What does self-care mean? Self-care and control are partners – you become responsible for your own wellbeing (you take control). Rather than being passive and abdicating responsibility to others – such as your doctor or your line manager. To succeed at self-care you need to be curious, listen, learn and take action; curious about how you think and why you think the way that you do, and then be willing to change, to “upgrade your beliefs” in line with your new understanding. The plethora of self-help books; videos and podcasts, which are available is testament to the need – the down side is that generally people seem to become curators of self-help information rather than users, where action is taken to address current habits or long embedded beliefs that are outdated and inaccurate. A simple example; it is understood that doctors are held in high regard – their status through knowledge and expertise results in deference. They are respected and trusted; however they are not infallible – in recent history, back in the 1930’s and 1940’s many doctors were enthusiastic smokers – cigarette manufactures used doctors to “endorse” their products (ironically encouraging users to choose the healthiest brand of cigarettes!). This does not mean you should not trust your doctor, it does mean that they are human and make mistakes. Once the implications of tobacco were understood the endorsements stopped. What are the fallibilities today? As mentioned earlier, self-care and control are partners – however, the word “control” is often seen to be negative. A phrase often used in business environments is “control the controllables”; an excellent way of thinking, which, like most things of value, requires practice in order to embed (don’t just curate). Example; when speaking to a client who was clearly under pressure. Talking fast; jittery; not listening, unable to focus. We eventually settled down to find out the source of their stress. Quote: “I have a million emails to do!” The truth is a million email would make anyone feel stressed; however we went through a process of breaking this down into accessible chunks. How many emails were actually in the in-box (96) How many emails were CC’d (40) How many emails needed addressing today (22)

Healthy Leaders Academy

Mental Health

Modules

Stress

Outliers; self-care and control

Sleep

Menopause

Kindness - An underrated superpower

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