Are you relying on your holiday for ‘headspace’?
If you’re a medical or public health leader, it’s time to take a look at how you spend your precious and well deserved downtime.
We can become over-reliant on lurching from one holiday to another to help us to recover from the demands of the modern work environment.
Here are three tips to help you to make the most of your holiday!
1. Wring out the stress!
Most of the time our work-related stress gets soaked up into our bodies in a non-specific way like water into a cloth, but the stress rarely gets properly ‘wrung out’ of our system. We carry the legacy of our stressful experiences in our thoughts, feelings and body sensations and express it in our speech and actions. Make sure your holiday time is proper downtime so that you bottom out and really wring that cloth our properly – think of it as mental hygiene!
2. We all need a REGULAR buffer against burnout
For every unit of work-related stress you are exposed to, you also need to have a recovery period to buffer the impact. What can you do on a day by day basis, finding micro activities to integrate into your work and home life to ensure that you have an antidote for every unit of work-related stress? Make ‘radical self care’ the norm so that you’re not ‘hanging on for the holidays’.
3. Engage in reflective practice
The more reflective practice you are engaged in on a regular basis, the less you will need to rely on your holiday to have that headspace. Every day, senior medical and public health leaders tell me how much they value having a regular coaching sessions to help them to process the complexities of a dynamic and challenging work environment and to make plans for the future. Coaching has been proved in over 9 systematic reviews and meta-analyses and is in NICE Guidelines for mental health at work (1,2).
I can give you the space and time as a thinking partner to help you to figure out your next steps in your leadership role and or career. Book a free, confidential consultation with me today and experience what it is like to have me on your team!
(1) NICE. Mental wellbeing at work. Evidence review E: Targeted individual-level approaches [Internet]. NICE; 2022. Available from: https://www.nice.org.uk/guidance/ng212/evidence/e-targeted-individuallevel-approaches-pdf-10959822258
(2)NICE. NG212: Mental wellbeing at work [Internet]. NICE; 2022 [cited 2022 Jun 16]. Available from: https://www.nice.org.uk/guidance/ng212
Dr Fiona Day is the world’s only Leadership Coach with advanced coaching psychology, medical and public health qualifications (MBChB, FFPH, BPS Chartered Psychologist in Coaching Psychology, EMCC Master Practitioner Coach & Mentor) and is in a unique position to help you and your teams to flourish. Fiona specialises in coaching medical and public health leaders, is a coach Supervisor, and an EQA Foundation Award Holder. Get 3 hours of FREE CPD with Fiona’s Health Career Success Programme here. Book a free confidential 30 minute Consultation with Fiona here.
