels of Teaching (which I knew nothing about). I not only needed to manage my time very efficiently, but also manage my stress and prioritize my own needs.

And I was struggling….sound familiar?

So I dove in and started learning everything I could about stress, reflected on my own coping mechanisms to determine what coping mechanisms were working and which were not serving me, explored different stress management strategies to see what worked best for me, then started building those strategies into my day-to-day as a regular habit, before fully curating a stress management system that you can use whenever I needed. 

And that became the Teacher Life Balance System!

1. Understand stress management and how stress affects teacher business owners specifically.

1. Reflect on your current coping mechanisms and systems to focus in on what is truly serving you.

1. Explore new stress management strategies to see what works best for your lifestyle and needs.

1. Build habits based on the strategies that work well.

1. Curate a stress management system that can help you in any stressful moment. 

Now, let’s dive into what each of these steps are, so you can get on your way to stress relief bliss.

Understand

In order to move forward with your goal of a sustainable work life balance, we need to start with the basics. Understanding what stress is, how it works, and how it's impacting you will better help you identify stressors in your life and allow you to handle them more effectively. 

Concepts to understand include:

• Stress and the Brain
• Stress Response Cycle
• Triggers
• Coping Mechanisms
• Time Management
• Self-Care
• Emotional Processing
• Acceptance
• Empathy and Compassion

Learn more about these concepts and pick up on the parts that really resonate with you. As you learn, ask yourself: 

• What of this information helps me make sense of my current situation? 
• How can I apply these concepts to my own life? 
• What new things have I learned about stress and how have they been showing up in my life and business?

Reflect

Reflecting is the next step. This is where you identify what coping mechanisms to stress triggers you already are using. These can be helpful or may be impacting your ability to process stress fully, leading to feeling stuck in a stressful state for longer periods of time. 

In order to reflect on your own coping mechanisms, you will want to look into:

• Your stress triggers
• Your physical and emotional responses to stress
• What you use for comfort when stress occurs

Learn more about each of these in our weekly blog. Sign up for our Newsletter and Stress Management Resource Hub to keep up to date with newly released articles. 

Explore

Once you know what may be causing your stress and how you currently cope with that, you can now dive into the different resources and strategies for dealing with these more effectively. 

Try out a variety of strategies while you are calm and while you are stressed to see which are going to meet your needs best.

A great place to start exploring different resources is the Free Stress Management Resource Hub, which includes information on stress, strategies to try, and even business tips to make your business more efficient (and less stressful). 

New resources are added every month, so check out this FREE Resource Hub today!

Build

After trying out a variety of strategies over time in both neutral and stressful states, you should have a toolbox of go-to resources to help you when stress shows up. 

So now, it is time to incorporate these strategies into your daily habits, so that stress is less pervasive. This will move us from reactive self-care to proactive self-care. 

Adding self-care strategies to your everyday life, while you are calm, helps reinforce those feelings in the body. We take care of our minor stressors while they are still small by allowing ourselves the time and energy to take up space. What I mean by this is that you need to dedicate time to yourself in order to take care of your body and your mind daily. We do not want to wait for intense physical symptoms to manifest and encounter burnout.

Instead, we want habits that will create day-to-day stress relief and emotional processing. 

Starting habits can be difficult, so you will want to take things slow. Find one strategy or resource you think is simple and very helpful to your overall stress to begin with. Then, work to incorporate this small practice daily (think 2-5 minutes max). Then, once it becomes more natural to do said task, you can build it up to longer amounts of time or add on another strategy. 

The goal is to have enough proactive tasks that the reactive tasks are less needed. You will of course have both in your stress relief toolbox, but you want to make sure that you know which one to choose at what time. Practicing these on a daily or weekly or monthly basis will help with that.

Curate

Curating your stress management system is the ultimate goal. At this point, you have: 

1. Understood how stress works and how it affects you as an individual
2. Reflected on your own coping mechanisms to determine what is serving you
3. Explored a variety of different stress management strategies
4. Built habits for your own self-care (both proactive and reactive)

So, now it is time to make all of these parts work together. The Curation step is all about creating that distinctive action plan for stress management in your life. You will write down what you want to accomplish, what strategies work for which triggers, and promise to dedicate time to proactive care. 

Curate the system that works for you and use this action plan for reference whenever stress occurs. This will remind you (without a bunch of extra stress or energy) what to do next if things become overwhelming. Eventually, those habits and synapses will be so strong, you will not need your written copy; but the written version will show you how far you have come. 

Conclusion

Thank you so much for allowing me to guide you on your stress management journey. Remember to take your time and that I am here to support you as you move through each step of the Teacher Life Balance System.

Start by joining the FREE Stress Relief Toolkit Resource Hub, filled with so much information to help you as well as a variety of resources you can try out (with more added each month).

If you would like a little more support and more dynamic resource strategies, I suggest joining the Teacher Life Balance Membership where we meet over Zoom once a month to discuss different stress management concepts, have a Q&A session to help you on your journey, and collaborate ideas for using the membership resource that is released each month.

Plus, you immediately gain access to the Teacher Life Balance Ebook! The eBook is filled with more detail on each part of the Teacher Life Balance System and incorporates interactive worksheets to help you work through each part of the system. Membership Opens in March 2023!

Still feeling lost and want a bit more individualized direction? Look no further, I also offer 1:1 Curation Coaching Calls where you will meet with me and discuss your needs and stress management concerns. Then, I will curate an eBook just for you with all the resources I think would be most helpful for you to start with. Find out more about scheduling your Curation Call here.