How (not) to get back to work after a holiday…
One of my coaches who I supervise said to me in a session this week… “as a coach I am so good at supporting my patients with what they should be doing to feel better but I’m terrible at doing it myself”. This really resonated with me particularly this week. I went away on holiday last week, and started back at work after the bank holiday weekend. I can soundly say that I have not followed my own advice about how to look after yourself and do good self-care in practice. So here are my top ten tips of how NOT to get back to work after a holiday… then…
Be a human being, not a human doing.
I have had a lovely couple of weeks off work, away from social media and totally unplugged. We’ve recently moved, to a house which is a bit of a ‘project’, so it was also great to get away from the endless to-do list of all the things that go along with moving and renovating. I went with the best intentions to leave work at work, and leave the to-do list undone, knowing that it will all still be there when I got back. It was surprising to notice how difficult it was to really switch off. I consciously thought “right, now it’s holiday time, hurrah, I get to stop for a while”.…
Social media stress
For those scrolling through endless filtered, curated pictures and feeds, saturated by idealised pictures, this enhanced vision of perfection becomes the norm as the brain is exposed to perfect images over and again. Once we start to perceive this as ‘normal’ it slips into being our expectations of ourselves, and we judge our unfiltered reality as “less than the normal”, rather than “less than the perfect filtered version”.
