A Teacher’s Tale of Burnout and Recovery

A Teacher’s Tale of Burnout and Recovery

Thanks for hitting play. If you love exploring how to do school differently so you can make a legendary impact on your campus, then you’re in the right place. I’m Danny Bauer, and this is the Better Leaders, Better Schools podcast, the original Ruckus Maker podcast for visionary leaders, innovators, and rebels in education. Thanks to Ruckus Makers just like you, this show ranks in the top 0.5% of over 3 million worldwide podcasts. In today’s conversation, I speak with Danielle Neufur, a former teacher turned coach and author of the Path of the Mindful Teacher. She’s dedicated over 20 years to supporting educators in navigating the challenges of the school system. As a founder of teaching well, she works with teachers and school leaders to prioritize well being and transform schools into thriving learning communities.

We cover topics like her two bouts with Burnout, why your words matter as a school administrator, and the idea of TLC plc. Once again, thanks for listening, and we’ll be right back after a quick message from our show sponsors. Hey, Ruckus Maker, I’ll make this quick. If you’re listening to this message right now, you’re missing out. When you subscribe to the Ruckus Maker newsletter on Substack, you get access to micro books focused on how to do school different tools and other resources that will help you make a ruckus and do school different stories and case studies of the worlds most legendary Ruckus Makers of all time. Access to my calendar to schedule coaching sessions, and you’ll also get bonus podcast content that won’t be released on the main podcast feed and podcast episodes without any advertisements.

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04:27
Danielle
Thanks so much for having me.

04:29
Danny
You mentioned when we connected last, he had two bouts of burnout, 2005 and 2015. You were a new teacher and that first time, and I don’t remember the second time actually, what happened there. But can you tell us about those experiences?

04:47
Danielle
Sure. They are fresh in my memory even though they were a long time ago, they still stand out as some of those integral times of teaching. In 2005, I was a new teacher and it was a lot of personal turmoil that, like, coincided with being a new teacher and then, like, doing all the things that you need to do as a new teacher. And it really, like, was this personal professional life. Like kaboom. Like the candles are burning at both ends and then the candle bursts into flames. I’ll actually say that my principal was the person who really pointed out to me something was going on. And interestingly, and this is what I like to tell the Ruckus Makers who are listening, that it is so important to talk to teachers and ask them those tough questions because that’s what my principal did. He asked me, and he said, ‘Danielle, the person we hired is not the person that’s here in front of me right now. What is going on?’ And he didn’t need to say that. He didn’t need to ask me. What I did is deny, deny. I’m fine. Everything’s good. But that question stopped me in my tracks, or that, like, conversation stopped me in my tracks. And that summer, I took some time to really do a lot of soul searching, and I hit a rock bottom that I never had to experience again because I got a lot of help that I really desperately needed, and I took a lot of those tools and I brought them into my classroom after that summer was over. And he never approached me again about it. We actually never had a conversation again about it. And I never went back to him and said, oh, that conversation is the thing that, like, turned things around. But it did. And that’s, like, one of the biggest things I love to talk to principals about is, like, your words matter. And even when your teachers don’t tell you that those conversations impacted them, they do, and I will forever be grateful for that experience.
Fast forward ten years. He’s still my principal, or he was still my principal. And I went through a second bout of burnout, and this burnout was completely different. And it was different because things were going really well at school. And what happens when things go well. You get asked to do lots more. And I kept taking on things, and I was 1015 years into a teaching career and still didn’t know how to have boundaries, didn’t know how to say no. And I legitimately was contemplating, like, I’m not going to go back, and I mean jestly, but, like, also semi serious, like, hiding under my desk, like, what am I going to do? And what happened there was I had the opportunity and also talk to my principal about this, to go on a sabbatical for two semesters.
I went on two spring semester sabbaticals back to back. And that’s where I discovered mindfulness. That’s where I discovered bringing mindfulness to a classroom. Not necessarily teaching kids about mindfulness per se, like, explicitly, but more like me bringing mindfulness to my teaching practices. And that’s how the work that I do now has been created through that opportunity also because of the school I was at, like, supporting that decision, but me going through that burnout and saying, I need to step away, not entirely, but, like, for now. And that made me a better teacher, a better human. And when you’re a better human, you’re a better teacher.

08:26
Danny
I tell a story about just figuring out how to manage my own inner world and that once I haven’t perfected it, but once I really showed interest and developed that skill. I stopped writing to kids. Which was an interesting thing because they didn’t change at all. I changed. And that’s a message that needs to be shared a lot more. It really is about taking care of yourself and navigating the inner landscape. But you said, too, that the principal asked some questions. You mentioned, he said, hey, Danielle, the teacher we hired is not the teacher in front of me today. And so that you said, stopped you in your tracks. But are there other questions or statements or things that Ruckus Makers can say with their staff too, as you said your words matter to show that they care?

09:18
Danielle
I think that for me, I don’t know if it’s a specific question, but it’s more like an open door. Also, one thing that this principal also did, so not an open door just for teachers to be able to enter their office, but this principal also didn’t really take to, like, us calling him or emailing us. He would then come to our classrooms and just pop in and have the conversation. Having that ability to have conversations and to have genuine, real heart to heart, not even heart to heart, just like person to person communication was really important. He didn’t hide behind his office. He didn’t hide behind his door. He didn’t hide behind his busyness. And that was really helpful because I knew I could be a real human with him and he was a real human with us. Like, he and not in a vulnerable, like, overly too much because people get concerned am I going to be too much? It wasn’t overly in that it was just like a real honest relationship that we all had.

10:28
Danny
And you mentioned as you sort of got better at teaching and were in a good place, you were taking on more and more, and that led to the second bout with burnout. So. So what are your thoughts around helping educators learn to say no? Because that is, that’s sort of, I don’t know how to put it. Like a traditional approach. Like I guess Ruckus Makers reject. The premise is something I’m talking about a lot today. And something that everybody just sort of accepts is that you keep going back to your, like, thoroughbreds, so to speak. Right. Or your top performers. And the problem with that, right. Because there’s two sides to every coin, is that you burn those your best out, which is like, why would you do that? I’m curious what you have thoughts around that concept.

11:17
Danielle
I think that for me, I had to hear from a lot of teachers and also work with a lot of teachers and share with them. When you say no to something, you’re saying yes to something else. And when you say no to something, you’re allowing somebody else to take a role that maybe they really wanted but never knew they were capable of or able to do. Oftentimes I saw a lot of, like, teachers who had been in a student government position or a yearbook position for, like, ten years, but they didn’t want to let go of it because it was familiar, even though it was hard. But sometimes, like, it’s good to just let those things go. If we don’t allow our veteran teachers or thoroughbreds, if we don’t give them permission or show them how to, like, say no or say yes to something else or allow somebody else to do it, we are going to burn everybody out. And that’s going to be good for no one because there’s not going to be any mentoring or that sort of thing. I also feel sometimes like, if we continually just grasp and try to keep everything going, sometimes things need to just fade out. Sometimes there are things and initiatives that just need to not be done anymore. Even though we’ve always done them, sometimes the things that can’t get done are the things we see. Like, okay, they just might not be that important, even though they feel super important at this moment.

12:44
Danny
That’s good. Thank you for sharing there. And you talked about mindfulness and not explicitly, necessarily teaching it to students, but how it changed you in your approach to the classroom. So you want to unpack that a little bit or bring us to a moment where you were using mindfulness, maybe in the classroom.

13:07
Danielle
Sure. I really loved what you said about the moment I started focusing on my inner landscape. I stopped writing kids up. Such a beautiful teacher can understand exactly what you’re saying when you say that because that’s kind of exactly what happened to me. I’ll give you a quick example. I was always the teacher. I had this, like, inner script, this inner belief that when kids relate to my class, it was disrespectful. They were disrespecting me blah, blah. They’d come to my class. I taught high school English. They’d come in my classroom and we’d have, like, this little exchange, and it was this dance of, like, oh, glad you showed up happier like, this sarcastic, completely unnecessary exchange that then allowed me to feel like I was on my high horse. It got them defensive. It was just this whole thing. And once I realized and once I started to, like, really tap into, like, what went on with me in that moment, and then I started to realize, I got my heart started to race, I started to get very hot. Like, I started to really track my emotions and ask myself, what is actually going on here? This kid’s a minute late. Like, really, like, is this about this incident or is this a lot more than that? Like, we could look at going way back? And this is the work that I do. This is what I do with teachers. We get down to this granular moment, and it’s amazing. I was reading on a. I was reading some reflections that teachers had today, and they’re being so granular with this moment, and I know that the fact that they’re being so granular at this moment that they are going to remember this, like, incident that seemingly, like, my this, like, small incident, and it’s going to change the way they teach and with the way they show up with their kids, not all the time, but back to my incident, I analyzed this moment of this kid showing up late, and I gave him, before it would be, again, a standoff. And when I got down to it was a lot of just my stuff. I was praised that you’re on time, and if you weren’t, this was disrespectful. And not that the student shouldn’t be held responsible for being late, but did it need to be the thing that I made it into? What I had to do was I created because, of course the kid’s going to be late again.It’s not like, now that I have this, like, epiphany, they don’t show up late. Of course they do. What I had to do was, instead of having a standoff, I would just put a piece of paper on their desk, and I would just say, can you write down what happened? And then I would be able to look at it, like, off to the side while they’re doing whatever, and just that simple shift in, like, tell me what’s going on. I either write them up, like, because they were late, or I check in with them because maybe it was something else, but it didn’t need to be this whole charged moment we could all move on.

16:16
Danny
Interesting thing, too, when you talk about checking in on your emotions. When I’ve been getting trained as a mindfulness meditation teacher as well, you mentioned my heart was racing and I felt hot. Scanning your body and investigating what’s going on there gives a lot of clues and a lot of data also. And it tells you, ‘Okay, so is now the moment to talk, or should I keep breathing? Maybe I need to start breathing. Take a step back and that kind of thing.” And so that brings us to a moment as a teacher and a kid being late, but a Ruckus Maker listening, who’s leading a campus staff. They’re late to staff meetings. Or do stuff that we might find undesirable, we’ll just say. But the point is, like Danielle learned, don’t take it personally, right. It probably 99.9% of the time has nothing to do with you know? And so if you could figure ways to just observe and then figure out the next, the best course of action from there versus reacting especially if you’re feeling hot and your heart is racing. This is in a moment where you’re probably not thinking logically and that kind of stuff, too. I think that’s what Jonathan hates when he says the emotional tail wags the rational dog. Really great example there. I’m really enjoying our conversation, Danielle. I think here we’ll pause for some messages from our sponsors. And when we get back, I’d love to ask you what the TLC framework is all about. Something that drove me nuts as a Ruckus Maker was hearing teachers say, I taught it and the students should have learned it, but really, some teachers just don’t know how to reteach so that all kids get it. That’s where IXL comes in. IXl’s diagnostic automatically identifies knowledge gaps for teachers and provides them with a personalized growth plan for each individual student. Teachers can step into the classroom every day knowing what their students know and what they don’t. IXL’s adaptive platform makes differentiating instruction easy. As students learn, IxL adjusts to the right level of difficulty for each individual. Close knowledge gaps and accelerate learning with IXL. Get started [email protected]/leaders. What do you see in your classrooms and how did you see it? As a principal, you can’t be everywhere at once, so how can you help support every teacher in the building? With Teach FX, teachers can gather their own feedback without relying on classroom observations. The Teach FX instructional coaching app is like giving every teacher their own instructional coach whenever they want it. Ruckus Makers can pilot teach effects with their teachers. Visit teachfx.com/betterleaders to learn how. For some students, the meal or two you serve them, that’s going to be it. That’s what they get for the day. Which means we’ve got to get this right.

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20:41
Danielle
Actually, this is a perfect tool to support exactly what you were just talking about, exactly what we’re just talking about in regard to our inner landscape. And I’m an educator through and through. I love my acronyms. When I go and work with schools, I like to offer them TLC plC’s. And TLC stands for Tracing your tendencies, learning about your script, and creating opportunities for calm. If the Ruckus Makers out there want to think about using this TLC framework in the way that they show up with the staff that they support and the families they support, this is also the way teachers can show up and start to really focus on how am I going to emotionally regulate when, if not if, things like go awry, but when. So tracing your tendencies means to do that body scan. Like what are my, what are the things that make my heart race, that make me clench my fist, that make my face get red? Oftentimes I do something called an emotion journal. And I have my teachers just have on their desk a, just a paint, a paper where they will track when they feel either positive or challenging emotions, and they just write it down. And then I have them look at it and analyze it. Is it during a certain time of day? Is it before lunch? Did you need to go to the bathroom? Is it a certain group of kids what’s going on either with your own schedule or with the students who are in your classroom and what’s going on with that. And then they really analyze those tendencies that they have. I have them start with what is actually happening, not what they want to happen.

22:32
Danielle
And then learning about scripts is the scripts are those things as I was talking about in that other example, the scripts are those things that are from old stuff. So in my previous example, my script was that the kid needed to be on time to be respectful. So I descript that on time meant respect. So we want to start to learn about the scripts that we have as teachers and we bring a lot of them to the table, especially if we’ve been teachers for a long time. We’ve had previous classes, previous experiences, previous incidences. And even if we’re new teachers, we’ve been in school, right, like in some way, shape or form. We probably have scripts as a result of any interaction we’ve had in this sort of situation. You want to learn about them, what’s going on and I like to also say, then we flip them. What is the wider thing that could actually also be happening? In my example, maybe that kid was talking to his girlfriend. It didn’t have anything to do with me, right? Like, like I’m thinking it’s this respect thing and it’s really like he or it could be a million different things. And guess what? I don’t even need to know about the other things. Like, it doesn’t even, I don’t even need to have the answer. I just need to see, I need to be curious about the possibility and then create opportunities for calm. The final c is that again, when these things happen, we need to have tools in place for us to deal with them so that we don’t have to go back and say, oh, I did that again, or, oh, I did that again, or I wish I didn’t react this way again. Whether that be every day you again, take three deep breaths before you walk into the classroom or it’s having something on your desk that reminds you to breathe or maybe so these are just like little things that I have teachers come up with so they’re there when the inevitable things that grind our gears that get us going happen. That’s TLC.

24:48
Danny
Beautiful. Thanks for sharing that. The breathing piece, I don’t want Ruckus Makers to overlook because it might sound so simple, but I had another guest on the show. His name was Eric Potteret. He wrote a book called Learning Excellence, and he works with the Dodgers, the American women’s soccer, football, whatever you want to call it. Team. The Navy seals. Some top performing types of organizations. And that’s like the number. There’s two things that he teaches, like almost fundamentals. Use your calendar, learn to breathe. And so that’s a slow, deep breath. I don’t know if you have a different opinion. I do want to hear it. But he talked about just 4 seconds in, 6 seconds out. And do that. It’s just kind of like a reset. Of your nervous system. It really is. You’d be surprised when you start to be mindful and scan your body. What’s going on? Usually we’re almost always doing these shallow breaths when we should be taking these big, deep belly breaths. Do you have any other different perspectives ? That I might learn from or.

26:03
Danielle
No, I think. I think what you’re saying is so important that it is so simple. And I think that the four and six makes it even more simple. I was going to say, sometimes people say four in, hold for seven, exhale for eight. Sometimes people do, like, the box breathing where it’s they’re tracing something on their hand, so anything that can just pause you and allow you to reset. So I try not to overcomplicate it. But I think sometimes I do say, well, read three times and feel like what? Like it can be like that. Simple.

26:44
Danny
Cool. I like that because it is so simple, it’s doable. And again resets your system. And so if you find yourself in a funk, just check your breathing, like, as the first thing and start breathing deeply. Before the last few questions, I asked all the guests, I want to ask you about the teaching well in schools program. And so you’ve mentioned the TLC PlC and some of the tools, like the emotion journal, which seemed really interesting. Actually, let me go back to that really quick, because a question popped into my head, as you were sharing, that I’m a teacher, or even I’m doing an emotional journal as principal. Let’s say as a teacher in this case, and it’s. It’s the same class that I’m seeing. I’m writing down negative emotions. Okay, now, I am aware. I mean, I probably already intuitively knew that, but now what? You know what I mean?

27:34
Danielle
I want you as a teacher, to put your reflection, like, cap on at the end of the day and really get to, what is it about the class. You want to try to get super specific as to. Because sometimes it can just be, like, two kids need to be moved to, like, two spots. Sometimes I used to joke there weren’t enough corners in my room to, like, separate all the kids that, like, needed to not be. But I really want you to think, is it something that is happening inside or is it something that’s happening externally? Because sometimes, again, it could be, I’m hungry or I need to use the bathroom, and I don’t have the patience then. So really get granular and as specific as possible, because I think when we talk in generalizations we just say that class is always, like, irritating me. First of all, I guarantee you that there’s probably more things that are going right in there than wrong. There’s probably at least, okay, I shouldn’t say all the time, but in many cases, there’s a lot more that’s going right than going wrong. Get really specific and then try to see how can I get curious about what’s going on with me, because, really, I’m the only person that can change the way that I’m reacting to this specific situation.

28:53
Danny
The teaching well in schools program, we’ve talked about some tools, TLC, plc. Anything else you want to add?
29:05
Danielle
What I do is I work with school districts, and I bring the work from my book, the path of the mindful teacher, to the educators in a variety of different ways. Sometimes school districts will bring me in to do professional developments throughout the school year, where I come in like five times, maybe once at the intro, and then each quarter, they have me come in and then do professional development, where we start to work with some of these tools. And then the teachers check in with me throughout the quarter, and then I come back. This can be done virtually or in person. I also do book studies with smaller groups. It’s almost like group coaching for teachers. With the book, again, you do the emotion journal, we flip the script, and we really work together to try to bring these principals alive in the classroom. The third way is I do teacher wellness coaching with this program where I work with teachers one on one, and we just kind of do goal setting. I do a lot of wellbeing tools with them, and that’s really, like, individualized for each teacher. But school districts can choose what level of support. And then I also like to really, with that, those groups find the teachers that want to be the well being leaders in the school, and they continue the work that’s the idea. I want to work myself out of the job. I want you to find your teachers that can do this and then, like, pass the torch.

30:30
Danny
Beautiful. And we’ll have links so that you can link up with Danielle in the show notes. So if you could put a message on all school marquees around the world for a single day, what would your message be? Danielle?

30:43
Danielle
So, this was inspired by my mom, because my mom is 73 years old, and she just got a tattoo because she’s that cool. And her tattoo said, be kind on it, and she got it because she just finished her second bout of battling cancer, and she said she wanted a tattoo her whole life, so she went and got one. And I want to just put that message on Margaret Keys everywhere, because I think we are all fighting battles that we can’t see. And I just want that message to be out there. Like, we need to start with kindness because there are so many of us going through so many things that we just don’t know about. So starting with kindness is always a great place to start.

31:27
Danny
Yes. And if you were building your dream school, you didn’t have any limitations in terms of resources. The only constraint was your ability to imagine. How would Danielle build her dream school? What would be the three guiding principles?

31:43
Danielle
So I thought a lot about this, and the ability to have, like, no resource allocation almost, like, made me mortified. There’s no limit. I needed to put my own limit on it. And it was that I wanted to start in the community that I am in. So that was my limit, was, like, I want to start here because I always feel like there’s work to be done. Like, that’s kind of like my mantra, like, in where I am. But the three guiding principles. This is my two boys, and this is the saying we start off our day with is we do hard things and we do them together. We do fun things and we do them together, and we never stop learning. I want those three things to be the guiding principles. Fun things, hard things, and we never stop learning.

32:31
Danny
We covered a lot of ground today, Danielle, of everything we discussed. What’s the one thing you want a Ruckus Maker to remember?

32:39
Danielle
I think the biggest thing is, I’ll start with my, you know where we started, and it was you have the conversations, even if there’s no evidence of change, you might not see it, but the words that you speak to the teachers and the doors that you open just through asking those simple questions, you might not see what happens on the other side, but they matter. I’m living proof of that. 20 years after the fact, I’ve remembered that conversation, and it has shaped the trajectory of where I’m at. I want all Ruckus Makers to know that.

33:19
Danny
Thanks for listening to the better leaders better schools podcast Ruckus Maker. How would you like to lead with confidence, swap exhaustion for energy, turn your critics into cheerleaders and so much more? The Ruckus Maker Mastermind is a world class leadership program designed for growth minded school leaders just like you. Go to betterleadersbetterschools.com/Mastermind, learn more about our program and fill out the application. We’ll be in touch within 48 hours to talk about how we can help you be even more effective. And by the way, we have cohorts that are diverse and mixed up. We also have cohorts just for women in leadership and a BIPOC only cohort as well. When you’re ready to level up, go to betterleadersbetterschools.com mastermind and fill out the application. Thanks again for listening to the show. Bye for now and go make a ruckus.