SELF-CARE IS NOT A SIDE-HUSTLE

WE MIGHT THINK WE NEED MORE WORK-LIFE BALANCE, BUT THE FUTURE IS ABOUT WORK-LIFE QUALITY

I was leading a session with a team of executives on Care-Driven Leadership® discussing how to prevent burnout and foster a well-being culture, when a woman in attendance spoke up, “I have always pursued excellence. However, I look at the young people, and I see them take lunch breaks and uphold boundaries around their private time.” She continued, “Listening to you, though, I realize that maybe I had it all wrong, thinking excellence is about working non-stop.” 

I used to think so too, I told her, and I acknowledged that she, like so many others, had learned that giving 100% to work and nothing to herself is what pursuing excellence has been taught is required of us for a long time. Our social construct is built on the pursuit of excellence as giving work our all instead of our best. We are conditioned to keep going until it’s all done instead of pausing to ask what we need to do so. 

But we are changing:

We are changing the way we work, our perspectives and relationship with work are changing, and the culture must change with it. During the Industrial Revolution, it was all about working faster and harder, which we kept doing as technology took over because it is hardwired into our survival instinct just to push on. But we have to pause and realize that we are in a relationship economy now, and how we reach results matters, which means people matter. How we work makes the difference between results that build us up or burns us. 

Granted, we still hear entrepreneurs talking about hustling to succeed, and most of them don’t by the time they burn out. We are faced with the accepted impression that a high-performance culture is a hustle culture that’s highly competitive and not inclusive. 

However, that’s not sustainable; it never was, and at this point, I hope you are recognizing that what truly drives performance and excellence is well-being, care, and connection. 

We don’t burn out from working too much.

Looking at the statistics of what causes burnout, it’s clear it isn’t only rooted in working too much but rather the loss of agency we experience by worrying too much and feeling that we do not belong or matter, which is why the Self-Care Mindset® is so important in cultivating work-life quality. 

However, many studies show that we are equally productive in a 4-day work week, and we get the same results in a 45-minute meeting as a 60-minute one. In 2015 in Iceland, workers in the public sector started working 36-hour weeks with the same pay, and the results were both steady and improved productivity as well as better well-being, more energy, and less stress. The crucial factor to recognize here is that when we have more time off to get our sleep and do things that stimulate our energy, like being outside, exercising, eating well, and pursuing other interests, we have more bandwidth to face and navigate stress at work better. However, if we spend our time off worrying and being stressed about work, time off is not going to help us see the impact we hope for at work.

The value of working a shorter workweek is that people sleep more. Or maybe we should say they get their sleep because when we learn to worry less, we can get our sleep, which in turn impacts our ability to access the best of our human skills, which helps us build better relationships so we feel more curious, connected and confident. Building self-care into how we work cultivates a work environment where we not only feel that we matter, we know that we do. 

Juliet Schor has been studying the impact of shorter work weeks for a while, and the conclusion continues to be that we work better when we work less, and with that, performance stays the same and even increases along with our well-being. And yet, we keep getting stuck in the human condition that working harder is the way we succeed. 

It must also be noted that lack of sleep is a stressor in itself, so there’s no getting around it. It matters because you matter.

Self-care is about healthy human relationships. 

Many call this the work-life balance, which we do need, but it’s not the answer to solving the burnout crisis. We must improve culture by increasing our sense of psychological safety, belonging, and knowing that we matter. We must bring self-care into our work-day so that we can harness our human advantage. That we can think, engage, and act with curiosity, clairty, courage, and confidence. That’s the key to growth, not working harder. 

The complexity of this is that when we have more time off, we do improve culture because we work less exhausted and more nourished as whole humans; however, we still need the skill to rethink self-care at work to build a healthy culture. 

Perhaps this is why it seems like a big task to change the culture and prevent burnout; however, that’s the point with my book; it gives us the tools for each of us to improve our own work-life quality, and with that, we can make well-being the foundation for how we change culture together. As with all things human, it’s multi-dimensional. 

When I ask people what would make them happy, they don’t say more money or a better title; they say peace —feeling at peace with themselves. So, let’s find our way back home to our humanity, shall we?