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You are not burning out because you are bad at this job. You are burning out because no one trained you for the part of the job that actually breaks people, and because the story you have been telling yourself about it has gone unchallenged for years.
That story usually sounds like this: I am a failure. I can’t do this. I don’t have what it takes. It feels like an assessment. It is actually a habit, and habits can be rewritten.
Dr. Ilana Nankin and Beth Schreiber have both lived on the wrong end of that sentence. “Burnout was our story,” Ilana says, and between them they have spent more than a decade building the thing they needed and could not find: a practice set that treats the educator as the intervention, not the delivery mechanism. This episode hands you three of those practices and walks you through the hardest one live, on tape, with Beth as the volunteer.
The tools come from the Emotional Intelligence layer of the Human Intelligence framework. Feeling Finder gives you a way to locate the emotion sitting underneath the tight shoulders and the fast drive to school, before it starts making decisions for you. Story I Tell Myself surfaces the belief driving the feeling. Re-THINK Your Story takes that belief apart with five questions, asking whether it is true, helpful, inspiring, necessary, and kind, and then rebuilds it into one you can actually work from. By the end of the hour, the sentence that nearly ended Beth’s career has become something usable: I am feeling depleted right now, and I am deserving of refueling. Same starting point. Different life.
You will also get the reason any of this holds. Shame does not survive being spoken out loud to another person who has been there, which is why these practices are built for community rather than for willpower, and why Beth’s own school data shifted the way it did when she brought a handful of colleagues and her principal into a weekly practice.
Here are some of the best moments from the episode:
- Why Burnout Hits Teachers So Hard
- What Traditional Teacher Preparation Programs Miss
- The Healing Power of Community and Vulnerability
- Internal vs. External Obstacles: Shifting Your Narrative
- The Human Intelligence Framework vs. Artificial Intelligence
- Practical Tool 1: The “Feelings Finder” Practice
- Practical Tool 2: “The Story I Tell Myself” & The THINK Acronym
- Real Results: How 6 Weeks of Practice Flipped Stress & Satisfaction Data
Follow “A Work of Heart” on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube. Subscribe so you never miss an episode. And if it resonated, take 30 seconds to rate and review. It helps more educators find these conversations and reminds the algorithm that teachers matter.
