Self-care

In our culture, leaders tend to focus a lot more on results than taking care of yourself. We’ve pretty much learned that taking care of your team will help bring good outcomes, but what about self-care?

It feels selfish.

But realize that driving for results also leads to burnout, as you run your body and mind into the ground in an effort to achieve ever-better outcomes.

Self-care is an important element of being a balanced and thoughtful leader. And how do you take care of your people without knowing what it means to take care of yourself?

I’ve seen too many examples of where companies think that employee retention comes from good pay and benefits and a stocked fridge in the corner. We all appreciate these things, of course, but that doesn’t convey the sense of personal caring.

Caring looks like your boss noticing that your new baby is causing you to lose sleep, and arranges some time off or even helps you find day care.

Caring looks like your teammates volunteering to help when you’re stressed.

Caring looks like not having to worry about taking the afternoon off to go to a funeral.

In the workplace we don’t like to call this “love”, but that’s essentially what it is.

We all need it, whether it comes from boss, friends, family, or yourself.

As an aside, when I was looking for illustrations for this post, I noticed that basically all of them conveyed a typically female view of self-care. Not that men don’t appreciate nice flowers and a good soak, but we also might look at more strenuous exercise or a challenging read. We have a lot to learn from each other!

But guys, please don’t think that self-care is some kind of “girly” thing. We can be even more prone to burnout.