Physical Wellness: Your Story

3. Choose food quality over quantity. 4. To sit or to stand? To move or not? Choose wisely. 5. Sleep, rest, repeat.

We invite you to consider this advice: when progress on your food, movement, and sleep routines seems slow, remember the wisdom James Clear offers in Atomic Habits: push yourself to consider how you can improve your physical wellness routines by just 1 percent tomorrow.32 Think incremental improvements: one action, one small step today, for a bigger goal tomorrow. If you find yourself doubting your progress, invite a trusted friend to join you on the journey. Find joy in the small victories along the way.

Now it is your turn!

Now that you have read this chapter, answered the My Wellness Action prompts, and considered parts of our (Tim and Tina’s) stories, what does physical wellness mean to you?

Take some time to write about your personal physical wellness story. Don’t worry if you don’t consider yourself a writer. This isn’t about the writing; it’s about the reflection. You can use the prompts we provide or you can simply write your own story and your next steps for moving your physical wellness forward in your professional life. Consider placing a date and time by each entry as you tell your wellness story, and reference figure B.1 (page 84) as needed.

What is the story of hope for your physical wellness future—your food, movement, and sleep routines—you want to write to yourself or perhaps share with a trusted other?

Examine the list of summarizing thoughts (pages 19–20). Of the five ideas listed, which one do you need to focus on in the next few months? Write out two I will statements to help with your growth in the physical dimension of your life.

Consider current progress in your physical wellness dimension. How do you anticipate your progress in your food, movement, and sleep routines will impact your relationships with students and colleagues during the school year?

Be patient and know small tweaks and minor changes can add up quickly. You don’t have to change it all in one day; in fact, you can’t change it all in one day. You simply need to get started. There will be setbacks, and that’s OK. Give yourself a wellness plan that allows a gradual buildup for sustaining a new routine most days. And as you do that, there will be a positive impact on the stressors in your work life. The mental wellness dimension of our work life is next!

Educator Wellness

A Guide for Sustaining Physical, Mental, Emotional, and Social Well-Being

“Kanold and Boogren manage to gently weave the importance of educator wellness into the educational arena, peeling back the layers of humanness and the interconnectedness that bind both student and educator in heart.”

—Michele M. Rivers Murphy, Associate Director, Heart Centered Learning

“This book will change your life. The interactive workbook format will set you on an active path to adopting new, healthy habits. This transformative power of understanding wellness at the granular level will propel you to success in living your best life at home and in the classroom. Dr. Kanold and Dr. Boogren will motivate you to carve out space in your daily routine to achieve your best self. Go ahead, superstar educator: open up this book, and start living your best life now.”

—Sarah Svendsen, Kindergarten Teacher, Pine Crest School, Boca Raton, Florida

Educators make thousands of decisions and encounter and experience varied emotions at work. Without an efficient wellness routine, their jobs can result in prolonged stress. In Educator Wellness: A Guide for Sustaining Physical, Mental, Emotional, and Social Well-Being, authors Timothy D. Kanold and Tina H. Boogren provide a framework to guide and support K–12 educators in continuously sustaining personal and collective wellness plans. By implementing the routines and strategies in this book—the foundational text of the Wellness Solutions for Educators™ framework—teachers and administrators at every level become active, reflective participants in their wellness journeys.

With this book, readers will:

• Review the four dimensions of educator wellness—(1) physical, (2) mental, (3) emotional, and (4) social—and twelve corresponding routines

• Understand how mental, emotional, and social wellness link to and depend on physical wellness

• Access videos of the authors sharing their own experiences with each wellness dimension

• Respond to thoughtful My Wellness Action prompts

• Use field-tested tools to self-rate, reflect, set goals, plan, and monitor progress for each dimension

Visit go.SolutionTree.com/educatorwellness to access materials related to this book.

ISBN 978-1-954631-09-0

9 0 0 0 0