Giving Yourself a Pass
By Melissa Wehler
As faculty developers, we are keenly aware of the importance of self-care for educators. In fact, at the very beginning of the pandemic, I wrote a blog post about how important self-care would be for educators during COVID Spring. Now that we're heading into an uncertain fall semester, I'd like us to revisit self-care in the time of COVID.
An important part of self-care is giving yourself grace. Creating a self-care routine is hard. Sticking with a self-care routine is harder. And it can be easy to beat up on ourselves when we come up short of our expectations. But it can be just as easy to give ourselves grace, write ourselves a pass, and promise ourselves to try again.
As I've shared with our community, I'm a perfectionist. It's difficult for me to let go of a project when I feel like it's not meeting my standards. I've worked on a five-minute presentation for eight hours more than once. I've scrapped a course the weekend before launch. I've deleted an entire course in the middle of a build. And once the frustration had worn off and I was faced with restarting, I realized I should have just walked away, taken a breath, and wrote myself a pass.
This upcoming semester, you may feel like I've felt in these moments, and I want you to know that it's okay to write yourself a pass. Writing ourselves a pass isn't about being okay with mediocrity. It's about being okay with being a lifelong learner and about being someone who is growing and developing themselves and their pedagogy. It's about giving ourselves grace. It's an act of self-care.
What is something you can write yourself a pass for in the fall?
If you'd like more of this kind of support and resources, join our Fall-on-Call program!