The Confidence to Say "No"
At the end of June this year, I was exhausted. Not incredibly uncommon, I know - after all, I'm a music teacher and performer, and May and June are full of performance opportunities for my students (and for me)! The school year is winding down and students are more easily distracted, so it's a bit harder work to teach them than usual. And of course it didn't help that we were in the beginning stages of planning an out-of-state move and a ton of travel over the summer. But to be honest, while all of those things exacerbated the problem, the main reason I was so exhausted was that I hadn't really had a full, planned-for day off since January. There was the occasional day when all my students on a given day would cancel and I'd suddenly have no teaching work to do, but there was always a webpage to update, a blog post to write, social media content to post, schedules and accounts to update, etc etc etc. So I would usually take some of that unexpected "fre