🕯 #PowerYourGrowth: Powering through at work during difficult times.
The show must go on, but only if you take care of yourself along the way.
With back-to-back tragedies happening in different parts of the world as of recent, a lot of us have been affected one way or another. Though we may not be directly disadvantaged by these incidents, the impact lingers on most of us.
While we navigate through these difficult times and try to make sense of what has happened, the show must go on and the world moves forward as we go back to work this morning. Between the news and work messages, be sure to take care of yourself.
Coming into terms
People react differently to tough situations. It’s even more trickier when it’s not necessarily happening to you. Taking care of yourself is crucial during this time—but what does that look like exactly?
Coping skills vs self-care
Positive coping skills can feel like self-care, but they are different.
Coping skills: Thoughts and actions you use to respond to events that may cause you distress, which are formed through influence and experience.
Self-care: Self-care is a coping skill, which helps you manage your emotions and gets proactive about your distress.
Coping skills vs defense mechanisms
Coping skills aren’t the same as defense mechanisms, either.
Defense mechanisms: Primarily subconscious reactions to protect your psychological well-being during extreme stress.
Coping skills: Tend to be more deliberate; they aim to solve and overcome situations or reduce distress.
Avoidant vs. active coping skills
As with other things at work, you need to put in place strategies to manage emotions such as anger, anxiety, fear, or sadness with positive coping skills.
Avoidant coping: Avoidant coping skills are more about using strategies that take your mind or heart off the event.
Active coping: Active coping means you try to directly address the source of your emotional pain with thoughts or actions that change your perspective.
According to a 2016 study, active coping skills tend to be most effective when managing distress. Read more about it here.
Taking gentle action
Some people may see the act of working while mourning as sabotaging their productivity. Instead of stopping or delaying your grief, there are measures you can take to keep it manageable at work:
If you get overwhelmed, re-center through breath
You can only filter work vs news notifications to a certain extent. When you read or hear something that can be a trigger, pause, sit down if you need to, figure out the best way to refresh yourself, and keep it moving.
Assign meaning to even the mundane tasks
As you go through your BAU tasks, intentionally assign honor and meaning to the life or value that has been lost. Your work may not instantly help others who suffered, but it will ease the fact that rest and time off is not present.
Let this be an opportunity to fire up healthy habits
Without diminishing the lives lost, there are still silver linings that can come out of the darkest times. Take this opportunity to reflect; “if you didn't take the time to learn to eat and sleep right, when would you?” Life’s too short.
Find more healthy ways to mourn while you’re on the job in the full article here.
Do I have the rights to grief?
Previously at Monday Mavens, we have dissected the topic of grief in more details. One of the topics we covered were the different types of grief and how they’re all valid.
Even in the case of incidents that happened not directly to you or your relatives, your empathy will allow you to feel a certain extent of grief, which could come in the form of:
Collective grief. A loss which is experienced by a group of people together. It could be a substantial loss in the event of a natural disaster, war conflict, etc.
Example: The Kanjuruhan Stadium disaster.
Cumulative grief. Cumulative grief emerges when these losses occur in short periods of time between one another, with multiple deaths in a quick succession.
Example: The Gujarat Bridge Collapse happening days after The Itaewon Halloween Crowd Surge.
The simple answer is—yes, you are allowed to feel emotions such as sadness and wariness when incidents like these happened. But, remember to keep your accountability in check at work, healthily.
Difficult topics are tough to talk about for a reason. But moving through them instead of suppressing is way more beneficial to your productivity.
If you or anyone you know might be struggling more than others when national or even international incidents happen, make sure to reach out to them with resources—including this week’s Monday Mavens edition.
We’ll see you again next week.