Promote Wellbeing SUMMARY

ENERGY MANAGEMENT

PROMOTE WELLBEING

Wellbeing is about taking care of your whole self, including your body and your brain. We need to take care of our whole self so we can:

be our best selves/have a better life
feel good in all of life and at work
work well with others and on our own

We can be our best selves when we take care of ourselves. When we have a foundation of wellbeing, we're able to

manage our fears, reactions and emotions.
withstand it when others have emotional reactions.
manage our emotional and social needs.
make better choices.
be more creative and have more innovative ideas.

It might seem self indulgent. And it's not. We need to take care of ourselves first. It's our responsibility. We impact others, so it's our responsibility to take care of ourselves so we have a great impact on others. If you think of your brain as a battery, we need to rest - the brain needs as much rest as the body does in order to fill up this battery capacity. During the day it is worn down and we need to make sure it's refilled.

Wellbeing is about keeping an active, functional battery and refilling it regularly.

As a manager it's important to role model these behaviors. People will do what you do. If you are working 24 hours a day and have your devices on all the time, that's a message. So you can create boundaries for yourself, which helps others create boundaries themselves too. You can't force people to take care of their wellbeing, but can give space for people to take time off, rest, and take breaks. Caring personally about each other's wellbeing leads to greater trust.

WHAT COSTS YOU ENERGY

In order to manage your energy, which is part of creating well-being, we need to look at what costs us energy:

Doing new things
Task-switching
Managing your emotions
Sustaining yourself through pain
Stress, project deadlines, short deadlines, high volumes of stressful work
Interpersonal challenges
Living in a complex, difficult, challenging situation, whether your work space, home space, or your country
Family situations, moving
Going on a special diet
World distractions

Most of these are related to some kind of threats to BE SAFE & Certain.

WHAT GIVES YOU ENERGY

Good food. You might pay attention to the food you consume throughout a day like coffee, tea, or sugar.
Rest
Taking care of yourself physically with exercise
Friends, colleagues, family members that feel good to you
Do you get energy from working alone? Does it create more enthusiasm and energy, or drain you?
What about working with others? Who is it that you work with that has you feel good?
What activities boost your mood? Is it starting a project, is it ending a project, is it creating plans, is it creating ideas?

Paying attention to your energy management as a whole package, inside and outside of work, will give you a clue as to how to manage your energy and create wellbeing.

ENERGY MANAGEMENT

When do you have a lot of energy, when is it low? How do you manage that through a whole day? If you know that you need lunch and that your work starts to get sloppy, let other people know. If you're in the middle of a meeting or something, you might just say, "Look, this isn't working, I am not my best self right now, let's take a break." If it's happening to you, it's likely happening to others. This will go a long way to you creating and working well together, being able to have more positivity, and great collaboration.

Notice when your PFC starts getting sloppy or lazy and stops working well. That's the time for a break.

AVOIDING BURNOUT

Most of us know we need a little bit of stress in order to perform. That's great. But a little bit of stress can lead to more and more stress. If we undergo a lot of stress, our brain battery is drained, and we refill it, perhaps we don't refill it all the way, and then we drain it again. Pretty soon, with a continual stressful environment, we're not able to refill this capacity of the brain. Then it's hard to manage our emotions, it's hard to get things done properly, It's hard to be functional, creative, all those things go out the window because we don't have the capacity to be our best self.

Do you notice that people are continually overwhelmed or underperforming? They don’t seem like themselves. Cortisol, the stress hormone, eats our memory. It keeps us from remembering and learning. Are you seeing people who are forgetting things? That may be an indication that they're overly stressed. Somebody else might be much more emotional than they normally are, more dramatic, more reactive, more angry. That might be a sign that they just don't have the capacity to manage themselves the way they normally do. That might be a case of leading towards burnout. Check it out with them. Care. Have a conversation. ”Seems like you're really stressed." "What's going on? How are you doing?" Have a conversation about that, and then encourage them to do something else to invest in their well-being. Perhaps take advantage of counseling or other services, or get support from the manager or colleagues. Create different working hours. Something. Because you don't want to experience burnout. It takes a long time to recover from that.

PROMOTE WELLBEING TOGETHER

BE PRESENT

Our brain is designed to be in relationship to other people. How do we take care of the wellbeing of ourselves and our systems? Imagine somebody you're close to and put yourself in their shoes for a moment: What do they want, what are they working towards? What is it that they need in order to get their job done? Then come back to yourself and notice that maybe there's a way you can give that to them or support them, whether it's

emotional support in helping them deal with stress or a job function.
collaborating on work
reaching across the organization and seeing someone in a very different part of it, and noticing "we work in the same organization, even if we're at odds with one another at times."

A lot of this is about, "How do I approach other people, have compassion for other people, have empathy for them?" Manage to step in their shoes from time to time and notice what they need. The more you can do that, the more you create trust, the more you create engagement with them, and these things, the relationship, the trust, the common purpose, they all lead to more wellbeing.

If you support the systems around you, they also support you.

ACKNOWLEDGE PROGRESS

You've come to Mercy Corps to do the best work of your life. It's part of the culture, part of what makes Mercy Corps great. You're a human being and probably not innately ready to do the best work of your life. It's about growing into that place. Along the way we may do something that's a bit of a mistake. Or maybe it's a big mistake. That's all part of growth. Growth doesn't mean always failing, but there's permission to fail, to make mistakes, to take risks. If we can accept that growth mindset, we can relax about these mistakes we make. If we get tense and upset about making a mistake, our brain tightens up and we can't learn or grow from it.

If we have a foundation of wellbeing, it helps us to be able to calm ourselves down. "Oh, I made a mistake." Take a look at what happened and reorient. If you have that foundation of wellbeing, you're able to look at what is working, and that reinforces the wellbeing. So work together with others, help each other notice what is working. Take milestones toward your big goals and at every milestone, look at what is working.

In the brain, we have something that's called an error detector. That error detector is so good at finding the one tiny thing that's wrong. See if you can set that aside for a moment and appreciate the other 99% that is working.

A foundation of wellbeing helps us grow, take risks, and have boldness to move forward. Wellbeing supports us to take a step back, review progress, where things didn't go well, evaluate it, grow from that, and move on. All of this will support great teamwork and collaboration.

SET EXPECTATIONS

Our brain is a social brain; we're very oriented towards other people. If we set wellbeing goals together, we can support one another. It's much more helpful to create the boundaries around work hours and boundaries around when we do things, if we do it together. As a team, you can support one another's wellbeing by sitting down together, finding out what are the individual needs around wellbeing and what are your collective needs. How can you set some agreements and support one another in your agreements? It's so easy to push the boundaries of wellbeing if we don't set clear expectations. But once you set clear boundaries and you agree with somebody else, you're much more likely to follow them.

What are your agreements together?

working hours
how long your meetings are
how often you take breaks
creating break times and lunchtimes
having a social lunch time perhaps
going on walks together

There are a lot of things that you can do to support one another in your wellbeing.

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