For this weekend engagement topic I was drawn to the topic of where I am on the spectrum between workaholic and relaxaholic. The reason this speaks to me is because I didn't use to be, but I have become a true relaxaholic out of necessity! So a topic that speaks to my heart and luckily nowadays I can be found relaxing more often, like here:
To give a bit of an intro: I used to be a real workaholic! I am a teacher in high school and it is one of those professions where you are never done, there are always parents to call, administration to fill in, classes to prepare and papers to grade. Now don't get me wrong, I love my job! But teaching is not a 9 to 5 job and if you do not limit yourself you will be working evenings, weekends and holidays. When I started teaching five years ago that is exactly what I did: I put in all my effort, worked late and worked weekends to get all my work finished and did all the extra school activities. Like visiting this school in Ireland to improve my teaching skills:
After two years I noticed what a lot of teachers notice: I was lacking in energy. Work was draining me, all I was doing was work. I realized that this happens to so many new teachers, they get burned out and often leave education all together. So I decided I needed to become a relaxaholic if I wanted to last. So I made sure that I cut out a lot of unnecessary things, make my admin as short as possible and accept that it would take me a bit longer to grade things. What I decided to do? I decided to put less focus on work and more focus on the things I enjoy!
One of the things I really love is climbing, so I decided to use my weekends to drive to Belgium (about 3 hours away) with friends to go climbing for the weekend. If I would leave friday after work and come home sunday evening I could have a proper weekend climbing and camping. And even though it meant I was super busy all my weekends, I quickly noticed that I had more energy than the weekends I spent working and at home. I got to spend my weekends doing fun things and I got to hang out with friends and both of these gave me more energy!
Besides that I also decided to keep my holidays completely school-free. For those of you that don't know one of the great things about teaching is lots of holidays! However, many teachers use those holidays to catch up on work. I decided that I wouldn't spend a minute of my holidays on work, I wouldn't check my emails and make sure that I had all my grading done before the holiday. That meant that I now had 12 weeks in a year to travel and do fun things. Last holiday we were on vacation for a full five out of six weeks and drove all the way from the Netherlands to Albania in an awesome road trip.
This picture was taken in Montenegro last summer. This was truly one of my best decisions, I have had amazing vacations and because I was totally switched off from work I really managed to enjoy them a lot more! Now that I am pregnant with our first one I am also looking forward to being focussed on her and on getting to spend time with our little family. So for me it made me really happy to let go of work and focus more on other things in life. Long live the relaxaholics!