EA Guilt

The guilt about taking annual leave.

The guilt about being off sick.

The guilt about needing a doctor’s appointment in the middle of the day.

The guilt about leaving early because your child has a school event.

The guilt about simply being unavailable.

And the irony?

We bend over backwards to make sure our Principals can do all of those things without giving them a second thought.

We move meetings so they can attend the school play.

We protect time for the dentist appointment.

We quietly rearrange an entire afternoon because they need to deal with something at home.

We make sure their holiday is protected.

If they’re unwell, we cancel, rearrange, field the questions and create the space they need to recover.

That’s our job. And we’re very, very good at it.

But when it’s us? Suddenly there’s a knot in the stomach.

“Is this a bad time?”

“There’s so much going on at the moment.”

“I’ll keep an eye on my emails.”

“You can WhatsApp me if it’s urgent.”

“I’ll just get everything sorted before I go.”

Sometimes (usually) we work twice as hard in the days before annual leave so that nobody experiences the inconvenience of us actually taking annual leave.

And I wonder whether, somewhere along the way, being indispensable became tangled up with being valuable.

Because when your role is built around anticipating needs, removing obstacles and making someone else’s working life run smoothly, your own needs can start to feel like obstacles too.

They’re not.

Being a brilliant EA doesn’t mean creating a working environment in which your absence causes no inconvenience whatsoever.

It doesn’t mean never being ill.

It doesn’t mean scheduling your life around everyone else’s.

And it certainly doesn’t mean earning your annual leave by exhausting yourself before you take it.

Perhaps one of the most important things we can learn as experienced EAs is this:

Our job is to create resilience around our role, not dependence upon our constant presence.

We deserve the same protected time we work so hard to create for everybody else. The same permission to be ill. The same space to have families, appointments, emergencies, holidays and lives outside work.

We are extraordinarily good at giving other people permission to be human. Maybe it’s time we extended the same courtesy to ourselves.

These are lessons I’ve learned the hard way over the past 2 weeks – and if I’m honest they’re tough lessons to learn and even tougher to implement!