Change is rarely easy, but for growth-minded organizations and leaders, it’s essential. As you juggle more tasks, deal with increasing levels of stress, and spend more of your time ironing out wrinkles, it’s important to take care of your self. After all, you can’t successfully manage, guide, or inspire your team if you can’t do these things for yourself.
Signs That Leaders Are in Need of Self-Care
Leaders are expected to have unlimited resilience. They should be able to burn the proverbial candle at both ends without showing visible signs of wear. Often working long after everyone has gone home, they’re supposed to show up before everyone arrives and have solid game plans in place. Unfortunately, despite being common, these expectations are hardly feasible.
The Physical Symptoms of Being Overworked and Undernourished
The physical symptoms of being overworked are usually the first tell-tale signs of the need for self-care. They include:
- Under-eye bags
- Poor posture
- Significant weight loss or weight gain
- Frequent yawning
- Chronic neck, back, or shoulder pain
- Low-energy
What It Means to Be Undernourished
Although nourishment is commonly associated with food and food intake, it can also mean lacking anything that's necessary for good health, condition, and performance, including:
- Sleep
- Social engagement
- Mental rest
- Exercise
If you aren't eating, sleeping, and living well outside of work, your ability to deliver will decline. Undernourished leaders eventually suffer from low morale, decreased loyalty and focus, and declining drive. If the goals that you're working toward sap the joy out of your life, your motivation to achieve them will invariably wane.
The Emotional Drawbacks of Poor Self-Care
Poor sleep, insufficient nutrient, and poor work-life balance can also impact your emotions. According to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), sleep debt can exacerbate existing mood conditions. Thus, if you’re already prone to irritability and depression, you’ll struggle with these things more often and their intensity will increase. Insufficient sleep can also cause:
- Anxiety
- Difficulty controlling moods
- Anger management problems
Not only will getting insufficient sleep make you miserable, but it will also impact the moods of those around you. This is but one of many ways in which insufficient self-care among leaders can impact the morale of entire teams.
Insufficient Self-Care Affects Leaders’ Mental Health, Too
Nothing will strain your mental acuity like insufficient sleep and poor nutrition. According to the Sleep Foundation, without adequate sleep, the brain has a hard time functioning adequately. Leaders who aren’t taking good care of themselves often experience declining:
- Cognition
- Focus
- Memory
- Problem-solving
Preventative Measures and Self-Care Tips
For leaders, adequate self-care is both corrective and preventative. If you recognize the signs of an impending burnout, you can use the tips that follow to turn the tides. However, even if you aren’t fatigued, stressed, and emotionally unwound, you can put these tips to use today to prevent problems in the future.
Assess and Budget Your Resources
Your energy is finite. You can only do so many late nights and early mornings before you wear yourself thin. Frequent flights, insufficient sleep, and improper eating will deplete your energy budget at a far more rapid rate than when subjecting your body to far lesser demand. Know what you’re capable of and mitigate your risk of burnout by making strategic changes in your schedule through delegation, compromise, and any other means at your disposal.
Empower Your Team and Learn How to Delegate
One of the greatest pitfalls for leaders is the desire to maintain total control over everything. Living by the old adage, “If you want something done, you have to do it yourself” is a setup for burnout and failure. Part of being a good leader is building the right team. After having surrounded yourself with highly skilled professionals, grow comfortable with delegation. Your job is to lead and make sure that things get done. Take advantage of the trained talent that you’ve hired by spreading your to-do list around. You’ll expend far less energy and take on far less stress when much of your work is simply checking the status of projects.
Why Empowerment Is Key
Empowering team members by giving the permission to take action and make decisions without always consulting with you is key to limiting your stress. Not only will empowered employees lighten your load, but they’ll also have a greater sense of involvement and a greater stake in your project’s outcome.
Practice Mindfulness
Leaders always have their eyes on the prize. Unfortunately, this doesn’t bode well for stress management. Step back from your goal-oriented approach to life at least once each day to relish the moment. You can do this by keeping a journal, meditating, practicing yoga, or talking long walks. Mindfulness will take you away from the shame, discomfort, or reproach of past failures and mistakes. It will also eliminate your anxiety about the future. Consciously creating minutes of mindfulness will promote mindfulness at other times. This will make you more mentally and emotionally present for yourself and those around you.
Establish a Feasible Workout Routine
Working out entails more work, and when you’re already overworked, committing to a fixed exercise routine can seem counterproductive. However, regular exercise has an invigorating effect on the mind and body. The right workout will clear your thoughts, boost your energy, and promote deeper and more restful sleep. It can also lead to the release of mood-boosting endorphins. Working out just before lunch is a great way to avoid afternoon slumps.
Adjust Your Diet: Make Good Nutrition a Top Priority
Giving your body the right fuel can make a world of difference in your mood and performance. Although busy professionals often eat what others prepare for them, the best self-care often comes from cooking for yourself. Cooking can be a cathartic, relaxing activity. It will also give you the opportunity to be selective about what goes into your mouth.
When you must grab meals while on the go, stay away from preservatives, food dyes, and other unnecessary ingredients and focus on nutrient-dense, single-ingredient foods like steamed broccoli, grilled steak, fresh fruit, or scrambled eggs. You’ll feel more energized after noshing on a caesar salad than you will after grabbing a burger or other heavy, greasy fare.
Prioritize Social Engagement
Leaders are often socially isolated from their teams. When your crew gets off work, they may head to the local pub to lament their troubles or celebrate their victories. It’s important to have peers of your own and plenty of opportunities to relax with them. Don’t let friendships and familial relationships fall by the wayside during times of challenge and change. Make spending time with your loved ones a top priority to protect your mental and emotional health.
Set Firm Boundaries
Establish clear boundaries from the outset. For instance, unless absolutely necessary for your work, your team members should never call or visit you at home. They shouldn’t label emails, texts, or phone messages as urgent unless they truly are so. Establishing boundaries is essentially giving yourself permission to have a life outside of work hours. When after-hours problems do arise, have an established phone chain that employees can turn to before reaching out to you.
Choose Compassionate Reflection
Take a compassionate approach when assessing your shortcomings and mistakes. Leaders are human. You have the right to fall short or outright fail. Give yourself the same courtesy that you give to your employees. Compassionately assessing your own errors will make you better skilled at issuing compassionate or empathetic responses to the mistakes of employees.
Join a Peer Support Group
Join a support group for team leaders. This will give you a place to vent, share ideas, and learn new strategies for managing stress in highly stressful positions.
Do Something for Others
Experience the rewards of charity by regularly doing something nice for others without expectation of reward. Schedule time to volunteer at a local food bank, soup kitchen, or long-term care facility. Working with people less fortunate than yourself can help you keep things in perspective. Charitable acts are also highly fulfilling.
Engage in Recreational Learning
Pick up a new skill to remind yourself that life isn’t all about work. Sign up for a yoga or rock-climbing class. Pick up the guitar, flute, or piano, or learn a new language. Research out-of-place artifacts (OOP-ART), or experiment with watercolor paints and pastels. Learning is a natural and necessary part of life, and not all of your learning should be geared at improving your professional profile.
Practice Absolute Escapism
Learn how to escape from the rigors of reality with a good book, a cheesy movie, or sunset walks with your significant other. Find recreational activities that completely quiet all work-related thoughts and allow you to just be present in the moment.
Don’t Let Vacation Hours Expire
CEOs, CFOs, and team leaders often have months of unused vacation. Letting these hours expire is like giving money away. They’re part of your compensation and you deserve to use them. Spending two to four weeks of the year with your toes buried in warm sand is a great way to de-stress and renew your love for your work.
How Leaders Can Model Self-Care for Their Teams
Be sure to talk about time management, resource-budgeting, empowerment, and delegation with your team. As appropriate, show team members how to leverage these strategies to alleviate or mitigate their own stress. When you eat well, sleep enough, exercise regularly, and practice mindfulness, your team will notice. Be willing to answer their questions about how you manage to remain bright-eyed, focused, and excited despite increases in your demand and trying momenets of change.
Build Self-Care Into Employee Schedules
In certain work environments, it’s also helpful to build self-care exercises into employee schedules. You might encourage your group to get up and stretch, avoid working beyond certain hours, practice mindfulness and meditation throughout the day. If your budget allows, consider making low-cost or free gym memberships part of your employee perks or providing affordable access to counseling and stress management training.
How Platinum Group Can Help
Platinum Group offers the all-in-one, cloud-based HCM system, isolved. isolved provides you with a seamless, efficient, and reliable way to manage your employees’s needs from hire to retire. As your company evolves and expands, we can help you limit change-related stress by streamlining critical Human Resource functions. Get in touch with us today to find out more!