• Why it might be feeling harder to give the amount of care and compassion that the people in your life are requiring right now. (1:43)
• Three signs you are experiencing caregiver burnout. (4:49)
• Michelle’s analogy that perfectly sums up what it feels like to be burned out from caregiving. (6:14)
• The well-intentioned, but incomplete advice people give when we feel burned out or depleted. (11:48)
• Signs you or someone you’re in a relationship with are experiencing burnout — and the impact to the relationship. (8:53)
• What is actually helpful when we’re feeling depleted from caring for others. (14:55)
• How to interrupt a downward relationship cycle when we’re being reactive — so we can become responsive instead. (18:09)
• Why sitting in empathy (which we’re often taught to do) without moving into compassion (which is not taught as often) can be painful and problematic. (19:41)
• How moving from empathy into compassion shifts us out of feeling the hard things into love. (20:45)

Michelle [00:00:14]

Hi, everyone, I’m Michelle Becker, and you’re listening to the Well Connected Relationships podcast. In today’s episode, we’ll be talking with Lisa Baylis about caregiver fatigue, where it comes from, the impact it has on relationships and why that impacts our ability to be effective. Lisa is a teacher, a counselor, a facilitator, and a mom who’s been sharing well-being strategies for the last 20 years, teaching internationally and locally. She’s a natural born connector with an innate ability to make people feel valued and heard. Her new book, Self Compassion for Educators, has recently been released. And she also created the AWE method A W E Awakening the Well-Being for Educators, which merges self care, mindfulness and self compassion. Lisa has a master’s degree in counseling psychology and a bachelor’s degree in physical education. She’s currently a high school counselor in the Greater Victoria School District and a certified, mindful self compassion teacher. No matter the setting: classroom counseling session or teacher development, Lisa incorporates concepts of positive psychology, self compassion and mindfulness. Welcome, Lisa. Thank you for joining us.

Lisa [00:01:59]

I am so grateful to be here, Michelle. Thank you for welcoming me and for that beautiful introduction.

Michelle [00:02:06]

You’re welcome. It’s a pleasure to be here with you. Most of us that are in a caregiving position, teachers, doctors, nurses, therapists, parents and the like, we got into the field because helping others was rewarding in some way. But these days, caregivers seem more burned out than usual. What’s going on here?

Lisa [00:02:37]

Right, it’s so true right now, and I feel like the whole world seems to need even more caring than usual. Like right now with the pandemic that’s been happening, all the social movements in the world to eradicate the hate and the injustices and just our physical environment needs so much love, our global, our world, our earth. And I think the caregiver in general, as you said, teachers, doctors, parents, therapists, all these people who care so deeply, they’re just being pulled in more ways than usual. You know, we’re usually used to showing up and caring for those that need us. And I think it’s getting harder and harder to continue to give of ourselves with that amount of care and compassion that we need, because there’s so much pull in so many directions. 

And the other thing, I think we’ve just not been taught to put ourselves first. And so with all these layers of needs and wants from people around us, it’s getting really difficult to continue to show up. And this idea of burnout or fatigue is really growing for caregivers. For many of us, we just feel like it’s unnatural and selfish to think about ourselves until it’s too late.

Michelle [00:03:51]

Mm hmm. Yeah, that’s really true. And I think, you’re also pointing to something important here, which is that the people where we’re caring for are needing more care. They’re also burned out. They’re also struggling in distress. So, yeah, what we what’s normally required of us seems to be more.

Lisa [00:04:14]

Yeah. Yeah, I agree. I think that that’s just it. And it’s like those this vibrational energy of of intensity happening everywhere right now and I don’t know about you, but sometimes I just have to turn off the news because it’s so hard, because I know for me, you know, I care so deeply and I know that so many people who are in those positions feel that. And when the people that we’re caring for also just have more needs, it gets even harder for us to continue to show up.

Michelle [00:04:45]

Yeah, that that makes a lot of sense could you talk a little bit about that, about caring and how does that relate to burnout?

Lisa [00:04:58]

Yeah, I think, you know, we’re so well and I say we as in a general, four for me, for people who tend to be natural caregivers. And we’re using that idea. And in terms of whether you’re a teacher or parents, right? We we care so much that we realize that it’s really hard to get to a point of continuing to give over and over and over and over again. And we eventually find that we just have nothing left to give. And I love there’s a definition that I actually heard from another podcast. Anyway, the twin sisters who came up with the book Burnout, and I love their definition. 

I think they took it from Herbert Freudenberger. 

But the definition of burnout there’s three pieces. And I love these three pieces of of how caregivers feel burnout. And that’s that this idea of emotional exhaustion, just this fatigue that comes from caring for too much for too long, that we just continue to care over and over and over again and we’re just emotionally tired. There’s not a lot of feeling there that we can give. And that’s one of the first components. 

And the second component is this, this decreased sense of accomplishment. It seems like that doesn’t matter how much we care, we’re not making a difference. There’s a sense of futility here that nothing we do makes an impact. And that’s exhausting, too. 

And then the third idea, and I love this one, too, and I think it really relates to people, especially in the far stages of burnout, is this idea of depersonalization. It is that depletion of empathy and caring, compassion, like we’re just we’re beyond just not having emotional exhaustion. We’ve just taken all those feelings and we’ve been not been able to give them anymore. And I think what happens with caregivers is we kind of combine those three were exhausted. We don’t feel like we can give anything more and we have no ability to care and offer compassion out anymore. And that’s a really hard place to sit.

Michelle [00:07:04]

It is a really hard place to sit. I love the definition, thank you for sharing that with us. And as you’re talking about it, the image that’s coming to me is like it’s being required to exhale continuously without having a chance to take an inhale. And at some point, the exhale just there’s nothing more to exhale, more to put out in the world. We have to take a pause and inhale.

Lisa [00:07:34]

Yeah. I love that because I think our world is you know, it’s like we’re on this constant treadmill and it’s just so busy. And I love how you just said we need to take a pause. Right? What a lovely gift to just be able to say stop and slow down and really take that pause to be able to recognize that there’s so much going on. And, you know, I love that visual that you just said of just taking a deep breath in for ourselves, just even for a moment, so that we have the capacity then to continue to to give out to the world. We just need to tend to ourselves so much more these days.

Michelle [00:08:10]

I’m completely on board with you. And, as a therapist, we get this advice, and maybe as teachers, you get the same advice. We get the advice if we feel what we call what some people call compassion fatigue. But it’s really caregiving fatigue. Yeah, you’re getting a little burned out. You need to go on vacation. You need to get a massage or whatever it is. Well, that’s fine. Those are not bad things to do. But what about in the session when you’re feeling really overwhelmed? You know, when you’re with somebody face to face, what are you going to say?

Lisa [00:08:50]

Yeah, I love that. I often say to people when we’re talking about this with teachers especially, you can’t stop in the middle of a classroom with, you know, twenty five thirty kids and somebody is throwing a chair across the room, and another kid’s biting each other and they’re really stressed out. You can’t just be like I’m stressed out right now. I’m going to go get a massage. Right. Like we just can’t we can’t stop in those moments because our job is to show up and hold the hard things. And so we need to find ways to attend to those those micro moments, those moments that say, oh, this is so hard right now. Holy. What am I going to do with Jimmy who is biting Johnny? You know, like, how do I help these kids and how do I help myself in these moments? Because often, especially for caregivers and as a parent, I feel this too, especially. I can’t stop and say, OK, you two, I know you’re fighting right now, but please, mom’s just going to go take off a little bit. I need to find a way to attend to myself so I can be present and not lose my cool either, which is part of what happens in burnout. And, you know, in any kind of relationship, we just don’t bring our best selves then. Right? 

These are some of the signs that all of a sudden we’re snappy, we’re making wrong decisions where we’re not getting to things the way we used to do them. We’re have no ability to sort of think clearly. And that’s really difficult. I had a colleague once and II love this. We were sort of right at the end of this year after a really long education year, it was really hard for teachers. This year. She sat down with me and she said, you know, that space between being OK and not OK is really, really small. She’s like, I used to be like, I’m not OK, but I you know, I knew it was coming, but she’s like, I like it. I flip instantly. And I think that this is exactly what’s happening with caregivers these days. The space between I’m OK and I’m not OK is just so tiny. And that’s the space we need to nurture right now.

Michelle [00:10:54]

I love I love how you say that, so how do we do that, how do we nurture that space?

Lisa [00:10:59]

Yeah, well, first of all, we need to become aware of it, right? We need to know. And like even when my colleague came in and said, I feel like I’m going to cry on the moment and or I just didn’t even realize that this was that hard, or I thought, you know, one minute I’m with my kids and then they do something wrong and then I’m yelling at them. And I think the first recognition that we we just need to give ourselves some well, grow our compassion with this grow our kindness to ourselves and grow our recognition and our awareness. So there’s just this lovely willingness to say, OK, this is a human response right now and it’s really hard. Right. It’s really hard. And that space is small. And so maybe I need to be even a little bit more gentle with myself.

Michelle [00:11:43]

Yeah, absolutely so recognizing and recognizing it in a nonjudgmental way with actually a quality of of warmth and understanding, yeah, it is really hard right now. That gives us a little bit of a space, doesn’t it?

Lisa [00:11:56]

Yeah. And then once we find that little space, even that’s where you like take that inhale, Right? Like you were saying earlier, finding that breath. Oh there I am. There’s that breath, OK. And, and then just creating a little bit more pause to be like, and then what’s next? And then what do I like, what do I need or what do I need to do or how am I going to show up in this moment? And I think there’s just right now, you know, this this permission to be super gentle and permission to just be even more gentle than we’ve ever been with ourselves, especially with caregivers right now, who, you know, I think of the doctors and the nurses who are showing up in hospitals and the horrors that they’ve been through this year. And, you know, at the educators and the therapist and the counselors who are then holding space for all the people who are struggling with mental health and the parents who have been with their kids from home like everybody’s space is small right now.

Michelle [00:12:49]

Yeah.

Lisa [00:12:50]

And we just need a little bit more time to say it’s OK, that it’s hard and then to meet it and really, really care for ourselves. And I know there’s a lot of talk out there about self care being the antidote to burnout, but I really think that self compassion is the antidote to burnout that we need to instead of just caring for ourselves first, because often people think that that’s just a jump to I’m going to eat better, I’m going to go for a run or like we were saying before, I’m going to get a massage. But I think, first of all, we just need to say, and this is where I’m at right now and it’s hard. And that’s OK.

Michelle [00:13:28]

Absolutely. So what’s the relationship between taking better care of ourselves like that, like being just more gentle with ourselves? It doesn’t actually require any more time to be more gentle with ourselves than it does to be harsh or critical with ourselves for the fact that we didn’t do something very well.

Lisa [00:13:49]

Yeah, totally.

Michelle [00:13:50]

So what’s the relationship between being kinder to ourselves, having that attitude of self compassion and being able to engage with others without, who also have that short pause you’re talking about?

Lisa [00:14:07]

Mm hmm. Well, I don’t think we can continue to show up and care for others without caring for ourselves first anymore. I think that it needs to become a priority in all professions, that that there needs to be space in moments to just pause and say, you know, what am I going to do to care for myself because we’re so good about putting everyone else’s needs first. And and then we you know, we continue to just lose more and more of ourselves. And so I think, you know, offering those little nuggets of wisdom to others that we are so good at offering. Right. Like, I often think what are what would we say to all those people we care for? What would we say to our colleagues who are struggling right now? What would we say to our students, to that our clients that we work with, to the people that we have these relationships for, with so many caregivers are so naturally able to find these little beautiful nuggets of of compassion and kindness for others? Right. Well, this is hard, you can do this. I know you’ve got it right? Or let’s keep going! 

And I think there’s just such a great time right now to invite those beautiful voice that we have back to ourselves, to our own heart, that we give those compassionate and kind and caring voices to others. But to to just welcome them so gently that when we hear them being offered to others to say, oh, maybe, maybe my heart needs to hear that right now, too. Or maybe that there’s a gentle voice that I offer to others that I can remember to say to myself when it’s hard too. And I think that’s one of the first things that we can, you know, really help people recognize is that instead of being gentle and kind and loving and compassionate to everybody else and being so harsh towards ourselves, I think that we have to start practicing bringing those kind words back to ourselves so that we can have the capacity to keep showing up for everybody else or we’re just not going to have that ability to grow those relationships, right? And the relationships are the most important thing in the caregiving relationship. And that’s what we need, is we want to be able to show up for people, but we can’t do it if we’re not putting ourselves first.

Michelle [00:16:15]

Well, I really appreciate, how you’re you’re saying that because the question often arises, do you have to be compassionate to others, to yourself before others? And as you know very well, because you’re also a mindful self compassion teacher, Kristin Neff’s research is that the vast majority of us are kinder to others than we are toward ourselves. But we think it’s actually not sustainable to care for others without caring for ourselves. It’s kind of like that exhale thing I was I was mentioning earlier. So I like the way that you’re talking about it when you’re saying, like noticing that you can speak to others kindly and then say using that same tone and voice with yourself. 

But there’s this other aspect too, that I think is equally true, which is that when we can pause and use that kind voice with ourselves, it’s like filling up our own cup, right? And now we have something to give to others. So it would you agree that it’s also true that the more self compassionate we are, the greater our capacity to be compassionate with those others around us who have a really short pause right now too?

Lisa [00:17:30]

One hundred percent. And I think the thing that what we do is when we grow that compassion for ourselves, I think it becomes a little bit more circular. Right. It’s like, OK, I’ve paused. And I think about this as myself as a parent. Right. I see myself getting agitated and then all of a sudden my kids are just cranky and they’re, you know, they’re they’re pre-teen right now. And they’re just at that stage of like, quick to be angry and upset and all kinds of feelings. And they pick up on when I’m also upset. So what I’ve discovered is that all of a sudden they’re upset and I’m getting more upset with them.

Michelle [00:18:06]

We call that the downward spiral.

Lisa [00:18:10]

Yeah, totally. And it’s so in those moments that I mean, I’m so grateful for my own personal practice because I go, oh, I see where this is going right now. Right. Like you’re going down because I’m going down. So what do I need to do right now? Like, I’m going to just stop and often I’ll just look at them and say, you know, Mom’s going to be really upset right now and I can feel this in my body and before I engage and have any more conversation with you, I’m just going to take a deep breath and then and then let’s see what we both need in this moment, and I do that in my counseling practice when I work with kids in schools. And I think it’s a great practice for in a classroom when we walk in or if we’re in a hospital, we walk in. It’s like, OK, before I engage with anybody else, I’m going to do to ground myself so that I have the capacity to just be present. So then I can offer that compassion. I think then when we have cared for ourselves, even in a micro moment, even in a breath, then it’s like, OK, I have that a little bit more empathy that you’re struggling too. And then I can offer compassion when I offer compassion and also feel good. Right. Like that promotes that part of our brain that goes, oh, it feels good to give love and kindness as opposed to more agitation and frustration. 

And then when I’m offering it to you, I can get that sense back to me again. It’s like, oh, this feels good again. And there’s more room for that next breath. And then I think it’s just the promotion of love and an upward spiral rather than getting stuck in those downward spirals because it’s so easy to do that.

Michelle [00:19:37]

It is, and as you’re describing it, it’s quite possible to turn that into an upward spiral in the way we can interrupt. That is by giving ourselves what we need to taking care of ourselves or by taking care of the other person, just not biting the hook of reactivity when they’ve done something that’s distressing. And to really recognize that that’s coming from a place of their pause was too short. They’re distressed. Yeah. Not necessarily about us, right?

Lisa [00:20:11]

Yeah. And most of the time it’s never about us. You know, in these in these relationships, it’s usually about some things going on for them. And when we have enough capacity to hold space and just be like, you know, whatever’s going on for you, I’ll just hold this because I can care for myself at this moment. And when I’m ready to offer you some empathy, your compassion presence, then we tend to have a better relationship. And so this is why I think especially in schools, because we’re as educators, we’re sitting there with many little beings in front of us all who are different levels of agitation at any given time. And we’re picking up on all these energies. And so if we don’t have a core practice of of just really recognizing how we’re, you know, empathetically picking up everybody else’s feelings, that we can hold that and then be like, all right, I’m going to just really be my authentic and kind self right now so I can be present with all these other little beings. It starts with such a foundational practice for ourselves first.

Michelle [00:21:11]

Absolutely, you use the term empathy and you use the term compassion, and earlier you said that compassion feels good, but I think a lot of people are confused about those two terms and also confused about whether or not compassion feels good. Could you say a little bit more about the relationship between empathy and compassion and why it is that compassion feels good?

Lisa [00:21:36]

Yeah, totally. Well, empathy is the idea of feeling with or understanding another person’s emotions. And so when someone is struggling or feeling agitated or frustrated and I’m empathetically resonating with them, which means I’m feeling what they’re feeling, I’m also going to be agitated or frustrated because I know that feeling. And what that does is it actually triggers a part of our brain that creates a stress response, really. It can create that cortisol and the things in our body that we don’t want to really feel. So we can sometimes get upset just by noticing that someone else is upset. This is the idea of empathy. We sort of feel what other people are feeling. 

Compassion is, is that I see that you’re struggling and I know that it’s hard that you’re feeling it. But I have this more of a desire to alleviate or be with you or just to recognize that it’s hard what you’re going through right now. And it actually triggers a whole different part of our brain. And it’s connected to our what’s called our prefrontal cortex, the top part of our brain. And the nice thing about compassion, it’s sort of like empathy plus love. It’s like I feel what you’re feeling, man, but I’m going to just offer a little love with that. And it releases a different type of hormones in our body. We get more of the love feelings in our body with that. And so many of us have been taught, especially in education, we’ve been taught that empathy is a really important experience that we need to have with our people, with our students, with our colleagues. In therapy, empathetically reasoning is important, but we don’t need to sit in empathy because empathy, as you know, is is really hard. And it’s that that beautiful transition from like I feel it, I know it, but I’m not going to stay there, I’m going to offer some kindness or love. I’m going to come into my compassion. 

And this is why compassion is such a great response for caregiver fatigue right now and why many people think it’s compassion fatigue is where we’re sort of more sitting in that constant feeling what everybody else is feeling. And if the whole world right now is in sort of a low grade stress response and we’re going to sit in that constantly and we’re going to constantly feel this empathetic fatigue, we’re going to feel it all the time if we give ourselves the permission to meet some of that with kindness, with love, with compassion. What we’re doing is we are it’s sort of like shifting our brain response to saying I don’t want to feel these hard things that are there, it’s OK, it’s not a bad thing, but I’m also going to just offer some love with that. And it helps our brain to to shift into a more positive experience.

Michelle [00:24:17]

Yeah, because whichever is stronger, I mean, one of the things the one of the ways I like to think about it is, you know, there’s the empathic distress, the feeling the painful feelings of the other. And then there’s you said, as you said, empathy plus love. So then there’s the love piece of it. So when the love is stronger than the empathic distress, the overall feeling we come away with is the feeling of loving somebody which feels good, as you’re saying. Right. And so that’s one of the ways that we can really help to to buffer the stress that we ourselves feel, the stress that of the people around us buffer. Our experience of that is really to increase our capacity to hold ourselves and to each other with that love or compassion that that wish that you’re important and I care about you and what can I do to help.

Lisa [00:25:15]

And just I just makes my heart just like feel so open when you say it like that. Because what if we all just said, what? What can I do to help? How can I how can I meet where you are and offer love. Right? But a different world that we would perhaps have less of that fatigue if the help came from a place of love, as opposed to maybe resentment from all the care that we’re constantly showing up with.

Michelle [00:25:41]

Exactly, yeah, exactly, and there’s this other piece too, this other piece that we’ve sort of danced around a little bit, which is the power of the relationship in achieving outcomes. So as a therapist, I can tell you that there’s been a lot of research about psychotherapy. You know, we have this model and that model and the other model, theoretical orientations, the ways in which to approach things. But what they find is across models, the most powerful predictor of a positive patient outcome is the therapeutic relationship. People need to know that we care about them.

Lisa [00:26:24]

Exactly the same in a classroom. Kids won’t learn from somebody they don’t like or trust or feel seen by. Yeah, so, um, exactly.

Michelle [00:26:36]

So what would you say about the relationship between, caring for ourselves and being able to… engage in, foster the relationships with the people that we are working with, whether that’s professionally as a teacher or as a therapist, as a doctor or as a whatever it might be, or whether that is personally as a mom or a dad or a grandma or a dog owner or, you know? There are so many caregiving roles that we play.

Lisa [00:27:10]

Totally. And I think I think the most important thing with relationships is that when we show up from an authentic, present, loving space, those relationships are more authentic and loving and easier to connect with. And when we are tired and overwhelmed and maybe not at our best, we tend to make more you know, there’s more pains in those relationships. It’s harder. We’re not giving we’re not meeting them at our best selves. And so when we have the opportunity to really tend to ourselves and or be aware of what’s going on, we have more of an opportunity to recognize that when those relationships are struggling or I see that, you know, I have a colleague right now who’s really overwhelmed. Well, I’m overwhelmed, too. But what can I do to, you know, help myself so that when I’m ready to go and settle in and chat with my colleague who is really struggling, it’s not going to come from a place of resentment or frustration or anger or maybe I’m not going to shame. 

Instead, what I’m going to do is just hold that. And I think that the more we take the time to build our own presence, then we have the opportunity to really see other people. And as you said, people want to be seen and heard and they want to feel important. And the growth of a relationship is when we continue to celebrate each other and whether that’s in a personal or professional relationship, people want to know that they’re important. And so it’s really hard to do that when we are we have very little left. So, you know, filling our own cup up, taking the time to really make sure that we are coming into any relationship with an ability to just sort of be present, I think is really, really key.

Michelle [00:29:07]

Yeah, absolutely, there’s something for me, too, about this, like the negativity bias and how we naturally notice what’s not going well in our environment versus noticing what is going well. You know, Parker Palmer, a teacher of teachers, tells the story of I think it was substitute teaching and the class was going pretty well. But there was one kid in the back that he wasn’t reaching. And gradually over the course of the class, his focus narrowed down to that one kid that he wasn’t reaching. You know, he tells the story beautifully and there’s a good outcome later. I won’t kind of share that. But there’s something there, too, I think, about being able to pause and to notice not just what isn’t going well, not just what’s stressful, but intentionally pausing and taking in the good, as Rick Hansen would say, because that’s a resource for us as well.

Lisa [00:30:22]

Yeah, I think that’s so important, I actually one of the activities I often do with teachers in one of my workshops is, you know, it’s sort of a practice and just this and gratitude and taking in the good. But I’ll say to them, find a colleague and for three weeks at school, find three things every day that are going well and text each other. And it’s simply a practice around creating a positive culture within our classrooms. Again, because just as you said, we’re so good at, you know, getting through our days and then noticing the one thing that went wrong. And what I was what I try and do with the classroom teachers and the educators that I work with is say, you know, just like Parker Palmer says, you focus in on that one thing, well, you are missing the other twenty six or twenty seven students in your classroom that are gaining so much from you. And what if instead of, you know, and there’s a desire to help, but there’s also a desire to see the gains that we have done and we forget sometimes to do that right? That we focus on all the things that we should do or that we have to do more of, or that we could do better, especially in this caregiving relationship. Right. Like we feel like there’s this capacity to always have to do more. 

And what if instead of coming from that scarcity mindset, we sort of shifted it more to a bit of an abundance of like look at how far we’ve come and look at all the good things. And so, you know, I love that practice of find a colleague, somebody in a school that you work with, that knows your students and knows your your culture and find three things every day in your school that went well and text each other. And then what we do is we find ourselves looking for them too, right, or heads up or not, you know, constantly looking down at the things that we’re struggling with, but we’re having to sort of pick up our chin and say what what is going well, what can I pay attention to in this moment? What can I be grateful for?

Michelle [00:32:11]

Mmm, I love that, as you’re talking about that I’m also thinking that in your whatever environment you’re in, so for teachers, the classroom, you know, could you have three positive anchors? Could you identify three positive anchors in your room? For example, I love that piece of artwork that’s on the wall, that tree outside my room is is in bloom, whatever it might be. So that each day or when a distress arises, you go back to those three things, those three anchors.

Lisa [00:32:45]

I love that. I love that grounding practice of just having something to see that makes me feel, you know, maybe not joyful, but at ease for a moment. Maybe it’s that reminder of I get to take that in breath in as we started with. Right. That maybe even in this moment, even when it’s challenging and I see so many struggles, but I get to find something that will anchor me to remind me, to take a breath, to care for myself, even if it’s just for a moment.

Michelle [00:33:12]

Yeah, and I think this is the way that we we resource ourselves, you know, I love Frank Ostaseski in his book, The Five Invitations, one of them is find a place of rest in the middle of things. And I think that’s really what we’re pointing to here, is how do we find a place of rest in the middle of things? Yeah.

Lisa [00:33:43]

Yeah. Create space to just notice things for within you and around you. Right. And then I think just adding to that, where you can then soften and be gentle with yourself, where it feels safe to just take a moment to be.

Michelle [00:34:00]

Right, to just take a moment to be. And, and kind of hold yourself with that kindness and warmth and understanding that you would hold a good friend with.

Lisa [00:34:11]

Totally.

Michelle [00:34:12]

So, Lisa, as we’re talking about this and it’s such a great topic and thank you so much for coming on and being willing to talk about it, I’m really reminded of your book, Self Compassion for Educators. And I’m curious, how did you come to write that book?

Lisa [00:35:18]

Oh, this was such a journey for me in my own personal practice and just working with educators for so many years around well-being, I started to really recognize the need. For self compassion as a practice for educators I’ve seen over the last decade or so, as mindfulness has been growing as a practice in schools, and what I found is that educators are really keen to teach it and to bring it in. And then there was sort of this. And then what? Right. Like I’m aware now, what do I do with it? Because I’m still, you know, burning both ends of of the stick and I’m still overwhelmed. And I’m trying to bring in a practice, but I am still being really critical and on myself. 

And I was seeing this more and more with educators and I had the privilege to actually learn some self-compassion. And one of that learning was from you, Michelle, was amazing. And I realized that there is a world out there of educators who are typically highly anxious, struggling with perfectionist tendencies, really critical of what they’re doing because they’ve been trained to do that for scanning their classroom and to improve their students. And I thought we need to be reminded that we get to be kind just as kind to ourselves, just as gentle with ourselves, be just as fierce with ourselves around some boundary setting, as we are with our students. And so I wrote this book really with this permission and reminders to the to the educators out there, they might my invitation with all of it, as you know, all this, you just need to be reminded that you get to put yourself first.

Michelle [00:37:01]

Lovely. Thank you so much. It’s been just such a pleasure to talk with you, Lisa. Thank you for being with with us today.

Lisa [00:37:11]

Well, I was grateful for your time, Michelle, and I’m always happy to talk with you. So thank you very much.

Michelle [00:37:17]

Oh, such a pleasure. If you’d like to know more about the programs Lisa offers, you can find her on her website. Lisa Baylis, dot com. That’s L I S A B A Y L I S dot com. And if you want to know more about her work on self compassion for teachers, I highly recommend her book, Self Compassion for Educators.

You can learn more from her by taking an eight week online mindful self compassion course or explore a half day AWE retreat. That’s all for today’s Well Connected Relationships podcast, thanks for being here! If you’d like to get our notes on the highlights of this episode, along with the simple practice you can use to go from empty to effective, please join our well connected relationships community on the Wise Compassion website. I’ve got so much more in store for you, so be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss a thing.