Self-Care as Community Care: Growing the Resilience and Wholeness We Hope to Nurture in Others

by Joe Schroeder, Ph.D., Associate Executive Director, AWSA

The responsibilities of a school leader are daunting, as a variety of folks seek out our limited time, energy, and resources to meet their virtually unlimited needs and desires. Day after day, week after week, they keep coming and coming and coming. No wonder that 89% of school administrators report feeling very stressed at least once a week and that high leadership churn prevails. (The School Leaders Network, 2014). In such a context, self-care has become a personal and professional priority but, paradoxically, can be one of the first things squeezed out of a busy administrator's life. This article will share a variety of approaches you can take to intentionally grow the resilient and compassionate personal disciplines and school culture that value human wholeness alongside academic achievement.

Oftentimes, progress is best informed at the outset of any enterprise by an assessment of the current state. Therefore, a self-reflection instrument called the Professional Quality of Life Scale (PROQOL) (B. Hudnall Stamm, 2009-2012) can be a helpful place to start, both for leaders and general staff. Within about twenty minutes, any interested participant can derive a confidential, research-based sense of where he/she currently stands on three important areas of work for those who serve others: compassion satisfaction, burnout, and secondary traumatic stress.

Besides identifying the current state of affairs, some new language and learning can also be helpful for those trying to better understand and navigate today’s complexities of servant leadership. Several helpful terms and concepts will be learned through the PROQOL instrument process previously mentioned. But at the heart of progress with such challenges is a construct called compassion resilience, which can be defined as “a reservoir of wellbeing that we can draw upon on difficult days and in difficult situations.” (WISE, 2019). So in other words, if you wish to sustain and replenish mental health and resilience, you will want to learn how to build more compassion resilience in yourself and others over time. To this end, DPI and others offer numerous resources regarding Compassion Resilience through the Compassion Resilience Toolkit. In recent instances, school leaders I have worked with have found two items of the toolkit (managing expectations of self and others AND setting personal and professional boundaries) particularly helpful.

Another resource that many leaders have found beneficial for building self-care and compassion resilience is a sort of checklist entitled “Managing Oneself in the Deep End of the Pool.” (Abrams, 2019). Rather than viewing this as a to-do list, I encourage leaders to find one or two items from the resource that, if pursued regularly as a habit, would make them more whole and thriving (rather than breathless and surviving) in their day-to-day leading and living. For example, after review, some leaders realize they don’t have a breathing strategy in their toolbox to help bring down the tension when those moments arise. So we work on that. Or others realize they need to build some skill around self-talk and/or a compassion practice that lets them productively “let go” of those experiences that hold them back and/or regularly diminish their energy and impact.

Yet another resource is Onward by Elena Aguilar (2018). This book and its companion (The Onward Workbook) are designed to guide leaders and/or their teams through a yearlong process, where each month has a different focus and series of activities to build new disciplines of emotional resilience in themselves. Essentially, through regular/daily activities, each participant turns habits into disciplines, which build that “reservoir of wellbeing to draw upon on difficult days and in difficult situations” that we previously discussed. Truly, pivoting from individual use of such resources to an invitational group book read and/or a systematic professional development experience for an entire school is a very practical way that several leaders are leveraging what could be self-care to actually serve as community care.

Finally, some Wisconsin leaders are modeling the way simply by sharing their own self-care efforts and then encouraging others to follow their example. For example, Katie Grundahl and Dean Kaminski (administrators at Prairie Elementary in Waunakee) developed their own self-care commitments and then shared them with each other as a means to provide ongoing support and accountability. Encouraged by this, Katie and Dean then shared their self-care commitments with their faculty, gave teachers time to write their own, and challenged them to share these with their PLC teammates and then reflect on them each week. Katie and Dean then occasionally return to a full-staff check-in on self-care commitments at intervals during the year and also integrated a wellness lunch plan into this larger effort, which you can see through these Prairie Elementary examples.

As I have learned and implemented more self-care into my own personal development and my leadership facilitation work, it has become exceedingly clear that such efforts pay great benefits. For example, through our first two cohorts of our BEL (Building Effective Leaders) Academy, it has become clear that self-care is a critical skill that enables hyper-busy, often reactive administrators make important shifts to being more whole, thriving and effective leaders. In fact, when I make the decision to begin our sessions with some aspect of self-care, I consistently find that this sets a positive tone and deepens the level of learning that we can derive from our overall time together. I hope that you have discovered at least one resource in this article that can be of service to your ongoing self-care, which can then also ultimately lead to progress in community care. If you want to learn more about this beyond this article, please consider enrolling in either our BEL Academy and/or Mental Health and Resilience Academy, which will lead to deeper learning and leading. Regardless, congratulations on making it to March, and be sure to take good care of yourselves in the busy months of the school year ahead of us!

References

Abrams, J. (2019). Swimming in the deep end: Four foundational skills for leading successful school initiatives.
Bloomington, IN: Solution Tree.

Aguilar, E. (2018). Onward: Cultivating emotional resilience in educators. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Aguilar, E. (2018). The onward workbook: Daily activities to cultivate your emotional resilience and thrive. San
Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Churn: The high cost of principal turnover. (2014). Hinsdale, MA: School Leaders Network.

Compassion resilience toolkit. (2019). Brown Deer, WI: Wisconsin Initiative for Stigma Elimination (WISE).