About
About Animo
Animo is Latin. It means breath, spirit, and courage.
That is exactly what this is for: a place where people who give so much every day can breathe again.
What I bring to it
- MA in Positive Psychology, with distinction
- BA Honours in Psychology
- Qualified teacher (PGCE)
- Neuro-coaching training, in progress
- Years of translating complicated things into language people can actually use
I'm Sarina Prinsloo. I trained as a teacher first, then spent nearly a decade in newsrooms, producing live bulletins to tight deadlines, where the load never quite lets up and there is always one more thing before you can stop.
Then six years at Skoleondersteuningsentrum, a not-for-profit supporting schools. I handled the communications. The media releases, the website, the writing about everything they were doing: curriculum development, the work inside schools, the conferences. To write about it all, I had to understand it all. That left me standing slightly outside with a view of the whole, and in a lot of conversations with teachers and principals.
Twenty years after I trained, it had not got easier. It had got worse. Teachers are drowning. The admin. The after-hours messages. The guilt that arrives the moment you try to switch off. And too many good teachers are leaving the profession to burnout, not because they stopped caring, but because no one ever taught them how to protect themselves while they care for everyone else.
The work being done around them was good, and it helped. But nobody was working on the weight itself. I was studying positive psychology through those same years, and that is when I decided this is where I want to make a difference. I'm in a newsroom again today, but Animo is the work I'm here to do.
Everything here is grounded in real evidence, and none of it is delivered like a lecture: science you can use on a Tuesday morning, in Afrikaans or English, built around the realities of the South African classroom.
Why Animo exists
Most wellbeing programmes fail teachers for one simple reason: they arrive as another thing to do. A course to complete. A programme to run. A binder to work through. To someone already carrying too much, that is not help, it is more weight.
Animo starts from the opposite end. Relief first. Small, practical shifts that make your actual week lighter, and permission to set things down without guilt. Only then, in the space that frees up, the things that help you flourish.
And that is where something quiet happens.
A teacher who is flourishing brings that into her classroom simply by being there.
That is positive education, lived rather than taught. No extra lesson. No extra load.
Where this is going
Right now Animo is a blog, two social feeds, and talks and workshops for schools. The dream is bigger. What positive education stands for, I would love to see become ordinary in South African schools, starting with the people who carry the most.
If that sounds like something your school needs, I would love to hear from you.