The Essential Resiliency Practices for Educators

Self-care is attending to our physical, emotional, social, and cognitive well-being. Well-being is the act of balancing our needs with the demands on our time from outside forces that include commitments to work, family, and friends. Self-care connects to well-being and builds our resiliency to feel competent and whole.

What are the essential practices that support resiliency for educators?

Reflective Practice - At the heart of reflective practice is examining our daily actions to gain insight into our work. Reflective practice also includes connecting to your inner life to understand what you feel and why you feel it. Some activities supporting reflective practice in the classroom include observation, documentation, and journaling about your experiences.

Life Skills - Developing our life skills helps us successfully navigate work, and home life demands. Life skills range from budgeting to dissecting a professional development activity to get the most out of it. Life skills include people skills, such as talking to parents and colleagues and mediating challenges on the job.

Emotional Supports - Supporting our emotional lives in early childhood education requires work-life balance and wellness activities within our work. Wellness activities include reflective supervision that scaffolds our emotional work in early childhood---the act of deconstructing problems within our classrooms and in the more significant early childhood community. Emotional supports also provide healthy work environments where guilt, gossip, and disruptive behaviors rarely exist.

Reflective Practice, Life Skills, and Emotional Supports are the foundation of well-being in early childhood education and lead to enhanced resiliency. Our resiliency allows us to make choices about our physical, emotional, social, and cognitive health that enable us to thrive. When we lack resiliency, we enter a downward spiral that minimalizes our well-being.

In a field that traditionally touted self-sacrifice as a virtue, it is time to take a hard look at the importance of well-being as an attribute and indicator of a healthy professional practice. Consistent acts of self-care are hallmarks of professionalism. It is time to acknowledge the need to embed our personal and professional care as part of our field's professional growth and long-term sustainability.

How will you support your well-being today?