How to Stay Positive About Teaching but Avoid Toxic Positivity

Hey, Teachers!

Are you struggling with negativity in your teaching world?

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We can't ignore the "real stuff" that hurts us as teachers. The industry is rough and doesn't care about our worth as individuals or human beings, in many schools and many situations.

How can you stay positive about teaching while avoiding the pitfalls of toxic positivity? 😣

Following are THREE WAYS YOU CAN LOOK AT POSITIVITY that might keep you in the teaching game longer than you may have imagined possible.

 1. Define "Toxic Positivity" and How It's Affecting You Personally

Have you ever engaged in a conversation at work with colleagues or administrators and their positive attitude didn't seem to match the truth of the teaching environment? We could also call this denial. Often, our colleagues and administrators continue with "business as usual" because identifying the elephant in the room is too frightening, too challenging, or too demanding. Keeping the "status quo" intact  and keeping things moving hour to hour are more important than being honest about what's really going on and having the courage to address it.

And you know that's damaging. Because talking about things as if they are better than they are is a lie. 

Toxic positivity in short, is an over-emphasis of goodness and positive thinking that strips a teacher of our integrity and the acknowledgement of what's truly wrong, upsetting, or difficult. If we don't acknowledge what's hurting us and making teaching stressful and nearly impossible, we can't really move forward to investigate solutions to the problems.

Toxic positivity ignores the pain. That won't get you anywhere.

AND GET OUT OF THE "COMPLAINER CIRCLES". Avoid jumping into conversations where you are nothing more than a teacher commiserating with other teachers.

That's definitely toxic.

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2. Define "Necessary Positivity" and How This Will Sustain Your Career

What I'm calling "necessary positivity" is the positivity that enables us to handle the demands of education over the long haul.  Necessary positivity is what sustains a multi-decade teaching career. 

The basic tenets of NECESSARY POSITIVITY that have gotten me through 30 years of teaching are:

• ✅ After allowing yourself to have your feelings, to have the tears, frustration, grief, anger, and any other tough emotion surrounding the challenges and heartache of being a classroom teacher, set your personal boundaries for how long you'll let yourself stay this emotional and bedraggled by bad circumstances. Why are you giving away your internal control and centeredness?
• ✅ Avoid punishing students for what's going wrong at the school building or in their home lives; instead, focus on the opportunities you have with students each and every day (even if they are making it near impossible to reach them).
• ✅ Reinforce your personal teaching philosophy as much as possible on the job; the more you can infuse your own personal belief system as a professional, the better for your sense of self as an employee in this industry.
• ✅ Remind yourself why you chose this profession; during the super rough school years, it's important to be able to see the forest for the trees; in other words, don't allow the burdens, targeting, gossip, backbiting, unfair evaluations, and ridiculous policies you didn't vote for destroy why you wanted to work with kids.
• ✅ LET THINGS GO whenever you can and as often as you can; it's not worth holding onto grudges, ruminating over what you can't control, complaining every day, or asking yourself the same circular questions about the nature of K-12 and how it isn't changing fast enough; recognize the system isn't going to change--YOU HAVE TO.
• ✅ Practice using positive affirmations even when you aren't feeling much is going right.
• ✅ Find friends who are having an okay school year, and learn from them.
• ✅ Don't sweat the small stuff, and stop blaming yourself for not knowing something or making an honest mistake.
• ✅ Avoid drawing attention to yourself for the wrong reasons.
• ✅ Celebrate small (or big) wins with kids, staff, or admininstration.

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3. Recognize the Difference Between Positivity That's Damaging and Positivity That Works

From a language perspective, "positivity" can have both negative and positive connotations!  By all means, never, never, never be so positive that you create a falsehood of who you are or what you need. That would be detrimental to personal and professional growth. But always, always, always, emphasize the good in what you are doing on a daily basis with students, even if you can barely see your efforts blossoming into good outcomes... 

This is paramount to sustaining a lifelong career in education.

Our emphasis, focus, center of attention--whatever we call it--is STUDENTS. 

And we can't lose ourselves in that process. 

So, essentially, maintaining a positive stance on the job means learning how to manage the job as a balancing act. 

It's okay to have bad days.

It's okay to take sick days or personal days when you're not sick or don't have a real appointment to go to. ALL TEACHERS NEED A BREAK for our own mental health and well-being. And without having to explain to someone else why we're not at school that day. (If your school has no subs and you have to go in sick, ask yourself how many times you're going to do this again...set those boundaries and stick to them.)

Positivity that's damaging is the kind that asks you to pretend things are better than they are.

Positivity that's necessary is the kind that asks you to assess your situation and look for ways to improve it. That's the POSITIVE ATTITUDE that will keep you in the game for several decades.

If we don't learn the resilience strategies or how to magnify and increase what IS working as a teacher, we will become threatened by the perils of the system, bad administration, and circumstances that make us go home feeling sick to our stomachs.

Positivity is more than a mindset. It's a way of living. Positivity puts optimism and opportunity at the forefront of our day-to-day.

We can't drive at night without headlights. 

Find the light that you can hold onto in the darkest of school realities. School years change. Supervisors change. Students change.

We have to be able to ride out the ugly stuff using a solid thinking approach that stabilizes us even when the ground is shaking and we feel like we might fall.

That's the positivity that keeps us strong and durable in a K-12 public school teaching career.

FIND NEW WAYS TO SUSTAIN YOUR TEACHING CAREER. BOOK YOUR FREE DISCOVERY CALL WITH DR. SHEA

And Snag Your: 5 WAYS TO STAY RESILIENT IN THE CLASSROOM FREE DOWNLOAD