Here it is! Your route map to self care. My self care model (lovingly drawn for me by one of our fabulous students Anna Short). It’s simple and straightforward but it’s what you need to get sorted. And over the next few days I’ll tackle each element of the triangle in turn and then we can get on to figuring out how to organise it all!
The three things in the triangle won’t come as any surprise to you. In fact most of what I have to tell you won’t come as a huge surprise. Looking after yourself is one of those things where we all know what to do but we don’t always do it. And we don’t always fully understand the impact on us and our productivity.
So… we’ll talk about sleep, we’ll talk about exercise, and we’ll talk about nutrition. This is not to turn you into tofu eating (although I like tofu), marathon running (although I’ve ran marathons), zen like (although I like some meditation) creatures, but rather to show you how these three things interact and have a massive impact on your productivity in your job and in your home life.
Current research tells us that lack of sleep has a significant impact on the risk of us developing things like cancer or alzheimers, never mind the impact of a poor nights sleep on the next day. Your brain and your gut are connected directly by the vagus nerve and scientists are showing how the quality of what is going on in your gut directly effects your mood. And exercise has been shown to be effective in reducing levels of stress. Also, they are are interlinked….
Emotions …..a strong and powerful force that sometimes get the better of us!? Agreed? Positive and negative emotions can lead us to lose focus and control and to respond in ways which we wish we hadn’t. In this area our evolutionary history is stacked against us. The oldest part of our brain, the amygdala, which regulates our emotional responses can easily take control. Our emotional response to the stress we are under in the work place can be very personalised. For some it’s anger, grumpiness (that ones me!), fear, or a whole range of others .
Did you know that simply by smiling you can change how you feel? Malcolm Gladwell (author of ‘Blink’ and ‘Tipping Point’ …among others) describes how contagious emotions are. He shows that if someone smiles, we smile back, even if only fleetingly.
He goes on to say that experiments have shown that merely the act of smiling can influence positively how we feel inside. In an experiment that Gladwell describes the researchers took two groups of volunteers and had one group call to mind a stressful experience that caused them sadness, anger or fear and had a second group merely make the facial expressions of these emotions without recalling anything. They discovered that the physiological responses in both groups were the same! Merely making a sad face had the same impact physiologically as actually recalling a sad event! The same is true of recalling a happy event and simply smiling. So when you’re feeling sad, or angry, or frustrated literally ‘put on a happy face’ and the science says you will feel happier!
Emotions work from the outside in – as well as the inside out Stay in charge, stay in control!
…I’ll tell you what works for me… ….I’ll guarantee it will be similar as we are made from the same stuff… ….but different because we are all unique…. …..you need to find your own balance…. …I’m here to help! 😉 Read more below if you can decipher my handwriting…..
….we haver too much choice these days and choice begins to fatigue us… …we need to reclaim our ‘soul’… …simplify things…. …read more below (if you can decipher my hand writing!)….
Life is all about transitions…. it’s about starting things and ending things and moving between things. That’s what I love about life. Challenges coming to a conclusion. New challenges to explore. Yesterday saw me watch this years graduates walk across the stage to be given their award. It’s a wonderful day because the journey to a degree is not an easy one. It’s a lot of hard work. But what starting a degree does is set you out a plan. The 3 years of an undergraduate degree, or the 2 of a postgraduate degree, sets out a framework around which all other challenges hang. It absorbs you. For better or worse!
We need challenges. We need to set ourselves targets. There’s evidence that if you have a plan that you record in some way you are more likely to achieve it. That’s remarkable. Just by writing it down it’s more likely to happen.
When I turned 50 (just short of 2 years ago) I set myself a ten year plan and I wrote it down (yes! For those who know me… in my spreadsheet!) My plan was simple. That by the time I was 60 I wanted to be making all my income from writing and other freelance work. I wanted to have the luxury of not having to work for an organisation. A kind of retirement of sorts. A ‘retirement’ to me setting the agenda for the part of my life I get paid for. This was a big task because 10 years, in reality, is not a long time. So, I had to make a plan. I had to start building up my writing. I had to think about the financial impact of such a move. I had to think about the skills I had and the skills I needed to develop. I needed to take a big idea and break it down into smaller ideas, smaller steps.
This relies on a nice little metaphor that I love to use which is – How do you eat a whole elephant? One bite at a time, of course. You couldn’t possibly eat a whole elephant at once! You need to work on things incrementally and what you’ll find is that when you tick a step off your list you will get a psychological buzz and that will generate forward momentum with whatever it is you are wanting to achieve.
I find myself with a day at home today. I had a meeting cancelled this morning so now I have a whole day to myself. I’m feeling a bit anxious about some things I need to achieve over the next 6 months because at the minute I don’t have a plan. Firstly, I need to write a book! I’ve signed a contract so it has to be delivered by the end of the year! And at the minute all it is is a list of chapters with a brief outline…. and I’ve never written a book before! I need to map out how this is going to happen. So while a 10 year plan is important so are shorter term plans. Because of the way my job works it’s useful to have a 6 month plan. So today I’m going to figure out my 6 month plan. What am I going to do between now and the end of the year and how does writing a book fit into that?
I’m running the Kielder Marathon in October and I can apply the same principle. So working backwards from the date of the run I’ll figure out what mileage targets I need to hit week by week. That way, I know what I need to achieve and I’ll diary time out to do it.
And finally, for today at least, I need to figure out how to fit the work I need to do at University into my working week. So I’ll plan where the lectures are, when I’m going to prep them, who I might need to talk to and when I’ll do that, when I’m going to work on placements, and so on and so on….. right up until the end of the year.
And I guarantee by the end of the day I will feel a huge sense of relief because I’ll have a plan. As David Allen (author of Getting Things Done) says, “if you don’t control ‘it’, ‘it’ will control you.” There is concrete evidence that having a plan reduces stress both at work and at home.
How do you set your goals? We all want to achieve. We all want to get better at things. We all want to move ourselves towards goals. But maybe the way we set ourselves targets just isn’t helpful. There is a tendency to want to put figures on things because we all know how figures work. “I want to lose 10 kilos”, “I want to run 5k in 25 minutes”, “I want to run a marathon”. These are all fitness goals but there will be others. Maybe, “I want to save £1000 by the end of year”.
These statements are problematic though because one of the things we are good at as people is not hitting the target. Think back to all of those new years resolutions that go unmet. Think of all of those weight loss strategies that didn’t get you to your ‘goal weight’. Think of all those fitness regimes that didn’t get you ripped and slim.
As soon as you set yourself a fixed goal then you run the risk of missing it. But even if you hit it you’ve still got a problem! Once you’ve hit your goal weight what do you do? Go back to eating like you did? What do you do when you hit that 25 minute 5k? Do you stop running? Well, sometimes we do! Sometimes it’s like ‘right that’s it – I’ve done it so I don’t have to worry about it anymore!’ And the weight goes back on or the fitness slides and you have to start again with another goal.
How about simply framing what you want to do differently? I want to get better at being a healthier eater? I want to get better at being a runner? I want get better at being a saver? These things have no end point. They have nothing to ‘fall off’ or ‘fail at’. You want to become a healthier eater so you start nailing the salads and the baked potatoes and then you have a take away. Well, what you are trying to achieve is still there. You’ve not done anything wrong because just because you had a take away doesn’t mean you can’t continue to try to be a healthier eater. When you choose a measurable goal like weight loss and you don’t lose any weight because of that take away the scales shout at you, make you feel bad, and make you think ‘well hey – I’m never going to hit my target weight – so why bother!’ But you can still follow your dream of being a healthier eater because that’s still an on going proposition – it never ends so it’s always available to you to help you frame what your doing. ‘Hey, I had a pizza, but I’m still trying to be a healthier eater’
The difference is maybe a subtle one but the psychology of it apparently really works. It’s like when you have a big task to achieve like, say, write a 3,000 word report. If your goal is to write the report then every time you sit down to do it and you don’t complete it your mind sees that as a failure – ‘I didn’t finish the report’. But if you break it down to manageable chunks. ‘I need to read this article’, ‘I need to think about the structure of the report’, ‘I need to map out what I want to write’ etc etc then you achieve a result whenever you do these individual things giving you a psychological boost. This is called ‘The Power of Small Wins”. This is the ‘how do you eat an elephant – one bite at a time’ strategy!
There’s a similar thing at play with the psychology of setting goals. If your goal is to run a marathon then every time you don’t run a marathon you haven’t achieved it. If your goal is to work on being a better runner then every time you run you are working on that. If your goal is to be a healthier eater then every time you eat you are working on that. Personally, I find that taking this approach helps me make better choices. What I eat isn’t governed by the scales or a target weight but by simply wanting to try and achieve ‘eating healthier’. Yes, I do hope that what that means is weight loss but if it doesn’t it doesn’t and I will continue to try and eat healthier because the positive impact on my life is broader than what the scales say.
Emails are great…. and they are not great! Emails allow you to ask the same thing to a number of people at the same time and get answers back quickly – that’s great! …and it can be a nightmare! How many of you get cc’d into things and wonder… “why has someone included me in this!?” For such emails there is the ‘delete’ button! Emails let you send things to people wherever you are and whatever time it is! That’s great…. and that’s not great!
Like them or loathe them they are here to stay I’d imagine though. They appear to have caught on! There are various estimates but it appears the average person at work sends and receives about 130 emails per day. In ‘Organised Mind’ Daniel Levitin tells us that even outside of work we process around 100,000 words every day! That’s remarkable. How do we manage this information overload.
Well, as David Allen, author of ‘Getting Things Done’ says….if you don’t control it, it will control you. And, as a manager I had was fond of saying, ‘you need to get ahead of it’. Steer it from the front rather than chase it.
How many are in there!?
So, how do we manage this onslaught of information, and particularly for this article, how do we manage emails. David Allen says that your Inbox is a capture tool not a storage tool. Your job on a daily basis should be to ‘get in to empty’. How many emails are in your Inbox at work? I bet for some of you it’s hundreds and once they disappear off the bottom of the screen they disappear out of your mind. ‘I emailed you about it’, ‘Don’t think I’ve seen it’, ‘It was a week or so ago’, scroll scroll scroll…. ‘oh there it is’. If your Inbox is empty, or at least down to a handful of emails, there can be nothing in there that’s more than a few hours old, or a day at most.
If your Inbox is overflowing set yourself some time aside and systematically work through it. You’ll feel great! I bet anything that’s older than a week or so can be deleted or saved somewhere. And then once you are down to a manageable amount you’ll find it easy to keep on top of them.
There’s a process you can go through to get in to empty – and it comes to us courtesy of the wonderful David Allen again! When working through your emails, take them each in turn and either ‘Do it, Delegate it, Defer it, or Delete it’.
Let’s have a look at each of them in turn. There will be some things in your Inbox that you can just ‘Do’. Here’s your chance to apply the 2 minute rule. If it’s going to take you less than two minutes to do just do it. Don’t procrastinate, don’t leave it till later… just do it. There’s a thing called the planning fallacy that leads us to overestimate how long small tasks will take and underestimate how long big tasks will take (more on that last one in a different article later). There are loads of emails you can do in two minutes. And when you have dealt with the email either save it off to a folder or delete it. You’re done with it.
The next one is ‘Delegate It’. Delegation is not a ‘down the command chain’ activity. It is merely passing something on to someone because they need to do, or you need information from them so you can do it. So you can delegate up, across, or down depending on what you need. So if you can pass it over or ask for information then do that and then file or delete the email.
Then you may need to do some work in order to respond to an email or, the email may have given you a task to work on. So you ‘Defer It’ for these ones into what Allen calls a Trusted System. We’ll talk more in another article about ‘trusted systems’ but essentially if there is something to do, put it somewhere where you will be reminded to do it. For me, if things are time and date specific they go in my calendar in a time and date slot. If something is actionable but not time and date specific it goes into my calendar as an ‘all day’ event on a day where I might be able to get to it. If something needs some thought and planning and isn’t time and date specific it goes into my master spreadsheet. Once it’s in one of those places I save or delete the email.
Finally, in this process, if something isn’t for you or of interest to you ‘Delete It’! Go on you’ll feel good!
I pick up and work through my emails twice a day. First thing on a morning and last thing on an afternoon. I sometimes have a look in the middle of the day if I have the time and I follow the methodology above. It goes like this. I work through the emails and delete the ones that I can. I then make another pass and use the 2 minute rule to do things or delegate things. This leaves me with the meaty emails that I need to defer into my trusted system. I then work through those and put what I need into my calendar or spreadsheet. And then, by that point, I will have got in to empty, safe in the knowledge that when I next look there can be nothing in there I don’t know about that’s more than few hours old. And if, for some reason, I don’t get to check them again that day, I know the next day that there is nothing in there that is more than 24 hours old. No one has been waiting on me for very long. It make you feel so good and so in control and frees up loads of psychological capital to do other things.
Note though – when I’m not actively dealing with emails my email client is shut down with notifications switched off. When I’m not doing emails, I’m not doing emails, because I’m working on other equally important things! Research by Microsoft showed that if you are working on a task and get distracted by an email it takes you up to 15 minutes to get back up to the speed on that task you were working at prior to going to check the email. That’s a huge productivity loss. So either be emailing or be not emailing. The idea of multi-tasking is a myth. Trying to write a report and answer emails as they come in will slow down your productivity in relation to both and research has shown that you will be more prone to mistakes.
Emails! They are necessary but you can manage them. Having them under control will reduce stress and allow you to focus on other tasks without worrying about what’s in there!
Start by emptying your Inbox… you’ll feel great!
Use ‘Do it, Delegate it, Defer it, Delete it’ every time you work on emails to get in to empty
Hello everyone! Monday! First day of the working week for a lot of us and a lot to do I’d imagine? But I want you to make sure you do something for me today… and then every day. I want you to take a lunch break. I want you to take at last 20 minutes even if you don’t think you have the time. I want you to go for a walk and eat something.
A study at the University of Bristol showed that exercise can boost mood and motivation by 41%. Now that’s got to help you get through your afternoon work! They also found that exercise improved the ability to deal with stress by 20%. I suspect you need that to help you out. Yet research by BUPA showed that up to two thirds of workers feel they can’t take 20 minutes away from their desk at lunch (Davison 2015)
In 2017 Pulg-Ribera and some fellow researches looked at a ‘sit less, move
more’ programme in the work place and discovered that simply by getting up and moving about people reduced their stress levels. Imagine that! Exercise, even gentle in nature, ‘burns off’ the cortisol and adrenaline produced by our stress response. When you are at your desk and you are feeling overwhelmed your stress response kicks in ….only the problem is it’s designed to prepare us for fight of flight… and when no fight or flight is required we don’t use these chemicals for what they were intended. That gives us the problem of those chemicals hanging around. Some gentle exercise will help mitigate that response.
Afternoon performance is bad enough as it is even if you don’t miss out on your break. Daniel Pink tells us that judges hand down harsher sentences for the same crime on an afternoon, and a study in North Carolina showed that the chances of something going medically wrong in one of their medical centres was four times higher at 4 p.m. than any other time (Pink, 2018, ‘When’)
In his wonderful book ‘The Joy of Work’, Bruce Daisley (creator of the fabulous podcast Eat Sleep Work Repeat) recounts the story of Laura, a manager at the Museum of London who, during a heavy period of work, went without lunch, and reported as a consequence that her mood, energy, diet and attitude to her job all crashed.
It’s such a small thing to do but it’s so important. Take your lunch break and have that brisk walk before having something good to eat. …and by ‘good’ I mean healthy 😉 You will improve your mental performance, clear your head and enhance your performance in the afternoon. You absolutely need some distance from your work half way through the day to energise yourself!
Go on… you know you want to. You’ll thank me for it…. as will your clients and colleagues.
Recently I got to wondering when I started setting myself big long term goals and I realised I’ve probably always done it. Most productivity commentators will tell you that you should have at least a 5 year plan. Personally I think you need a life plan! What is it you want to do, next week, next month, next year, the rest of your life!? Planning stuff and writing it down has been shown to make it more likely to happen. If you have a plan written down it sets it in your mind. You can refer back to it and when you’re ready break your plan down into manageable steps.
Let’s get excited!
Starting with think big – what is that you want to achieve. I remember my first day at college studying social work, listening to my first lecture, and thinking about her, “I want to to do what you’re doing.” And 13 years later I found myself doing just that thing. When I started being a lecturer I decided I wanted to write and here I am 7 years later writing regularly about social work and a book in the pipeline! It’s important to have a growth mind set. In her book Mindset, Dr. Carol S. Dweck tells us that people fall into two categories – those with a fixed mindset and those with growth mindset. If you have a fixed mindset you think that talent and ability is inherent. It’s something you either have or you don’t have. You think that you’re either intelligent or you not. But what Dweck shows in her book is that we can all do whatever we set our minds to. What it takes is hard work and dedication. Things aren’t easy but things are achievable if you have a plan and you apply yourself to that plan. Broadly speaking we all have the same potential, it’s our mindset that dictates what we do with that potential. So you need to think big! What do you want to achieve?
Then you break it down into small steps. Because, if you had to eat a whole elephant, the only way to do it would be one bite at a time! Those steps need to be small and achievable. By breaking things down into little steps you draw on the psychological power of small wins. Every time you complete a step you get a psychological buzz! A feel-good boost. If you don’t break things down into small tasks, firstly you won’t know where to start or what to do next. And secondly, you will only get to feel that buzz when you achieve the final goal. Write down the goal, break it down into smalls steps and write those small steps down and then start…..
And start you must! Breaking things down into small manageable steps will help you beat procrastination. But the thing when starting something is to simply do that – start it! Do something. Even if what you have to do is break down your first step into micro steps to fit into the time you have available then do that. But do something!
Make a start!
As i’m fond of saying – making a start is the hardest part! Because it is… but the reality is that once you do start you will keep going!
So here we go..…
Write down your long term or life goals Think about which of them you want to tackle first Break it down into manageable steps Write these steps down (I’d put them in my electronic calendar) And then… do the first thing.
What a weekend I had last weekend! I actually never stopped! Yet, I woke up on Monday morning morning feeling refreshed and excited about how much I was going to get done! Why’s this! Why was I not shattered and daunted by the week ahead!
Well, for all it was busy, the weekend was choc full of things, all of which I consider as self care. There’s a meme kicking about that I see that says something like, “self care is not about chocolates and pamper days, it’s about creating a life that you don’t want to escape from”. This weekend has been awesome and tiring both at the same time – and I didn’t want to escape from it! Let me tell you about it.
It started Friday tea time with a 14 mile bike ride home from work. I just took my time, I wanted to be home, but I also wanted to delight in the scenery around me. So, I took a detour down to a little place off my route called Cox Green and I just spent a few moments there looking at the river and the beautiful vista. I then continued my way home. For me, exercise is mindfulness in motion. You can think of all sorts of things if you want to while you exercise. It’s just you. On your own thinking things through and mulling things over. Or it can be you thinking of nothing. Just you and your body doing this thing to the exclusion of everything else. I love the loneliness of a solo run or bike ride. Some quality time with yourself. Self Care checklist: Alone time, you time, exercise, getting outdoors tick!
Cox Green by Gordon James Brown
Saturday started with Parkrun, starting at Durham’s Maiden Castle and ending by the River Wear in the shadow of the glorious Cathedral. We’ve got quite a little team going on now for Parkrun and we’ve pretty much ran it every weekend this year. So my eldest son Jonathan picks me up and, in the car are usually the Whellan’s brothers and Oliver’s girlfriend Sarah (although she didn’t make it this week). The run and the scenery is great and is an absolute delight. Parkrun is 5k which is doable and not too tough. But for me the most important part of this is the camaraderie of the whole thing. We are all at different levels of fitness but all in it together. The banter in the car on the way there and on the way home is great. And it’s wonderful that these young pups tolerate this old guy tagging along!
The Sunday saw me running again with two of my colleagues from work. We were doing the Sunderland 10k. It was an absolute delight. A huge group of people all with one endeavour in mind. To test themselves against the distance in front of them! There was a great atmosphere as the gun went off and we started and it continued all the way around and into the finish funnel!
Parkrun!
Then, in the afternoon, tired and weary I had a gig to play. I’m a musician in between other things (!) and I was playing in the Union Rooms, a lovely bar near Central Station in Newcastle. Music is a gift to us all. I love playing on my own at home or in front of people in a bar. Music lifts the soul. Or ‘resets’ it, as I like to say. And it creates a wonderful connection between people. It was great to watch people chatting and enjoying themselves as I played, and from time to time joining in singing along to the tunes they recognised.
There’s a Stoic ‘saying’ that ‘the obstacle is the way’. When confronted with an obstacle don’t avoid it – go through it! Because it’s in doing so that we grow and develop. My tiring weekend left me re-energised because of how the things I did contributed to who I am – my idea of ‘self’ – and therefore to my self care. Connections made, existing connections enjoyed, exercise engaged in, getting outdoors, the healing properties of music – food for the soul – all meant that the busy weekend was a refreshing weekend.
