What are your hopes for the new school year? Maybe you want to get better at handling the day-to-day stresses of the job, or be more patient with yourself and your students. One teacher-friend I know says her hope for this year is to learn to “soften more and more into the inevitable chaos and messiness of life.” Can you relate?
The problem is, of course, that it isn’t so easy—this softening thing. Elena Aguilar knows this, which is why she wrote the new book Onward: Cultivating Emotional Resilience in Educators.
“Simply put, resilience is how we weather the storms in our lives and rebound after something difficult,” explains Aguilar. But resilience is more than this, she claims—it’s also “what enables us to thrive, not just survive.”
Last year may go down in history as one of pure “survival” for some of us, but why settle for managing or enduring when we have the potential to feel energized and joyful in our work? After all, it’s not ultimately about us—it’s about our students. They need us, with all of our faults and complexities, to walk into the classroom fully present and alive to them.
If thriving is your goal, Onward is worth reading. Although Aguilar acknowledges how our neurobiology can influence resilience, she reminds us that we can ultimately become much more emotionally resilient by simply changing our daily habits. Onward (with its accompanying workbook) serves as a practical, user-friendly resource for change—a daily guide for teachers’ personal growth and professional development.
Fostering new habits (and ways of being)
With 25 years in education under her belt and a decade as an instructional and leadership coach, Aguilar draws on research in mindfulness, neurobiology, positive psychology, change management, and systems thinking to package a coherent year-long program for developing resilience.
She explains that resilience is influenced by four factors: who you are (genetics, values, personality), what you do (habits), where you are (context), and how you are (emotions, dispositions).
Aguilar teaches you how to work on these factors with her 12 habits of emotionally resilient educators, which include things like building community, being here now, and taking care of yourself. You can choose to read about one habit every month or go straight to the topics that are most important to you, each of which is supplemented by a long list of daily activities and practices in the companion Onward Workbook.
On your journey, Aguilar believes that there are three foundational habits all educators should start with: knowing yourself (purposefulness), understanding emotions (acceptance), and telling empowering stories (optimism).
1. Know yourself. According to Aguilar, to become emotionally resilient, you must begin by exploring the key elements of self: your values, personality, aptitudes, and skills. Aguilar recommends two free online assessments for identifying some of your personality traits and character strengths. If, for example, you can identify one of your personal strengths (like kindness, curiosity, or perseverance) and creatively use your strength every day for a week, you may find yourself happier (and potentially more resilient).
To become emotionally resilient, you must begin by exploring the key elements of self: your values, personality, aptitudes, and skills.
“When you know yourself well, you gain clarity on your purpose in life and work,” says Aguilar. As you begin to understand and embrace your purpose, skills, and areas for growth, your sense of efficacy can increase—and in one research review, efficacy (or self-belief) was one of the personal resources most frequently linked to teacher resilience.
To help you get to know yourself better, Aguilar’s companion workbook includes activities like identifying your hopes, creating a values jar, and crafting a mission statement.
2. Understand your emotions. Once you have a better sense of “who you are,” it’s important to understand “how you are”—what sorts of emotions influence your daily life. By spending time observing your emotions, you can begin to understand how they function. For example, knowing that your fear reaction to an aggressive student (the tensing of your muscles, the increased heart rate, and the tightening in your throat) is both protective and temporary may help you let it go more easily and move toward a more thoughtful response to her anger.
This form of self-awareness is one of the fundamental components of emotional intelligence as described by psychologist Daniel Goleman, and studies indicate that emotional intelligence facilitates resilience to stress and may even lead to less burnout. Although Aguilar doesn’t directly cite emotions studies—in fact, most of the research in her book is implicit rather than explicit—she seems to draw on the work of researchers like Paul Ekman and Dacher Keltner.
In her supplementary workbook, you can develop your emotional intelligence by examining your beliefs about your feelings, observing your emotions (see sidebar) and how they affect your body, and learning techniques for relaxation such as the body scan.
3. Tell empowering stories. Aguilar also encourages us to focus on the narratives we create to understand (or distort) our reactions to daily events. When we tell positive, empowering stories about our lives, we are likely to feel