I recently read a Harvard Business Review article that was making the point that many leaders neglect self-care. They prioritise work over getting enough sleep, eating well, exercising, having fun, socialising, meditating… all the things that make us happy and healthy.
The article suggests that what leaders are doing is pitting their own wellbeing needs against the needs of the business, when in fact the opposite is true. The happier and healthier they are, the better it is for the business, their team and their performance.
If we are tired, grumpy and not well nourished, we won’t perform well.
And it’s not just business leaders, I’m sure we can all relate to prioritising the needs of others over our own as if it’s a zero sum game, and in the process feeling stressed, tired and more than likely resentful as well.
But the key question for me is why do we prioritise doing things for other people over self-care?
Unless we understand that, we won’t be able to break the pattern.
Here’s one explanation. Attachment theory says that, when we’re very young there are times when our needs aren’t met by our parents. We want attention, to be soothed, or to be able to express how we feel, and we don’t get it.
If at that point we said to ourselves,‘Sod this, I’m out the door!’, and crawled off into the sunset, we’d be in big trouble!
So the theory is that we are programmed to interpret us not getting our needs met as something wrong with us rather than being critical of our parents’ behaviour.
We can end up believing that we’re not important — not deserving of the time, attention or love that we long for.
Furthermore, as we develop, we see that if we behave in a certain way, we get approval, and if we behave in other ways we’re met with disapproval. So, we learn to adapt to rewards and punishments in a way that sometimes overrides our own needs.
Then, we get to school and we find that if we try to meet our need for self-expression, connection, play or even going to the loo, in a way that our teacher doesn’t like, we are punished — perhaps even humiliated in front of the class.
Fast-forward to being an adult in the workplace, feeling stressed, tired, and perhaps not really enjoying your work, and all the while you feel that you have to live like this — that trying to get your needs met so that you feel happy, relaxed and fulfilled wouldn’t be okay.
I listened to a fascinating podcast series about busyness that argued that the drive to be busy all the time comes from a desire to achieve enough to get approval from others. No amount of external approval will make you feel good enough if you feel inadequate so it’s a relentless, exhausting hamster wheel.
So, if you’re not practising enough self-care, setting more reminders on your phone to go to bed early or to go to the gym probably isn’t going to be enough to override all of that programming.
But fear not — there are ways that you can gradually learn to override it.
One way is to practice self-compassion meditation. Connect with the thought that you’re not good enough, that you can never do enough, and that you feel trapped and exhausted, and meet that experience with acceptance and kindness, over and over again.
It’s not a quick fix, but it is a skill you can learn. The work of Dr Kristen Neff has found lots of evidence that doing these practices measurably improves people’s levels of self-compassion and their ability to meet their own needs.
Here is a meditation that will help you do that.
If you’d like to have a chat with me about how I might be able to coach you to do that, book a call here.
