Welcome to the July edition of The Inbox Coach, a monthly email to bring you a little bit of coaching to your inbox and help you to make time for your personal development. As we approach the summer holidays, I thought I would turn our attention to rest and how that supports us at work.
Do you think about rest as part of your career development or is it just something you do as an afterthought?
I’ve been doing a lot of work on self-care over the last three months and for The Inbox Coach topic this month I want to think about rest and how this supports us in being our best self at work.
As I’ve been thinking about my health and self-care, rest has been a big part of what I have been working on. Sleeping and taking time away from doing is all part of staying healthy. I’m trying to build in consistent rest to my week so that I don’t have peaks and troughs in energy levels, and I can show up at work and be my best. It has been helpful for me and I’m feeling much more in control, but it has got me thinking that we don’t spend enough time thinking about or making time for rest.
Why do we need to rest?
If you are tired you can’t be your best self. We all have those traits that show up when we are tired, maybe you make mistakes, or get snappy with colleagues or you lose focus. However it shows up for you, it’s not the best you can be. Sure, you can push through as a short-term fix, drinking coffee and eating sugar to keep going, but it isn’t sustainable.
If you want to be able to perform consistently then you need to know when to take a break and rest. Taking a rest from your work allows you to come back rejuvenated. When you aren’t tired, and you’ve given your brain a rest you are better able to tackle a tough problem.
It can also help you to gain perspective. When you are in the middle of something it can be hard to see the bigger picture of your situation. The project in front of you can be all consuming and you can’t see a way out of it. Taking a break and resting can help you to come back to your challenge with a fresh pair of eyes, a renewed enthusiasm and it might just help you to unlock what you were getting stuck on.
How do you rest?
Taking a rest from work is more than just closing down your emails, it is about allowing your brain to switch off from all your concerns and worries. It might be that you need to do some preparation to manage your time off effectively. We are all used to putting on an out of office and telling people we won’t be available, but the harder thing to do is to allow ourselves to switch off from work. Rather than just taking time off and hoping for the best, we can think about what we need to be able to have an effective rest from our work. It might take a bit of planning but thinking about how we spend our rest time in the same way that we think about approaching our day at work can be helpful to make the most of your time off.
Reflection
*If you can’t do the exercises from this email now, then don’t forget to pick a time when you are going to do them and add this email to your calendar
Taking a rest from work isn’t just about booking a two week holiday, it’s also about the small moments in your day when you take a break from what you are doing. It might be as small as getting up from your desk to walk around or making a cup of tea. It could be going for a walk on your lunch break or being mindful about leaving your work at work at the end of the day. Rest will look different for all of us, but knowing what we need to rest will help us to make time for it.
Ask yourself these questions:
How do I know when I need a rest?
What is the impact of me not taking a rest from work?
What does a break from work look like for me?
What does a short break look like compared to a longer rest?
How will I feel when I come back to work after a good rest?
Think about what answers come up for you when you are asking and answering these questions. Spend a few minutes writing in your journal about how answering these questions makes you feel.
Action
It seems odd to say that the action this week is to rest, we think of rest as not doing, but in order for us to rest well we have to work at it. Taking time away from work might just mean shutting your computer down or you might need to work a bit harder at switching off. It’s no good taking time off from work if all you do is worry about your work while you are off.
Task
The task this week is to find time to rest. Whether that is taking a proper lunch break, switching off from your work at the end of the day or booking some leave to take a few days or weeks off from your job. Rest isn’t something that will just happen, we need to prioritise it, make time for it and when we take it, make sure we have set up the conditions to do it well. Give yourself space this week to make time for rest.
If you can’t do the exercises from this email now, then don’t forget to pick a time when you are going to do them and add the prompts in this email to your calendar.
Inspiration
“The more you learn, the harder the lessons get.” - Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
If you have heard of the 5 stages of grief, then you will be familiar with the work of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. Elisabeth trained as a psychiatrist, but it is her work on supporting those who were dying that she is best known for and her book On Death and Dying, is still relevant today and it was republished in 2014 to mark 50 years since its first publication. She dedicated her working life to listening to people who were facing death and as a result she learned a lot about what is important in life.
Learning how to take a rest from work can be tough. I know that I had to reach a stage of burnout before I started to pay attention to what my mind and body needed. Over the last 16 months we have all been under huge amounts of pressure and stress and being able to rest well is more important than ever. I know that for me, not prioritising rest was a hard lesson to learn.
Knowing when to rest has been a game changer for me. I’ve been able to stop myself from being unproductive and resentful at work and instead taken time out so that I can show up energised and committed to doing a good job. I enjoy my rest time; I’m not thinking about work and I’m doing things which leave me feeling refreshed and rejuvenated.
