Your professional and personal survival kit
Survival is not just about coping with day to day stressors. It is about building the tools you can draw on in a crisis to cope with any situation you may be confronted with. The end goal of your survival kit is to not only stay alive as a person, but to keep your career alive and growing. You need to maintain a focus on YOU, and push past the barriers thrown in front of you by your family, your colleagues, your employer, and other institutions.
Maintaining a toolkit is important for any professional. Master craftspeople build their own tools that allow them to create works of art within the constraints of their abilities. You need to be a master craftsperson of your own professional career, developing tools that allow you to achieve your potential, work with others, and deal with whatever adversity comes your way.
The forces that drive us
Exercise
A healthy mind and body will pull you through whatever adversity that life can throw at you. It is when our health is compromised that we are more prone to illness, whether that be physical or mental. When we undertake regular physical exercise, we feel more powerful. When the body is exercising, the mind becomes more energised and thoughts become clearer. Many successful leaders have discovered exercise as a way of clearing the clutter in their mind and laying a mental workspace for learning, reflecting, and brainstorming.
Willpower
Willpower is a very limited resource that we need to budget and utilise sparingly! How often have you intended to do something, only to find that the willpower left you before you had completed it? Willpower is our ability to take an action that inflicts immediate pain or discomfort on ourselves. Getting out of bed at 5am to go for a jog requires willpower!
Think of willpower as you would think of fuel in the tank of your car. If you could only fill up your tank once a month, you would use your car very sparingly. If you put a trailer on it to carry more stuff, then you would use up the fuel a lot quicker, and you would become stranded a lot sooner.
So how do high achievers seem to have unlimited willpower? They don’t! High achievers never rely on willpower to achieve their goals, but use willpower to initiate change and establish ritualistic habits while changing a mindest, their way of thinking about their challenges.
Habits and
Rituals
For many people, the term “ritual” may come across as a religious or dogmatic notion that prevents us from deviating when circumstances change. For some things in life that is exactly what we need, especially when we find ourselves giving up easily, or constantly falling into bad habits.
Health care professionals are bound by rituals and habits in the training we receive, our clinical practice guidelines and the decision making frameworks that govern our actions in the workplace. We have these set processes to protect us and our clients from harm, from being swayed by human faults and whims.
In respecting your own individual goals and outcomes, sometimes you need to form rituals and habits. Our strong need to avoid pain or receive pleasure can be overcome if we turn “should” into “must” and take the word “but” out of our thinking. It is when we are at our most vulnerable that we need these hardened practices to pull us through.
Habits are those things that we train ourselves to do repeatedly. When we do all the simple tasks in life like making breakfast, driving a car, or hanging an IV line, we are working off habit. Habits can be positive, such as brushing our teeth, or they can be negative such as reacting when someone upsets us. We need to repeatedly use our limited willpower to make positive habits and break negative habits. As we repeat our new habit, we work off our memory of experience and find ourselves needing to use less and less willpower. If you aim to jog up a section of hill without stopping, the first attempt will take every ounce of willpower you have and you will still fail. As you repeat the achievement, you remember how you pushed through in the past. Your memory tells you are capable of doing it, and there is no excuse for not doing it again. Over time the habits you develop to push through the challenge take over from the willpower. This saving in willpower can then be used to form new positive habits or break more negative habits.
Your Own Personal Strategic Plan
We find ourselves in a personal and ethical crisis when we are forced to abandon our values in the course of our work. Sometimes we can’t put our finger on the problem, we only know that something is wrong. If you want to be successful in a caring role, you have to define your stance, your values, your not-negotiable’s. When you define your values and set your boundaries, you are giving yourself solid foundations to stand on in leading and directing the care of your clients.
Vision
What is your dream within this role? What do you want to experience for yourself and others? How should things be? Paint a picture with words that you can turn to for inspiration.
Mission
What do you see as your role in achieving this vision? Look beyond your present role. What if you had a greater influence? More education? A different team? a different workplace?
Values
What are the boundaries in terms of your behaviour and decisions in your role? What do you believe must not be compromised in order to achieve your vision? Have a think back to when you achieved satisfaction with doing a good job. What guided the decision making? Here is a list of words that are commonly used in corporate values statements. Can you find five that are most important to you? How would you frame those five in a way that inspires you to achieve your vision?
Honesty, Integrity, Respect, Compassion, Innovation, Quality, Empathy Responsibility, Teamwork, Justice, Hospitality, Sustainability, Leadership. Collaboration, Passion, Diversity, Accountability, Humility, Simplicity, Trust, Ownership, Perseverance, Empower, Optimise, Excellence, Community.