The TEFLer - Stop “shoulding” on yourself!
Active Language Teacher Training
Train to teach English; Trinity Cert, Dip TESOL and Teaching Younger Learners courses online and in the south of Spain.
Classroom mantras can be hugely powerful; what about our teacher mantras? How can our mindset help or hinder us and what can we do about it? How does the language we use affect us? Maybe let's start by not “shoulding” on ourselves.
The TEFLer is a fortnightly companion for language teachers written by Simon Pearlman and brought to you by Active Language Teacher Training. Subscribe on LinkedIn or here to get a copy straight to your inbox.
A lot of us are a little over half way through the September to June academic year, a good time to consider how we want to move through the rest of the year. We all have classes that we enjoy more or less, and learners we find it easier or more difficult to work with. It's great to have high expectations of ourselves and our students and we also know that sometimes being super-demanding on ourselves can be counter-productive. How can we help ourselves more? Read on, become more aware of the effect of the language we use and a couple of podcasts you might like too.
Stop “shoulding” on yourself.
We are language teachers, most of us enjoy words and language. Let's pay attention to the words we use, our words are full of meaning and by shifting some of our language we can change our mindsets.
Our lives are full of “shoulda, coulda, woulda” (or maybe “should have, could have, would have”!) and full of things we say to ourselves that we “should” or “have to” do, we teach these things to our students all the time too, don’t we? “Should” can so often add weight to our worries and create expectations of ourselves that we just can’t keep. If we keep adding “shoulds”, we keep adding expectations and adding pressure on ourselves. Just like negative self talk, like “I’m not good at…”, “I stink with…”, etc, “shoulding” can make us feel terrible, especially as busy teachers, possibly on the edge of burnout.?
This comes from an interesting podcast, not ELT related, which in this episode suggests we can upgrade our language to help ourselves more.
We talk about students upgrading their language to move through the levels from B1 to B2 and onwards, why not upgrade our language too? Let’s be aware of the words we use.?
What can we do instead? Instead of “have to” and “should” we can use “I choose to…”, “I’ll try to…” or “I want to…”, it’s interesting how the language we use can impact us.
The podcast goes on to talk about the difficulty around the word “but” and how we might be better off replacing it with “and”.
Interesting things, aren’t they? Words.
Perfect is the enemy of good
These are more interesting words!?
“Perfect” is another overused word. Arguably nothing is “perfect” and certainly none of our classes are perfect, none of us are perfect as teachers, it’s a crazy concept. Perfect; it’s as good as it could possibly be, it couldn’t be better in any way. If we’re aiming for perfection, we’re only ever going to be disappointed as we yet again fail to achieve the unachievable. Let’s go for “good” or “great” or “fantastic”, but not “perfect”. We can hopefully get to good, maybe even great, but perfect is impossible. This is why “perfect is the enemy of good”.
This leads us beautifully to another idea…
Good enough is, so often, good enough
The second podcast of the post is ELT-centred for sure, it’s even in the title. “Thrive in ELT”, there are 70 episodes to move through, all short, this one is about 10 minutes, all relevant to our work and all with the stated aim of helping us move to a calmer, more organised ELT life.
The host is Heather Johnston and in this episode she talks about how we can accept being good enough in our working lives; good enough at planning, good enough at email and admin, good enough enough is good enough.
Planning is an interesting one. Planning is elastic, isn’t it? If we have more time, we can always plan more but if we’ve got more time, maybe we should, oops, I mean, might choose to or try to do something for ourselves instead.?
So, let’s stop shoulding on ourselves and remember that perfect is the enemy of good and that good enough is indeed enough.
Oh, and when asked at an interview about your weaknesses, it’s probably best to avoid, “some people say I’m a bit of a perfectionist”, it will invariably receive an eye-roll from the interviewer!?
Happy TEFLing!
The TEFLer is brought to you by Active Language Teacher Training providers of Trinity CertTESOL, DipTESOL and Teaching Younger Learners courses. For more information about the course, please visit www.activelanguage.net?