This year I’ve changed my language when talking about self-care. I felt it’d become an overused term, synonymous with Instagram wellness warriors drinking green juice and taking yoga selfies. It seemed to be difficult to get traction in business and to get organisations to take self-care seriously.
Now it is serious obviously. I believe it should feature on our job descriptions because it powers everything else that’s on there. Without it we’re simply not as good as we need to be, we run out of energy, focus and tolerance and ultimately do not perform at our peak unless we’re investing in this stuff.
So how can we shift the dial and talk about this in a way our businesses will listen but we’ll also take more seriously ourselves.
For me the angle is performance not wellness. This doesn’t take away from the fact that we’re of course talking wellness and that’s one of the most important focuses we can have. It changes the language in a way our organisations understand. Wellness has long been a focus and aside from a few lunchtime meditation classes, free fruit in the staff room and some resilience training we've not shifted the dial. In fact burnout is on the rise despite our focus on wellness and mental health.
When I look to the sporting world they have perfected this approach. Their approach to performance is that peaks must be followed by troughs of rest and recovery. Massage, saunas, days off and rest actually feature as part of their jobs and their performance schedules. Pre match preparation and post match recovery are integral parts of ensuring peak performance. Athletes see it as a non negotiable that their energy, shape and physical and mental health is directly linked to their success. So why hasn’t this translated into our organisations?
I believe it’s about changing the conversation from one of self-care to one of performance. For too long we’ve resisted the need to talk to our managers about the need for self care or discuss burnout through fear it’ll be seen as a sign of weakness, that we can’t cope or we’re not keeping up with the demands of our job. Asking for help, support, time off or a focus on self-care feels like a loaded question as a result. However if we start talking about performance, how we remain sustainable and ensure we’ve giving our best, it flips this conversation. A shared goal we have as both employer and employee is that we want to do our best so when we talk about what’s required to achieve peak performance rather than what we need to remove to allow for self-care can you see how this fits with even the most traditional organisational cultures.
I now talk about sustainability. It’s a popular term when we talk business sustainability or about the environment and climate change. Yet we don’t use the word in association with ourselves. I believe our energy and condition is a direct predictor of our success. Ensuring we’re a sustainable resource and that our teams are too is one of the foundations of success and peak performance. It’s also how we address the rise in burnout. I’m not saying it’s right that we need to change the conversation or that self-care has fallen on deaf ears but I’ve seen it to be effective in getting better results. Not just in terms of how our business responds but how we prioritise it in our own life too.
For too long we’ve seen self-care as a nice to have, a luxury item and a bit of an indulgence rather than the key to sustainability and a critical pathway towards peak performance. It’s why so many of us feel guilty for prioritising it or that it’s something we can go without if we’re busy.
So what do you do to keep yourself sustainable? What does your employee sustainability policy look like? In my workshops I often use the analogy of a road trip (in an EV of course because we’re sustainable!) When we’re on a long road trip and our fuel light comes on we’d never dream of driving past a fuel station. We stop and pull over to refuel even though we know it’ll add minutes onto our journey. We do this because it helps us get to our destination and without it we’re left broken down on the roadside. Yet how often does our inner fuel light come on and yet we push through, don’t have time to stop and refuel, assume we can refuel when the work is done. The result? We don’t get to our destination, our inner vehicle doesn’t perform as well as it could and for some we’re left broken down on the side of the metaphorical road.