Focusing on Self-Care is Good for Business

I had the pleasure of doing the keynote talk for the Pennsylvania Museums Association conference in April, 2018. Below is a summary of my remarks.

Summary:

  1. We all need to take care of ourselves
  2. As managers, you particularly need to take care of yourself
  3. You also need to advocate for your staff and to help them find space

Self-care is an umbrella term for the types of activities that people use to maintain the necessary stability required to accomplish all the hard work of life. While self-care varies by person, it is necessary for every individual. Everyone needs to have moments when they are focused on themselves.

Non-profit work can be exhausting. Employees work long hours for little money. Burnout is high. Management jobs are often only garnered by leaving your organization (and potentially your city). People do this work because they believe in the mission. Organizations win, as they get dedicated employees for a bargain-rate. The employees are so dedicated, partly because their job has been conflated with their identity.

Self-care Strategies:

Self-care can feel hard to jam into a brimming schedule. But, self-care can fit into a negligible moment. One calming breath won’t destroy your schedule but will help you get through the next hard experience.

There are many different ways to try out self-care. For example, I wrote a few articles about creative mindfulness, basically meditative drawing. I paired these articles with posts about productivity. After all, if you are exhausted, you can’t even begin to think about self-care.

Whatever form your self-care takes, the key is transforming your life in simple ways that afford more mental space. Physical space can often be tied to mental space. A streamlined work surface makes finding tools easier and therefore accomplishing tasks easier, and finally affords employees more time for themselves.

Managing and Self-Care:

Self-determined goals are often meaningful.  And, self-care cannot be foisted on people. When an organization requires that their staff exercises in order to decrease insurance rates, the HR office usually gets to field plenty of grumbles and complaints. Managers, therefore, should avoid pushing self-care on their staff.

Instead, managers need to find substantive ways to support the staff in their self-care. First, they need to model self-care. I say this as someone who came late to self-care. I needed to become an expert in burnout to become an evangelist of self-care. Managers need to be honest about their own struggles with burnout and share their strategies to counteract these feelings. Sharing challenges is not a sign of weakness. A good leader is a human who is worth following, flaws and all; a boss is a person who you have to work for.

Managers are responsible for the care and feeding of departments. With the never-ending demands of growth and excellence, managers often place their energy on the feeding elements of running their departments. But, care is an equally important element in an expansion. Departments grown by a burned-out staff can be shaky and subpar. Therefore, it is incumbent on managers to ensure that staff has the opportunity and structures to implement their self-care strategies. Part of this is encouraging downtime and relaxing experiences during the workday. While Americans are notorious for their long hours, Swedish workplaces understand the need for downtime. Coffee hour, or fika, is a time-honored tradition in most Swedish office.

Keeping people in the non-profit workforce is hard, and plenty of younger people are willing to fill open positions. Museums are losing trained middle-level staff. Putting the staff’s sanity about the job is one of the best ways for nonprofits of all kinds, including museums, to ensure a strong future.

Resources:

Creative Mindfulness: The Buzzy Brain

Productivity: Idea Trees

Creative Mindfulness: To Tidy or Not to Tidy

Productivity: Baseline Check

Productivity: In Defense of Breaks

Self Care: Dr. Jekyll & Mister Hyde in the Technology Age

Self-Care: 5 Ways to Cope With Setbacks

Productivity: Your Relationship with Time

(Online Course) Self-Care For Mission-Driven Professionals

What if I’m Burned Out? Counteracting Workplace Burnout

Trust the Revolution

Time and Space Self-Care Plan

 

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