Reflecting on a personal affirmation I'm trying to ditch: "Some day I will have less stress in my life"
"Some day" may never come, and hope does not spring eternal. Besides, per my training thus far, I'd just overburden myself with personal projects, anyway! It's what I've trained to do, and would be more comfortably familiar at that point.
Continuous improvement shouldn't really care too much about the destination, just about making each step of the journey the best step possible.
Reflecting on a personal affirmation [2]
The best step possible when you're climbing a mountain requires a lot of consideration, but ultimately you can't worry about how long it's taking you to climb the mountain when you're deciding where to put your next foot down.
If you're focused on the destination, you might convince yourself the best step is the one that might cause you injury, but save you time.
A twisted ankle causes incredible delays that always justify the longer, safer route.
Reflecting on a personal affirmation [3]
If I'm focused on that "some day" where stress will be lessened, the hard days will always require recovery time- and the folks around me will start to expect an unreasonable level of effort every day.
Enough hard days in a row, and you're well into burnout with no support.
Instead, I recognize the hardest days require extra support time. Some recovery can be included in the work day: For example: I keep a work journal to vent into, and use it daily.
Reflecting on a personal affirmation [4]
To make this work, you have to know your own limits, and every working environment has its own hurdles, roadblocks, rules and restrictions that define your effective limits as a cog in a greater machine.
In any working environment, it's important to consciously take time to recognize when you've reached a limit, and to consider those limitations when assessing your own productivity-- in theory (beforehand) or in practice (during & after). Then: aftercare!
Reflecting on a personal affirmation [5]
Aftercare after a string of hard days feels like a collapse of exhaustion at the end of a hard race. The exhaustion continues for days.
Aftercare when focusing on continual improvement means reflecting on the day and how you felt about it, identifying things you can do to set yourself up for a good start the next day, and documenting anything important you missed. It should happen during your workday. Schedule time for it daily, in advance, if you can!
Reflecting on a personal affirmation [6]
Finally, there's support.
Racing to the finish line doesn't leave time for collaboration and often puts you in the position of not having enough time to effectively request support.
To make all potential journeys possible, you need support-- and you need to engage that support well before you have any need of it. That means making time to both ask for and spin up that support - especially in situations where you *might* not need it.
Reflecting on a personal affirmation [7] (end)
Ultimately, capitalism's demand for endless growth is designed intentionally to inspire you to push yourself past your limits.
Businesses purposefully assign challenging goals with unreasonable time frames to inspire a sense of urgency.
That urgency is toxic to mental health, and harming yourself to meet unreasonable goals will only result in even more challenging goals later on.
So: Just focus on making each step the best step you can take.
re: Reflecting on a personal affirmation [7] (end)
@mawr I struggle with this a lot.
We recently had our yearly self reviews at my new employer and was having long talk with my manager because I felt like I could have done more and was feeling guilty over ending up sick enough to get admitted to the hospital for a few days during a critical point in a project I was our teams primary representative on that had a lot of C-suite eyes on it.. and someone apparently mentioned I was attending project meetings from the hospital bed while being pumped full of antibiotics to him.
The end result made me feel a lot better.
Paraphrasing him but. "I really value what you bring to our Team and feel very good about the current team dynamic. It is normal that not everyone has the same amount of bandwidth and I'd rather you take on less work than get burned out. During your first year here you've taken on two major projects that were highest priority for the company and managed to keep them moving forward. You are doing great, other managers regularly ask if you are available for projects but I'd rather you be focused on one or two major projects than burning midnight oil to keep velocity and constantly context switching."
Like.. some days I barely manage to bang out some random answers to stuff and maybe a code review or two. Other days my brain is on fire and I'll spit out the thing I've supposedly been working on for the last two weeks and has been simmering in my head for weeks.. in like 6 hours and then collapse into a puddle.
And that is just like... work. Home life.. taking care of my self? Never enough time for everything.
