The society we live in often leads us to reverse priorities and put work first. This can negatively affects our quality of life and physical, mental and emotional health.
According to researches carried out in France, physical suffering related to work affects 3.1% of women and 1.4% of men, but according to some experts, the figures are higher. The international classification of diseases identifies burn-out as a work-related phenomenon but in reality work is not the only cause.
With the cost of living constantly rising, we are likely to work longer hours to earn a salary that allows us to provide for our own needs and those of our family. Because of this, many elements of our private life are put aside.
We spend many hours working, reducing the time to eat, to rest, to be with the family, and we do not realize how much this can harm us.
While most of us cannot afford to leave their job, a balance must be found between work and private life to prevent stress from building up in a worrying way.
Photo by Christin Hume on Unsplash
In this period of forced tele-working, it is even more difficult to put boundaries between work and private life. For this reason, many governments have been drafting directives that establish the right to “disconnect”. We need to have the time to do sports, to walk, to take care of our dear ones, to follow our passions or simply to rest.
More and more people suffer from stress, feel exhausted, have problems with nutrition, addictions, or relationship difficulties, and all that because of the long working days, which do not leave us the time to do activities for our well-being.
If you feel you are in one of those situations, know that no salary is worth your health, no job is worth the wear and tear that comes from working days that annihilate your energy and happiness.
If you have no other alternatives to the work you are currently doing, find something positive to balance your life, because otherwise, there may come a time when you will start making mistakes at work and your overall performance will suffer. Start looking for another job but put your health in the first place, because if you get ill it may take a long time to recover.
Your job is an important part of your life, but it is not your life. There is much more: family,health, and friends. Do not allow work to take up all the space in your mind and body, taking the joy away from you.
Remember always taking care of yourself first, because this is the only way you can live a better life.
You finish the chore tasks of the day in an hour and you dedicate yourself to kill the time you have left to complete your workday. You might ask your boss something more to do, but you would rather go out. If they need you, they will call you.
It sounds like an enviable plan, but as soon as you have posted something on social media, searched for the best book deals to buy, and eaten a sandwich, you wish the call would come. It does not come, and you realize that you have already become chronically bored, and you feel undervalued. It is not normal.
This type of boredom is called by specialists bore-out syndrome. According to psychologists, this boredom can be as damaging as overwork exhaustion, the best-known burnout syndrome. We tend to think that a bored employee will take the opportunity to pay more attention to performing a certain task, but this is not often the case. According to a study by the University of Lancashire (England), bored people actually perform poorly at work and make more mistakes.
Of course, to avoid getting involved in the source of their boredom, people with this syndrome tend to be distracted by social media and may even develop an addiction. Food, alcohol, and tobacco are great candidates to fill in your time.
It is important to distinguish normal, even healthy, boredom from constant and chronic boredom that ends up making you feel useless. Chronic boredom can generate profound anxiety and can negatively affect all aspects of life, from private and family life to social life.
We already know that, usually, the things that bore us are the same things that we do not like. This lowers the levels of motivation and involvement, the levels of responsibility and makes you adopt a passive attitude. You are procrastinating. However, there is more.
Photo by Scott Graham on Unsplash
To begin with, know that getting bored during the working day does not depend on the type of work you do, but on the type of interests you have. You can have the best job, even be the boss, but feel deeply bored and undervalued. In other words, working on something that does not match your education or experience, and that does not allow you to develop professionally, is a time bomb. Other causes of demotivation are also lack of communication with others, carrying out monotonous tasks that do not represent any kind of challenge and having a definite contract.
All of these factors increase when you have no other choice than taking a whatever job, or you cannot afford to change your current job. The situation is getting worse in these times due to the economic downturn caused by the pandemic. People in that situation, run a much higher risk of boredom and exhaustion because they do something they know from the start that they do not like. Their only motivation is financial and over the years this becomes hard to bear. It is extremely serious because people spend about 33% of their day at work, and sometimes even more.
To limit the damages you could try finding small motivations that could be incorporated into your work. The idea would be about making each day meaningful and interesting. Communicating interest and commitment to superiors by developing new tasks could also help. Finding an exciting activity to bond downtime at work would be interesting but sometimes impossible to do. In those cases, you could, for example, move it to immediately after working hours.
If despite this, your motivation does not increase, it might be better to look for another job that best suites you, something you could do while keeping your current job. Indeed, it would not be wise to replace the anxiety generated by the lack of motivation at work with the one arising from being unemployed. You could consider a part-time job or volunteering activities if you have enough resources to live on.
The year that has just ended changed the ways of working and managing people. The different lockdown periods (stronger or lighter) have forced many employees at home who have done “smart working” as they call it in Italy, teleworking otherwise said, and perhaps will do so for another good part of 2021.
Let’s see 4 major changes that I hope will happen in 2021.
New leadershipstyles. In recent years, a change in leadership has already begun with the new generations (millennials and generation Z). Young people no longer accept that their managers know everything and want to be actively involved in the decision-making process. Due to the Covid pandemic, this trend has intensified. For old-fashioned managers, getting rid of old habits while managing staff during teleworking was a challenge. I think leadership should develop in the direction of offering opportunities to staff as well as empowering them.
Diversity and inclusion. The past year has also brought news regarding inequality. The “Black Lives Matter” movement, launched in the United States, was exported to Europe in no time. Some consider the refugee issue problematic but others consider it a solution to the problem of ageing. Gender equality, right to equal pay between men and women and among people regardless of their origin: these are some signals sent to us in 2020. Diversity and equality will therefore be the watchwords for human resources sectors. Companies that will adapt better to new circumstances will be the strongest.
Evolution of recruitment. Recruiting new staff will never be the same. Recruitment in 2020 has been characterized by technology and artificial intelligence. Online applications have been the norm for some years already, but asynchronous interviews, such as those in which a candidate receives questions from a video recorded on an information system and replies via the system itself, are becoming increasingly popular. Candidates are also encouraged to leave their feedback to improve artificial intelligence tools.
More committed employees. The use of surveys to assess the satisfaction of human resources policies will become increasingly important. Whether it is the integration processes in the workplace, the actions aimed at the well-being of employees or performance evaluation, the opinion of employees is increasingly important. Actually, a company that does not want to let its best talents leave will have to pay more and more attention to the satisfaction of its employees. However, not only they will have to listen to their opinions, they will also have to implement actions as a follow-up to the results of the surveys.
“She asked me to put her in copy to all emails, even the most trivial ones. Sometimes she would knock on my office door to ask me if I was okay because I had spent a lot of time in the bathroom, when actually only five minutes have passed. She checked when I walked in and when I left my office to see how long I had been way. The pressure she exerted by checking every detail of my work was suffocating, more than exaggerated and above all counterproductive.”
This is just a testimony from an employee who used to work with a micro-manager. What exactly is micromanagement? It is a managerial practice through which the manager exercises exhaustive control of the actions, tasks, functions and responsibilities of the people subordinated to him / her at a hierarchical level.
This type of managers may also ask to see an email before it is sent, and they may want to be informed of all the decisions that employees need to take, because they think that their staff cannot take decisions. A micromanager combines impatience and distrust with absolute control of the tasks assigned to their subordinates.
The situation look like the schemes used by the “Thought Police” to scrupulously monitor every moment of the characters in George Orwell’s “1984” novel. As in that book, the consequences of this practice of strict control on employees are devastating. The boss gains in peace of mind but staff suffer from it and are also less productive. Actually, this system creates bottlenecks that cause a slowdown in all activities. This type of manager wants to earn a good reputation and prevent a supervisor from blaming them that something was wrongly done.
Photo by Michal Jakubowski on Unsplash
But the worst part falls on the employees. Many times they do not know how to give priority, because the boss constantly changes their priorities based on the urgency that arrives, or because a superior asks him or her or it is the market requiring that. Employees lose creativity and self-esteem. A culture of fear is established, where everything is subject to the orders of the superior. This can lead to sickness absenteeism.
Apart from real psychosomatic diseases that can arise, psychological situations can also develop for which the person feels worthless, becomes smaller and smaller until they doubt their abilities. You begin to ask yourself: “Am I capable of doing it? ”,“ Am I in the wrong job? ”,“ Why do they control me like this, what have I done wrong? ”. And it can also happen that you quit your job, even if you have a good salary. When a situation cannot be changed or accepted, you have to leave it, and, in this case, you leave your job.
It is important to know that people do not quit jobs, they leave bosses.
But why do managers fall into this trap?
If micromanagement spoils the work environment, employees’ health, and it is harmful even to bosses who lose productivity and may lose also staff, why can’t this total and constant control be avoided? The bosses don’t have enough work to do?
Let’s see the possible causes.
First, managers themselves suffer pressure from the environment, be it from their own bosses, shareholders, markets or competition.
Second, incompetence. Either managers feel unsecure because their staff perform an excellent job compared to their own, or the employees are not suitable for that type of job.
The third cause is clear and straightforward: the boss’s obsessive personality making them unable to organize and manage the work.
Whatever the cause is, it is necessary to analyse what is happening in order to put an end to the situation as soon as possible. First, you should go to the human resources of your company. I have worked in human resources for over 10 years and have seen a lot of micromanagement.
As an alternative, you could turn to your superior and ask them to implement one or more techniques, perhaps with the help of a coach. One technique could be that of the traffic light. Together with the boss, you define the admissible and acceptable control limits, that are not to be exceeded. If these limits should be overcome, some signals will be sent to the manager. When the manager receives them, they identify their behaviour and try to control it.
Another strategy is to define the profile of the boss and of each team members, analysing their personal, professional and communication style and characteristics. Once this “x-ray” is completed, the boss shall answer the following questions:
1. What leadership style they use with each employee;
2. What leadership style each employee would need;
3. Which leadership model they would like to use with the each employee.
By doing so, the boss can realize that the type of leadership they are using is in line with that person’s role, but it is not what that employee, due to his or her personality, needs. By adopting this paradigm shift, the boss begins to think not from their own point of view, but from that of the subordinate. While this strategy may sound like science fiction, with time and a willingness to change, success is assured.
I’m sure you use the word stress often throughout your day.
We all feel a little stressed due to the multiple commitments we have, pending deadlines, and lack of time to dedicate to ourselves.
The common denominator of all forms of stress is a feeling of malaise, fatigue, irritability that makes us more fragile with illness and less tolerant of others and of daily problems.
Actually stress is an adaptive response that has allowed our species to survive throughout its evolution.
Hans Seyle, the first theorist of stress, conceived it as an adaptive response that the body puts into force to overcome all the situations that its alarm systems deem dangerous.
The stress reaction is indeed characterized by the secretion of hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline which make the muscles stronger and the person more reactive. In this sense, stress has a value that is not only positive but also necessary for the survival of the species.
Primitive men had to face dangers that were of a short duration. While they were hunting, for example, they might encounter an animal and had to decide whether to run away or face it (have you ever heard of the “fight or flight” response?), but once they made up their mind and acted accordingly, they had plenty of time to recover.
Photo by Crawford Jolly on Unsplash
In the contemporary age, we too have this type of reaction when facing what, on a conscious or unconscious level, we perceive as dangerous (stressor). But today’s stressors are definitely different from those our ancestors faced. Modern stressors are psychosocial and no longer physical. It’s about the work environment, social relationships, financial worries, the huge amount of commitments we have and the limited time to complete them. Above all, these stressors are not momentary but can persist for a long time and consequently we need more time to recover.
Look at these signs that may indicate that stress is becoming a threat to your health:
What can you do concretely to combat stress, when the conditions in which you find yourself do not allow you to avoid it?
Physical activity, especially aerobic, such as brisk walking, swimming and cycling, is undoubtedly one of the best remedies for stress.
Breathing control, like getting used to using the diaphragm and slowing the respiratory rate, is another useful tool against stress.
Other activities may be: yoga, tai chi and meditation. In recent years, mindfulness has become popular. Mindfulness, by increasing the level of personal awareness, carries out an anti-stress action.
Obviously, a good massage that helps you increase the level of oxytocin, a hormone capable of counteracting cortisol, is certainly effective.
As regards food supplement, magnesium is the anti-stress mineral for excellence, also because we are chronically deficient. Remember that a supplement is such because it must be complementary to a healthy diet. Therefore, remember to eat well!
Have you ever wanted to reinvent your life? Have you tried several times but failed? Reinventing yourself professionally or personally can be a challenge but also a great adventure. Follow these 6 steps to succeed.
First step: find or wake up one of your passion.
Photo by Braden Collum on Unsplash
Concluding one phase and starting another one is not easy. Reinventing yourself requires more commitment than a simple change. Consequences may impact vital aspects of your daily life and a lot of courage and determination are needed.
The pandemic phase has forced all of us to look within and it is possible that many of us are dealing with the need of reinventing ourselves. There will be some who feel empty and need to do something to fill the empty spaces, others who have been forced to reinvent themselves due to the loss of a family member or a friend, others due to difficulties with their work.
For one reason or another, these are times when you need to stop to reflect and make decisions. Let’s see how to deal with this situation.
Reinventing yourself in a satisfactory way presupposes confronting yourself with one of the most uncomfortable emotions that exist: fear. You will be forced to leave your comfort zone and take a leap in the dark. The best antidote to fear is passion. It is the first success factor in a “reinvention” phase. Finding your passion, or awakening it, is only possible if you are honest with yourself. You have to ask yourself questions like:
who I really am;
what I want to do;
which of my passions can help me in this moment.
An honest reflection and re-discovery your old dreams are the fundamental ingredients to neutralize fear and not fearing the future.
The second factor that will help you is not to assess uncertainty as a danger but as an opportunity. It is a question of letting go nostalgia and opening up to the experience of the “new”, so that to focus on what you want and not on what you fear.
To achieve this, you must be willing to learn with humility. If you think you already know everything, it is difficult to be able to start over in any area of your life in a satisfactory way. The success of those who are successful is only the tip of the iceberg, behind there are hours and hours of training and mistakes that are barely seen.
Facing the future and uncertainty also requires a great deal of creativity and imagination. When reinventing yourself, it is important to keep a compass to map the path you are taking. The future is not written anywhere, it is up to you to create it and to do so you need our imagination and hard work.
Photo by Jamie Street on Unsplash
Reinventing yourself means knowing yourself from another perspective and being surprised by the opportunities that suddenly begin to present themselves. If we want your new self to be successful, you need to go out and make yourself known. For this, it is essential to strengthen your network of contacts.
The final ingredient for your success is to be self-confident, because you are capable of doing things you do not even imagine. But you need to learn to use the resources you have and find others available around you.
To conclude, here are the six ingredients to successfully reinvent yourself:
Staying focused and maintaining a high level of productivity when teleworking isn't always easy.
Faced with a list of things that accumulate day after day, the important thing is to plan your day and week in advance. A simple and effective solution is the "to-do list" with the allocation of time and corresponding tasks in your agenda.
In this way, you will work on one thing at a time and will be able also to prioritize.
To be productive, you can try the Pomodoro Technique, which gets its name from the timer used while cooking that often looks like a tomato.
What is this technique about? Work 25 minutes on a specific task and then take a 5 minute break. Repeat this mode 4 times (25 minutes of work and 5 minutes of rest), then take a longer break of 20 minutes away from the computer. If you have a dog, go for a walk, or water the plants, eat some fruit, do some stretching.
To avoid distractions and focusing problems, do not turn on the TV, do not work on the bed and put your personal phone in the "do not disturb" mode so as not to be interrupted.
Don't forget to set limits. Once the day is over, don't work overtime and truly disconnect! The ideal would be to have a dedicated workspace, so that you can "leave the office" once you are finished with your work.
Some tips to optimize your workspace.
As regards your workspace at home, do not underestimate the positive effect of comfort on your productivity and concentration.
Invest in the purchase of a comfortable chair and a foot rest to maintain a good posture. And if you really want to do yourself some good, also buy (or buy only) a standing desk.
Good lighting is important so as not to strain your eyes and it will help you stay focused. Try a light bulb that diffuses blue light, for example.
In addition to being comfortable, your workspace at home should reflect your personality with some decorative objects that help you stay inspired during the day and make you want to spend time in it.
Organize your office and arrange your things according to the frequency of use. Keep the things you need frequently on hand. Sort out the things you need least in an easy way so not to waste your time while looking for them.
Finally, remember that physical exercise is essential for your well-being and after a day of work it would be good to dedicate some time to your body to relax and start the evening well.
What do you think about these tips?
London, February 1944. The bombing alarms sound throughout all the city.
In a small room, however, everything is calm, extremely calm. In this room, Dwight Eisenhower is preparing the “OverLord” operation, an operation of capital importance. Eisenhower is an important general in the US military. The decisions he makes will have an unprecedented impact on his life, his career and the whole world. Europe has been suffering from Nazism for too long.
“OverLord” has as its objective the landing of allied troops on the coast of Normandy to free Europe from Hitler’s Nazism. It is a historic moment: it is the largest landing of military troops. The fate of Europe and the whole world are at stake. Eisenhower’s staff are pessimistic. The King of England, George VI, wrote him a letter telling him that the more the project progresses, the more frightening it becomes. His organization does not hold. Eisenhower is in his quiet room in London and the bombs don’t stop falling. It seems that the weight of the whole world is on his shoulders. Work on the final preparations by drinking tea. He has faith in his plan. History will prove him right a few months later. Eisenhower is part of that group of heroes of which little is said, despite being the author of one of the greatest military successes in history. On 6 June 1944 he saved Europe from nazi-fascism.
Eisenhower is at the same time a brilliant strategist, a peerless organizer and a charismatic statesman. His successes are numerous. In 1953 he became the 34th President of the United States. During his tenure, he launched several reform programs, including the modernization of all road infrastructure in his country. We remember him as a man with an infallible organization. A man who is not afraid of challenges, of whatever size they may be. Among the lessons we can learn from Eisenhower, there is the management of time according to the matrix that takes his name, the Eisenhower matrix in fact.
“What is important is rarely urgent and what is urgent is rarely important.”
This phrase was a kind of mantra for Eisenhower. He analysed all his actions according to this principle. Therefore, he has built this matrix, which teaches us to make choices.
It’s very simple. Imagine 4 boxes on a table (in the picture here below they are called quadrants):
one containing urgent and important things;
a second box containing important but not urgent things;
a third box containing urgent but not important things;
a last one containing non-urgent and unimportant things.
I would like to point out that this matrix can help you in both private and professional life.
For all the things we have to do, we need to ask ourselves these two questions:
How urgent is it? When do I absolutely have to do this?
What level of importance does it have? What happens if I don’t do it?
For example, I have a medical appointment that I have been waiting for a long time. It’s urgent? Yes, I booked it a long time ago and so now it’s urgent. It’s important? Yes, because I have to understand the origin of this health problem that has been bothering me for some time.
Therefore, I will put it into the top left “Urgent and Important” box (quadrant I).
In the top right box (quadrant II) I put the activities that are important but not urgent because they are things I can do later. Right now they are not crucial to achieving my goals. For example, I want to promote my business on social media or translate my site into English. They are activities to be planned.
Then, there are some activities that are urgent but not important (quadrant III). For example, replying to an email that does not concern me directly, or attending a meeting that I consider superfluoud that it is important that someone from my team participate. I can delegate this activity.
In the lower right box (quadrant IV) I put everything that is neither urgent nor important. Actually, for everything that is inside this box, I should ask myself: shall I keep it?
According to Eisenhower, such a drastic choice is difficult. However, if after a few weeks, the things inside this box have not been done yet, they must be eliminated.
This matrix is very useful because it forces us to distance ourselves and question ourselves about our situation.
Here are 5 questions that you have to ask yourself:
In the middle of the desert, a somewhat stupid coyote runs after a very clever bird. The two animals go at high speed.
Suddenly, the bird stops in front of a precipice. The coyote, on the other hand, continues to run without looking until it realizes it is running in the air.
This scene is a classic of Bee Beep and the coyote.
But it is also the perfect illustration of a very serious economic theory: the hypothesis of financial instability.
According to Hyman Minsky, all periods of economic prosperity contain the elements of a future crisis. Like what? It is simple. When all goes well, economic agents (households, businesses, the State) are trustful and borrow money to carry out projects, invest, and develop activities.
In this good environment, investors risk more; banks lend money more easily, without paying too much attention to the danger of not being repaid. Minsky calls this the “paradox of tranquillity”.
However, at some point, the whole economy lives on credit. It then happens that other, more worrying phenomena arise: unemployment, slowdown in activities, lower income, and difficulty in repaying. Despite this, economic agents continue to behave as if nothing had happened. Just like when the poor coyote runs in the air!
Some bad news are enough to trigger the “Minsky moment“: everyone wakes up suddenly and gets scared. We realize that risks can no longer be taken, loans cannot be repaid, and banks stop lending money.
It is the general crisis: the coyote is too busy to realize it is about to fall on deaf ears. And it is too late to avoid to fall. The same happens in the real world.
I look forward August with impatience as for me it represents the top of summer time, that is my favourite period of the year. July prepares myself to August that comes full of expectations and good intentions.
However, at the end of the summer I find myself dealing with what I have actually achieved and I am not always happy with the results.
It happens that often my expectations are misaligned with reality and this causes me frustration and distress that reaches its top at the end of the summer. The idea of not having enjoyed the summer period as I wanted and the thought of the “going back to work” around the corner might turn the last days of vacation into moments of anxiety and suffering.
The August melancholy is known as “August Blues”, the boredom and the dissatisfaction that may become a real malaise of the season.
Therefore, this year I decided to anticipate it and I identified four suggestions so to avoid being overwhelmed by it:
spending time outdoors: natural light, fresh air and nature help psychophysical well-being and allow us to look at situation with more detachment and serenity;
thinking about the positive moments: we all have had for sure beautiful experiences that brought us some benefits, even though small ones. They will help us to add value to the time spent. Sometimes our mind plays with us and makes us not very objective;
scheduling your time: we are all different and there are people who can go back to work straight after their flight back home but there are others who need some time to recover from the shock of returning home from holidays. Listen to your needs and plan your time accordingly;
last but not least, show awareness: learning to recognize the first signs of your distress will help you to manage it better and to prevent it from overwhelming you.
Crisbie Coach 