As a lecturer and manager within a large multicultural, inner city London College for 14 years, I began to feel “battle weary” from government initiative overload, yet another organisational restructuring and the conflicting demands of my job. I suffered from palpitations, breathlessness, and an underlying sense of panic but the thought of the students waiting for me and letting my colleagues down by picking up the slack of my absence would often propel me into going into work anyway.
I felt powerless to change what was happening, and while I occasionally experienced intense crisis, I continued to trudge in to the work that I once enjoyed with the idea that I was helping to shape the future through educating young minds.
As the years went by, my body started giving way to the demands I was putting on it as a result of my internal conflict and high stress levels. It started taking me even longer to recuperate during our term holidays, which also, incidentally, became shorter over the years.
Eventually, I suffered a short illness, had a period in hospital and then spent four months at home recovering – my body just wouldn’t let me keep going. And afterward, I just couldn’t face returning to work.
My body had just come to a halt and my mind just wasn’t making sense at all. After four months off work and recuperating, I was at a critical choice point – I needed to return to work or change careers entirely. And so I returned to work, with a reduced work schedule and little tolerance for the stress that is part and parcel of the job anymore. Finally, in 2004, I was offered voluntary redundancy due to yet another restructure, and I gratefully took it.
When things began to settle and time had passed, I realised that it didn’t need to be that way. It didn’t need to be that my ability to shape the future was compromised because I didn’t have the right support system to help me through the tough spots. It didn’t need to be that I had to get really ill to realize what I needed to do to take care of myself. And it didn’t need to be that other teachers are potentially suffering, feeling alone, and trying to hold the dreams of the future of our world together on a shoestring.
I feel that teaching is one of the most important, valuable professions there is because our collective future is riding on it. And I realised that I could do something about preserving the integrity of the profession, despite the necessity of my personal career shift.
My purpose is to leverage my experience and support individual teachers by creating a hub of heart-centred teaching in every way, from personal coaching / mentoring to sharing innovative teaching methods to reminding teachers of the sacred work they are doing to advance our planet every day.
It is now my path to share heart-centred living to help teachers improve the quality of their lives first by building a life they love, in order to be so full of the robust and abundant joy of life that it cannot help but spill over into their careers. This fulfillment is the key to being more effective as teachers, both by modelling a way of being for “our” students and affecting more sustainable and comprehensive learning while in the classroom.
Together, we can create a more extraordinary future for our world.
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