Over the last several weeks, I have been reading "Little House on the Freeway: Help for the Hurried Home" by Tim Kimmel, PhD. When I read non-fiction, I tend to read very slowly and pick up and put down a book over and over and this book has been no exception. When I do read it, however, I feel like a person lost in the desert who has found a secret lake - I just can't get enough.As you probably know, I am a teacher and tomorrow, I go back to work after my winter holiday. I do NOT want to go back. Of course, nobody wants to end a holiday, it's nice being free of schedules and being able to live pretty much as you wish, knowing that financially, all is cared for. It goes deeper than that for me lately. I have felt incredibly torn since I had to go back to work after Pk was born. I have always been fairly type-A - I have always tried to be as perfect as possible and life has been all about that "exemplary" performance rating. It may not seem so from the outside but schools are often very competitive places, with the staff jostling to be "the best". While I wouldn't say that I am trying to be better than anyone else, for me, it's all about not being "worse" than anyone else - if someone else is doing something, then I must do it too, all in the name of being "good enough". It gets tiring. It was hard enough before I had Pk but since she came along, I don't have the time that I use to have to put into things and I also know myself well enough to know that to do what I need to do to be that perfect teacher, I would be making sacrifices that are not worth the cost. In the end, it's led to a sense that I am just not good enough, that I am not pulling my weight, since there are people doing more, making more obvious contributions, getting accolades that aren't coming my way.
Yesterday, I read the chapter entitled "Maintaining Rest in the Work Area." Wow!!!! It really forced me to see and understand my thinking in a much different way. I would love to share the entire chapter here but obviously, I don't have time for that. Tim Kimmel's point is that to maintain "rest" in the work world, to remain true to our values and be able to live in balance, we need to re-examine how we define success. We need to shift from seeing success as a list of accomplishments and a collection of rewards, but instead, doing our work with integrity and doing what is "good enough". What hit me most was this:
When success is our goal, we can never be satisfied. That's because success was never meant to be a goal. It was meant to be an outcome of certain qualities and wise priorities. Qualities such as hard work, rendering a good service and product for a fair price, backing up your work and maintaining integrity all the way - these are the things that bring success. These qualities allow room for us to be human. To be as good as we can... but maybe not as good as the next guy. People who work hard and fair can accept their shortcomings and inevitable failures - because success for them is an outcome, not a goal. It's a process, not a product. It's what you are, not what you do. page 201
Can I accept that I have shortcomings? Not until now, I haven't. Instead, whenever I encounter a weakness, I just push harder, apply more pressure and feel like crap. I don't enjoy my work and haven't for a long time. No matter what praise or encouragement I get, it last for a few minutes and then I go back to focusing on what I am not doing well enough. As we spend more and more time focusing on "reflective practice" and trying to see what we should be doing and aren't, I get so mired in the feelings of inadequacy that I don't want to be there, especially when the guilt of not be "good enough" is paired with my guilt as being away from my daughter, which is always there. It's time for me to try and live with the new definition of success and start to measure myself fairly. It's time to be "good enough" instead of "perfect" and to allow myself to be a human being, a daughter of the King (the true measure of my success). I need to ask myself daily whether I have made a difference or a connection as opposed to whether I have been "perfect".
It's time to rest and enjoy.
To my mind, this is the time to enjoy the fruits of years of labour. It's why we put off having children - to reach our career goals, and get to the point where we are comfortable enough with what we do and competent enough to do it well without pushing so hard any more. It's time that you can pull back and rest on your laurels a little bit, reuse some of the old lesson plans, fly by the seat of your pants some days knowing that you have done this for long enough to go through a day not fully prepped, and still do it just fine. You are accustomed to being exemplary, but you can't - no one can - be exemplary in several places at once. Instead, we wohm's have to figure out how to put in enough in each area to be fine, and that's as good as it gets.
ReplyDeleteRemember this, too - it gets easier. Once you pass the 4-year mark, it gets easier.