Coping with stress: school leaders

In previous articles I have detailed exactly what is happening to our bodies when we are under stress. An understanding of the physiology of stress is vital if we are going to survive in a sector that is regularly in the top three of most stressed employees. Building on this foundation of scientific knowledge it is time to ask: What can we do about it?

The principles of good health are known to all, even if they are not universally followed: a balanced diet, appropriate levels of exercise, not smoking, modest alcohol intake, good sleeping patterns and satisfying personal and social relationships will all help to reduce the impact of stress on your physical and mental health.

This is all well and good if you have the time to make healthy food choices or visit the gym twice a week. Often we don’t. If you are lucky you might just have time to grab a pie and a packet of crisps from the corner shop between the end of the staff meeting and the beginning of the governors’ meeting. Rest and relaxation means stopping off at the off licence on the way home to grab a bottle of wine and big bar of chocolate before crashing out in front of the telly for an hour ahead of another sleepless night thinking about the budget. We just don’t have time for a healthy lifestyle!

Valuing your time
Time is a strictly limited resource – we all have 168 hours in a week. The fact that some people seem to manage to get things done and have time to relax is not down to how they manage their time – it is down to how they manage themselves. Talking about time management is a misnomer; what we really need to talk about is self-management.

Valuing your time means identifying the aspects of your life that you value most and prioritising them. If you really value your role as a headteacher more than your personal wellbeing and more than your partner or children then by all means spend every waking moment at school. The different aspects of our lives are all competing for the same limited amount of time each week. In order to reduce the stress that this induces we need to think about what we value and organise our lives around these values.

Some stress management people talk about our values as ‘big stones’. Imagine you have a pint glass and some piles of stones and gravel and are challenged with the task of fitting all the materials into the glass. If you simply pile the stones and gravel haphazardly into the glass it will overflow and you will have failed. Place the big stones in first, however, and then you can sift the gravel into the gaps around the big stones – and fit everything in.

When planning your week place the ‘big stones’ first. If you value your relationship with your own children schedule time to spend with them before scheduling anything else. Timetable an hour to help your son with his homework or to attend your daughter’s school play – and make absolutely certain nothing stops you doing these valued activities.

Block out in your diary important meetings, time when you are teaching, a swim on the way home from work one day. Once you have placed your big stones, the things you value most in your life or the things you have no choice about, you can fit the other stuff in around these.

Each week make a list of smaller jobs that you can fit in when you have a spare 10 minutes because a visitor you were expecting is running late.

Just one more thing about what we value. If work isn’t near the top of your value list just remind yourself that it pays the mortgage and puts food on the table! We might not ‘like’ our work in the way we would ‘like’ to spend a weekend in Prague with our closest love, but you have to admit we do value the fruits of our labour. If you prioritise and schedule your working day tasks at the beginning of each week according to their value for the children in your care you will find that certain aspects of a headteacher’s workload can be delegated or even discarded. If it ain’t of value, don’t do it!

Urgent and important... or not?
One of the greatest challenges to this form of self-management is when something comes along that you just have to do. You have scheduled a swim on the way home from school and you plan to leave early, but just as you are walking out the door the caretaker catches you and complains that his floor polisher has packed up and he needs a new one. Urgent and important or not? Probably not – ask him to give the hall floor a sweep and arrange to meet in the morning to discuss the matter further. Go and have a swim!

What if the caretaker comes running up to you shouting about a major flood in the upstairs boys’ toilet threatening the newly refurbished library downstairs? Forget the swim, just rescue the books! Sounds like common sense? It’s not. Ask yourself how many times you have reacted to something as if your life depended on it when actually you could have dealt with it in the morning.

In the final article on stress we will consider the cognitive dimension – how the way we perceive stressors and our ability to cope with them can be turned to our advantage.

Read Steve's other articles on stress:

• Coping with stress: the long-term impact
• Coping with stress: situations and contexts
• Coping with stress: the physical and mental effects