Who is the boss you or stress?

Mindset is everything. The quality of our life is not about what happens to us it is it is reflected, it seems, in our response to what crosses our path. At one stage of my career I was struggling with my job. A good friend suggested I should think of myself as ‘CEO of Me Ltd’. She went on to explain That my job was to add value and mitigate risk. Now, where I worked should be thought of as my biggest client. I should do my job and make sure I do no harm. If, however my place of employment was doing me harm and I had tried to resolve issues with professionalism and integrity then I should consider looking for another client. I should promote Me Ltd to another major client.

This frames our thinking differently and perhaps changes our place in the hierarchy of the workplace mindset.

My career has at time involved some personal struggles trying to find a relatively comfortable fit with my skills and knowledge. This is the reality for many of us. In moving through my career, I recall a terrible saying we jokingly shared when I worked in sales for AMP. This was the saying,

‘Home is where you go to when you are sick of being nice to people!’ 

The above thoughts and concepts are things I share on the first day with each of my business classes. It is my observation that too often our best energy and sense of self is offered to our work and career and home gets what is left. We try to be professional and polite at work then walk in the door of our home and sometimes slip in to a tired, disconnected, sometimes impatient demeanour. This is backwards in my opinion. Let me suggest a different focus and scale of priority.

First Self, then your beloved – spouse or life partner, then children, then work. To be sombre for one moment I think of the funerals I have attended. This includes my son’s funeral. When standing at the edge of the grave all you have, all you think about is the strength of the relationships with those around you. If you live a good life hopefully you will have a great deal of love and support. Who on their deathbed or at a funeral think, “I wish I spent more time at the office”?

OK, sombre moment over. May I suggest we first care for ourselves, physically, emotionally, spiritually and intellectually. This will allow the best version of ourselves to be offered to our beloved and to our children and family. We then take to work what is left which hopefully is a more centred and congruent individual who has addressed the needs and demands of life with a measure of balanced effort. This concept is not suggested as a naïve and fixed set of priorities. Some days work needs all of us. Some days family needs all of us. The question is, what are our priorities most of the time?

To adopt a mindset of being CEO of Me Ltd offers me a measure of empowerment. Over the last 4 – 5 years of teaching adults I have seen stress levels rise; I have no validated statistics it is just my observation. In many ways it appears at odds with developments in the Employments Relations Act and the Health and Safety imperative to comply. When I consider workplace stress it is often related to a feeling of being in the wrong place all the time. When I am at work I feel or experience a need to be at home. When I am at home, I feel the need or guilt to be at work. I would suggest the more intense and constant this sense of misplacement the more the need to review the idea of being CEO of Me Ltd.

I like the acronym: HALT? Widely used in Alcoholic Anonymous it stands for Hungry – Angry‐ Lonely ‐ Tired. Individuals in recovery are cautioned that feeling Hungry, Angry, Lonely, or Tired – is a signal to HALT‐ stop ‐ and re‐group because they’re in danger of relapse. HALT is good stress‐management advice. When we’re unaware of our vulnerabilities, feeling hungry, angry, lonely, or tired, we become “out of sync,” anxious, or depressed. 

How we care for ourselves when we’re not stressed has a direct impact on our ability to cope. The main ingredient in good stress management is self‐care: eating healthy, sleeping enough, creating a positive support system, and balancing emotions.

Self-balancing and adjusting the place of Self in the list of priorities can build our happiness and resilience. We can take steps towards building our happiness and resilience by developing our own practice. There will be more on this in another article. I hope you can consider your place as CEO of Me Ltd.