Picture this: a classroom filled with engaged and enthusiastic students, a teacher brimming with passion and energy, and an atmosphere radiating positivity and growth. It may sound like a dream, but the secret behind this transformative classroom experience lies within one crucial aspect: teacher mental health.

As educators, we pour our hearts into nurturing the minds of our students, but often forget to tend to our own mind and our own well-being. In this episode, we open your eyes to the truth about teacher mental health. In this episode, Helena Hains and I share our personal journeys, offering practical strategies to prevent burnout, build resilience, and embrace self-compassion. This isn't just another self-help spiel; it's a wake-up call to all educators (new and veterans alike) to prioritize their mental health for a profound impact on their teaching journey. Get ready to unlock the power within and witness the magic that happens when teachers nurture themselves, as they do their students.

Helena Hains is a New Elementary Coach, who empowers new elementary educators to go from being overwhelmed and feeling frazzled to being excited and confidently having a smoothly ran classroom. Helena knows the importance of systems and how they can make teaching a joyful and impactful profession. Also known as The Present Teacher, Helena has presented at over 10 other summits, and loves to share all the latest teacher tips on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and her Podcast. Helena graduated from Eastern Oregon University, with her Master's in Elementary Education and a Minor in ESL and Spanish.

HEAD OVER TO THE SHOW NOTES: teachingmindbodyandsoul.com/episode65

👉Join the FREE Resilient Teacher Community on Facebook: http://www.teachingmindbodyandsoul.com/supportsquad

📝 Want a FREE personalized step-by-step guide to crushing teacher burnout? Take the Personalized Burnout Recovery Roadmap quiz here!

 ❓Get your Questions Answered on the Resilient Teacher Podcast: Ask anything about burnout, recovery, self-care, simplification, and get your questions answered on the show. Head over to teachingmindbodyandsoul.com/ask

✨While this podcast is meant to be helpful for teachers and their mental health, it is not a replacement for therapy or medical care from a licensed professional. Head over to teachingmindbodyandsoul.com/talkspace to save $100 on your first month of accessible therapy from a licensed professional by using the code: SPACE!

🚨Get on the Waitlist for the Automate Your Classroom course & be the first to know how to simplify teacher tasks and create automations so that you can reduce time wasting tasks, set it and forget it, and have the time to do the things you actually want to do in teaching here!

👩🏻‍💻Get on the Individualized EduCare Program Waitlist and be the first to know when the doors open & special promotions here!

💬PS: Has this podcast been helpful for you? Quick! Screenshot this episode, add it to IG, and tag me @teachingmindbodyandsoul  This helps spread the word of this podcast to other educators.

[0:00] Hey, Helena, it is always such a pleasure to hang out with you, and I'm so excited to finally have you as a guest here on the Resilient Teacher podcast.

Yes, thank you so much, Brittany. I am so excited to be here. I know I've talked with you and worked with you for the last couple of years, and I am so excited that we get to do this.

Yes, I am excited too. So I would just love it. I do this every time. My go-to first question for any guest on the podcast is just to tell a little bit about yourself, even though I did this great introduction. Tell a little bit about yourself, like what was your journey through education thus far? Yeah, absolutely. So I graduated, first off, my name's Helena. I am the creator of the present teacher. I started my teacher journey, we'll start with my master's. I got my master's in elementary education from Eastern Oregon University. And then from there, I moved from Oregon all the way to New Mexico with my then-boyfriend, now-husband.

And that was a really big shift. I remember being so excited when I first came in to my school because I finally had my classroom.

[1:06] And this was the moment I had dreamed of since I was, you know, 5 years old, making my little brother play school with me.

And I carried those boxes in and I was thinking, this is it.

This is where my life's going to change.

I finally got here. And then the following month, I was greatly surprised by the amount of workload teachers were expected to do. Now, this was pre-COVID, so even before then, it was a struggle. By that December, I was exhausted. I slept my entire winter break, and I just felt paralyzed.

Like, I couldn't mentally make a decision. I couldn't talk to my family. I was isolating, And I felt really defeated because this is the profession I had dreamed of doing since I was five or six years old.

And here I was, struggling, not sure if I could carry on.

A little background, I taught kindergarten at the time, and I still remember the last day of school, my little kindergartners, they crossed the gymnasium with their little diplomas in hand, and in a moment where I should have felt proud, I felt like I had failed them.

[2:13] And most importantly, I had failed myself because I felt like I should have been there more for them, but I was so busy trying to get everything else done that I wasn't able to be that teacher that I knew I was capable of being. And in that moment, I had to figure out a way to make this work. Something about me is I'm 110% or nothing, all or nothing kind of mentality.

So I needed to figure out a way to give that next year my everything. So I started researching and I went to counseling because prior back in January and February of my first year, I was diagnosed with depression and anxiety.

And so I was trying to navigate that while also trying to show up for my kids.

And I needed to transition. So that's when I started learning about burnout and sharing with everything I was learning online.

[3:05] Yeah. So we met a couple of years ago at the first annual Summer Self-Care Conference.

You were a part of that and you were doing the present teacher at that point, really focusing on that burnout.

I think one of the things that we do as teachers is we, we want to share what we're learning as we're learning it. And I, think that's so powerful. When we can actually share the things, the tools, the strategies, whatever's working for us, it kind of gives hope and support for those teachers who maybe are too afraid to ask those questions. And so your platform really helped support those teachers. And now you're focusing a lot on new teachers, which I think is so important. Because just listening to your story, like when I started teaching, I, my first year, I taught kindergarten.

And I can remember thinking, This is the job that I want. This is great. This is awesome. And then getting into the classroom and being like, I don't know. I don't know about this. This is, this is not what I thought it was going to This is not who I thought I was going to be and so.

[4:10] During that time period, I decided, no, I think what I really need to focus on is I don't know enough about all of the learners in my classroom.

[4:19] Let me go get some more certifications. Let me go learn more about special education students, gifted and talented students.

And when I went into the classroom the next year, I felt a little more empowered, but that's just not where I was meant to be.

And so I think having a mentor like you would have been so much more helpful, because I wouldn't have made the mistakes of going and trying something else where maybe I, maybe that wasn't for me. Maybe just kindergarten wasn't for me. It wasn't, by the way. It was middle school. And I love middle school. Middle school is my jam. But I would love for you to kind of share a little bit more about your mental health aspect. Like you, you talked about finding out that you had depression, anxiety, those types of things.

And that was a real struggle just to kind of grasp or come to terms with those diagnoses.

Can you talk a little bit more about that?

Yeah, absolutely. And I agree with you. I taught kindergarten.

I actually just finished teaching second grade. So, you know, that first grade may not always be the one to start with.

But as far as being diagnosed, I think one of the contributing factors is the year before I actually had lost someone in my immediate family.

So not only was I completing my master's program, which was a 10-month intensive.

[5:40] Because you had to go through a 10-month placement on top of also getting your teaching accreditation.

At the time it was at TBA.

And then I was moving across the United States and that was big for me too.

But I remember feeling like when it made sense And I found out I actually had this probably pre-conditioning of anxiety and depression for years, in fact, since I was a teenager.

But I remember laying in bed feeling like...

Worrying about every single thing that was gonna happen in the future and not being able to get it all done and focusing and hyper Focusing on that while also at the same time.

[6:21] Feeling guilty for all the things I didn't complete in the past whether that was showing up for my family Or if that was showing up for my kids if I didn't teach a lesson, right?

So it was that inner battle of You know being in the future and in the past and that's where the present teacher came to be as I realized that that what my journey needed to focus on, especially with those two diagnoses, was to focus on being in the moment. And I realized in the classroom I wasn't doing that. I was, you know, I would be working with a kid one-on-one and I'd be worrying about the other ten things on my to-do list, or I'd be worrying about how I didn't say that exact thing the right way with my other student earlier that day. So learning that practice, and it's definitely a practice and a journey, not a destination, of being in the moment and showing up to your best capabilities or your optimal self in the moment to help your kids.

And I will say that, honestly, reaching out for help, I know there's a stigma against reaching out to professionals, but reaching out to a professional really helped me take like a bird's eye view of what was going on because in the moment, especially in the classroom amongst like whatever you're diagnosed with, it can feel very real, but being able to take step back and look at all the different angles and figuring out where you can grow. I mean, I'm still using practices that I learned that first year in counseling that were just absolutely astounding on my life and completely changed my life.

[7:50] Yeah. I mean, you were talking about counseling and all of that. I think it was probably my fourth or fifth year teaching when I realized I needed to go get help. And one of the things that was taught to me in counseling was I used to think that every day was a bad day. Every day was a bad day. And it was some kind of conditioning that I grew up with or that I learned over time or it was just my mindset at the time. But what was really cool for me was my therapist told me, said, Brittany, you need to start writing down how your day went, find one positive, find you know if you want to talk about the negative, and then give yourself a score of the whole day.

[8:37] And so I did that for a while. And what I found was that not every day was a bad day, because I could see that in my calendar. I could see, oh, this day was a 6, this day was a 2, you know, but I still had something positive that was happening. And I, it.

[8:53] Was like collecting data, like how we do for our students, how we, you know, take data on our students or progress monitor, things like that. It was bringing that into my life. And I still use it all the time to this day. I have, now it's an app on my phone. But it still checks in with me. How was I feeling that day? So that I can kind of see over time. Also, what I found through that was that when I did that, I could see what was really affecting how I was feeling that day. It wasn't always the circumstances of the day. It wasn't because Johnny threw a pencil at me that day, even though that was bad, it was because I wasn't drinking enough water, or I didn't eat breakfast that day, or it was the week before the great week out of the year, or out of the month, that I was having, you know, some different hormonal changes. And so really seeing those things as clear data points, for me, was really transformational and I learned that through counseling. I would never have learned that any other way and I'm a huge proponent for counseling. Yeah, so I love how you used that, you know, data because actually my counselor had me do something similar because like you, I was focusing on the negative so much that I felt like I was drowning. I was trying to come up for air and I would for a second but I'd go back down under the water and so instead to break.

So what I found when I was starting to share my journey about burnout and getting rid of burnout and preventing burnout is I was focusing so much on burnout that what I found was a a lot of new teachers were reaching burnout because they didn't have the systems in place.

And there's a variety of systems you need. So instead of treating the initial cause, I was treating like the results or the symptoms when I really need to help teachers from the beginning set those systems up so they're not getting to that point.

So that's when I kind of made that shift from a teacher wellness coach to now a new teacher coach.

And you know, the systems I like to focus on are things like classroom management, time management, teacher organization, parent communication.

All of these have different systems and you can make them run smoothly, especially that first year to where you're not feeling like you're drowning or trying to catch up all the time.

You're focusing on your foundations. So then you can show up and get closer to being that teacher you were meant to be.

Nobody ever told me those things. and I think that that's not really focused on in teacher prep programs. They're just, it's more like these ideas and that you can't really.

So I think what you're doing is just really powerful and totally necessary because, yeah.

Yeah, and it's sad how common that is. So many teachers – because I have a podcast as well, the Present Teacher Podcast.

One of the things whenever I have a guest is I like asking about their first year teaching And it's typically the same story. I went to a, you know, college, I got my degree, and then in teaching, it was just this big transition. And that's not to say that, you know, the teacher programs are bad. In fact, I personally, Eastern Oregon, I had the most amazing professors. They would actually teach how they wanted you to teach in the classroom, but there's no specific, you know, philosophy or system they teach you on those different things, on how to do management or help disruptive behaviors or show up for your kids or to organize your classroom in a way that allows you to move efficiently and not have this big pile of papers on your desk.

So I feel like there's just this big disconnect and the districts are just kind of throwing you in and hoping for the best. And maybe you have one or two mentors you can go ask questions, but a lot of it's just trial and error.

Yeah. And then, more than likely, having those systems built up, they're able to make the changes each year so that they're not burning out, so that they're not getting to this point where they're reaching burnout or the burnout is coming from something completely different than one of the things that we can, from the get-go, really sink our nails into and fix from, from the start. So yeah, I would love, you're one of the, you've been in the Summer Self-Care Conference from the very beginning, from the very first year. You have been there and providing, you know, resources and professional development for those teachers every year. But you are, again, one of the presenters, and you're talking all about mental health. Can you share a little bit about what the listeners can expect from your session, and maybe even what you have as part of the All Access Bonus Library?

I've made friends that I've kept in touch with from presenters to people that have seen my presentation, have reached out to me, and it's just amazing.

It's something I wish I would have had my first year of teaching because, again, you're dealing with so much that you don't think about prioritizing yourself.

But when you're surrounded by all these people, this community that are trying to prioritize that and help support you in that. It's such a huge, huge asset. So I highly recommend that you check out the Summer Self-Counter.

This year what I'm talking about is the truth behind your mental health and element as a new teacher, because I feel like, again, we're just kind of thrown to the wolves and I don't want there to be surprises. So I talk about, you know, some backs in the research behind what can you expect for, you know, the most, the, what most teachers experience their first five years. And then I give you actionable steps because I'm not really a woo person.

I have to have action. I'm a checklist need a disease on how to prevent it and what you can do now to be proactive about your mental health. So that's not your scenario. That's not your story. You're able to create your own story and create your own impact by being proactive about your mental health now. And then in the All Access Pass or in the bonus, I provide a journal that helps you kind of go through that mindset shift from, you know.

Yeah, I love it. I love it. You have always been one of the best presenters. And I'm just really excited to have you again in the Summer Self-Care Conference. I'm putting the links to what they can find out from you and what's in the All Access Pass in the show notes. But I would also love for you to share where they can connect with you further. So maybe they missed out on the Summer Self-Care Conference. Can you share a little bit more about where they can find you, what you offer, more about your podcast?

Yes, thank you so much. So I am the president teacher on all social. So TikTok, Instagram, Pinterest, you name it.

You can go to my website, thepresidentteacher.com.

If you are looking for a community for new teachers on Facebook where we're being supportive and we're there for the hard and great times and we're working on those systems together, you can go to thepresidentteacher.com slash community and that's a free Facebook community for new teachers.

And I really help teachers all the way from you know the interview process all the way to you know working on those first You know three to five years of really.

I love it and I love connecting with you. Yes. Thank you so much, Brittany. Honestly, I wouldn't have delved into the wellness, I think, if I hadn't met you that first year of business. So, huge thank you and thank you for putting on this summit. I know every year, the people that, you know, I collaborate with and talk with and hang out with are always excited. So, super, super appreciative of you and everything you do.

Yes. Thank you so much. Thank you.