Early childhood educators dedicate their lives to nurturing and shaping young minds, but this demanding profession can take a toll on their well-being. Burnout is a persistent challenge, and it’s crucial to address it proactively.

In this interview, we speak with The Early Childhood Coach Anisha Angella, an expert in early childhood education and a passionate advocate for educator wellness. Anisha shares her insights on the causes of burnout, the importance of understanding it at a personal level, and practical strategies for prevention and recovery. She introduces the concept of a “burnout toolbox,” a personalized collection of resources and practices that educators can use to safeguard their mental health and reconnect with their passion for the field.

Whether you’re an educator, a center director, or an owner, this conversation provides valuable tools for creating a supportive and sustainable environment.

Anisha, what’s the big topic on your mind in the early childhood education space right now?

There are quite a few things that come to mind. I would say topic-wise, I think right now, all over in the industry, a lot of educators are playing a little bit of catch-up in the sense of, you know, burning out coming after COVID. Even though COVID seems like it was a long time ago, it’s still kind of around, but just playing catch-up a little bit. So, a lot of the conversations I find that I’ve been having within my community are around mental health and burnout and managing that. I do spend a lot of time in my space in conjunction with the burnout piece, but then also talking a little bit about reconnecting them with their “why.” That’s one of my favorite topics I like to do when I speak on stages and stuff is kind of reconnect people with their passion and their why for the industry, because a lot of us have lost sight of why we’re doing this, because there’s so many things that are happening to us in the industry that sometimes educators need that reminder of what their “why” is and recapturing that why. So, I find that those are my top two conversations for the educators.

You mentioned burnout. Did burnout exist before COVID, or was this just a big thing that COVID accelerated?

That’s a good question. So, burnout has always existed. I think what happened after COVID is that it made it ten times worse. Let’s just say that it made it ten times worse and a little bit more apparent in the educators, especially trying to bring them back into the programming, bringing them back into, you know, the realm of things. After COVID, it became more apparent.

I think also what’s happening in our industry, which I love, is that I’ve been in the industry for 17 years, and I can say that having conversations about mental health and burnout wasn’t really a thing. So now we’re almost normalizing the fact that educators are humans and we go through all of these things like crazy. And it’s about time that we’re starting to talk about it so that we can create methods to support educators. So, to answer your question, I feel like it’s always been a thing, but now we’re becoming more open to having the conversation of what actually is happening and how to support the educators, which I’m loving.

The topic seems to be fairly well-known. Do you think that understanding of burnout is at a good level with the people you are working with, the leaders who are working today?

That’s a great question. I think there’s multi-layers to that. So, the first thing that came to mind when I heard your question is that I feel like with burnout, everybody’s somewhat aware or has experienced it. But I think because burnout has become almost this famous trending topic, everybody’s placing the word on such an umbrella, more of an umbrella term just to kind of label how they’re feeling. “I’m burnt out.”

So, I feel like there is some understanding, but a lot of the topics and a lot of the things that I discuss when it comes to burnout are not just the level of understanding what burnout is. It’s also about understanding how it shows up in us, because one of the things that I realize is that burnout looks different on every single person. You can see somebody that looks like they’re okay, but they are really, really burnt out inside, and just helping people manage that.

I think when it comes to the leaders, I think the leaders are very well aware that, you know, educators are burning out because they’re burning themselves. Educators are not different from that. They’re also burning out themselves. But I find that the leaders are in this tough spot where they’ve got their day-to-day focus on, you know, the administrative duties and the parents and all of those things that they’re recognizing it, but they just don’t know how to support the educators through that.

So, a lot of the times when I work with leaders to kind of support educators when it comes to burnout is helping them give the educators tools to identify burnout with in themselves. So, giving them the power to be able to understand what burnout is, work on it independently, and kind of navigate through that, while the leader is kind of taking a background scene and saying, “Okay, here are the resources I have for you to help you navigate, but you have to do the hard work.” And I think sometimes as leaders, I do a lot of leadership coaching, too. We do a lot of, we want to take everything from everybody. We want to make it better.

But we’re also human as well. So, I think that that’s kind of the struggle that I’m seeing is just, you know, getting rid of the trending topic of burnout and really understanding the core, but then also helping leaders navigate and support educators to independently work through burnout on their own.

For someone who realizes burnout is a big topic, what’s a great way to start doing something positive?

By giving everyone the tools to look at how they’re doing themselves. Alongside that, I would say definitely, so one thing I talk about with leaders and educators when it comes to burnout is to create a toolbox. I talk about the burnout toolbox, and a toolbox is basically something you can grab at any time when you need it. You grab a wrench, you grab this, grab that at any time. I feel like burnout can be addressed in that way.

So, what leaders should be focused on is how they can support educators to create their own toolbox that they can open up any time they’re ringing on burnout’s door. And basically, how they can help with that is giving them the resources. So, like I get invited to come in and do, you know, coaching and workshops, leaders are organizing those opportunities, which are great, which is giving them the information to support things in their toolbox. But again, it’s taking out the elimination of the leaders feeling like they have to fix the burnout, right?

So, that’s one of the things that I would encourage leaders to do is help them build a toolbox and start having conversations. And just really, like I said, normalizing the conversation because I find a lot of educators when I’m coaching them and supporting them through that, some of them are still feeling like they don’t have a space to admit that they’re burning out. So, and it’s not intentionally that the leaders are not creating a space. It’s just that, as I mentioned, there’s so many things that they’re doing.

Just kind of having that finder out there to let them know that you do have a safe space to let me know what’s happening. And I’ll help you the best way I can, but just kind of having that opening space. But I think having that element and understanding of building almost like a toolbox, helping the educators build their own burnout toolbox and be actively putting things within their toolbox.

So, it could be simple things such as, you know, as I mentioned, doing workshops with your team or, you know, reminding them of the things that bring them joy. A lot of us haven’t had a really, really great laugh in a long time. But so anything that you can put in a burnout that you can really open up that toolbox. So, I think really helping leaders let educators know to build this toolbox, but then also empowering them to put things within it that will support them with burnout.

Can you share any tangible examples of things people have put in their toolbox that have surprised or delighted you with how colorful people’s thinking you’ve been around there?

Yeah, it can get really, really creative, which I love because I’ve got a workshop with a lot of people where we talk about what’s in your toolbox. I’ve seen people put things as simple as affirmation cards. They’ve got a set of affirmation cards. Whenever they’re feeling a little down, they pull a card, and they read it to themselves, and they put it somewhere.

It’ll be as simple as that. I have people that have connected with professional help, so maybe who’s in their toolbox is a therapist, maybe it’s somebody that they can talk to and actually work through a lot of that stuff. I have people that add podcasts, so there’s a lot of podcasts that are out there that you can listen on your way to work or on your way home from work that really excite you and get you really thinking about things as well.

I always encourage people to say, you know, figuratively more so like who is inside your toolbox? So, there’s certain people in our lives that just generally when you connect with them, you talk to them, you just feel a sense of refresh, right? And then there’s also mentioned there’s a couple of people in our toolbox that we need to take out, the people that are absolutely draining us and absolutely we need to build some distance, right?

So, that’s the thing I think a lot of educators talk about, it could be as simple as building boundaries. That’s what’s in their toolbox. A lot of them developing and understanding some boundaries they need to put in their lives professionally or personally to support them in working through burnout. So, it really can be anything. And I think what’s really great about thinking about burnout in terms of this toolbox is that it could really be curated to the person and what they need.

The idea of the toolbox is not for when it’s just happened. This is preparation for challenging times ahead. Is that correct?

Yeah, you nailed it. You nailed it. I always talk about discovering and talking about burnout, it comes in three phases in how it looks. There’s the understanding, there’s the prevention, and then there’s the recovery. So normally when you’re having a conversation about burnout, you’re looking at the recovery. When you’re already burnt out, you’re looking at what do I do?

And I think what I try to channel in and have conversations with, which is great that you mentioned that is starting to have conversations about burnout and the understanding and the prevention stage, and the toolbox would usually come in in the prevention stage. So now you understood what burnout looks like, the fact that it looks different on you and I and everybody else. And then we’re now stopping at the prevention phase because now we have, we have the toolbox.

So, we’re not focusing on how do we recover from burnout. We’re focusing on, “Okay, I feel this way, something’s a little bit off. I’m not myself. It’s time to open up my toolbox and see what’s in there.” So then I cannot get to the recovery, not need to get to the recovery phase. So absolutely, there’s a lot of planning that has to go about it, but really it’s just empowering the educators to really think that we need to start having converse and leaders. We need to stop having conversations about the prevention piece before we get to the recovery when it comes to them.

How quickly do teams get up and running with their toolbox after you’ve worked with them?

I would say a good percentage move with it very quickly because they’ve been really battling this whole burnout thing for a very long time. So, most of them are very eager to finally have, because they find a lot of conversations that are happening around burnout is just the basis of, you know, what is burnout. But it doesn’t really get into the actionable piece, which I definitely pride within my brand.

At the Early Childhood Coach, we really focus on not professional education, not just to be about the theory of what things are, but what you actually have to do and the actions need to take. So, I find that the majority of them take it, but I always remind educators because we are very, very prone to overwhelm ourselves because we want to do everything and be everything to everybody, especially the leaders. Us leaders are like that too, but it’s about taking it a step at a time. So, kind of reminding them to take the smaller pieces and doing that a step at the time.

But I would say a lot of educators and leaders grab into it right away once they get it because they’re finally looking for something that they can use as tangible to help them navigate this thing that has been around for years and years and years.

It sounds like COVID was a catalyst for a little bit of knowledge acceleration in this area. Do you think it’s fair to say that now there’s a little bit more resilience throughout everyone because of what’s happened recently?

I think there’s definitely a link. I definitely think that there, I think there’s several links that are happening, and I think that’s definitely one of the one of the links that we’re seeing for sure in the ECE community is that there’s, there’s a little bit of a build of resilience around everything that has happened for sure.

But I think a lot of people and a lot of people in the field are really connected to, there’s something that happened at COVID for everybody that kind of shook everybody to the core that got them really thinking about purpose. I think, and I’m having, I mentioned the other topic I talk about is finding your “why.” If I’m between the burnout and finding your “why,” those ones kind of mold in together. And I think a lot of people are focused on that.

And when you think about what your purpose is and your “why” is an early education and why you chose to be in the field, then it forces you to kind of reflect within yourself to say, “Okay, I know I have to be here, but how do I stay here?” And that’s by taking care of myself. So that’s one of the things that usually pop up. But I do think that there’s a little bit of a resilience piece that is that is linked to it for sure with educators. And I think like I mentioned, burnout has been a thing for years and years and years and years. And we’ve learned how to kind of put on a brave face and move forward with it in general because we know that what we’re doing, everything we do is for the children and for the families. But I think now we’re having, we’re not just covering it now we’re actually dealing with what that looks like. But there is a link of resilience for sure.

Where can people connect with you to learn more?

You can reach out to me at the early childhood coach, or connect on LinkedIn, Facebook or Instagram.

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