Ignite Your Spark with Meg

Are you feeling drained, overwhelmed, or like you’re simply going through the motions in your teaching career? You aren't alone. In this episode of Nurturing Educators, Debbie sits down with Meg Gallagher—educator, coach, and founder of Ignite Your Spark—to explore how brain science and self-compassion can help us move from surviving to truly thriving.

Meg shares her journey from observing widespread teacher burnout during her 10 years of school visits to completing master's research on educator well-being. Together, they dive into the real-world pressures facing teachers today, the neurological traps that keep us stuck in overwhelm, and how small "micro-actions" can kickstart our motivation and protect our energy.

In this episode, we cover:

• Understanding "Lost Spark": What it actually looks and feels like when we drift away from our core values.
• The Neuroscience of Motivation: Why waiting to "feel motivated" doesn't work, and how the brain uses habits and prediction to save energy.
• Actionable Micro-Steps: Simple, daily habits—like pausing at the classroom door and practicing gratitude—to regulate your nervous system.
• School Culture & Leadership: How schools can create safe, belonging-focused environments that honor individual teacher well-being rather than using one-size-fits-all programs.
• Reframing Success: Letting go of the myth that everyone else has it all figured out.

Resources & Links Mentioned:

• Book: Belonging by Owen Eastwood
• Self-Compassion Research: Dr. Kristin Neff (self-compassion.org)

Connect with Meg Gallagher:

• Email: Meg@MegGallagher.co.nz
• Instagram: @igniteyourspark
• Facebook: Ignite Your Spark | Teaching and Learning with the Heart, Brain and Mind

Connect with Nurturing Educators:

• Socials: Follow us on Facebook and Instagram @nurturingeducators
• Subscribe: If you enjoyed this episode, please leave a rating or review and share it with a colleague who needs a little spark today!

Hosted by Debbie Ross
Find us on Instagram & Facebook: @nurturingeducators

For more information, guest recommendations, and sponsorship opportunities 
or to chat, please email: nurturingeducators@gmail.com or visit  www.nurturingeducators.co.nz

Thanks for listening! 

Transcript

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Debbie: Welcome to Nurturing Educators, the podcast that shares inspiring and insightful conversations with passionate teachers dedicated to education and well-being. I'm your host Debbie Ross. In each episode we will explore the personal stories, challenges and successes of educators from all walks of life. You'll hear practical tips and strategies to help them thrive both in the classroom and beyond.
Hi everyone, today we're joined by Meg. She's the founder of Ignite Your Spark and is an educator and a coach dedicated to using brain science and empathy to help us overcome burnout and also to reclaim our energy. Let's dive in and learn how to move from being simply surviving to truly thriving. Welcome Meg.
Meg: Kia ora, thanks for having me here.
Debbie: Would you like to tell us a little bit about yourself?
Meg: Yeah, I am a teacher and I'm passionate about education. I'm passionate about teachers, so that's the heart of me. I wanted to be a teacher from the time I knew what a teacher was and so I'm living my dream. I'm a mum and that's probably the best job I've ever had, and a fur mum—fur kid mum. I love my fur kids and am passionate about reading.
Finding my joy has been something that's been a bit of a project lately and stretching myself. So recently I just started doing adult ballet classes.
Debbie: How fun.
Meg: Very fun. I'm not graceful or elegant at all. I swear that I'm going to be walking around gracefully in another 10 weeks, but it's certainly fun at the moment. But I'm really big now on finding places where I can stretch myself and experience joy more because, you know, life's too short.
Debbie: Yeah. In your words, you talk about losing your spark. What does that mean?
Meg: So in terms of losing your spark, that's when you've lost your joy. For me, when I see people and when I know myself, when I've lost my spark, I've become disconnected from my core, from who I want to be, and so it feels like you're just going through the motions, but the joy is absent.
Debbie: And so what was the pivotal moment for you that really inspired you to launch your business, Ignite Your Spark?
Meg: So a number of years ago I was working in an organisation where I was travelling around schools a lot, and I'd been a teacher for a long time beforehand. What I noticed over the 10 years that I was travelling around schools was actually visibly noticing that teacher well-being was being eroded. You saw more people living off coffee, you saw more people wolfing down food, less talk in the staff room, fewer people in the staff room, people standing to eat so that they can move on, stressed faces, stretched energy—and so it became really obvious that there was something going on.
So I did my master's research into teacher well-being in 2017, and during that time we were going through an election cycle. I noticed just the nasty stuff that goes on in an election cycle to teachers and educators and about education. There was a primary teachers page that I was part of, and with all the tense conversation and antagonism going on in there, I just felt that there needed to be something else. So I started a page called Happy Healthy Teachers Matter, and it's still running to this day to offer an antithesis to the negativity and really focus on teacher well-being.
Then I felt that I needed to do more than just share some nice memes and positive quotes. So I moved into looking at coaching, and that's where Ignite Your Spark came in—that's the coaching arm of what I do.
Debbie: Why is it that so many teachers are really struggling to thrive at the moment?
Meg: Look, teaching is not an easy job. Honestly, if you're looking for an easy ride, don't teach because it's not. A long time ago when I was speaking about teacher well-being, I used to say I pride myself on being not a good example, but a terrible warning. The times I crashed and burned—it wasn't good. I gave everything to my classroom, everything to my kids, and I had nothing left for me or my other relationships.
It's a never-ending to-do list and we're dealing with human beings' growth—not only the human beings in our classrooms, but the human beings in their world and our colleagues. Then we've got ministry stuff coming at us, we've got stuff coming at us from the media, everybody's an expert on education, and so the pressure on teachers is huge. At the moment it's really, really huge. We're dealing with massive change whilst at the same time dealing with the impact of social problems.
Schools are a microcosm of the communities that they are part of, and so if people are struggling in the community, our kids are coming to school bringing those struggles with them. It's like bringing in backpacks full of boulders. Those poor wee guys are carrying that and we have to somehow try and help relieve that pressure on our kids so that we can do the job that we're actually employed to do, which is teaching them basics and helping them to grow.
It's really hard when everything else is coming at us. We have to be like gatekeepers for our tamariki to try and relieve them of the pressure that they're carrying so that they can learn, and that is huge. It's absolutely massive. We also have an ageing population of teachers, more female teachers dealing with the effects of perimenopause, and all sorts of things like that are added layers in lots of staff rooms and schools. So yeah, it's not an easy job.
Debbie: And so you said you did your master's with regards to brain science—what do you think is the biggest mistake we tend to make with how our brains handle motivation?
Meg: Yeah, motivation is a really interesting thing because often people think, "if I just push through, we just have to push through." So you've got two sides of it: one, you've got that "push through" mentality which isn't motivation, it's just hard work; and then the other side of it is we don't start until we feel motivated. Motivation doesn't come from inaction—it comes from some action, but really it comes from aligned action that's aligned with who you are, your values, and your core beliefs.
In terms of the brain, our brain is amazing. We've got a hundred billion brain cells each with the capacity to make 10,000 connections. We are learning all the time, our brain is changing all the time right throughout our life cycle. It is phenomenal—a miracle, really. Every brain is completely unique, but our brain is also designed to be really efficient with its energy, so it's kind of lazy as well.
Rather than examine beliefs or do things differently to what we normally do, the brain will go to habit first because it takes less energy. Habitual pathways of thinking often get in the way of our motivation—that's our core beliefs. Some people hold these core beliefs about motivation where we think that we have to have certain things in place before we can do something, so we don't do anything and get stuck in procrastination. Or we believe that we need to feel good, or that being mean to ourselves will help us get motivated—we let our inner critic loose and she starts going at us.
Motivation comes from taking small action. Often a small action will lead us to new energy because when you take action, you get a wee hit of dopamine. It feels good, so you're more likely to take more action. But getting into taking action can sometimes be really hard if you've got an old underlying belief saying "you're not good enough." You are far less likely to take a risk because you already feel like a failure. These are old beliefs that we need to examine, but it takes effort to do that and get started. Sorry, I probably burbled a bit!
Debbie: Oh, I love that—take that small action. If you're a teacher feeling completely drained and feeling really worn out, what would be a tiny small action that they could take to help them move forward?
Meg: Something like changing the sheets on your bed, tidying up a small pile of books sitting on a table that are annoying you, or going outside and taking three beautiful deep, lung-filling breaths in the fresh air. Stretch, stop and drink a glass of cold or warm water—whatever works for you—but actually stop, sit down, drink, savour, and be present in the moment.
Debbie: Yep, and take that moment back.
Meg: Honestly, we're so busy. We can fill six days with what we've got right now, but taking that breath or taking that little time out gives us more time in the end because it frees our minds, stops the continuous overthinking, and actually enables us to just be here. Then we just do the next thing rather than trying to do the next 20 things.
Debbie: I like that. Yeah, and it helps the overwhelm, doesn't it? Starting small and doing just a few small things takes the overwhelming feeling out of it and makes it more achievable.
Meg: Yeah, just one thing. If we work on just one thing at a time... often when people come into my coaching, they go, "Okay, this is what I want," and they've got this massive list of who they want to be and where they want to get to. It's kind of like, "Whoa, back up—let me just pick one." Because you're actually setting yourself up for failure when you've got a massive list.
We all know what we should be doing, but we don't do it for a variety of reasons, and that "should" becomes a burden that we start carrying: "I should be doing this, I should be doing that." Then you decide you're going to change everything tomorrow because you "should" be better. That's setting you up for failure, and that's actually going to reinforce an old belief that makes you feel stink. So we're better to do just one thing.
Debbie: How do we know when we've drifted away from our core values?
Meg: When you don't feel aligned. When you feel like something's off, or you feel wrong in your skin, or you do things that don't look, sound, or feel like the person you want to be. When you hear yourself say something and you think, "Oh, I don't like that, that's not who I want to be"—that's when you know you're moving away from your core values.
Debbie: So when you get to that space where you feel stuck, what's happening with the brain there?
Meg: Sometimes it's about being stuck in fight-or-flight mode. Like I said before, our brain is really keen on saving energy. If we're using heaps of energy on overthinking—which is just looping old stories that may not even be true around in our brains—then there's less in the tank to give to other things, creating a sense of stress.
The brain is a prediction-making machine, which is also about saving energy. Rather than assess this situation right here, right now in front of me (particularly if we're not present, and you can't be present if you're overthinking), it goes, "Okay, what are the other times when I've felt like this?" and it assumes that's what's going to happen. This all happens subconsciously, and you end up rolling out an old routine or habit.
The brain sees those times of overwhelm as stress and reacts like it would to a sabre-tooth tiger leaping into the room—our brain hasn't evolved that much, that quickly. So our hearts start racing and our breathing changes to get oxygen to the large muscles so you can fight or flight. When you're in that state, you can't think clearly because your resources are going to survival, not to thinking creatively or finding new solutions to old problems.
When we're running through loops of old behaviours, pressing pause is really important. When we notice ourselves carrying stress like the kids with their big backpacks and boulders, that's a signal from our body saying, "Hey brain, we need to have a bit of a sit-down, we're going to have to do something different here." "Stuck," if you tune into your body, can actually be a wonderful signal to say: here's a time when I might need to do something different now, consciously.
Debbie: For those people who are passively waiting for change to happen, what can they do to actively own their growth?
Meg: Yeah, that's a really big thing. I think the first thing is a bit of self-compassion. As a teacher, in training other teachers, and working with teachers over the years, my experience tells me we're pretty hard on ourselves.
I think in part that's because there's so much out of our control, but we take it all on ourselves. A child comes in having had a really rough morning, has a rough day, and we feel like we've failed them, but we're only part of the world that they're living in. We have a massive to-do list and feel like we've got to get it all done, and if we don't, we feel bad about ourselves. We're always judging ourselves: "I could have done this better, I didn't do this..."
Self-compassion is really important. Kristin Neff, who is like the mother of the self-compassion movement, is a great person to look up—she's got a fabulous website. I think that's a really good place for us to start: connecting with yourself and being your own best friend. It might be as simple as writing down three things at the end of the day that went really well.
Debbie: Yes.
Meg: Just at the end of each day, three things that went really well or went okay—it doesn't even have to be remarkable.
Another couple of things we can do is just connecting. We're designed to connect and be with others, so connect with people that make you feel good. Try to avoid the ones that make you feel awful! Do those little things that bring us joy. Give yourself permission to do something that brings you joy—it might just be sitting down and actually enjoying eating chocolate rather than wolfing it down.
Debbie: So what can schools do to build a team culture that's actually protecting their staff well-being?
Meg: Yeah, that's a really big one and that's hard.
Debbie: It is hard.
Meg: Because for our school leaders, they're dealing with a whole lot of people with a whole lot of different personalities and needs, trying to juggle that with everything else coming at them. Nobody's having an easy time in education at the moment.
One of the core things that came out of my research—to save you actually having to read it, which is dreadfully boring!—was that happy, healthy teachers tend to have happier, healthier classrooms where kids do better academically, socially, and emotionally. There's a mountain of research out there that supports that.
My thing for school leadership is really to look at: what are the conditions that we can create? Not only school leadership, but staff as well, because everybody's got a responsibility in creating a place that's happy and healthy to work. Look at your team and ask, "What's going to make a difference for the people that we've got here right now with us?"
Generally speaking, it's not a one-size-fits-all programme. For me, I might think it's fabulous to get a dance teacher in and do ballet for a bit of fun, but I can guarantee several members of my team would find that living hell, so that would be no good for their well-being.
What came out when I did the research were the small moments of recognition, connection, and care aligned to the person. For one person, it was being given the afternoon off to go and see her son compete in athletics because a member of the school leadership team took her class, and she didn't have to plan for that. That meant heaps to her.
For another person, they got given $250 from the Board of Trustees to spend on well-being—they just had to prove it was connected to their well-being, whether it was a meal out with a loved one, fancy gym shoes, or a gym membership.
For another person, it was about a gift bag when she went into hospital. Those small things actually add up and make a big difference.
The other thing is being really clear that we've got clear values, and that the actions we take as a school are aligned with those values. Being curious about each other, getting clear on what's important, and being really efficient about how we use our time is essential.
Creating a culture of learning within your staff where it's okay to make mistakes, okay to be you, and where leaning on each other or supporting each other is our norm is vital. Often in education, teachers feel quite isolated: "These are my kids, this is my room, this is how we do things here." None of us were meant to do this on our own, but in team cultures where it feels unsafe, you go to the bit you can control and stay there, leaving you feeling isolated.
School leadership needs to notice that and try to break it down. There's a great book, Belonging by Owen Eastwood—he's a New Zealand coach who worked in high-performance sport, and he's got some really great strategies in that book to help leadership and teams create a strong sense of safe belonging so we can thrive.
Debbie: That's wonderful! We'll have to find out the surname and put it in the notes later on.
Meg: Yeah, I'll get that for you—Owen Eastwood.
Debbie: Just a couple of questions to finish off our chat today. What do you think is a non-negotiable in terms of daily habits that would be important to protect our energy?
Meg: For me, I've got two. One: I pause and breathe before I open my classroom door every time. If I have to go in and out of the door several times, yep, I do it every time because it helps me reset. It means when I walk into my classroom, I walk in fresh and am less likely to react, allowing me to respond thoughtfully if needed, which reduces stress and argy-bargy stuff.
The other thing is a gratitude practice. I belong to an online group where we put up three things we're grateful for each day. This is also something I use in my own home at dinnertime with my family. When you shift to an attitude of gratitude, it helps you notice the good things around you, even when things are hard.
Do you ever go for a walk and see those little plants growing up in the cracks of the concrete?
Debbie: Yeah, I love those.
Meg: Yeah, they always make me smile, and that's a bit like gratitude. Even though it's hard around you, there's always something beautiful in there. It doesn't mean the hard stuff isn't there or that it isn't hard, but it means there's still hope. In education, we're purveyors of hope—that's what we do. You don't turn up working in education without believing that something good is going to come from it. So a daily gratitude practice and an attitude of gratitude is hugely protective. Those are my two.
Debbie: I like them! And those little flowers also remind me of resilience—how the little flower, despite where it's coming up through, is still able to do that. It reminds me of how resilient human beings can be as well.
Meg: Yeah, absolutely.
Debbie: So if someone's light feels a little bit dim right now, what would be one little message that they could take away from this?
Meg: Just know that this too shall pass. A little story from me: one of the gifts my father left me when he passed away was a gift of perspective. I loved my dad very much and miss him every day, but he left me with this gift of perspective because now when I go through a hard time, I can ask: "Is this as hard as losing your dad?" The answer is invariably no, and I survived that, so I can survive whatever else is going on here.
Think about the record of the hard days you've gotten through so far—you've done pretty well! If you could do it then, you can do it now. So yeah, this too shall pass.
Debbie: Yes, it's very true. What's one myth about success you wish everyone would let go of?
Meg: That everybody else has got it sorted! Social media has exploded this whole idea that everybody's got it sorted.
I remember a long time ago working with a wonderful colleague whose teaching was amazing—it was like Disney on Ice, looking flawless and impeccable. I said to her, "Oh, you make it look so easy, and it's so hard." She replied, "Yeah, but I've been doing this for 20 years."
Just like the Olympians in a flawless three-minute performance, you don't see the hours and years of pain, preparation, practice, and work that went into that. You don't see them on their hard days or when they fell. Everyone goes through this process—we all have to go through "hard" to get to "easy."
Overnight success really isn't overnight, and everybody else does not have it sorted. They might have it sorted in one aspect of their life or today, but they'll have ups and downs. We need the ups and downs to have a rich lived experience; if we were just flatlining, that means we're dead! When things go wrong, that's where we build resilience and learning.
Don't believe that everyone's got it sorted, and don't believe you have to do this on your own either. Remember that we're part of a team and belong to a family of educators who want to make a difference in kids' lives. Don't be alone, because you're not.
Debbie: I think that whole having bad days and going through struggles is also a great way to connect with people facing similar difficulties, because you can be compassionate and empathetic with them since you know what it's like.
Meg: Yeah, absolutely! If you're a newer teacher, talk to your veteran teachers and find someone who's open, because guaranteed they will understand where you're at—they've probably been there before. Some of us several times!
Debbie: Great. I think that's the amazing thing about the teaching community—we are all going through the same stuff. If you can find your little group or community of teachers that can support you and help you grow, it's going to make such a difference for your mental well-being.
Meg: Absolutely!
Debbie: All right Meg, I think you have really given us some great things to take away and think about today. If this resonated with the listeners and they want to get in touch with you to find out more about your work or get support, how can they find you?
Meg: They can email me at Meg@MegGallagher.co.nz—that's probably the quickest and easiest way. I am on Facebook on two pages: Teaching and Learning with the Heart, Brain and Mind and Ignite Your Spark. I'm also on Instagram at @igniteyourspark.
Debbie: Great, and I will put this in the show notes as well so that people can refer back to it. But yeah, I just wanted to say it's been so great having you here today. Such a powerful reminder that reigniting your passion really starts with understanding your brain and taking those first little micro steps. Thank you for sharing everything with us today!
Meg: Not a problem! Thanks for having me, Debbie, and thanks for the work that you're doing—it's amazing.
Debbie: Thank you so much for listening! If you enjoyed today's episode, don't forget to hit the subscribe button, leave a review, and share it with your fellow educators. Let's keep these important conversations going. For more information, follow us at @nurturingeducators on Facebook and Instagram. Until next time, take care! 

This transcript was automatically created using AI technology. While reviewed for readability, minor inaccuracies may exist. Please refer to the audio for the official version.