I didn’t get it.
When I heard people talking about self-care, it conjured up images of self-indulgent escapism. Self-care was going for a spa day or taking time for a guilty pleasure to forget about the challenges of life.
It didn’t feel like something relevant to me.
But I was wrong. Self-care is vital. In fact, it may be one of the most important skills we can learn if we want to thrive and be happy in our lives.
This seems to be the lesson that I have been repeatedly trying to learn since March 2020. It will be one of the permanent marks this pandemic will leave upon me.
When I don’t take care of myself, my ability to do all the things that are important to me diminish.
My work suffers. I don’t show up in the way I want as a parent or spouse. I lack energy for things I generally love to do. Joy becomes harder to find.
It’s not good.
I came face to face with these consequences last summer when I experienced burnout. A big part of how I got through it was self-care.
What is Self-Care?
While there’s a lot of different definitions you can find out there, I like to keep it simple. Self-care is the commitments, behaviors, habits, and actions you undertake to preserve and maintain your well-being.
When you are well, that means that you are happy, healthy and thriving in your life. It means that you can be your best and offer your best to others and to your endeavors. Well-being is what fuels our ability to live life up to our potential.
And when our well-being suffers, so too does our ability to show up in our lives in the ways we want and need to.
So, another way to think of self-care is as maintenance.
If we don’t perform regular, routine maintenance on our vehicle, it will slowly and predictably decline in performance until it finally breaks down. Self-care for us is the same.
Sure, we can get away without doing it for a while, but our performance in all areas of our life starts to decline until eventually, we break down.
This is what we are seeing all around us right now. Over the past 18 months, all of us have experienced some serious wear and tear on our well-being. And, unless you’ve been tending to self-care, you might feel like you are about to break down.
I know I did.
Self-care helped me get back up and running. But since then, I learned another important lesson about self-care. It isn’t a one-time event.
If you only change the oil in your car when it breaks down, you are in for a lot of future breakdowns and costly repairs.
It’s easy to get motivated to do self-care when you realize you’re burnt out or broken down. But, that’s a costly and painful time to tackle it.
The real work of self-care is the routine part. It’s committing to it on an ongoing basis to ensure you can be at your best in life and at work (and avoid the unnecessary breakdowns).
Why Self-Care is Vital for Managers
Managing effectively is hard work. Now more than ever.
As teams become more distributed, as pressure mounts to create more just and inclusive work experiences, as employee expectations of flexibility increase, the pressure on managers is mounting.
Take all this and multiply it by the fact that our collective well-being has been under constant threat for the past year and a half.
As a manager and leader, you need to be on top of your game right now. Your people need you at your best and unless you are invested in your self-care, you won’t have your best to offer.
They tell you to put your own oxygen mask on first in an airplane because if you don’t care for yourself first, you can’t help anyone else.
Self-care is your oxygen mask. You need to put yours on right now because your team needs your help.
How to Practice Self-Care
Now to the tricky part. There is no one-size fits all approach to self-care. What works for one person may not be ideal for another.
What I recommend is to find a framework of well-being that resonates for you and then use that to help you think about what commitments, behaviors, habits, and actions to take to maintain your well-being.
A few good frameworks you can peek at are WELCOA, Gallup, and the Center for Spirituality and Healing. There are others, but these are three good ones.
For today, let’s use the model from the Center for Spirituality and Healing as an example.
This model of well-being includes six elements:
- Health – Are you caring for your physical and mental health?
- Relationships – Do you have healthy, supportive relationships?
- Security – Do you feel safe and free from threat and fear? Do you have a healthy relationship with money?
- Purpose – Do you find meaning in your work and life?
- Community – Do you feel part of and contribute to a larger community?
- Environment – Are you living and working in spaces that are positive and supportive? Do you have a good connection with nature?
This model might not feel quite right for you. That’s okay. You can find one that does.
But, hopefully you can see that by finding a model like this, it can help you start to ask the right questions that lead you to the self-care practices. Having a framework like this to reference will help you maintain and enhance your well-being.
Exactly what that looks like will look a bit different for all of us.
What Self-Care Looks Like for Me
Since there is no single best way to approach self-care, it feels like the most helpful thing to share are a few examples of how I practice self-care. Perhaps it will inspire ideas for you to find your own unique approach.
Below are some parts of my self-care practice. Many have evolved over the past year as I’ve developed a deeper appreciation for the importance of self-care.
- Get 7-8 hours of sleep nightly. One of the realizations I had recently is that when I’m feeling off, drained, stressed, or afraid to the point that it is affecting how I show up in my life and work, it’s almost always during times when I’ve not been getting enough sleep. When I am rested, I am 1000% more resilient.
- Do at least 1 hour of exercise daily. Almost as important as sleep for me is to move my body every day–walking, running, yard work, or OrangeTheory.
- Practice daily meditation. I’ve been a meditation dabbler for years, but on the heels of my burnout last summer, I committed to a daily practice of meditation. It has been a game changer for me.
- Make time with family and friends. If you want great relationships in your life, you have to make time for them. Time is the currency of relationships. If you feel like you don’t have time for this, it’s time to reevaluate priorities in your life.
- Learn something new. I realized that I spend more time teaching than learning, so I decided over the pandemic to finally start taking lessons to learn how to play the harmonica. I’ve always loved blues music so this has been something I’ve talked about for a long time. It’s both humbling and rewarding.
- Take time off. Admittedly, I’m not as consistent on this as I want to be. I’m behind on this one, so I’m planning to do more of it in the upcoming year.
- Watch some TV. I love watching good TV and sports. Getting immersed in a great story or game gives my brain the opportunity to let go and take some downtime.
When I am doing these things, I feel like I am fully powered up and strong. I feel like I can be present in my relationships and life.
This isn’t my full list but hopefully you get the idea. Your list will look different. The point isn’t what’s on the list, the point is that you have one and that it helps you feel stronger, healthier, and more energized for life.
What you practice for self-care will evolve and change as you do. The key is to stay committed to it and continually check-in on what’s working and what needs to change.
You Need Self-Care
Don’t fall into the trap of believing that self-care is only for certain people who need it, it’s for everyone. We all need maintenance. And our well-being is too important to wait on others to care for it.
If you plan to succeed as a manager and leader in the upcoming months and years, you are going to need to be on top of your game. There’s no way to pull that off without a commitment to self-care.
Do it for you. Do it for your people. Do it now.
Related Reading:
- How Much Should a Manager Know About Their Employees’ Personal Lives?
- The Other Side of Burnout – What’s Working for Me
- Managing Through Love
Upcoming Course Information
My next online course, Managing in the Future of Work, starts September 13, 2021. Learn more by clicking here.