When you are pushing forwards with your career or even maintaining the momentum you have built up, you can find that self-care is not always at the top of your priority list. When self-care is not high up there, you can end up getting yourself into a negative cycle. Not being able to break this cycle and not being able to focus on your own wellbeing can actually be detrimental to your health and to the longevity of your career. So, within your career, what can you do to start making self-care more of a top priority?
Establish What is Important for You
To start, you will need to establish what is important to you. What you feel (or think) is important may not be important to other professionals, and as you have to do what is right – you have to find out what you need and what you want. Your needs and requirements may vary dependent on the role you are in, but establishing what you need in terms of self-care will help you positively move forwards. So, for example, do you need to focus on less time at work? Do you need to focus on finding a more fulfilling and rewarding role? Where do your priorities lie, and why?
Give Yourself Time and Space
When you are busy working with others and working for others, you can forget to give yourself some much-needed time and space. Without time and space, you cannot reflect on your career, and you cannot reflect on your personal needs and wants either. Carving out time for yourself may be difficult – especially when you are juggling multiple commitments, but it is crucial whether you can snatch 15 minutes at the end of work each day to focus on reflection and progress. Or, whether you can snatch longer to truly wind, finding (and making the time)m is an important element of self-care. If you are not giving yourself time, then you will find that stress and pressure will build, and you will struggle to get a handle on it.
Reach Out To Those in Your Industry
You should never feel alone in your work or within your career. There are always those that can help you focus on your self-care and wellness. For example, if you have a career in social work, you will find that there is a lot of pf self-care and wellness guidance around, as well as professional bodies and organizations to which you can reach out to. Being able to share your thoughts and feelings within your industry and with those that can relate will help you relieve a lot of worry and pressure. When others know how you are feeling and they know what you are experiencing, then they can offer more targeted advice. If you are not reaching out to others within your industry, then you run the risk of feeling (and being) isolated. This is not going to be beneficial to self-care or to pushing your career to the next level.
Manage Stress Levels
When you are feeling stressed, you will struggle to think clearly, and you will struggle to focus on yourself and on your career. Managing stress levels will help you give your best to your job. To manage your levels of stress, you need to establish where the triggers lie and exist. Pinpointing what is giving you stress is important. You cannot manage your levels if you are not sure about where stress is coming from or where it is building from. If there are several areas in your career that are causing you great deals of stress, then always try and focus on one area at a time. Getting to the root cause of a problem and then working through it systematically is the best approach you can take.
Avoid Too Much Confrontation
There are situations within your career when a confrontation with others cannot be avoided. Maybe this is because you clash about the methods you use within your work, or you clash about other elements of your job. Managing confrontation and avoiding it where you can is important, as confrontation can raise your stress levels and leave you feeling anxious, and of course, this is not good for your self-care. If you feel that situations are building or escalating, then try and do what you can to dampen them before they end up consuming you.
Focus on Exercise and Eating Healthy
You can give a lot to your career, but how much are you remembering to give to yourself. For example, are you focusing on eating a healthy and balanced diet, and are you getting enough exercise? When it comes to focusing on self-care, you need to often start working from the inside out. If you are not looking after yourself as well as you should be doing, then you may be affecting yourself and your mental health and wellbeing moving forwards. Of course, this can then have a knock-on effect on your career and on what you achieve. Building healthy eating and exercise into your day may be testing at first, but after a while, you will find the changes will be part of your new and improved routine.
Return to Studying
Breaking any negative cycle within your career is going to be important. To do this, you may wish to return to studying. Shifting your time and your focus on advancing your studies and education can be truly beneficial to how you approach self-care and how you look at your career too. When it comes to returning to studying, you are taking time for yourself, and this is important. Focusing on what you need and want within your career is also another way of practicing and maintaining self-care.
Don’t Put Yourself Under Expectations to Conform
You already have a lot of pressure on your shoulders to perform well within your career. This may also mean that you have pressure to do the best that you can at all times. Too much pressure coupled with expectations to conform to standards and expectations can be a surefire recipe for disaster. Instead of pushing yourself to conform to unrealistic expectations, make sure that you focus on doing what feels good and right for you. When you can do this, you can be true to yourself, and you can stay true to yourself. This approach and way of thinking is going to help you focus on self-care all throughout your career.
Work Towards a Healthy and Sustainable Balance
To get to a happy place within your levels of self-care in your career, you need to work towards a healthy and sustainable balance. If you are not aiming to get a balance within your career and within your personal life, then you will find that you will end up chasing your tail and simply going around in circles. To work towards a balance, you need to manage your time more effectively, and you need to be aware of what you can achieve within any given day. If you are pushing yourself too hard or trying to do much on any given day, then you will feel the after-effects.
Set New Career Objectives and Goals
Sometimes within your career, you can find that self-care is elusive because you are trying to push towards achieving too much. When you define what you want to achieve, and you focus on setting clear objectives and goals, you can then shift your focus and target your efforts. Establishing and setting out clear targets and goals will help keep you focused, and it will help you focus on what is important to you and to your career. If you are not laying out future goals and targets, then you are trying to do too much, and this will backfire on you and on any plans you had for self-care.
Always Set Boundaries
To ensure that you are not pushing yourself too hard or spreading yourself too thin, you need to work on setting boundaries. Let colleagues know what is acceptable to you, and set out clearly where you draw the line. If you do not set boundaries, you can find that the line between work and life will get very blurry, very quickly. When this line is blurred, a balance can be hard to achieve and hard to maintain, and this can mean a demise in self-care is imminent.
Lose Any Career That is Leaving You Feeling Deflated
If you have tried to get better levels of self-care in your career, but you just feel like it is unproductive and unsuccessful, then a complete change may be on the cards. If you keep trying to seek solutions in your career, but you find that you are getting nowhere, then you may end up feeling drained and deflated, and this is not going to be beneficial for anyone. Don’t be afraid to embrace a career change or embark on a career change if you are struggling to get the self-care that you need and deserve.
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