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Hi there, Mauriciana here, founder of the Mindsight Academy, Eurocoach to Executives, Leaders, Entrepreneurs, and a Neuroleadership Trainer using insights from neuroscience to help you deliver results by learning to work smarter, be in control of your brain, manage yours and other people's emotions, change behaviors, flourish and exceed expectations. I am so pleased to be back here with another episode of Lead to Excel Podcast. Today we're going to be looking at the importance of self-care for effective leadership. So without wasting any more time, grab your drink, put your feet up and listen in. I don't have time. How many times have you said that to yourself as a leader? More often than not, whenever I talk about self-care, the response I get is some version of are you serious? You must be joking. I'm already so overwhelmed trying to keep my team motivated, struggling to keep my business afloat, doing homeschooling and keeping myself sane. I don't have time for that. Now, have you said that? Or you probably have heard somebody say it over and over. The question is, why are so many leaders so resistant to taking time to focus on themselves? It usually boils down to misperceptions around what good leadership is, what self-care is, and how self-care actually works. The failure to embrace looking after yourself can result in an acute decrease in productivity as well as the quality of work that is produced. It can also lead to stress, which causes mental blocks that will hamper creativity. Lack of self-care also increases the likelihood of making mistakes. What is self-care though? Self-care is anything you deliberately do to take care of your mental, emotional, and physical health. It's something many people overlook, but it's key to improve performance and helps reduce anxiety and stress. It also helps you develop a good relationship with yourself as you develop increased self-awareness. In the current climate, with the pandemic and a lot of things going on in the world, it's so important now for everyone to take time for themselves, to take time to focus on their mental, emotional, and physical well-being. Self-care isn't a selfish act, rather, it's something that refills you so that you can be your best. This is the one time in life that everyone needs to develop high emotional intelligence. And the first step in doing that is developing self-awareness. So taking time to look after your mental, emotional, and physical self is key to thriving in these uncertain times. It's about knowing what you need to do to help yourself to be your best and subsequently your ability to understand others and help them as well develop. So basically, taking care of yourself enables you to look after you better, your family, or your business. This feeling of constantly juggling so many balls in the air and feeling stressed is sadly all too common among many leaders today. Unfortunately, when we are stressed, neuroscience tells us that the emotional center of the brain, specifically the amygdala, which is responsible for a fight or flight response, kicks in, diverting resources from the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for logical reasoning, problem solving, decision making and willpower. In other words, it's precisely when you're feeling stressed and overwhelmed that you would benefit from slowing down in order to think big, innovate, and solve the problems that are stressing you out. Science teaches that what the mind harbors, the body manifests, and therefore it's imperative that every leader prioritize mental and physical health as part of a daily routine. Research also shows that taking breaks, for example, improves focus and helps prevent decision fatigue. It helps renew and strengthen motivation, it increases performance and productivity, increases creativity and innovation. So here are a few questions to ask yourself when you find yourself making the I don't have time excuse. What are my main priorities in life? Can I achieve them with poor health and stress? How much time would I save by responding from a place of control rather than reacting from a place of stress? What one thing can I choose to say no to today that will give me back at least five minutes? And a hint there is think about the time wasters that you find distracting you from meaningful work that you should be doing. How could you use this time to improve your own mental and physical well-being and professional performance? Many leaders believe that taking time for themselves is a weakness. Working with my clients, I find that one thing that prevents many from being or achieving their goals or even being high performers is the belief that showing weakness makes you a bad leader. This unfortunately leads to many people being risk-averse and resist exploring new opportunities. Brenner Brown talked about the strength in being vulnerable, and this is one message every leader needs to hear and adopt. Developing a self-care mindset will help you as a leader to be better when at delegating or even asking for help. So, how will you now start to integrate self-care into your own daily routine? Let's look at some more strategies that can help you. You need to start your day right. Decide to take action to be intentional. You could start your morning with a 30-minute exercise, a short walk, prayer, meditation, or just planning your daily task for the day. During your day as well, short diversions can provide a powerful boost to your energy and to your creativity. Journaling can actually help you promote self-awareness or just making notes of your thoughts can help you as well. Gratitude is so important. When you have a win, no matter how small, just stop and reward yourself with some form of gratitude. Either going out and getting yourself a cup of coffee or sitting out in the garden. Do something that is not related to your work. Just take that time to appreciate it and do something you like. Watch a program you like, giving yourself some form of reward helps to motivate your brain to even do more and want to achieve more. And it could be a spa day, it could be massage, it could be shopping, could be visiting a car showroom, whatever it is. Just give yourself some form of reward. If you're not sure what to do, just set yourself 10 minutes or 15-minute blocks each day and just do something different. Try new things out. Another thing to remember is that perfectionism does not exist. You will never get things exactly perfect the first time, and a lot of people spend so much time trying to make things perfect or trying to be perfect in anything they're doing, and this is why I mentioned being able to delegate at the beginning of this podcast, because that is one area many managers and leaders and executives don't do well. It's so important to identify the skills of people that you work with and delegate to them, and you can even delegate tasks that they are not really good at because it will help them build up their skills as well, as long as you're monitoring them but not micromanaging. So look to your peers and colleagues for inspiration. Don't go trying to reinvent the wheel. If something other people are doing appeals to you, borrow it and make it your own or ask for help from them. And remember that as a leader, you set the tone for your people. Be very clear what your expectations are of people so that they don't have to keep second guessing what it is you want. If you're open about your self-care and the investments that you're making into your own self-care, the people you work with or your team would also feel comfortable to look after themselves as well, and you find greater performance and productivity from your team because you're all looking after yourselves. And this is so important, especially now with a lot of the remote working and virtual working. I've spoken to clients who complain about being in front of their computer for hours, one because they're having meetings, or two, because they just get carried away because they are home, so it just stays working, working, not you know, cons consistently. It's really important to even if it means setting the alarm every 20 minutes or half an hour or an hour maximum to give yourself that break. It's really important. And after a meeting, take a break before you go into another meeting. And if your meetings are back to back, it's really important that you speak to people as a leader. Let your people tell you how they're feeling because the problem could be that there are too many meetings, and then you help them manage that effectively. If you're an employee or a staff, speak to people, speak to your managers or leaders about your concerns. It's really important, and this is all part of self-care. So now you need to create that time where you can unplug during the week. Create a list of 10 favorite activities that will generate excitement and enhance your ability to unplug and relax. It's really important that you know when to stop, reevaluate, and recharge. You could also start by creating a work-week calendar that includes time for you to relax and rewind. When you do your planning, schedule in me time for you, and then actually start thinking about what you plan to do so that you plug in blocks of time for relaxing, for reading, for any activities that you want that will enable you to relax after each week. Assess your physical and mental state. Did it feel good to have that time for self-indulgence? And what will you try out next time? Or what do you need to do differently? These are really important. And as I mentioned at the beginning, practice self-awareness because what sets great leaders apart is their dedication to learning more about themselves and others. When you develop self-awareness, you find that you have more direction, more purpose, more influence, and more success in your personal life and in your professional life as well. So start by just being aware of your feelings and what they're teaching you. Think about your emotions, think about the thoughts that go through your mind when you have different types of emotions. As I was discussing with one of my clients today, it's important to really have that feedback loop where your colleagues give you feedback and you also give them feedback. So gather feedback to look after yourself through other people's eyes because this will help you grow as well. Know what your strengths and weaknesses are to enable you to identify what you're doing well and what you could also improve. And it's important that you know how to set boundaries. Boundaries are basically the limits that you set with other people in what you find acceptable and unacceptable in their behavior towards you, and it's also setting boundaries for yourself, what you will find acceptable, and what you would find unacceptable for yourself as well. So setting boundaries is a form of self-care, it's an important process that will help you recognize what you need so that you can then put it in place or ask for it. So know what your limits are so that you can set your boundaries at work and at home, and especially now that you're working from home, it's important to set those boundaries, and that could mean that you're not going to work after a certain time, or if you do work for a longer period of time, then you're going to take time off the next day or during the week. But it's important to set boundaries, and saying no is okay. Be direct in stating your boundaries to avoid confusion, and this is very important because sometimes people are trying to set boundaries, but the language that is being used is not clear, and so people misunderstand it or ignore it because you've not been firm or you've not you're not you've not been clear. So basically, the key is really looking after yourself. Another important aspect of self-care is your diet. A healthy diet is also important for self-care because a healthy diet will create better moods, it will give you more energy and lower levels of depression or stress. Exercise is also fantastic for helping blood flow, boosting both learning and helping with memory as well. Getting enough sleep is extremely important because it also helps with increased focus and memory. High emotional intelligence improves cognitive function. So it helps with creativity, we need innovation, and creating greater capacity for learning and improved empathy. So basically, looking after your mental health, looking after your physical health, looking after your emotional health will all help to enable you to develop the care that you need to go on to keep pushing, keep achieving, keep being successful in every area of your life. The fact is that many people forget that the actions you take, the behaviors that you exhibit all come from what's going on in your brain. And self-care is a form of helping you rewire your brain so that you can achieve the performance you need. You can achieve the high performance as a leader, as a business owner, and as an individual in anything you're doing in your career. Self-care is so important. Don't ignore it. And it's okay, it's not a weakness, it's a strength. So I hope this podcast has helped you to start thinking and putting into place taking actions to start looking after yourself. Thank you once again for tuning in. And remember that if you haven't subscribed to this podcast, click on the button wherever you listen to it so that you don't miss an episode. And I would really appreciate you leaving a review as well or even a comment on the podcast or ideas of topics that you want me to talk about in future. I've got some exciting episodes coming up with some interesting guests that you really wouldn't want to miss. So, in this climate, wherever you are, do remember to keep safe, look after yourself, and I truly wish you perfect health. Stay limitless, and I look forward to seeing you in the next episode. Bye for now.