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What's your "gap plan"?

Brene Brown introduces the "family gap plan" in the fourth episode of her podcast, Unlocking Us. This came about when she and her husband would argue when she would return home from traveling. It seemed like the minute she walked in, her husband would expect her to be ready for him to "tap out," where she could take over where he had been supporting the family. While she was away from home, this didn't mean that she was full of energy and at 100% the minute she walked in the door. She had been working too and was exhausted.

So, over time they began to name where they were at as people and as a family: I'm at 10%. I'm at 30%. They knew they needed a plan for when collectively she and her husband were not at 100%, but they needed to be for their family.

Beyond our personal lives, the idea of a "gap plan" got me thinking about our classrooms and schools. What happens when we are not at 100% or we know that our classrooms or students are not able to be at 100% ? For me, I think we can start by just doing these three things:

Knowing Where You Are
How many of us honestly take the time each day to check in with ourselves? Maybe during social distancing we have been doing a better job of this, maybe note. What would our mornings or days look like if we just took five minutes to take a deep breath and find out where we were that day? For me it's often a quick mental list of what I can control and what I can't, what my priorities are, and what I need to do for myself that day.

Communicating This Honestly
I think our students are always quick to tell when we aren't ourselves or if we are in a bad mood. Sometimes we have the honest student that will point this out, other times our short responses are meant to communicate this. Instead, what if we just modeled the result of our self check-in and borrowed Brown's language? "Class, I'm at about 50 today... Can you bring the other 50?" What if we communicated this to our office team or to our partners?

Finding a Way to Re-Charge
We need to be able to create time in our daily lives to re-charge. Maybe that's carving out more time for sleep like she suggests in the podcast. Maybe it's doing something for ourselves without guilt or reservation. It's okay to take the dog for a walk. It's okay to eat a quiet lunch. If we aren't at 100 and we aren't doing something that will get us back to 100, then it's a continuous cycle and it's not going to get better.

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