“Those who tell stories rule the world” said Plato – a mantra that we live by at Tuesday. Every day, we work with exciting brands, businesses and individuals to understand, distil and articulate their stories.
The Campfire is a new bulletin to share some of these stories with our wider community in the hope that you will enjoy them as much as we’ve enjoyed curating them. The content might also give you a moment to reflect and think about your own stories and what you might like to share.
Mental Health Awareness Week and the importance of working well, and playing harder. Early this year, we signed up Em Stroud as a client.
A performer and speaker classically trained in the arts of clowning, Em coaches CEOs of SME and global businesses using pioneering techniques that force leaders to ‘take fun seriously’ at a time when it’s never been more important to find joy.
Creativity, kindness, acceptance and play are all key ingredients in Em’s coaching toolkit. She’s even written a book about it.
This week is Mental Health Awareness Week and Em has shared with us her top seven tips for workplace wellness. These tips can help you connect to yourself with kindness, respond instead of react and feel a sense of accomplishment at the end of the working day.
1. Find pockets of joy
Throughout the working day, allow yourself ‘little pockets of joy’. What this means will be unique to you, whether that’s taking five minutes to go outside and look up at the sky or watching cat videos on YouTube. Building blocks of joy into your day is a guaranteed boost to wellbeing.
2. Breathe
Instead of rushing through your day, find a few minutes to breathe before you click ‘join’ on your next online meeting or walk into a room. Allowing a moment to breathe helps ground you through the day by cultivating moments of calm.
3. The 45 minute rule
Cap meetings at 45 minutes to gain at least 15 minutes in every hour, creating vital space to proactively plan priorities that will help focus on work tasks, breaks and breathing.
4. It’s OK to say no
Having a mechanism to decline work can also include ‘creating a longer yes’, which you might find easier in the first instance if you find it hard to say ‘no’.
Giving yourself permission to consider the cost to yourself can include having responses at-the-ready such as ‘I’d love to help you with this but I’ll come back to you tomorrow, if that’s OK?’ will create space for you to understand where you’re at and what capacity you have or don’t have.
5. Be kind to yourself
We are all working out who we are in this new world, and it is only by taking some time out each day that we can ask ourselves ‘what do I need and what do I want’? Without this crucial kind act to ourselves, we can become more stressed, saying yes to things we later realise we can’t fulfil and getting into overwhelm.
6. Prioritise you
Taking five to ten minutes at the start of each day to write down the work you have to do for that day will allow you to better accommodate colleagues, taking the focus of your day into proactive not reactive mode, where you feel happier and more fulfilled.
7. Make technology work for you
Take control of technology, instead of it controlling you, by switching off all notifications and seeing how much better you feel. When you respond -instead of react- to the day’s requests, you’ll notice how much more space you have to think on a deeper and more creative level.
Did this provoke any thoughts for you? We’d love to hear them.