As I was saying yesterday, here we are at a place where we think we moved mountains in the workplace, but instead, we have #EmotionalSupportWaterBottle – what more clear expression of the size of the HumanDebt and how deep the EQ crisis really is?
For as long as you have read us we have maintained that “the human work” consists of both team-level human work -through tools and space holders such as our Dashboard– and individual-level human work aka self-care. There is resistance to both. Organisational resistance and employee-level resistance.
As this video acknowledges it is not surprising in the least that people don’t throw themselves into the work with gusto when they have neither the energy nor the training or support from the organisation and when they certainly have seen little more than a game of accountability “monkey throwing” when the organisation even mentions “self-care”.
So isn’t “hydrating” self-care? It really isn’t, the hygiene factors simply can not be counted as part of it. Equally basic human rights can not be counted or seen as favours. The fact that the organisation or your colleagues exhibit respect is not self-care. That they seem empathetic to you needing something is not self-care. Taking a mental health day off when you hit the wall or having to perform any other crisis measures to make yourself feel well is also not self-care.
While someone was telling me there are over 100 different definitions of self-care used in research to me, a decent one is where we refer to self-care as a collection of physical and emotional pro-active and preventative practices performed by the individual routinely that are designed to make us feel better and grow that we engage with consistently and the enterprise should be rewarding this part of the human work as much as the team side of it.
They should be grateful when we engage with it and deliver them a better version of ourselves as a result. When we:
- Take up space and fill it with things that make us reflect, breathe or feel better be it rest or learning or protected work time to think and create;
- Claim our right to have individual self-care needs and don’t blindly accept a centrally mandated wellness policy but invest time into working out what works *for each of us* in particular and ask for time and support for those individual activities;
- When we declare and implement a habit collection to pertain to exercise, sleep and nutrition as well as our mindfulness practices be they meditation, Yoga, breathing or gratitude or, better still, all of the above.
Self-care is even harder than team-level human work because the latter benefits from the motivation the group provides whereas the former is so eerie when we have spent all of our professional lives never putting ourselves and our individual and emotional needs first and being commanded for the stance. When we overlay to it the impostor syndrome we all exhibit when it comes to behavioural and psychological topics and then, even more pressingly and dauntingly, the mental health and engagement crisis that we are collectively traversing, it really is little wonder that we are not eagerly demanding more than we are receiving from the organisation.
Self-care is the opposite of self-serving and gratuitous selfishness, it is instead a service we perform for the benefit of the organisation since they are the first to profit from us being in the best shape we can be so we can apply ourselves to the work they need us to perform.
With all that said, this much has to be clear to everyone: emotional support should not come from a service dog or even a bottle in the workplace but respect, appreciation, empathy, coaches, time, appropriate tools, organisational support and each other.
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“Nothing other than sustained, habitual, EQed people work at the team level aka “the human work” done BY THE TEAM will improve any organisation’s level of Psychological Safety and therefore drop their levels of HumanDebt™.”
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