Article Five Essential Resilience Practices for School-Based Professionals
Kristen Esposito Brendel
Due to the increased stressors and demands experienced by school-based professionals (SBP) since the onset of the pandemic, districts have been devoting in-service days and creating professional development opportunities to support staff’s self-care, stress-reduction, and resiliency. A silver lining to the pandemic is that many districts plan to continue this precedence indefinitely. I’ve been working with several districts, facilitating a variety of stress-reduction trainings for staff and parents during the current academic year. The trainings included five essential sustainable self-care and resilience practices based on my upcoming book. Sustainable self-care is the process of cultivating awareness of one’s state of being and responding with intentional care, non-judgment, and kindness. What makes it sustainable is that it can be practiced throughout the day, with limited resources, and the methods provide short- and long-term resiliency and stress reduction effects. The sustainable selfcare practices presented here include the Window of Tolerance, STOP, non-judgment, SAND, and setting valuebased boundaries. These five practices are tailored to the needs of SBP and can apply to any setting. SPRING 2021 | VOLUME 67 | NUMBER 1 | PAGE 50
