Women, Avoid Martyrdom This Christmas!

How are you? How are you feeling right now? No really, how ARE you? How you doing?

I imagine that quite a few of you are feeling a tad stressed and overwhelmed with all you have to do, both at work and at home. It’s the time of year when our work home balance can get quite out of kilter.

If that feels like you right now take a few minutes to consider this:

Christmas will happen whatever.

Christmas is not simply one day-it’s a season. If it doesn’t go right one day there’s another on the way.

Most things will still be there on December 28th.

Time is man made. There is no law that says everything must be completed on time (except  tax-do your tax returns on time!)

Are you succumbing to the well known ‘I must be superwoman at work as well as making my own mince pies and knitting a witty cat blanket and still look gorgeous’ syndrome? It’s rife at this time of the year and very infectious. If you haven’t been inoculated you could be in danger.

If you’re getting caught up in the pressures that are heaped onto women’s heads at this time of year (by ourselves as well as others) take a moment to pause and reflect. Try giving yourself this mini cure.

The Cure for Martyrdom

What really matters to you and those you care about during this season? If you come up with the answer a beautiful magazine-photo-fit home and hand knitted mince pies then you’d better give that some priority.

But most of us won’t come up with that answer. Most of us will want a relaxing, argument-free time with people we care about, if we can manage it. If the cards don’t get posted on time, they’ll arrive late; the world won’t stop spinning on it’s axis.

Remember to take a break now and again. Recent research shows that people who practice mindfulness are particularly resistant to the blandishments of the ad industry, and frankly that’s what’s we’re talking about here. Being constantly bombarded with images of the perfect woman organising her perfect Christmas for her perfect family, while wafting clouds of Chanel and simpering Nigella like over the bread sauce are so not real! They are figmentsof the admen’s world.

Instead, let’s ‘channel’ Marje Simpson enjoy ourselves! Cheers, purple haired lady!

P.S. I think it might just be me with the cat blanket thing..substitute your own pointless activity.

Photo Credit: Steven J Sullivan

Work Life Balance – Have you got it?

Over-Working

It seems we Britons continue to work the longest hours in Europe. More than 4 million employees in full time roles work more than 48 hours a week (that’s 700,000 more than did during the 1990s), and one in six regularly works more than 60 hours a week.

According to the TUC, the UK working week is now up to 43.5 hours – three hours longer than the European average. It also found 5.26 million Britons work an average of 7.2 hours of unpaid overtime a week. I’m worn out just writing that!

Technology which has made our lives so much easier on so many levels has also meant it’s much harder to escape from work. It’s always there: in our electronic notebook, our whizzy phone or lap top, staring balefully at us from our briefcase like a silent reproach. How long do you wait before succumbing to those emails? And how many times have you been caught up in the  ‘I can send a work email later than you’ game?’ Be honest!

Stress at Work

You may absolutely thrive on stress at work; indeed maybe you can’t get motivated unless there’s an important deadline looming. This is fine if it works for you. For most of us, however, there comes a point when we need to take a break. (See ‘Do You Give Too Much‘) If you let the balance get out of kilter you’ll start to experience the classic symptoms of stress (see Top Five Symptoms of Stress). Play smart and try and stop it before it starts!

Work Life Balance Exercise

Try this for one week. Keep a time diary (otherwise known as a time and motion study on yourself!). As accurately as you can jot down everything you do every day over 7 days with a note of how much time you spend on it. Work could be broken down into tasks if you can manage that. Then you’ll probably have family or friends time, your hobbies, professional development (which includes things like reading a professional magazine). There will be things you do for others and things you do just for you. Just log it, don’t make a value judgement.

Once you have your week’s worth of data sit down in a comfortable chair and look through it. Honestly assess yourself; there is no right or wrong balance to achieve. You will know yourself if it’s getting out of kilter. At different stages of your life you’ll be applying your attention & time in different places. Listen to your intuition; if it feels right it probably is right. But if there is a nagging doubt, pay that doubt some attention and think about some alternative strategies. Get to the stress before it gets to you!

How do you know when your balance is tipping too far in one direction?

Picture Credit: Juanita De Paola

Top 5 Symptoms of Stress

Stress Management

If you’re going to rise high in an organisation or your business, you’re going to get stressed from time to time. Fact. In fact, stress is a much maligned word and generally used to mean something undesirable. Yet a  bearable amount of stress, like when we venture to try something new, can be enormously beneficial. It can actually advance our careers. It’s getting the balance right  that is difficult. If you always tried to avoid stressful situations you’d never advance, never learn and change your ideas. You’d stay where it’s always comfortable. (This is a significant point for ambitious professional women as generally speaking we emerge from surveys as being risk averse and also as disliking conflict. I’ll cover this in a future post)

When the balance gets out of kilter it can have disastrous consequences, for ourselves, and others. Work overwhelm is a serious business.

Work Life Balance

I was listening to an interesting seminar from Julie Hirst the other day (courtesy of  a Women in Logistics seminar, many thanks to them). Julie had been part of a project which  had run for ten years looking into work life balance and how stress affected people. An interesting distinction emerged. Working long hours which spilled over into your personal life were not such  a huge cause of stress for people at the top of an organisation as for those lower down.

In Control of Your Work

The variable factor is actually feeling in control of what is going on. It’s about having a choice; people who felt this was imposed upon them exhibited other symptoms of stress too. When we feel out of control at work serious ill health is sure to follow and then we are NINETEEN times more likely to make a major error. And I mean major error. The survey invited folk to give examples annonymously of mistakes they had made at work. The results were scary, down to actually causing death.

Having an element of control as a factor in helping manage stress is not surprising. The same thing happens in organisations when they are undergoing significant organisational  change. The feeling of not knowing, of having no control is the one which produces the most stress and leads to higher than average sickness levels.

Top 5 Symptoms of Stress

1) Sleeplessness on a regular basis.

2) Fatigue, again feeling tired most of the time, even when you’ve done little.

3) Inability to focus and concentrate

4) Irritability with others and with self

5) Pains in the neck, head and shoulders.

So, if you tick any of these boxes it’s time to start taking your well being seriously.

Sometimes it’ s impossible to take control of the external events, even if you are at the top. And that’s when we have to look within ourselves. There is one place where we can always have control. We can control and manage how we react to the external events. I don’t mean to sound trite, because it’s not as easy as talking positive (although that is a part of it). But it is possible.  Take steps to recognise your stress and then take steps to address the cause when and however you can. But always, take care of what is within your contol- you and your feelings.

Epictetus: “We are not touched so much by life events themselves but by the view we choose to take of them.” Wise words from a Stoic philospher AD 55-AD 135.  There is always a choice.

How do you manage work place stress? Do please share your ideas. The best thing I ever did to manage my work stress was to run my own business! And there are 3 tips here. Or, try listening to my free visualisation and see if you find that calming. Loads of women have told me how much they love it.  Here’s the article that accompanied it : What’s your perfect working day?

Photo Credit: Irum Shahid

How to Manage WorkPlace Stress – 3 Tips for Women

It’s Friday and you’ve had a stressful week at work and are longing for the week end. Phew, thank goodness Friday is here and you dash home thankfully and very tired.

But somehow the week end you had planned doesn’t quite cut the mustard. Your longed for rest and relaxation doesn’t materialise and you find yourself tetchy and irritated for much of the time. People around you are getting on your nerves and maybe you find yourself snapping at those close to you – kids, your partner or friends

You’ve taken that workplace stress home with you and it’s infecting other areas of your life.

3 Tips for Managing Work Place Stress for Women

It’s so easy to do. We know the research – even high fliers at work still end up doing more of the household chores than men (if the stats are to be believed). This is frequently an issue for women who are working with me, either one to one or on my women’s courses; it seems getting the work-life balance right is harder sometimes than getting that promotion!

So here are a few of my tips that have worked with other women.

• Finish work properly.
  By which I mean clear your desk, pack away any files and leave everything ready for Monday. Don’t take work home to sit reproachfully in your briefcase unless you are absolutely sure you a) really have to, and b) will be able to do it. Otherwise you literally have your work at home scuppering your chances of proper relaxation. I know at a certain level working at home is inevitable, but see if you can’t schedule this into the week nights and keep your week ends sacrosanct . You will be more productive the rest of the week for having a proper break. And leaving that desk primed for Monday is sending you a subtle but strong psychogical message.
• Share the chores.
  With a little more  probing it often emerges that women do have partners who are happy to share the chores but there is a undertone of  ‘they won’t do it properly so I’ll only have to do it again. It’s quicker to do it myself‘. If this sounds like you try to adopt the ‘good enough’ principle with some household tasks. Good enough means being good enough, not perfect. Don’t add to your stress by placing excessively high demands on yourself and others. Sometimes we can get a bit of victim mentality as we dash around trying to do it all…
• Take a guilt break.
  Being superwoman all week end (as well as all week!) means you’re on a hiding to nothing and probably quite difficult to be around. Make sure you do something over the week end that is just for you, that helps you recharge your battery. It may be tea in bed with the newspapers for half an hour; it may be a long phone conversation with a friend. Often it’s not a big thing but I find even when women do make time for themselves they tend to feel a bit guilty about it. Men do a lot of rushing around at week ends too. The difference I find is that men don’t tend to have the same feelings of guilt if they can’t do it all, or when they have a game of golf, watch the football, go to an exhibition. Whereas we women can get really good at beating ourselves up.
  Work out what it is you need to do to keep yourself on top form and then make time to do it! (If that’s on your too difficult pile take a look at What Stops You being Assertive?)

Life is a balance, sometimes a very delicate balance, of managing our needs and the needs of others. Remember, though, however many responsibilities you have at work and home, everyone needs a break, space to recharge. Make sure you build some time in for that, your essential maintenance down time! Happy Week end!

Photo Credit: Craig Hauger

Is Presenteeism Hindering Women’s Success?

When I left the corporate world over 9 years ago no one actually used the word ‘presenteeism‘. We  talked lots about absenteeism but over working? It didn’t feature in discussions yet it was there.

Apparently, the term “presenteeism” was coined by Professor Cary Cooper, a psychologist specializing in organisational management at Manchester University in the UK. It generally means people turning up for work when sick and is especially prevalent now as more people are fearful of losing their jobs in the current poor economic climate.

The Midnight Mail (Male?)

There have always been incidents of being present at work (and not necessarily working), and we all know the folk who send out work emails out at 2am to illustrate how dedicated they are to the cause. I even know of someone who set them on auto to go out then so it looked as if he was madly working away all the hours available!

The trouble is it becomes the corporate norm and suddenly people, men or women, who are not doing it are viewed as lacking in commitment, even when the organisation officially disowns the practice. I don’t have a gender breakdown, but generally speaking this is not a game women can play, as they are usually the ones with caring responsibilities; neither is it a game that women want to play.

Part Time Gain

What I do know is, that when I recruited part time staff (always women as it happens) they worked as hard and as productively as my full time staff and actually achieved more, hour by hour than their whole time equivalents. I have also watched members of staff who didn’t have to rush home at close of play, dawdle through parts of their day, secure in the knowledge that they could stay after normal hours and gain kudos for being ‘committed players’.

No Winners

The sad fact is no one really wins when this culture is prevalent. Sick people do not work well and get sicker; people feel compelled to stay late and work too long and get stressed as their life gets out of kilter; and women are at a disadvantage because even if it were desirable, they tend not to be part of the late clique and get labelled as not committed. And what we should be doing is questioning the whole idea of presenteeism and its role in corporate life

A very senior female executive confided in me recently:

“I have given up the idea of trying to get a balance in my life. So many of the meetings don’t even begin until after 5pm. I’m paid a lot to do this job and I m now resigned to never getting home before 8pm most week day evenings unless I plan it in advance“.

The role models need to be at the top, modelling a good work and home balance. And if the ‘top’ were more gender balanced, we might just see some more sensible hours. No one can give of their best 12 hours a day on a regular basis; eventually folk will burn out and women (and so e men) who want to have a life outside of work, or who have to be home, will be disadvantaged and companies will lose excellent staff.

Photo Credit: Chris Johnson

Need a Break? Check out these questions.

How many of the following questions do you answer YES to?

• Do you feel you don’t have enough time for yourself, doing what you want to do?
• Do you often find yourself getting to the end of the week and wondering where all the time went?
• Do you frequently work through your lunch break, or grab a sandwich while skimming emails?
• Do you rarely leave the office on time at the end of the day?
• Do you take work home with you on a regular basis?
• Is your mind always buzzing? Do you find it difficult to switch off?
• Do you panic if you leave your phone at home/work and are without it for even short periods of time?
• Do you think you could be doing something different if only you had more time to think about it?
• Do you think life is passing by too quickly?
• Do you sometimes feel really lacking in confidence? Does it hold you back from doing new things?
• Do you have a feeling that there is something better out there but don’t know what the ‘something’ is?

If you answered yes to more than 5 of those questions it’s probably time time for you to stop and take stock. At worst you are heading for burn out and at best you may be pedalling furiously but not going in the best direction for you.

I didn’t actually make up those questions; they are all a variation of the reasons given to me by women for coming on my RenewYou day. I’ve been there too. For a period of my life I was so busy being busy that I didn’t have time to listen to the intermittent nagging voice in my head saying ‘Is this it?’

Sometimes we’re just so taken up with the grind of the day job, giving our all at work and home that we don’t take time to stand still and really think about what it is we’re doing. We are buffetted by events and react, rather than taking control. Once I took some serious time out to consider what it was I really wanted it helped me set about taking back control; in fact, over the course of a year I totally changed my life.

Scared?

I know sometimes it can feel totally overwhelming, and to be honest, quite scary. I was scared. But I was excited and enthused too! And, as soon as I had begun following my plan, directing my life, my energy levels went up, my health improved, and I had more time to do the things that were important to me. I just needed to give myself some time and space to work out what I really wanted.

It’s why, when I designed RenewYou, I made sure that there was plenty of thinking and reflecting time built into the day, and why I always choose a venue with some nice outdoor space. It’s great to spend some time walking and thinking. Deep inside we usually know our answers, and the thought provoking exercises, support and encouragement of a day spent renewing yourself helps you find them.

So, if you ticked more than 5, I urge you to take a bit of time to yourself and think about how you are spending your precious life. I still do it every year – make time for my own personal development and run a mini audit on myself. Whether you choose a course, a book, a coach, or simply find time to reflect yourself, make sure you do it! And do it soon!

Photo Credit: Watford