Teacher Wellbeing with Amy Green

SHARON HUBER:
Good morning, everybody. I would like to extend a warm welcome to everybody joining us for this year's first Thought Leadership Series, the webinar on teacher wellbeing with Amy Green. I extend this welcome to online participants as well as our guests in the Bendigo and Geelong offices. My name is Sharon Huber. I am an expert teacher in residence at the Academy this year, and I am delighted to be here this morning. I would like to start with acknowledging the Wadawurrung people of the Kulin Nation, which is where I'm joining from today. They are the traditional owners of this beautiful land and this area. I acknowledge that the sovereignty has never been ceded. I pay my respect to elders past and present, and I extend my respect to the Elders from the lands you may be joining on today and anyone in our webinar today. To the exciting bit of introducing Amy Green this morning, I would love to share, I guess, her expertise with you today. Her focus on sustainable wellbeing, which is incredibly important.

We'll be exploring some evidence-based strategies to reduce stress and lead with confidence in our context. Our key topics are going to be- Stress reduction and strategic clarity, along with other wonderful things, no doubt, that come up through our Slido. A few tips to help you get the most out of our webinar today. The webinar is being recorded and will be available by the Academy website. Your image will not be visible in the recording. You can activate closed captions by clicking on the CC symbol in the bottom left of your screen. We also encourage you to participate by submitting your questions on Slido, which you can see on the screen has popped up. For those online, this will appear in the bottom right of your screen. And if you're joining in Bendigo or Geelong, there should be a QR code on your table for you to engage with that. We won't have time to get to all of the questions today, no doubt, but if you'd like to like the questions that you can see of most interest to you, and we'll work on those with Amy.

We also have a little short feedback survey at the end of the session. And we'd love to hear, obviously, as much feedback as possible. We'd love to hear how you feel about it and what you'd like to see in the future from the Thought Leadership series. So, thank you very much. It's my pleasure to introduce Amy properly, our guest speaker for today's webinar. Amy is here to challenge the ideas we've all been handed about how we are supposed to live and work. Through her own lived experience working in high-pressure environments as an educator, leader, and someone who's faced the reality of burnout and made it out the other side, Amy gets it. Her own experience has shaped the heart of the wellness strategy. A commitment to helping others live, lead, and work in ways that are more real, sustainable, and human. Amy brings big picture thinking and practical tools to back it up. She's strategic, knows how to get things done, and helps people move from overwhelm into action. And now I warmly welcome Amy Green. Over to you, Amy.

AMY GREEN:
Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. It's always a delight to be able to share this wonderful work with educators who truly deserve it. And I know we're joining from all over different parts of Victoria this morning, which again is something just so beautiful to be able to bring people together online. And for those of you who don't know, I'm actually in Queensland, in Brisbane. So, it's very early for me, only 6:30 in the morning. And I am usually a morning person, but to be completely honest, I am coming off the back of a type of flu variation from last week. So, if my voice sounds a bit funny or if I have to cough or something during this session, I'm letting you know upfront, that's what we're dealing with. And we know that, don't we, as educators, that sometimes you've got to show up, and you've got to keep going. But I have my tea and I have all of the things that I need ready to be here for you. And I think it's such an important time. We're end of term one. We're nearing that really pointy piece of counting down those days.

And maybe some of you are already doing that, are ready to think, gosh, when do I get this break? When do I slow down? Which is a really pivotal piece to consider as we have today's topic around the stress solution and the different ways of thinking about stress. So, thank you so much for having me. Thank you for the introduction, Sharon. We'll get started. Now it is no, I think, lie to consider what we actually do in our role as educators. And you might've seen this image before. It comes from Board Teachers. It's one of my favourites. It unpacks all of the hats we wear as educators, whether you're a classroom teacher, whether you're a school leader, whether you sit in the middle of that and do a little bit of both, it doesn't really matter what your role is. We're all educators in schools, and we certainly wear a wide range of different roles, different hats, which is why the job can feel like at times, literally when you look at this image, it's weighing us down. The stress that comes with it, the constant thinking and the reactivity, the decision-making, the cognitive overload.

And these are words that we're hearing more and more and more, not just alongside having to be a classroom decorator or a mentor or a therapist for our students or a comedian to pick them up if you have to teach double maths on a Friday afternoon to year eight, which my brother was sharing with me on the weekend is what he's doing. He's actually starting to become a high school maths teacher at the moment, and he's doing one day a week in a school. And that's the gig that he's got, double maths, year eight, Friday afternoon. And I was like, yeah, you have to bring your A-gramme to that space. So, it's been a lot of fun unpacking that with him as well. But over the last few years, what has really been added, not just to the hats we wear as educators, are the hats we have to wear for ourself. And so to borrow this image again, when we think about wellness and wellbeing, looking after our own stress, self-care, whatever word it is that you use in this space, a number of hats have been added to us.

All of a sudden, we have to be able to meditate. We have to have a gratitude journal. We have to make sure we're resting. We're spending time in nature. We're doing breath work. We have digital detoxes. We're sleeping our seven to nine hours. We're making sure we're eating well. We're maybe getting our monthly massages or going to the gym, making sure we're walking, staying hydrated, doing our yoga classes. All of these other things have become add-ons to our already busy days. And it feels a little bit like we're competing for the job, for our own health and wellbeing, to manage our own stress. And we're seeing these things as separate rather than being able to support one another and intertwined into how our days are organised and designed. And this is where I think, under the banner of wellbeing and wellness, we really shift the benchmark around what it means to be successful in this space. And just as with the first image around being a teacher, we now have all of these other hats we need to wear as well.

And just take a minute there and think about what other hats might you be showing up with this morning? Because I am sure there are many more. Those of you who are perhaps parents, you've got parenting hat, caring for someone else. Maybe you've checked your emails. So, there's an email moderator hat already happening this morning. It keeps going and going. And so, under the banner of wellbeing, we need to pause for a minute, and we need to actually ask ourselves, what matters here? When we're talking about being well and leading well, working in teams that are well, being educators that are well, what does that actually look like? And not just for ourselves, but also for those around us. And this is where it becomes crucial to understand that wellbeing is not one size fits all. There is no checklist. And I know today we're gonna talk a lot more about stress and what I call the stress solution framework. But I'll be really honest with you. I'm not gonna give you ten strategies that are going to fix everything because we don't know that.

What works one day may not work the next. And what works in one school may not work in another. And that's what makes this idea so nuanced and so complex in a way because whilst we might want one answer that solves everything, it actually is far more trickier than that to be able to put together. So, the first piece that I always recommend any school or any person starts with when it comes to understanding what wellbeing is, is to get really clear on the definition. Now, there are multiple definitions and frameworks of wellbeing. You might have one in your school that you use. You might borrow one from another organisation. I actually have frameworks in my books that I use, and I'm gonna share some of those with you right now that, I think, are really, really important to being able to understand what wellbeing is. Now, the first two pieces that, I think, are crucial that we need to get right when it comes to understanding what wellbeing is, are the two pieces, or these two types, two opposing ideas of hedonic and eudaimonic wellbeing.

Now, you might be familiar with these. You might know what they are, or when I start to unpack them, they might start to make a bit of sense, but you didn't realise that's what was going on because that was what happened to me when I first started to explore and learn about positive psychology and wellbeing. This was presented, and all of a sudden, I thought, well, gosh, this makes sense because I'm doing all of the right things. You know, I'm wearing all of the wellbeing and wellness hats, and I'm doing everything we're told to do, but I still feel empty. It doesn't feel like it's working, and that's because my wellbeing strategies were solely focused on hedonic wellbeing. Now, hedonic wellbeing is this piece where we ultimately are chasing happiness and pleasure. We want to feel good. Now, that matters, and it's important, but these are things that usually bring that enjoyment and fun. They're quick fixes. They're pleasure-driven. They boost positive feelings, usually to reduce negative feelings.

This is our morning teas that we all love, and I know some of you are having breakfast this morning. That's so great. What a perfect example of hedonic wellbeing. It's feeling like we've had a really big week, getting takeout on a Friday afternoon. It's the holidays that we plan. It's getting the massages and maybe getting your nails done or going to the hairdressers. It's getting that takeaway coffee when you know you probably could make one at home, but it just makes us feel that little bit better as we head on our journey to work. These are the things that are in the box of hedonic wellbeing, and on the other side, we have eudaimonic wellbeing, which is all about fulfilment, and this is what we're seeing more of a shift towards because right now, we live in a world where our hedonic wellbeing is at our fingertips all of the time. I did say before you can drive through and get takeout, but depending on where you live, you can also just Uber Eats it straight to your house. We don't even have to leave our homes now to get that instant feeling.

We can buy something online straight away, and it boosts us for that minute, maybe a couple of minutes. There's actually a theory called hedonic adaptation, and what that teaches us is when we do engage in something that is one of these pleasure-driven strategies, at some point, we come back to our set point of happiness because we adapt. We go on that holiday. It boosts our happiness. We feel great, but one, two, three weeks later, we adapt straight back to that set point, and this is why we can't rely on these strategies alone. So, back to our eudaimonic wellbeing, this is the piece that many of us now realise we need to pay attention to, and the leading expert in this space is a lady by the name of Carol Ryff. Carol, C-A-R-O-L Ryff, R-Y-F-F, and she's done some great research into psychological wellbeing factors that look at fulfilment, meaning, engagement, growth, purpose, connection. These are the elements that most of us right now are craving because we can get that hedonic stuff really easily, so we need to come back to, well, how in our communities, in our school environments, in our teams, but also ourself, are we actually making sure we're doing meaningful work?

We have those strong relationships. We're engaging in continuous learning, and now this is where we can start to unpack and redefine exactly what wellbeing in the workplace is because often I hear things, or I read things online in those Facebook groups, I have conversations and people say, oh, what is everyone doing for staff wellbeing? How many morning teas do you have a term? What celebrations do you do? And those things are a very unique way of thinking about wellbeing through our hedonic lens, but also the real work of wellbeing is done through considering things like where are our areas of growth? Now, it might sound odd, but actually setting our growth goals or strategic goals, whatever it might be in your AIP, that's actually part of eudaimonic wellbeing. We need to be learning and growing as humans and people. That's what we should be doing. We love morning teas or breakfast, but at its core, that's actually about building connections and relationships with each other. That's about eudaimonic wellbeing.

And I was on a podcast last week. One of the things I actually do in schools, which might sound a little bit odd, is coming in and helping build our curriculum protocols, our curriculum playbooks. That was my background in education in schools, leading learning and teaching. And from all the schools I've worked with over the past four years, one of the biggest factors to contributing wellbeing and reducing stress is knowing how to plan well, knowing what the school expects, knowing what done looks like on a unit planner, knowing when that's going to occur, timelines for assessment. That's part of meaningful work. We know what matters. We know what happens. That is actually a wellbeing strategy. And so part of the reason this really matters is because when we're talking about wellbeing initially, we have to be prepared to also recognise that it's not always fun and easy. It's not always just the morning teas. It is actually also doing the core business of our job when we have those systems, those structures, those routines, the clarity, the cohesion around it as well.

So, this is an essential place to start if you haven't started here, and I do unpack it in more detail in both of my books. But the other piece that I love when it comes to defining wellbeing is this. Now, this comes from the World Health Organisation, and they talk about wellbeing as not just being the absence of disease or illness. It's not just not being sick, like I am right now. It's actually about understanding all of the different dimensions of wellbeing, physical, mental, and social they have here, but under the banner of wellbeing or wellness, sometimes there are up to 12 different domains, financial, spiritual, relational. But what's more important in this piece here too, is that there are four key contributors. One is about a person recognising their own abilities and utilising them. And this is what we would call a strengths-based approach. This is really important when it comes to managing stress. If you're trying to do something and it's not a strength, it's going to have an added stress.

Now that doesn't mean we avoid it, but we need to be really honest with ourselves. Do we actually learn this skill or do we outsource it? I'm someone who is very quick to recognise now this is not a strength of mine. I don't actually need to go and learn how to do this. I'm gonna outsource it. And I did the same when I was teaching in a school environment. I actually, as I just alluded to, really did enjoy curriculum, documentation and planning. I would use that as my strength. And some of my colleagues loved making the resources they would do those pieces. We were working in line with our strengths, it's far less stressful. The next piece is actually coping with the normal stressors, and that's why we're gonna spend most of today. So we'll jump that one for a minute. Working productively. This is all about efficiency, effectiveness, systems, processes, structures, energetic and sustainable ease. Are we able to work productively in a way that supports us, not just fast to get stuff done, but are we actually in school environments, aware of our standard operating procedures, which is what they have in the business world, in the corporate world?

Do we know how to get things done or are we relying on a person? If I use the curriculum example again, it's very common for me to go into a school, and I often pretend I'm a new staff member or a new educator, and I ask questions around, can you tell me what your planning looks like here? What's your curriculum approach? And more often than not, the answer is you need to go and talk to the head of that faculty or the head of learning and teaching. Now, one of the challenges with this is, is if every head of faculty is doing it differently, we instantly have inconsistencies, which adds to cognitive overload. If you are a teacher in different faculties and maths does it this way and science, does it this way, then we've got those tension points already. If we don't know what done looks like, which is a term I always borrow from Brene Brown, we do it for our students. We give them exemplars, we give them work samples. We need that for ourselves as well. So we know what done looks like and we can walk away going, I've done enough.

We're not sitting in that space of, oh, have I done enough? Should I do more? That is a contributor of stress. And the last piece in this here is around contribution to community, which is about showing up. It's about being engaged in the work that we do. If our stress levels are high, we're not gonna be able to do that. It's not about above and beyond. It's about actually participating in the work we wanna see happen in our school environments. Now that is one of my favourite definitions. So if you haven't seen that or used that, or unpacked it with your staff, it's a great thing to take back and do. You can take each of those four areas and just list like, what would that look like in our environment? Now, I did jump over this one because this is where we're gonna spend most of the day, the morning here, coping with normal stress. Stress is not something we avoid in life. Stress is normal. In fact, some of you sitting and listening this morning would have experienced a moment of stress already today.

Maybe Monday morning you're ready to go. You spill your coffee on the way out. Maybe there's more traffic than you anticipate. Maybe you slept through your alarm. Maybe you're sitting here already with an email going, oh, I've really gotta deal with that. And it's increasing those stress levels. Maybe you've forgotten your lunch and it's sitting on the bench and you know exactly where it is. These are what are called little micro stressors. They're not end of the world stressors. They're not big traumatic events. But when we have an accumulation of little micro stressors ongoing, they add up to become a big piece of stress for us. So we have to start to recognise when are these different pieces of stress showing up for us. Now Beyond Blue talks about stress as a natural response that everyone experiences when under any type of pressure. It's just normal. It's not always bad. In fact, some stress can be healthy. But when stress is too much or lasts for too long, then it's going to affect daily health, mental health and wellbeing.

And so, we have to get really good as educators at starting to recognise, is this a one moment piece of stress? Is this stress we could avoid? Is this stress we're repeating? Now, I'm sure all of you in the room have had experience with writing reports on one way, shape or another. And you know people in your teams or those you have led who write reports as well. Very common thing. But sometimes the variation in how people manage that stressful point in time is so wide you would think some people have never written reports before. Think back to report writing season or to the upcoming report writing season in term two. There will be people you know, maybe you were one of these people who are super organised. You might have already started collecting your data, jotting down comments, and you think, yep, I'm all on top of it. I know exactly what to do. And then there will be people, and you may know these people, or you might be one of them who mid term to go, oh my gosh, we have to write reports.

No one told me they're the same time every year, but some people breeze through it and some people hit the stress. And this is just because of perception and how we see things, how we approach different things. It's not bad stress. Our job is to ask, OK, well, how do we anticipate some of the stressors that are coming? How do we plan for some of these stressors? And also at a school level, what are the stressors might be happening alongside this so that there's not too much pressure at once? This is a crucial piece when it comes to stress. Now, the World Health Organisation also defines stress as this kind of worry or mental tension caused by a difficult situation, but again, a normal human response. What I like about this is that it says it prompts us to address the challenges and threats if there are threats in our lives, but the way we respond is what's going to make a difference to our well-being. So in the journey of report writing cycles, if our response is to go, oh, I made it.

We got through the end. Oh, but we know it's coming again next year and we don't learn anything from our strategy. We're continually putting ourselves in that stress cycle year after year or semester after semester. What's more important, when we look at stress and when it occurs in a school environment, is not just cross our fingers to survive and get to the end of that point in time or the end of the event or the end of the term, but rather ask, is this stress going to be repeated? Is this something we can control? Is there something we need to do differently around this point of time? Because if I was to ask you to list every piece of normal stress, which is what the World Health Organisation says, so normal stress in a school environment, it would be a lot. It would be a lot of things. Our job is to develop these healthy resilience and emotional regulation strategies to manage those normal, stressful periods of time. But resilience also includes things like problem solving. Resilience also includes things like rethinking.

It's not just bouncing back. So if you wanted to do that task at a later date, later today or during the week, or even with all staff, it gives a really interesting insight into how many stressors we're facing that perhaps we don't need to keep repeating, or we could strategise solutions around and pre-empt them. One of my favourite people in the stress space, or the experts in stress is a guy named Mo Gawdat. Now, if you're not familiar with Mo Gawdat, I've put a little screenshot of his book down here in the bottom right-hand corner. It's called Unstressable. And he's on a mission to make 1 million people unstressable in life. Now wouldn't that be amazing to never be stressed again? Because he, with a background in engineering, has created a formula around what it means to understand stress. And it's really interesting because he talks about the concept of stress being the sum of our challenges that we face. So all of those little micro stresses, all of the little things we're dealing with, along with our ability to perceive and deal with them.

So perception is essential. This is why two different teachers can have a very different experience with report writing season with a parent interaction or email with a student. It's got to do not with the challenge alone, but with our perception of that and also our skills, our capacity. If you think about writing a unit plan as a first year teacher, writing assessments, marking that takes a lot more effort than someone who's in their 10th year because they don't yet have the skills, the knowledge, or the capacity. They don't have that ability yet. And so the challenge is higher. Once we learn to build those things, we can better navigate those stresses. But our job is to also ask, well, how are we supporting those people early on as well? Now I'm gonna share with you a video on the next slide from Mo Gawdat. It goes for about three minutes 20. And in it, he's talking about some of the work that he's done with his co-author, Alice Law. At the very beginning, he talks about the 22nd rule.

It is a crucial piece for those of you who might be thinking that stress stays in our body for hours and hours and days and days, and something happened on Friday, and you're still stressed about it. So I'm gonna play this video for you and then we'll unpack what he is saying. (VIDEO PLAYS)

MO GAWDAT:
Hormones are flushed out of your body, so you now have it.

AMY GREEN:
I'm just going back to.

MO GAWDAT:
The 92nd rule is from the minute you have cortisol in your blood, you get stressed, you respond or you don't. It doesn't matter. Within 90 seconds, all of the hormones are flushed out of your body, so you now have a chance to actually sit back and say it's all OK. But then, because we re-engage stress every 90 seconds your body basically says no more cortisol. We're still stressed. So if you were to let the biological cycle take place, you would actually end your stress every 90 seconds. But some of us manage to renew that for 17 years, 90 seconds at a time. It's one thought that happens in your head, and that one thought engages stress once again. To me when Alice and I discussed this, it started to become a problem because it is very natural for all of us, huh? Your partner says something hurtful on Friday. You're stressed for six weeks. Alice decided to look at this from her approach. I decided, of course, when things become tough, you tend to do more of what you know how to do best.

So I ended up deciding to look at it mathematically and I attempted to understand the math of or the physics, if you want, of stress. And it is very eye opening when you really think about it, it's very eye opening because the it is actually very straightforward to compare stress in humans to stress in physics. If you remember in elementary school when they taught you that when you put pressure on an object, there is force and then there is stress. And stress is different than force. Stress is, you know, as felt by an object and an inanimate object is the amount of force applied to the object divided by the square area of the object. If a camel is walking on high heels in the desert, it will sink in the sand because not only because of its weight, but because that weight is distributed across a very thin area. However, with the hoofs of the camel being this big, the camel doesn't sink in the sand because the force is distributed across a very large area. In that case, stress in humans, if you take the analogy, is the challenge or the force applied to you divided by your abilities, skills, and resources to deal with that stress.

And that's not actually very difficult to understand. For some of you as you look back at your 20s, for example, you would freak out about things. Then when your teenage son or daughter freaks about now, you go like, come on, chill. It's easy, right? You gain the experience and then you realise that you've gained skills, abilities and resources, and you can deal with stress a lot better. From that equation, you understand that to deal with stress has very little to do with the external force, as a matter of fact. So if the external force is forces applied to you out of your control, what you can do is increase your abilities and skills and resources and then you will feel less stressed. The challenge will be the same. It will be a challenging time like the times we're going through now in business, for example, with the economic crisis and geopolitical issues. But you will not feel stressed about it. You'll be carrying the same load and not stressed about it. Why do we break then? If we have an ability to carry stress before we break, the problem with stress, as I said, stress is a superhuman machine.

It reconfigures your body in ways that are incredible. We still break. And I and Alice found out that we break under three conditions. (VIDEO ENDS)

AMY GREEN:
Now I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, Amy, I wanna know what those three conditions are. It's actually in a different video. We're not gonna watch all of the different videos there, but I have put them here for you. Now in that video, first of all, Mo was talking about those skills, abilities and resources. This is crucial for us right now as educators with what we're going through, especially when we think about headlines that we see on the news, the media representation of a job that is so amazing and so great but is currently portrayed as being stressful. All teachers are overwhelmed. They're burnt out and leaving in droves. Now, there is truth to some of this. Let's not deny that. But it doesn't have to be the only truth. All jobs are stressful. All areas of life have moments where there is stress. Our job is not to get stuck on that stress. It's to pay attention to the 92nd rule and know that cortisol lasts in our body only 90 seconds. The reason that we feel like we're stressed all the time is because we keep repeating that story.

So I'm gonna give you at the end some strategies you can do to capture yourself before we repeat those 90 seconds over and over again. Now you can all think of a time where you've been stressed about something, and it's kept going and going and going. The event didn't keep going, but our story kept going. It's a very important skill to learn, to have the awareness and mindfulness to be able to catch yourself when you're going, "Oh, I'm stressed." So, we get out of that 90 second loop and can move into strategy. (COUGHS) Sorry. Now, at the end of that video, Mo said there are three reasons we break. You can go and watch that second video. It is on YouTube. There are lots of little clips there. But there are three reasons. So, the first one is load. And now this is like I was saying before, all of those little micro stresses that build and build and build is the pressure. It becomes too much. If there is too much demand on ourselves, the load becomes too heavy. This is a reason we break.

The next one is trauma. Now that is like big T, big life event trauma. That can be a reason that we break. But in Mo's work, what he also talks about is the idea of post-traumatic growth, which is a concept out of psychology. Post-traumatic growth is said to kick in after about six months. So, if we have a big life event that is traumatic, and we manage and deal with that life event, post-traumatic growth can start to happen about six months later where we learn from that. So, when I think about my own chronic stress and burnout, which would be a big event, coming out of the other side of that was post-traumatic growth. And that probably did start somewhere around after I started seeing my integrated GP, maybe four to six months later, and continued for a couple of years even now because it's always work that I'm doing. But then the last one is fatigue. And this is that repeated pressure over time that weakens us. So, it's that constant having to redo the same things, which is why I was giving the examples of repeating that report writing stress cycle, or having to continually jump from faculties and not know how we plan here, or it's different, or we're doing this, and now we're doing that, and that constant relearning.

That is that pressure over time. So, when we're feeling stressed, we need to ask, well, what's going on here? Is it load? Is it fatigue? Like we're just being bent back and forward, back and forward over and over until we break? Or has there been a big event? Because this is what can help us to know how to strategise. Because strategy is the bit everyone wants to do, right? We wanna know, what can we do? What are these practical things? Now, there is not, as I said, one way to fix all stress in the world. Wouldn't that be great? Or all of the issues that we're seeing right now, that's not how it works. What we have to consider is knowing that stress is not just about what's happening. It's about how we interpret and respond to it. As I mentioned before, as I said earlier, I've been quite sick last week. I've pretty much spent four days in bed. It's been quite awful. My voice I can feel is starting to strain after talking for only about 30 minutes. I knew it was going to be a problem. It is a bit stressful for me to have to do this morning through this.

Now, my story, my perception could be, oh my gosh, what if I lose my voice? What if it doesn't work? What if I have to cough during the event? That is how I'm interpreting the response. But instead, I thought, you know what? I'm just going to talk at a lower pace. I'm going to make sure I have my tea. I'm gonna get up earlier, so I'm all ready and I can be calm as I enter the situation. There are different ways of viewing every scenario. Go back to that report writing. It is the same. A parent email comes in. It's not the nicest of emails. How do different staff members respond? What is the story they tell themselves? What is the interpretation? This is what we need to know when we come to thinking about stress because there are different types and degrees. Our body will send us signs, thoughts, racing heart, sweaty palms. Talking about something over and over is a sign for me that it's stressful. If I'm constantly talking about or thinking about something and I catch myself, I go, "Oh, OK, this is a stress moment for me.

What am I going to do about it?" Because you don't have to live in the stress. The job is to recognise it, catch it in that 90-second loop and then go, right, what am I going to do? Building daily habits to manage stress is essential. Resilience, I mentioned at the beginning as being a crucial part to being able to cope with normal stresses. We don't just engage in something like meditation or exercise when life is hard. These are the foundations of how we manage stress with daily habits. There is some great research out there that says those people that have a meditation practise daily of as little as three minutes means that they are calmer under stressful situations. It's not about being stressed and then going, oh, I'm super stressed. I might learn to meditate right now. That's not what we're doing. We learn to meditate in the good moments and build the habit of it so when the stress comes, we've already got things in our toolkit. This is where resilience has got a bit messed up. This is where the idea of using strategies has become an afterthought.

It's actually about the foundations. And then also sometimes we just need to normalise the stress. Yeah, report writing is stressful. Going on excursions is stressful when you've got a whole bunch of little people you're trying to work with. Using the new curriculum is stressful. We don't have the skills, ability, knowledge or capacity yet. That's OK. It's not a bad thing. We just need to learn. And so it's not about going, stress is bad, run away from it. It's about checking in with all of these different things, especially the different types and degrees of stress. Healthy stress, you know, this is that short-term motivating stress, the deadlines, preparing lessons, tolerable stress. This is where it lasts a little bit longer, but it does have an end point. So, maybe planning a new unit, maybe someone's sick, and you're looking after them. Maybe you're applying for a new job. And then there's this long-term toxic or chronic stress that kicks in. And that's an accumulation of a number of things.

There are some examples here for you. So, we can see that our healthy stress, these are the different types of stress. We've just got to know what we're dealing with. Healthy stresses, preparing lessons, getting resources, training for a marathon, sitting an exam or undertaking a new course, learning a skill, organising a holiday, organising a school camp, organising a production. You know, they're healthy stresses. They're not the end of the world stress. They exist. Tolerable stress is that longer-term stress, but you might need some support. Moving house or trying to balance work. I'm currently getting ready to do that. I know that's going to be a stressful point in my life, but I'm going to plan and prepare for it. The difficult parent emails or just working with a parent. We've talked about staff absences in a teacher shortage with the way schools are currently designed. We need different strategies for this. It's manageable, but it's not going to go away. And then that longer-term stress there, again, you can see it's that unrelenting workload year after year.

If we're not being really, really intentional with what are our systems and processes around it, what is the clarity here? Where are we removing or reducing our stresses? Long-term stress can also be things like ongoing social isolation, being sick without having support, not feeling psychologically safe over a period of time, bullying that goes on for a long time, toxic workplaces that you're in for a long time. There are different types of stress. In this session, what we're really looking at are these first two types of stresses, healthy stress and tolerable stress. I'm just going to say as a caveat, if you feel like something is happening in the toxic or long-term stress space, please go and utilise something like your EAP, make sure you're accessing your school leader support if that's available, your GP. That's what I didn't do when I had chronic stress and burnout. I didn't go and get help. I was just of the mindset that the more I could take on, the better I would be, the more successful I would be.

That's what leaders are supposed to do. That's what educators do. It's not. We don't need to do that. If you feel like you're in that space, please go and get some professional help. In our workplaces, our job is to manage healthy and tolerable stress and pieces of long-term stress if it's work-related. We need to be really clear on how we do that. To wrap up, I'm going to share with you the stress solution framework. This workshop is actually part of our bigger two-hour or longer stress workshop that we run. The stress solution framework is something I've put together to help us not jump straight into strategy because that's what we want to do. We want to go straight into, oh, I'm stressed. Give me something to do. But we're often, when we do that, missing the data from the stress. There is data in our stress. There are data in our overwhelm. There are data in our discomfort. We need to pay attention to that so we can not repeat it, and we can learn and do things differently. The stress solution is S, stop.

T, take a breath. That's that 90-second loop. Want to get out of it. R, reflect. Evaluate options. Select a strategy, and utilise our self-care. So, let's walk through these. As mentioned, stress sends us signals to our body. It could be racing thoughts. It could be constantly talking about something. It could be that feeling of flustered. You know when your body, when you're starting to feel that. When this happens, we need to stop. Call the time-out. We actually need to take a minute and go, right, am I actually stressed? What's going on? What is happening with that 90-second cortisol flush in my body? How do I capture it? Am I stressed because I just need to actually get a few things done, and if I get the things done, it'll go away? Great, let's do that. Am I stressed because I'm stuck in traffic, and it's going to take me 20 minutes extra to get home, and I wasn't planning on that? I can't really control that. So, is the stress worth it? What else can I do? Am I stressed because I've walked in the door, and I've got books to mark, and I've got emails to attend to, and I've got kids yelling at me, and there's a lot happening, and I'm in cognitive and sensory overload?

OK, so what do I need to do to pause that so the 90 seconds doesn't keep going, and I can get myself out of the stress loop? That's what take a breath is. We have to work to get ourselves out of the stress loop. Otherwise, we just stay in this reactive space. Now, this is where things like deep breathing, going outside, doing some mindfulness, really, really help. The deep breaths of a couple of minutes will make a significant difference, even to your perception of stress. If you're in that stress loop, you are not going to be able to think of ideas, or solutions, or how to get out of it while you're in that reactive thinking. So, we need to take a breath, maybe go for a walk, maybe go sit in the sunshine, maybe close our eyes at our desk, and just allow ourself. Do a box breath, or an even better breath to help calm your nervous system is a breath where your exhalation is longer than your inhale. So, you might inhale for four, hold for two, exhale for six, or if you can double that, inhale for four, hold for four, exhale for eight.

That will slow your nervous system right down. And then when you're calm, you can reflect, what's really going on? Is this like a real stressful situation I should be getting worked up about? Is it perceived? Is it fact? Is it story? Do I know? What's the actual truth? So, often, our stress is amplified by the stories we're telling ourselves. A parent has sent an email, we're starting to feel flustered or stressed by that because we don't quite know what to do. We run through different scenarios in our head about how we might respond. Then we run through the scenarios that they might send back. Then we run through the scenarios that we're going to have to send back to them, or that we're going to have to deal with. And all of a sudden, we've made up five fake emails that haven't even been sent, but all of a sudden, we're stressing about. This is very normal, that thing that humans do. But our job is to go, what's really going on? What is the actual fact? I just have one parent email. That's all I have right now.

I don't have the five that I've made up in my head that are worth stressing about, just the one. So, what's the fact? What do I do? Because then when we come back to fact, we evaluate options. What can I control? What can I let go of? Do I need support? Who can help me? This is where we're going through strategy now because we've stopped, we've taken a breath, we've reflected on what's really going on. And so now we can evaluate the situation because we're calmer, and we have that factual information. Then, from here, we select a strategy. OK, what is the thing I need to do to reduce the pressure? What's the thing I need to do to maybe remove the stress? What do I need to do, so I don't repeat it again? Obviously, it depends on what this situation is, but the solution and the strategy should be about the event so that we don't always repeat it so that we're building our skills, our abilities, and our resources so that when that challenge comes again, our abilities are stronger. That's what we want to be doing.

What is the challenge? How do we strengthen our abilities? Sorry, I'm doing this because I'm thinking about the diagram from the book. That's what we're doing. We're going challenge, abilities. How do I strengthen that? And then lastly, self-care. How do I refuel? How do I get my energy back? Being in any stressful situation, whether it's a day of micro stresses, whether it's a big stressful event that you've had, is going to take energy from you. This is why sleep and movement, connection with other people, rest, having some type of hobby where you can tune out for ten minutes, 20 minutes, spending time in nature is really, really crucial. What your boundaries and work habits are, the routine that you're in, these things reduce stress even more. And sometimes we overlook these, and we think, oh, I don't really need to have a routine. I just go with the flow. And I get that some people quite enjoy that. But actually, one of the reasons that we use routine in classrooms, if we think about our students, is because it creates a predictable and safe environment.

If you are on the journey of setting up or using in your school the same entry routines for classrooms, the same expectations for how we start our lessons, whatever that might look like. I'm pretty confident in saying that that would be done so that our students know what success looks like. It's predictable, it's safe. We don't have to think about it. They know what they're coming into. As adults, we need the same routines. We benefit from the same thinking. It reduces the stress. When I was working as a classroom teacher, my routine was so clear each week that on a Tuesday afternoon, if I didn't have a meeting, I didn't have to think about what I was gonna do after school that day because I knew on Tuesdays that's when I looked at my maths lessons for the following week as a primary school teacher and would get my resources ready. On a Wednesday, I would look at my English resources and get them ready for the following week. It was routine. I wasn't going, oh, it's Tuesday afternoon, what will I do with my time?

Go to the staff room, talk for 40 minutes, all of a sudden realise I have to go home and I've done nothing. I worked in a routine and a rhythm to reduce those stresses and to build those habits. Routine is essential. The same with movement. Same with our food. Same with rest. These are not just nice-to-haves. They are about reducing stress, reducing that cognitive overload to create more space in our brains. Let's have the last minute on some quick strategies. Now there are so many strategies, but I'm gonna give you some for yourself, some that you can use at work or in the school space. This is certainly not a definitive list. There are hundreds of strategies, but it's about thinking what works for you. Now we have made a handout, so you should be able to get this on there. Or if you're looking at the slides and you want to take photos, go ahead. But really what we're doing is trying to think what's gonna work for me. We've talked about lots of these already, but our breathing techniques, that 92nd rule, you've got to catch your head and go, OK, it's only a 92nd cortisol flush.

Science says, yeah, that's it. If the stress lasts longer, it's about our story and perception. Name and notice those emotions - how am I really feeling? Am I stressed or am I actually probably just a bit overwhelmed right now because I've got five things to do and I just need to shut my door, sit down and do some deep work? What's in your resilience toolkit? I know what's in mine, but what is in yours? What are those habits you're building over and over again? The strategies you're building all of the time and doing constantly because you know they help you, not just when you're stressed, but all of the time. It's outside fresh air. There is so much research now. There are even some doctors in Europe that have been given the green tick. Will we say, to be able to prescribe people time in nature instead of antidepressants and also prescribe people a holiday. Doctors in some European countries are now legally able to write on their prescription pad, maybe not that literally, but write on their prescription pad, this person needs to go on a holiday, they will not be at work.

And you have to go on holiday 'cause doctor says. Now I'm a little bit concerned that we've got to that point in the world where doctors are having to tell us to go on a holiday. I think that sheds some light on how much we are perhaps overworking and the systems around society for that, but they're saying, go outside, get fresh air. It matters. It is essential. Get that support, connect with your colleague. We've talked about reframing our language. Change your environment. Sometimes literally just taking your laptop to a different space, a different office, a different room, environmental change. Lisa Feldman Barrett talks about this. Can reduce your stress and help you to think more clearly because you're not surrounded by the same things. And then shift that sensory input, nature, different sounds, lots of little things that you need to have in your toolkit that you can draw upon. And then finally, for work, these are some things that I would suggest you start to consider - identifying that root cause.

Is that workload? Is it timetabling? Is it systems? Is it processes? Ask for help. Be really clear and specific about the cause, not just the symptom. What's causing the stress? Not just I'm super stressed, I need a day off but why is that stress occurring so that we don't continually repeat it. Protect time for deep work and uninterrupted time. So if you're a leader and you have the ability to find time in your week that you can set aside for one or two hours. Cal Newport talks about this, for deep work, put it on a timetable, like a lesson. Close your door. Deep work. Educators, teachers finding times in your sessions in your week where you can have a session where you know you're not teaching for deep work, you're not used for anything else, can't be in meetings essential. Or if it's an afternoon, deep work time, just let everyone know that's what you're doing. Project management tools. We don't need to keep it all in our head. A tool like Asana is free. There are many project management tools.

Depending on what AI your school would use, there would be things there as well. Leveraging AI. Full disclosure, I made this slide deck using Claude. I had an old slide deck. I'm doing a rebrand. I wanted to jazz it up a bit. I put this into Claude. It did it in about ten minutes. The handout that you have, I put the PowerPoint as a PDF into Claude and said, I want this slide, this slide and this slide. Sorry, as part of the handout, can you make me the handout along with other relevant information? It did it in about five minutes. Utilise AI for some of those tasks. It instantly gave me a PDF. I didn't do it. Full disclosure. Be smart with how we use AI for some of these things. Establish SOPs. So that's a standardised operating procedure. What is the process? We make the how we do things here visible. It wastes time and it's stressful if those things aren't clear. We have those clear planning processes to reduce that cognitive load, streamline assessments and feedback, strengthen that team collaboration to use structured meetings.

All of these things will actually better benefit our stressors if we do them intentionally because we're looking at the cause not the symptom. That's how we actually really get these pragmatic, co-designed, achievable strategies. We go to the cause, not just the symptom. So, as we're about to wrap up, I'm just gonna drop my details here, but I'm sure you all have them anyway. This is crucial work. Stress isn't bad. Stress doesn't go away. Our job is to stop. It's to take a breath. It's to reflect on what's happening. It's to evaluate our situations. It's to seek solutions and practice our own self-care so we don't keep repeating those stress cycles. Schools are full of stress, there's no denying that but it doesn't mean it has to always be a negative thing. Our job is to make sure we don't get caught in that repetition of stress over and over without realising, hey, perhaps, and this is my favourite thing to do, perhaps we could do something differently. Lovely people. I'm going to stop sharing.

I'm fully aware I've just talked at you for that whole time but that's how this is set up. So we do have time now for questions. I'm gonna stop sharing and I think we'll have someone share some questions if there are any. Thank you so much.

SHARON HUBER:
Thank you so much, Amy. Such wonderful insight. And I've taken a lot away from it and I'm really drawn to your thoughts around how we perceive like in the cycles and obviously the 92nd rule, that's very powerful. I definitely will be digging in and using that a lot more. I really love your stress solution framework too. So I think these are some amazing tools. I feel like you've already done a wonderful job at addressing one of our questions about some quick reset strategies. I think there was some wonderful ones there. I thought we might jump to a question that's also been in the Slido, which is how can teachers create boundaries without feeling guilty or falling behind?

AMY GREEN:
Yeah. The idea of creating boundaries without feeling guilty, I always use the rule is, is this good for me and is it good for other people? So is it good for me and good and safe and not harmful for other people? So one of the boundaries that I used in my school life and would use is not having emails on my phone. Now, that is sometimes a very big like shock moment for some people. Like, how do you survive if you don't have emails on your phone? Is an intentional boundary for me to not constantly be checking because every time you open that app, you are actually flooding your body with that cortisol, that 90s right there. And so is it harmful for me to not have my emails on my phone? No, it's perfectly reasonable. Is it harmful to anyone else? No. It just means that if I have that boundary, I have to do two things. We have to communicate our boundaries. And so sometimes this is where we start to feel a little bit guilty. It's because we haven't informed people. So I just used to let my team, my principal, everyone know, just FYI, I don't have emails on my phone.

I will have them on my laptop, which means I'm checking them first thing of the work day, not at six in the morning, but like first thing in the work day. Last thing of an evening. If there's an emergency, call me. There's never really an emergency, you can survive. So we have to have our boundaries that work for us and that aren't damaging to anyone else, that are still healthy and kind for everyone involved and we need to communicate them. And then I think that helps to dissolve some of that guilt.

SHARON HUBER:
Yes, I think that's a wonderful tip and some good strategies on that for sure. I also would love advice for leaders/teachers to create a culture where teachers feel safe to speak up about their burnout or stress. And that's obviously something that can be really difficult depending on the environment that you're in.

AMY GREEN:
Yeah, hugely difficult. And I think one of the best ways to do that is open conversation. And like you would have heard me do a lot of in this session is just acknowledgment, the job's hard, we get it. And sometimes we don't hear that enough from leaders. We're also busy. We're doing our bits and pieces. And I work a lot with leaders and the perception is that leaders have to be the ones holding it all together. And my response to that is, but how are we expecting our staff to be open if we're not open with them? And so people become vulnerable by learning and viewing vulnerability. If we're not doing it as leaders, they don't see it as safe. What they're viewing is you've got to have it together all of the time. So I really think the first step, and maybe this is something you build into your staff meetings or team meetings is really just open for casual conversation around what are the stresses right now? That's where I'd start. Like, what are the stresses? Because it's so common in our environments to walk around and go, oh, we're stressed, we're stressed.

But about what? So really, really getting people to be specific around those stresses and then being open to going, oh, maybe we can do something about that. When we start to normalise that, it's comfortable to talk about it. And when people can start to see that by sharing, things may shift, it creates that safer environment. We can't do everything. We can't fix everything. But it is also about going, I acknowledge that that's stressful right now, we can't do anything about this because of X, Y, Z, or that's not even a school thing. Sometimes I hear things and I'm like, oh, that's not a school decision, that's a department decision. But people don't know. And so we've got to be able to be really clear about what's the stress? What can we do? And how do we work through those things together?

SHARON HUBER:
And I think probably our last question will be just around if someone finds or feels that they might be slipping into that year, that more unhealthy sort of, I guess, stress column of how, I guess, if you feel like you're tipping into that unmanageable state and perhaps you haven't yet been able to reach out to people in your workplace, what might be a final tip in regards to that?

AMY GREEN:
Yeah, I think if you find yourself in the borderline of I'm not OK, whatever that looks like, in my case, it was just saying, I'm tired, I'm tired, I'm tired. I mean, I was having afternoon naps in my car, I couldn't even get upstairs and I just thought that was normal 'cause I was working so hard. But in those moments, this is where we do have to go and talk to someone or find someone. Now, there are so many resources out there now and I would be coming back to what can I control? Where are the stresses in my life? What can I control, and are there any minor tweaks I can make? If I guess, dovetail the boundaries question onto this, often I speak with people who are saying they are struggling with sleep, they're not getting enough sleep. I've listened to so many podcasts, read so many books, looked at so much research. The number one thing you can do for your stress and your health is sleep but we also need boundaries around sleep. And that might mean from 8:00, for example, you're getting ready to sleep.

You need to tell the other people in your house, especially if you have teenage kids, whatever that might be or a partner that from 8:00, we're wind down time. So in our house, I actually have a rule that if my partner tries to raise anything that might require my brain to function after 8pm, I'm like, I'm not talking about that right now, it's too late. The window has shut. I am on wind-down time for sleep. And so we need to be starting to pay attention to how do I do some of that for myself first alongside going to get help from those professionals? So where are those pieces that you actually do control, that you can influence and start to make those tweaks around first, as well as getting that professional support?

SHARON HUBER:
Thank you so much. I would love to also just answer that. Yes, the handouts will be circulated shortly to attendees and participants today. So you will have all of this great information handy for you. I'm tempted to go make an appointment with the doctor and see if I can get a script for a holiday, but we'll see how we go.

AMY GREEN:
Yeah, I don't think that's available in Australia yet.

SHARON HUBER:
Darn it. So we would love you all. As you could see, the QR code there, the feedback survey would just take a couple of minutes, but we would appreciate any feedback from you. And before we head off today, just wanted to do a big final thank you to Amy for a wonderful session. And I'm sure everyone watching today is leaving feeling a little bit more reassured and positive going into the day. So thank you so much, Amy.

AMY GREEN:
No, thank you for having me. Thank you, everyone, for joining on your Monday morning too, really appreciate it. SHARON HUBER: Thanks, everybody.