RESOLVING CONFLICT THROUGH SELF-CARE

THE INNER CONFLICT

Just pause for a moment as you think about how self-care affects how you feel, how you think, how you engage, and how you act… or perhaps sometimes react. Pause one more time to hear this… I’m not blaming you for what’s going wrong on the outside, because of what you have going on inside. What I am saying is that we need to learn to see the inter-connectedness between self-care and how we show up in the world, because stress has a ripple effect, and so does wellbeing.

CARE MATTERS

So let’s explore this a bit more from the inside out. Let’s imagine you didn’t sleep enough.

I don’t know about you, but most people get pretty grumpy or at least easily irritated when they are sleepy. Now we all know sleep is important, but we might not know just how important, because we don’t see the cause and effect and therefore we don’t prioritize getting enough sleep and we just push through. Because we can just push through. We humans are designed to survive. At least under short-term pressure. So we do that, too much, too often, over and over again and especially right now, when we might feel as if this is a period we just have to get through. It’s the trap of creative agencies, service-based industries, production and event companies, product launches, lawyers and accountants. Ok… pretty much every type of industry knows what it feels like to be under pressure to perform within a time-frame that might be too tight for comfort. So what to do? We don’t have enough time to get the job done, so we borrow time from our self-care, thinking that’s the way we can hack time. By throwing ourselves under the buss.

WHO’S WORKING?

Who’s doing the work if we are too tired to work optimally? Lack of sleep causes us to lose focus, feel more easily overwhelmed and anxious, not making the best decisions, cut corners and just do what we have always done, instead of being innovative problem solvers. Add to that feeling foggy and unclear, because when we are running on survival mode and our stress hormones are running amok, plus we are probably also not taking the time to eat food and drink enough water to sustain the kind of mental, emotional and physical energy, clarity and focus required to work under pressure. Think athletes.

Then who is the I that’s showing up to work? Not your best self, maybe not your worst self either, but perhaps it’s your anxious or scared self, or your annoyed self, or even your angry self. At least your tired and irritable self, the short sighted, let’s get this done self. The one that might not care as much about working better either, just the one getting it done. The one focusing on the result at the cost of the process and the relationships, which essentially could have bettered the result, but since that’s unknown, we don’t have time for that.

THE RELATIONSHIP WE HAVE WE OURSELVES SHOWS UP AT WORK

If we put ourselves last, we also send a message to ourselves and our very own body that we don’t matter. It might be an unconscious message, but the choice is conscious. Can you feel that? Can you feel the sadness of not caring about you? Or the frustration maybe even anger? Because what we care about, we also care for. That’s how culture works as well. When we care about people, we automatically care for them too. When we care about the work, we also work better. When we care about ourselves, we care for ourselves too and we end up working better. When I was a young executive I thought my body was my servant and I could just use it as I wish. I didn’t think I needed self-care, but it’s not just about using up our very own resource and taking it for granted. It’s about recognizing the irony of neglecting the resource that what makes us work better, because we don’t have time or see the importance.

RESOLVING CONFLICT STARTS WITH US

Now we can keep talking about the importance of rethinking self-care, but I would rather talk about resolving conflict through self-care, because we need that more than ever right now.

Stress affects all of us, not just right now. Stress and burnout has been a silent crisis for a long time. We have focused so much on team-work, leadership skills and communication but we have not focused on the root cause of the problem. Just like with any disease, we see the symptom “conflict”, we try to fix the symptom by learning the skills of communication, but if the root cause of the conflict is stress, fear, anxiety, unhappiness, anger we need to ask more questions about the root cause of those emotions.

We are emotional beings, we cannot hide from our emotions. We can suppress and ignore our emotions, many do and have for centuries, but they are still there and they affect our interactions with each other until conflict arises.

Sometimes the root cause of those emotions are poor self-care that’s one layer we can do something about, but what’s really the root cause of poor self-care? Most say time when I ask that question. But is it really? If we work better with self-care, if self-care saves us time, why do we still not implement it in our workday? It’s not about self-care coming first, it’s about being inclusive. It’s about seeing that we matter, because we are human and humanity matters.

It’s about acknowledging the conundrum we are in; we cannot be our best emotional and mental selves, if we don’t feel and function well physically. However we don’t take care of our physical needs, if we are not feeling emotionally and mentally well either. That’s why a stressful work-culture is costing us not just our physical, emotional and mental health, but also our joy and happiness as human beings because we don’t connect with others the way we crave and need so that we can flourish.

LEARNING TO KNOW OURSELVES

Self-care is actually not really about the habits, it’s about the relationship we have with ourselves that leads to the habits. It’s about emotional intelligence and the skills that come from accepting and respecting our humanity.

We all have human needs that we need to fulfill and satisfy to bring our best self forward. To have healthy relationships because we can communicate from a place of self-awareness and take responsibility for our choices. Choices that feed and fuel us as whole humans, not just a piece of the culture puzzle, but the pieces that’s needed to complete the culture puzzle. All of us matter and it starts with us knowing that we do, making the choice and the effort to stand up and reclaim our personal power by taking care of ourselves.

Photo by Uriel Soberanes via Unsplash