Bringing It to the Office

Because more than one-third of our lives are spent at work, our workplace and how we work are often blamed for causing many of our stresses and woes. An ideal work situation is one where your organization is attentive to the well-being of all staff and stakeholders. A bad working environment is one where stress and turnover are high and morale and energy are low. If you are doing good work in a bad environment and leaving isn’t an immediate option for you, you can still make efforts to inoculate yourself against the contagion of chronic stress with your self-care regimen.

Your workplace encompasses all Five Spheres of Happy Healthy Living. We just covered self in the previous chapter. Now we’ll look at others, environment, work, and technology, all areas where you can practice self-care. Bringing self-care into your place of work is critical for sustaining your optimum energy levels and helping stave off stress and burnout.

Relationships in the Workplace

Your relationships with your coworkers, your boss, your board, and other organization stakeholders can either help you combat stress or can cause it. Stressful work relationships can affect the quality of your time at work and the quality of your work and even your relationships at home. Caring for the relationships you have with others, including your coworkers, attends to your self-care and well-being.

One way to manage the stress that can stem from your relationships in the workplace is to get skilled in emotional intelligence (EI). Daniel Goleman, in his book titled Emotional Intelligence, defined EI as the ability to manage yourself and your relationships with others through greater self-awareness and being socially aware or being able to recognize and understand the moods of others.¹ Knowing who and what pushes your buttons at work and managing your own reactions to others is important.

Goleman writes about the specific areas of being socially aware on his website:²

• Empathy: Sensing others’ feelings and perspectives, and taking an active interest in their concerns
• Organizational awareness: Reading a group’s emotional currents and power relationships
• Service orientation: Anticipating, recognizing, and meeting customers’ needs

How do you apply social awareness in your workplace? Here are a few tips:

• Ask empowering questions that inspire others.
• Pay attention to what others say, how they say it, and the body language they use.
• Identify other people’s emotional states when you are interacting with them.
• Give your full attention when speaking with someone.

Emotional intelligence is helpful in all of your dealings with other people and can be especially useful at a nonprofit. Kaitlyn Jankowski, product marketing manager at charity: water, admits that working in a nonprofit can be hard, especially when it comes to people’s emotions.

“I think emotions are high as the organization, and the people that fill it, view their jobs as more than just a job,” says Jankowski. “I’m constantly thinking about how each day we, as an organization, are bringing more than 2,700 people clean water. With that being said, it’s important to find a way to show empathy, compassion, and kindness in the workplace and also have the ability to decouple that from getting the job done.”

Jankowski says she took a leadership development training led by Beth that included emotional intelligence skills training and learned how to keep her emotions in check when she finds they are “doing the talking.”

“Over the years I’ve learned that my physical well-being is directly tied to how I feel in the workplace,” Jankowski explains. She says she keeps an eye on when her emotions are running high, remembering to take some deep breaths or walk away. Adds Jankowski, “If I’ve learned anything, it’s that being emotional about your job isn’t always a bad thing, but not being able to control those emotions can be detrimental to getting the job done.”

Environment

Your environmental self-care efforts at work can start in small but obvious ways such as making physical changes in your cubicle or around your office space. There are many techniques for modifying your physical space, including the ancient and often-practiced methods of feng shui, and the contemporary methods of Marie Kondo. Let’s look at both to see which technique might suit your personality and your physical work environment.

Feng shui is an ancient Chinese system of arranging both indoor and outdoor spaces to encourage the flow of positive energy or qi (pronounced “chee”). You can design buildings for “auspicious” or optimal and advantageous placement and positioning for good energy flow. A few common feng shui techniques include placing your desk in a “power position” so you are facing into the room and not with your back to the door; you should be able to see all windows and entryways in front of you. Not being able to see who is approaching you as you sit at your desk is disruptive to your energy. If you cannot arrange your desk in this manner, place a small mirror on the wall in front of you so you can see when someone is behind you. Position plants at the corners of your desk to soften the sharp edges of your desk corners. Sharp edges disrupt the smooth flow of qi.

Choose colors such as off-white and pale shades that are pleasing to the eye. Display artwork in your office that reflects the state of mind you want to both project and absorb—calm, clear, and prosperous, for example. Try to represent all five natural elements in your office: wood, earth, metal, water, and fire. Look to balance out your space; if you have too much metal, bring in something made of wood. If you have too many angles, bring in something round or with curves. Keep office accessories simple and orderly.

Clearing clutter is a major aspect of feng shui. A modern version of tidying spaces is introduced in two books by New York Times best-selling author and professional organizer, Marie Kondo: The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing³ and Spark Joy: An Illustrated Master Class on the Art of Organizing and Tidying Up.⁴ Kondo’s process involves examining why you are holding on to an item and literally holding it and asking yourself, “Does it spark joy?” If not, give it away or throw it out. Once you have eliminated clutter, you will gain a new perspective, more energy, and more clarity. Kondo suggests you do this for every room in your house starting with your closet and clothes and moving to all objects. You can also apply these techniques to your office.

Setting a more pleasing ambience does not have to be complicated. Holistic health coach Rochelle Ludovisi suggests using aromatherapy to reduce stress and produce an environment that is pleasant and calming. Look for high-quality essential oils that appeal to you, and bring them to the office. Note any coworkers who might be allergic to certain scents. If you are restricted from using an aromatherapy diffuser in the office, keep a bottle in your bag and pull it out periodically to inhale a scent such as vanilla or lavender for relaxation, or peppermint or orange to energize. Consult an aromatherapist to find your ideal scents.

Ludovisi also recommends bringing a Himalayan salt lamp into your office to help purify the air. The soft light can turn any room into a more relaxing space with just the flip of a switch. Use an ionic air purifier to remove pollen and dust particles from the air. We don’t always pay attention to our sense of smell, but clearing the air in our offices and training our brains to associate certain scents with relaxation can give us a lift and a boost against stress.

Physical cues are important for triggering positive behaviors. Temptation goes both ways. You can be tempted by packaged cookies, chips, and candy bars, or you can put healthier options within reach and be tempted by those. If storing your healthy snacks in the office break room or fridge isn’t a viable option, consider getting a small cube fridge to have near your workstation, and stock it with yogurt, fresh fruits and vegetables, nuts, and water. What about putting a fruit basket with fresh fruit on your desk by your computer next to a plant?

Clearing your work environment and the energy in your workspace can take you only so far. You also need to learn to manage your personal energy and workflow. Believe it or not, how and when you work may not be optimal for the way your body and brain are genetically structured to operate.

Your Workflows

A work process filled with interruptions is not good for your workflow and can impair your productivity. A brain that drifts away from attention isn’t at its best. If you find yourself getting distracted often, try Peter Bregman’s “18 Minutes a Day” technique from his book of the same name.⁵ It is two 5-minute periods and then 1 minute for each of the 8 hours of a typical workshop day which equals 18 minutes. Here’s how it works:

• For five minutes in the morning, think of and write down three important things you want to accomplish that day.
• Set your smartphone to beep every hour and when it does, spend 1 minute asking yourself if you are on track. Do this 8 times for an average 8-hour workday.
• For five minutes at the end of the day, ask yourself, “What did I accomplish? What didn’t I accomplish? Why?”

You might think the hourly beeps would be distracting, but they are reminders to stay focused. An exercise like this can help you manage your attention. With better attention comes better focus and energy. Janet Fouts, social media consultant and author of Mindful Social Media, suggests asking yourself throughout the day, “What am I doing?” and “Is this important?”

Says Fouts, “Lots of times you can catch yourself procrastinating by doing anything but the one thing you need to be doing. A little practice can shorten that wasted time.”

If you find yourself choosing to work on undemanding, low priority tasks instead of important work priorities, procrastination may be an issue for you and an early warning sign of burnout. You need to be more aware of when, why, and how you are procrastinating. Boredom, fear, distaste, being ill equipped, overloaded, or overwhelmed are some triggers for avoiding a particular work task.

How can you avoid procrastination? Best-selling self-help book author Brian Tracy says in his book, Eat That Frog, “If the first thing you do each morning is to eat a live frog, you can go through the rest of the day with the satisfaction of knowing that that is probably the worst thing that is going to happen to you all day long.”⁶

He’s not literally saying to eat a frog, of course! Your “frog” is your biggest, most important task, the one that you are most likely to put off if you don’t do something about it. So eat that frog early, and get the added benefit of making a positive impact on your day.

Is your procrastination due to being overwhelmed? If so, try making a “not-to-do list,” says Vu Le of Rainier Valley Corps. A not-to-do list can be an antidote to the never-ending to-do list or as Beth calls it, a “no thank-you list.”

Le explains, “It can be a list of stuff you are currently doing that you might want to consider no longer doing. For example, do you really need to have a staff meeting every week or is biweekly okay? It can also be a list of stuff that you are currently not doing, but it’ll make you feel better to write them down and check them off.”

Le may be half-joking with his suggestion, however, sometimes we need to shake things up to be able to push through the times when we have less focus or low energy for our work.

Managing Your Energy

Most of us think that the secret sauce to productivity is time management, but energy management is just as important. We’ve talked about circadian rhythms, your natural cycles of wake and sleep based on light and dark. As with other living things, your energy is like the ocean, with a high tide of peak attention and energy and a low tide of difficulty concentrating and needing to rest. It’s time to get to know your ultradian rhythms, another type of natural rhythm that repeats throughout the day.

“I take breaks to stretch my eyes and body every 90 to 120 minutes,” says Fission Strategy CEO Cheryl Contee, who applies techniques to work with, not against, her ultradian rhythms. “I got this tip from a great book I highly recommend: The Way We’re Working Isn’t Working by Tony Schwartz.⁷ I was actually at an airport gate area hunched over, working my laptop, iPad, and iPhone simultaneously, and looked up to see an ad for the book. It hit a nerve!”

In his book, Schwartz explains that our brains can only focus for 90 to 120 minutes before they need a break for 10 to 20 minutes. An effective way to manage your energy is to sync your work routine to your ultradian rhythms, designing your workday based around them. Realistically, you cannot have complete control of your daily calendar, especially within an organization where your time is not always your own. But be aware of your energy flows and try to plan out your work tasks to align with these cycles. Once you start working with, not against, your energy, you’ll find that you’re more productive.

Asking for Flexible Work

We’ve talked about workflow and movement as well as energy management and how typical work schedules and routines may not coincide with your optimal work times. Think about the changes you can make to your daily routine that will help keep your energy up so you work more efficiently. You could immediately improve the quality of your work and day through flexible work structures and schedules.

Carie Lewis Carlson of The Humane Society, introduced in Chapter 4, says having a child really opened her eyes to the need for self-care. Lewis Carlson was motivated to ask for flextime when she found that working until 9:00 p.m. meant her daughter would always be in bed by the time she got home.

“When I came back from maternity leave, my life had changed completely. I went from work being my one and only priority to being a working mom overnight,” Lewis Carlson recalls. “I had a really hard time adjusting to this, so I decided to ask my manager for a meeting. I was honest in telling her I was struggling to get some balance and asked if she would be open to trying a part-time work-from-home arrangement. And, I told her that if it didn’t work, for any reason—like she didn’t feel like she could communicate well enough with me, my direct reports needed more supervision, etcetera—that this was only a month-long trial.”

Now Lewis Carlson works from home two days a week. She also leaves the office by 5:00 P.M. every day without apology. Lewis Carlson makes it a point to communicate with her supervisor about what she needs in terms of work flexibility. From there, they work out what is best for her and what works for the organization. Her advice to others seeking flextime is to be ready with a solution—or several scenarios—that would meet your needs and the needs of the organization. Start with a trial period to test the waters.

Rachel Calderon, marketing and communications manager at Central Florida Foundation, asked for a flex schedule when she returned to work after having her second child. Calderon leaves work early two days a week with the agreement to stay connected through e-mail, available for phone calls, and remote access from home.

“I also have a lot of flexibility to work from home if I have a sick child or something going on at home. This allows me to beat traffic on the way home, spend some extra time with my kids, start dinner, and do a few things around the house. The extra time really helps with the work-life balance and helping me feel like I’m ahead,” says Calderon, who adds that her organization benefits from allowing her to work flexibly because it gets the “best version” of her.

Flextime is not an official employment policy at Calderon‘s organization. Before she went out on maternity leave, she had several conversations with her boss about what she needed to be able to come back to work and be okay. Her supervisor took the proposal up with the organization’s CEO who agreed as long as Calderon’s time in and out of the office was consistent so that the other staff would know what to expect. Calderon wrote a formal memo, and she and her supervisor review her schedule every 90 days to make sure it still works for everyone.

Megan Keane, who works at NTEN and is a part-time yoga teacher, asked for schedule flexibility so she could continue teaching. Says Keane, “It is very helpful to teach a yoga class as a complement to the day job as it flexes a different part of my brain. The benefit is that I’m more focused at work.”

Ash Shepherd, one of Keane’s coworkers at NTEN, is the parent of young children. He requested multiple accommodations in his schedule to align with his children’s school schedules, working at home for a few weeks at a time instead of going into the office or scheduling his own “bring your kids to work” days as needed.

For Shepherd, this flexibility allows him to balance the needs of work and his children without feeling the full brunt of stress. Says Shepherd, “This benefits NTEN because it allows me to bring my best, in whatever form the schedule needs to look like. If I was constantly feeling the pressure of my needs in my personal life and professional life, I would hit a point of burnout very quickly, become less productive, and likely feel like I needed a new job in order to find balance.” Shepherd admits he felt the latter in a previous job.

Here are tips from Shepherd for requesting to work remotely and balancing parenting with maximum productivity:

• Be honest with yourself. When you need to take the day off if you have sick child, acknowledge that you won’t be productive working from home.
• Stay in touch. Good communications with your team when you are working remotely is essential. Make a conscious effort to reach out via e-mail or instant messaging so your colleagues know you are being productive.
• Know yourself. If you don’t have the discipline to get things done working remotely, don’t set yourself up for failure.
• Establish a routine. When working remotely, don’t forget to take breaks if you get too absorbed in your work.
• Keep work-at-home space separate from personal space. Working at your kitchen table may not be best for your productivity. Find a separate space in the house, if possible.

Bottom line is if you do not ask for what you need, you definitely will not get it. Your self-care often requires planning and proposing to get others on board with you. If you ask for flexible work and present a clear plan for how that will benefit your organization, you have a good chance of getting buy-in from your supervisor for a work routine change.

Bringing Play to Your Work

Now let’s shake things up a little more. Let’s play! According to HelpGuide.org, a guide for mental health and well-being, “play is not just essential for kids; it can be an important source of relaxation and stimulation for adults as well.” Adult play is a time to “forget about work and commitments, and to be social in an unstructured, creative way. The focus of play is on the actual experience, not on accomplishing any goal.”

Yes, we are talking about play at the office. Appropriate play, of course. Some other benefits of play include stress relief, improved brain function, increased energy, creativity boosts, and stronger bonds with others. Don’t those all sound like valuable tools for working well?

Industrial-organizational psychologist Keris Jän Myrick, MBA, MS, PhDc, and former CEO of Project Return Peer Support Network, says people “can’t help people if they aren’t in their own wellness zone.” In addition to a number of other self-care activities, Myrick uses toys for stress relief, including robots.

“Robots help me get my stress out,” Myrick explains and says she uses them to help people make decisions—to “robot it out.” She uses kaleidoscopes as a small way to escape, stress balls to squeeze and Play-Doh to play with to relieve tension.

Sheena Greer is a nonprofit writer and strategist, and founder of Colludo—Latin for “play together.” She encourages nonprofit professionals to find ways to playfully approach their work, and her company even organizes “play days” for organizations.

Says Greer, “This hard work of saving the world should be fun sometimes, right? But with so many expressing to me that there was no room for play in their worlds, I realized that I needed to do something.”

Greer believes play is crucial to a healthy, balanced life and a powerful way to change nonprofit culture. Here are some tips from Greer to get you into play mode:

• Stop thinking of play as a frivolous waste of time. Play is necessary for good personal health, for healthy relationships, and for big change.
• Take time to play with other grown-ups, including coworkers. Try things like playing board games or tag in the park.
• Create a culture of play at your office. Even if you’re not the boss, model play behavior to naturally encourage others to join in.

Here are some of our ideas for play at work:

• Distribute small puzzles, games, or toys throughout the office that anyone can pick up at any time to relieve stress.
• Bring a kid’s joke book to work (more likely to be work appropriate) and take turns telling jokes before the start of a meeting.
• Take a quick break during a walking meeting (see Chapter 8) to toss a squishy ball around.
• Blow up balloons and have a pile of them in your office or cubicle to bat around solo or with others throughout the day.
• Bring a deck of cards or board games to work and play a game in the break room at lunch.
• Bring a jump rope to jump solo (or invite others to join you) outside during a work break.
• Laugh. The act of laughing can be a brain and body reset, is good for your mental and physical health, and can be contagious.

Says Greer, “Play is disruptive. It shakes up our everyday way of approaching our work, each other, and even ourselves. And in a field where outdated best practices and overwork reign, we could all use an opportunity to play together.”⁹

Breaking from Work

Play may be helpful for relieving work-related stress, but you still need to take other kinds of deliberate breaks throughout your day to avoid burnout. Taking breaks is critical to working at your optimal levels of focus and attention, productivity, and creative thinking as well as coping with stressors. Breaks from work can come in all shapes and sizes and at any time of the workday.

Designate times to physically step away from your work to give your mind a short rest. Where you can, fill those breaks with movement or quiet. Even switching up where you are doing your work can refresh your thinking. Only you can know what types of breaks work best for your body and brain and for your work situation and environment.

Tech Wellness

We’ve covered techniques for implementing self-care related to the spheres of self, others, environment, and work. The final sphere where you can practice self-care in the workplace is around technology. With the myriad ways your tech use is affecting your body and brain, it stands to reason that incorporating tech wellness into your self-care plan will alleviate stress and damage to your health and well-being.

Before we go on, we want to reiterate that we love technology. We do not see technology as a culprit. In fact, we advocate using tech gadgets and apps as tools to encourage wellness and well-being including fitness motivators, nutrition trackers, mindfulness reminders, and relaxation devices. We provide a list of apps and wearable tech we recommend at our website, www.happyhealthynonprofit.org.

Tech wellness starts with awareness of how you relate to your tech and how it is affecting you. You need to develop better habits around how you use technology on a daily basis and that includes changing from a mindless use of smartphones and mobile devices to being more in control and mindful. You need to develop what Howard Rheingold¹⁰ calls “infotention skills” or training your attention and developing better productivity habits given all the online information you consume.

Using technology in a thoughtful way is referred to as “conscious computing,” a term coined by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang in his book The Distraction Addiction: Getting the Information You Need and the Communication You Want, Without Enraging Your Family, Annoying Your Colleagues, and Destroying Your Soul.¹¹ This classification of technology use is also referred to as “calming technology” or “contemplative computing.” We like to refer to certain apps, chosen with care and for specific benefits, as “mindful tech.” These apps can transform your mobile phone, tablet, and computer from agents of distraction into agents of mindfulness.

Activities to help you begin a healthier relationship with your technology can start at home but can also be applied at work. Here are a few things that Aliza recommends to stop being tempted by digital devices and reduce the anxiety and stress that come from using them compulsively instead of mindfully:

• Set up a charging station. Put chargers and devices at the entrance to your home and leave them at the door instead of in the kitchen, family room, or bedroom.
• Keep all electronics out of the bedroom. Don’t interfere with your circadian rhythms by looking at screens before bedtime.
• Keep all electronics away from the spaces where you are eating. Keep smartphones off the meal table.
• Turn off smartphones and tablets and tuck them away in a bag or leave them in your car when meeting with someone face to face. Don’t cheat by putting them on silent or vibrate.

Turning off your phone completely may not be an option because of your work. In that case, remove all nonessential and non-work-related notifications on your phone and turn down the sound. Unless you are on call as part of your job or are responsible for tracking social media for your organization, stop responding to notifications in a Pavlovian way.

Daniel Levitin, author of The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload, says brain science dictates that you should chunk your day into project periods.¹² Designate time for your social networking instead of dipping into it all day long. The same goes for e-mail—“time box” checking and responding to e-mails at designated intervals. Timeboxing means allocating a fixed time period, a time box, to any planned activity. Controlling your interactions with your technology helps you control your interactions with others so you can manage your workload and information intake. Do not let the constant dinging and buzzing of your electronics make you slave to distractions or to work when you are away from work.

Sara Beesley, center director at the Mitchell Lake Audubon Center, stopped using her phone as an alarm clock—a common technique we have mentioned several times already because it is simple, effective, and has helped many people who are seeking tech wellness.

“Every day, the alarm on my phone would go off, and I would reach over, turn it off, and immediately switch over to my e-mail and check the e-mails I missed between going to bed and waking up,” says Beesley. “I would end up staying in bed another 30 minutes, answering e-mails via phone because others were already up and working, and I felt I had to appear to be right there with them. After I gave it up, I suddenly had much more free time in the morning and feel calmer.” Beesley now gives her mobile phone and e-mail a curfew.

We aren’t saying throw out your electronics or to heck with tech. There are ways to use online tools, mobile apps, and software to help lengthen your attention span and replace information overload with a sense of mindfulness and calm. We share a list of mindful tech uses online at www.happyhealthynonprofit.org. Trying all of the tips we’ve shared at once might be daunting, but a good place to start could be going cold turkey. Let us explain.