Tag: healing

Building Houses and Pacing vs Pushing Yourself (10-1-25)

This wasn’t the blog I intended to write this week, but I was driving into work on Tuesday and the universe told me this is the story that needs told.  This week is about building houses and the balance between pushing and pacing yourself.

Pretend for a minute that you build houses.  You’ve been building a house since January 1st.  It’s a large and difficult job, and you’ve been grinding day in and day out.  So far, you’ve made good progress.  Now you find out there will need to be some last-minute changes on top of the unfinished work you already have.  You know you should pace yourself, but there is so much stuff to do that you begin overly pushing yourself.  You are working hard and working long hours.  You get tired.  Your work gets a little sloppy.  At one point you’re so tired that as you are hammering nails you hit your hand and break all the bones in it.  You get the house done before the end of the year, but it’s not exactly your best work, you have broken bones, and you are spending the end of the year hoping you can heal a bit before starting the process all over again.

Let’s make some connections.  We may not be building houses, but I think it’s safe to say that we all have been running hard this year.  It’s been another year of high expectations and doing more with less.  I’ve seen all of us work and push and work and push to deliver for the people we serve.  With all that said, we are now kicking off Q4, and that is always a mad dash to the end of the year.  In the midst of this mad dash, I want us to finish strong, not broken.  I want us to finish the year and be ready for rest, not needing to heal whether that is physically or mentally.  What we build matters, AND the people who do the building matter too.

The challenge: How can ensure you are pacing yourself vs pushing yourself to the point where it becomes hazardous to your health?

Bonus challenge: If you are a leader, how are you setting up the environment so your people can deliver without harming themselves?

Have a jolly good day,

Andrew Embry

Recharging and Mental Health (10-2-24)

Last week I finished the series on lessons I’ve learned from therapy.  This week I want to touch on one more mental health lesson, before moving to new topics.  Today, I want to touch on the importance of recharging for our mental health.

Let me start by saying that everyone is okay.  Here’s the story.  On Friday, I drove a few hours away for an obstacle course race on Saturday.  On Saturday morning around 1am, I received a text that a family member was in the hospital.  I packed up and drove the 3.5 hours home to see what was going on.  It was a long day of waiting and little sleep.  Eventually, I felt good about everything and went home.

When I got home I sent a couple of emails to folks letting them know what was going on and that I wouldn’t be at work on Monday.  Then, the guilt started to set in.  On Saturday night and Sunday morning this little voice started whispering, “You’re really behind at work.  You’re going to be even more behind, because you aren’t working on Monday.  You should start doing work right now.  You’re not doing anything else right now.  You’re just staying at the house.  You’re just sitting there.  You could be doing work to catch up.”  Have you ever had something like this happen to you?  Have you ever heard guilt whisper to you like this?

For a moment, I almost gave into that voice.  Then, I paused for a second and I assessed how I was feeling.  I was sleep deprived, physically tired, and emotionally exhausted.  Working is not what I needed.  I wasn’t sitting around doing “nothing”.  I was recharging.  I was catching my breath.  I was taking care of myself.  I was being present with my family.  After embracing these things, I let go of the urge to work.

What does this have to do with anything?  I don’t know about you, but it’s easy to get lost in the hustle and grind.  It’s easy to subscribe to this idea that we should be doing something every moment of every day to better ourselves and deliver for the business.  This is the same mentality that leads to burnout.  We don’t always need to be running ourselves into the ground.  We need to challenge that voice of guilt.  We need to embrace that sometimes we need to do “nothing”.  Sometimes, we need to slow down, reconnect, and recharge for our own sake and for the sake of others.

The challenge- Will you allows yourself to recharge when you need to?

Have a jolly good day,

Andrew Embry

Therapy and Investing Effort (9-25-24)

This will be my last in the series about lessons I’ve learned from therapy.  We started with asking for help, analyzed root causes, and explored thought traps and radical acceptance.  We will end by reflecting on therapy and investing effort.

As I mentioned in the first blog, I leveraged our Lyra services for therapy.  Going through this experience consisted of a few different things like live sessions, assessments, articles to read, and online videos to watch.  We were a few weeks in, and I was telling my therapist that I appreciated the different resources.  She shared that she was concerned she was assigning me too much, because she recognized that I was busy in life.  I thanked her for her consideration and told her that she was not overburdening me.  I explained that I wanted the materials, because I knew how important it was to invest in my mental health.  I came to her, because life was kicking my butt, so my number one goal was to work through that.  As a result, I was committed to investing in my mental health, and I made the necessary trade-offs to do this.

How does this connect to anything?  So much of life is about putting in effort to grow.  The challenge is that there are so many domains in life we could invest int.  We can put in effort for our physical health, mental health, relationships, parenting, careers, etc.  This can be overwhelming, especially if we allow ourselves to fall in the trap of thinking that we need to master and max out all of those domains.  Instead, we need embrace that everything can’t get equal focus all the time, AND THAT’S OKAY.  For me, in that period of my life, I over indexed on my mental health, because I needed that.  I did the extra work in that space and deprioritized other things.  As my life moves from season to season, I know I’ll continue to evolve where I put the work in and how I invest my effort. 

The challenge: Where will you invest your effort?

Have a jolly good day,

Andrew Embry

Therapy and Thinking Traps (9-11-24)

The previous entry was about therapy and symptoms vs root causes.  This week is about thinking traps (also called cognitive distortions).

Last week I shared that the root cause of my problems is that I got trapped in a mindset of, “This sucks.  I’m stuck and powerless.”  As I explored this belief with my therapist, she introduced me to the idea of thinking traps, which are patterns of negative thinking that distort our perception of reality.  The way you bust out of the thinking trap is by asking what the facts are and challenging your beliefs about a situation until you find the truth.  This truth empowers you to act. 

My belief that “This sucks.  I’m stuck and powerless” was a combination of two thinking traps, black/white thinking and catastrophizing.  To challenge these traps, my therapist asked me for evidence that supported my claims.  I could prove my challenges were real.  I didn’t have evidence to support I was truly powerless.  For example, my therapist pointed out that if work was a challenge I could get a new role, interview with another company, or at a minimum quit my job.  Those were choices I could make.  That was power I had in this situation.  Once I shattered the illusion of being powerless, I reflected on other times I had been in tough situations, and how I had always found a way to get through them.  Now the evidence was telling me a different story.  I went from “This sucks.  I’m stuck and powerless.” to “this sucks, AND I always find a way to get through.”  I was now free from the thinking trap.  Does any of this ring true for you?

There are many applications for thinking traps.  Beyond using this tool to deal with stress at work or at home, we can also use this tool to solve work problems.  We can pressure test our thinking to make sure we didn’t get stuck in a thinking trap.  Work thinking traps often sound like, “Well, this is the way it MUST be done” or “This is the only decision that can be made” or “If we do X it will definitely lead a disaster.”  Similar to my situation, we can take those statements and begin breaking them down.  What is the logic that led us to that conclusion?  What is the evidence?  Sometimes, our assertion might be right.  Often, we’ve fooled ourselves into believing something and became trapped by it.

The challenge: How will you recognize the thought traps you get stuck in?

Bonus- Here are some videos about thinking traps

Have a jolly good day,

Andrew Embry

Stress Fractures and Taking Time to Heal (9-13-22)

Happy Tuesday,

Breaking the rule and sending my blog out on Tuesday. Our topic is taking time to heal.

Last week I mentioned that when the doctor diagnosed me with a stress fracture that he then shared a plan to help me get back to doing what I wanted to do.  The first part of that plan was REST.  He looked me in the eye and said, “If you continue training and doing what you’re currently doing, you are going to cause more damage.  Damage that will be longer lasting.  You need to rest.  If you need crutches or something we can do that.” He then outlined what I could and couldn’t do for my health.  Eventually he gave me a plan to ease into running.  It felt weird resting.  It felt like I was doing nothing.  However, it was the best training move I made,  and now I feel better than I have in a long time.

What does this have to do with anything?  Think about work for a minute, how often do you give yourself time to recover?  How often do you truly unplug and do what you need to heal from a day, a week, a month, a quarter, a year of running HARD?  This rest is essential if we want to keep performing at a high level.  Now I want you to think of the doctor.  He came into this situation and did a few great things.  He saw me and my pain.  He took things off my plate (no impact on the leg).  He offered resources (crutches).  Even as I returned to running, he gave me clear parameters on what I should focus on and how long I should run in order to avoid reinjuring the leg.  Now think of work.  As a leader, are you doing what this doctor did?  Are you acknowledging where your people are mentally/physically/socially?  Are you seeing their struggle and pain?  From there, are you putting a plan in place with clear priorities that removes things from their plate?  Are you giving people the appropriate resources and support to do what they are being asked to do?  We need these all these things, not only to do our jobs, but to give us the space, freedom, and opportunity to heal and recover.

The challenge:  Are you taking the time to heal?  If you are an official leader, are you creating the space/culture and are you putting in the support, so people have time to heal and recover?

Bonus: Even if you’re not a leader, as we work on projects, we could all do a better job of finding places and spaces where we can encourage folks to slow down and work at a more suitable pace vs. sprinting on fractured legs.  I’m proud of myself, because I recently told a person, “Don’t do any more work.  This will wait, and we will be fine with waiting even though it’s late.”  I gave them permission and space to recover.  I’m also disappointed in myself, because I’ve also ran colleagues into the ground lately with some projects that were overwhelming fires that consumed so much time at work and beyond.

Have a jolly good day,

Andrew Embry