Cultivating Wellbeing and Mindful Awareness for School Leaders and Aspiring Leaders

 

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This course has been designed to help school leaders and aspiring school leaders cultivate the skills, knowledge, and dispositions necessary to develop an effective and sustainable approach to leading in complex and demanding school environments through fostering awareness, resilience and wellbeing in self and in others.

 

Educational leaders have highly demanding careers  and typically report their jobs are so chronically stressful that they are often unable to renew and recuperate sufficiently .  Although research on school leaders highlights significant negative impacts of job related stress on physical health and performance , many feel ill-prepared for the conditions they face and burnout is all too common.  It is imperative that we are able to build the awareness, commitment and strength to keep ourselves at the center of our efforts, as both people and leaders.

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The training will introduce educational leaders to mindfulness-based practices that can improve professional competency and well-being through nurturing self-care, increasing self-awareness and developing more connected relationships. We will create the space for leaders to take a step back and share broad perspectives on how our school cultures function and on the actual, rather than the perceived, impact of schooling on students. This exploration will help us revisit the deeper purposes of education as we employ Systems Thinking ( and Theory U) approaches to uncover the unexamined concepts that drive much of our schooling processes. By combining this understanding with a cultivation of mindful awareness we can begin to build our capacity for sustainable leadership and learn to 'lead from the emerging future' instead of from the narrower, more constraining influences of the past.

 

Established leaders can augment their skill set through developing this more mindful awareness while younger educators embarking on a career in leadership can begin to cultivate this crucial area - the overlap of personal and professional development - that will help foster the lifelong grounding and sensitivity essential to being an effective, self-sustaining school leader.

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•      How can a coherent focus on wellbeing become a transformational factor in the overall development of our school culture and ecosystems?

•      What are the potential benefits of cultivating wellbeing and mindful awareness for our students, our teachers and our leadership skills and qualities

• Why is taking care of ourselves, as leaders, an essential aspect in this process?