How to Cope with Stress and Teaching Challenges by Using Your Inner Powers to Prevent Burn-Out
Course Description:
Nowadays, teachers must face many stressful and challenging situations – related to students, parents, school management, curriculum, and general expectations – and this can easily lead to burnout.
This course aims to give participants the opportunity to get to know their own inner coping potential, the existing wisdom which has been concealed under determined routines and rigid patterns of thinking. Most of these practices, however, are not truly helpful when struggling with stressful conflicts or managing complicated interpersonal relationships.
After calming down body and mind through relaxation, participants will practice listening to their body’s signals, noticing all kinds of feelings and emotions. Withholding all judgment, they will let their mind uncover all the available information related to a certain situation or problem. It’s highly recommended to use a personal journal during this process; this can be helpful later for similar work. Participants will be encouraged to be truthful and honest to themselves. Slowly, they will begin to uncover their real needs and motivations and consequently to look for possible ways to meet these needs, to achieve greater satisfaction, or to find a solution that works beautifully for all parties, depending on their own priorities.
Conscious work with hidden aspects of the situation and freely made independent decisions will help participants feel empowered, decrease stress levels, and increase satisfaction through acceptance. Moreover, this can also help to unblock certain psychosomatic illnesses. The last step of the process is learning how to use this process on one’s own in other life situations.
Course Objectives:
- To learn how to slow down, calm down, and really listen to your body, mind, and feelings in order to gather all available information
- To analyze this information with an open mind freed from must and should
- To understand a situation’s background, the motivations of all involved individuals, as well as one’s own needs
- To brainstorm for possible solutions – both familiar and entirely new
- To evaluate the pros and cons of all these solutions – what there is to gain and what price must be paid
- To see whether they prefer to accept the status quo, they want to avoid the situation by escaping from it, or they have the capacity to change it
- To make a decision and to reach full acceptance and ownership of this decision
- To be able to apply this experience for use in other life situations
Tentative Schedule:
Day 1:
Introduction to the course, the training process, and the course’s goal
Relaxation of the mind and body so as to be able to watch and listen
Learning to watch and listen to your feelings, body signals, dreams, etc.
Day 2:
How to get in touch with your inner self, the one that ‘knows’
Being truthful to yourself, uncovering your inner thoughts
Noticing negative feelings, tensions, conflicts
Day 3:
Rational analysis of your negative feelings, tensions, and sources of conflict
Identifying what you need and want, specifying your and other peoples’ needs and priorities
Day 4:
Looking for possible ways to deal with the situation, solutions, directions
Discovering whether you feel like accepting, rejecting, or changing the situation
Evaluating the options, capacities, pros and cons, and any price that must be paid
Day 5:
Making the decision– what direction to go
A summary of the process
How to use the process in other situations
Course Designer:
Mgr. Janette Retová
- Born in Bratislava, Slovakia; currently living in the Czech Republic
- Psychologist, Consultant, and Lecturer
- Master’s Degree in Psychology at Comenius University in Bratislava
- Master’s Degree in Economics
- 20-years of meditation practice
- Author of the course Managerial Communication