Self-Care: Simple Tools that Can Work

I’d like to talk about self-care.  It’s important because if we look after how we physically and emotionally feel, our cognition will also function better and we will be able to think more clearly and make more reasoned decisions.    Self-care is in many ways the core of all good decision making. 

I am going to write today about a number of tools that I have found effective in diagnosing stresses and improving our relationship with ourselves.

Voice the Difficulties

The first step to change is to name the difficulties.  If you write out a typical day hour by hour, you can note where your stress triggers are.  Do they happen during the working day, during the transition from work to home life, during idle hours when dissatisfaction seeps in?

Manage the Manageables

Then draw a large container image. You can see the container as a membrane between yourself and the world. 

I draw three sides of a rectangle that’s open at the top.  Everything you write inside the jar are things you can control.  Everything that is stressing you but that is outside your control goes in the white space outside the jar.

The Container helps you to visualise the membrane between you and circumstances beyond your control

The container helps you to appreciate that there are limits to what is within your control and to visualise what life would be like if you focused your energies on managing the manageables.

The Incredible 5 Point Scale

The Incredible 5 Point Scale is actually a sensory tool developed to help children to emotionally regulate by becoming more aware of the stages and levels of their emotions.  However like many sensory tools, it works well for almost everyone.

To develop your own self-care scale, draw a table.  4 columns, 5 rows :

Example of an Incredible 5 Point Scale Table. Make your own!

And start to fill it in, relating your emotional state of mind to what you do when you are unaware and what you could do instead to move yourself down through the scale to a calmer state.

Reflect on What’s Changed

When developing new coping strategies for yourself, reflect on what you have learned about yourself that you didn’t always know.   Many of us have experienced transformative change during the pandemic and drawn on resources we didn’t know we had.  What’s changed for you?  What new information have you learned about yourself?  Did you discover new coping strategies or new joys in your life?

Make a list for yourself that you can draw on: Things that help you cope.  Be as specific as you can be. Is there a certain TV show, a certain moment in the day or a view you really enjoy? Name it!

Early Warning Signs

What are the warning signs for you when the self-care is slipping?   Are they likely to trigger you into feeling worse?  Make a note of them so that you can recognise when they’re happening. These may be the things that will move you up the 5 Point Scale instead of down

Maintain your Supports

Now that you have named what works for you , keep it in your mind by writing your list of coping strategies somewhere you will find it, like at the back of a work diary.

I like to write it in a gentle way.

I Can Try:

• Keeping a little structure on the week; Getting exercise; Only scheduling two things a day; Sitting in my garden; Drinking water with ice; Making time for play.

Start changing your life by changing your self-care and see if it helps you to identify your stress triggers and make clearer decisions.

How a Guidance Counsellor can help with Career Burnout

‘Stress is a reality – like love or electricity – unmistakeable in experience yet difficult to define.’[i]

Career Burnout is a form of stress.  It is a gradual building up of work-related stress to the point where it is having chronically negative impacts on your life.   

The Lobster Pot

Burnout is hard to recognise because what can often start as high job satisfaction becomes over time a waning optimism and eventually chronic stress.  You can’t quite figure out what’s wrong but something is wrong.  It’s the lobster pot metaphor: it heats up gradually and you can’t quite tell whether the problem is with you (the person) or with the pot (the context).

Burnout is depicted as having three strands: if you are feeling exhausted in your work, cynical about your work (and losing your sense of identity with it) and feeling reduced in your ability to do your work, you are exhibiting warning signs of burnout.

Fuzzy Thinking

The trouble is that stress can lead to fuzzy thinking which makes it hard to define and even harder to imagine that the solutions available to you will help.  You are being asked to think clearly at a very moment where you are feeling unable to do so.  It is difficult to live through something and make sense of it at the same time.

Here are the ways that I think a Guidance Counsellor can help:

1.       Making Sense of What is Happening to You

Life is made up of everyday individual actions and interactions.   Guidance counsellors are trained to help you bridge the divide between who you are and the world in which you exist.  By making sense of what is happening to you, your understanding increases.  By making meaning from your experiences,  you become able to separate what you need to respond to and what is outside of your control.

Life experiences can feel like fact but the very act of talking them through with someone else can change them.  This act can help you to reframe your understanding of yourself and think more clearly how the world in which you exist is impacting on you. 

2.       Adding in Objective Information

Sometimes an objective assessment such as a Career Assessment provides useful information to add to the context of your experiences. Tools such as an Interest Profile, a Personality Quiz or an assessment of your Career Values can help you make sense of your career issues and why your current context is no longer working for you.  You can also reconnect with forgotten career aspirations and begin to consider whether your current work is still meeting your needs.

Whether you need a big change such as a change of career, or a small change such as a change in your hours, your responsibilities or your communication with direct management, assessment helps you to gain awareness of your skills and how you can use them to change your context and ultimately help you to cope. 

3.       It’s not You, it’s Them

Many coping strategies for stress and burnout focus on developing personal resilience.  These elements, while helpful, don’t suit every person and every situation.  There needs to be a recognition that sometimes people are being asked to deliver beyond what would be considered reasonable. 

Example of an approach that focuses only on personal resilience. Source: hellodriven.com

This HBR article quotes a survey by Gallup that found the top five reasons for burnout are:

1. Unfair treatment at work

2. Unmanageable workload

3. Lack of role clarity

4. Lack of communication and support from their manager

5. Unreasonable time pressure

While a focus on personal resilience is a valuable tool, workplace practices and expectations feed into personal burnout and a person’s context needs to be addressed if they are to break the cycle.  Burnout is a system problem and most likely things at work will need to change.

Knowing Yourself Better Helps You Plan For Change

The process of guidance counselling can help you to bring yourself to an a-ha moment of what kind of change you are looking for.  Clarity – the very opposite of fuzzy thinking – is a major component in planning for change.  By taking a step back, you begin to explore options which you have not been considering because you have been feeling overwhelmed from your current work context. 

Sometimes a dilemma enhances our freedom to choose.  The process of guidance counselling can give you a new vocabulary for breaking down your old coping routines and building new ways of developing your career.

i Eugene Kennedy and Sara Charles. On Becoming a Counsellor. Gill & McMillan 1977