Welcome to episode six of Angela Watson's Truth for Teachers.

I'm your host Angela Watson and I'm here to speak life, encouragement, and

truth into the minds and hearts of educators and get you energized

for the week ahead.

Today I'm going to share some thoughts on how to stop being overly critical of yourself.

Welcome to the show.

I want to start by thanking you for listening

and encouraging you to leave a review for the show.

Podcast reviews are super important. The more reviews we have,

the more easily discoverable the show will be and the more teachers will be able to

reach and inspire. You can visit truth for teachers.com to learn more. So our topic for

this week is how to stop being overly critical of yourself. This is a problem that a lot of teachers struggle with for a number of reasons.

For one thing, teaching is an important job.

When we make mistakes or we fall short, those areas have the potential to impact kids' lives in a negative way.

And that is a huge burden to carry.

And on top of that, many teachers are by nature perfectionists. We want things done right. We have

high standards for ourselves and we tend to get mad at ourselves when we don't meet those

standards. And so we get trapped in this cycle of

falling short of our expectations or other people's expectations and beating ourselves up about it.

In order to understand how to break free from that cycle, it's important to understand

a little bit about what I call self-talk. Every single one of us has an ongoing internal monologue or

conversation that's playing in our minds and this self-talk typically

...