Tag: wellness

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

Professional and Personal Quarterly Check-in (3-27-24)

This week’s entry is about quarterly check-ins for work and for yourself.  It’s a longer email, because I’m including my own quarterly self-assessment as an example.

As we finish out the end of Q1, I find myself doing a lot of reflecting on the progress that has been made on various projects and tasks at work.  I’m asking myself things like, “Where are we now compared to where we were at the beginning of the quarter?  Were we able to achieve our goals?  If so, how do we keep up the momentum?  If not, what should we adjust to do better?  How can we ensure we regroup and are clear and focused for Q2?”  It seems like a perfect moment to pause, reflect, regroup, and plan before attacking Q2.

What does this have to do anything?  While this is great for work, we could apply this same thinking to our personal lives as well.  What are some of your goals for 2024?  How did you do with them in Q1?  Have you stopped to CELEBRATE your progress?  Stop RIGHT NOW and celebrate something you’ve achieved.  After you celebrate, then you can reflect and see if there are any gaps.  If you have gaps, why do you have gaps?  What happened?  What got in the way?  How can you adjust to reach your goals for this quarter?

The challenge: Will you take the time to do a quarterly check-in?  What changes will you make to set yourself up for the rest of the year?

Bonus: Here is my review based on the dimensions in my life I set goals for.  Hopefully, it sparks a thought or two for you.  Also, just know if things have been tough lately, you’re not the only one.  Bottom line- tough quarter, and I need to bounce back. The picture of me flipping a tire is from my most recent obstacle course race and summarizes my Q1 in a nutshell. It was all about moving heavy stuff and getting through it.  I did it, but dang it was so much harder and uglier than I wanted it to be, or it needed to be.

  • Intentionally Invest (D+)- This is my mantra for the year.  This is about being intentional about where and how I invest my energy.  Investing my energy means doing the right things that help me be the best version of myself.  I gave myself a bad grade, because I wasn’t intentional.  I got overwhelmed by a lot of things and just started recklessly spending energy.  It wasn’t helpful and it didn’t help me get to where I wanted to go.
  • Mental Health (C-)- Overall, I want to feel like I’m in a good, strong, solid mental state.  In full transparency, life and work just kicked my butt this quarter.  The stress was overwhelming and was too much for me to manage in an efficient way.  I got really lost and stuck trying to trudge through everything.  Feeling lost and stuck drained so much of my mental energy.  I spent so much energy here that I didn’t spend it on taking care of myself.  I am proud of myself for getting some help.  Moving forward, I need to use the new tools I’m developing, so I won’t get so stuck.  If I can do that, everything else will improve dramatically. 
  • Physical Health (C-)- The goal is to take good care of myself, so I can do the things I want to be able to do.  The only reason I’m not giving myself a worse grade, is because I did manage to at least hold things together enough to complete a couple of obstacle course races.  Other than that, I was inconsistent with working out, my sleep was poor, and my nutrition was abysmal.  I’m ready to do better in Q2.
  • Family (ugly hard-earned B)- The goal is to feel like I’m being an amazing husband and dad.  As they say in The Inside Job podcast, “Life gets lifey.”  It’s been a hard few months with each day seemingly bringing new challenges.  I give myself an “ugly hard-earned B” because it’s like one of those things in school where you have to put in so much effort you dang near exhaust yourself just to make it.  I was not necessarily excellent, but I found ways to hold it together.  It’s an ugly B, but one I can be proud of.  At the same time, I think some work and mental health challenges got in the way of me being on the top of my game here.
  • Career (ugly hard-earned B)- The goal is to feel like I’m delivering magic.  It’s a high bar about being in a flow state and getting incredible things done.  Similar to my Family category, challenges kept popping up and compounding on themselves day in and day out.  As a result, this quarter was filled with nothing but peaks and valleys, and they couldn’t have been further from each other.  At times I was operating at a high level, and there were other times when I felt like an ineffective burned-out piece of garbage.  This is another hard-earned ugly B that left me a little bruised and roughed up.  I believe I focused on the right things.  It just so happens that all the right things were the extremely difficult, and it was like carving through ambiguity made of marble while walking through quicksand.  It took so much energy to keep slogging forward, and I know I was burned out for a period of time.  On the positive side, I’m proud of myself for finding a way to regroup.  I feel I’m getting my energy and magic back.  All I need is a little more momentum, and then I’ll be like the Juggernaut (bonus points if you get the X-men reference)
  • Financial (B)- The goal is to ensure we are saving/investing money in the right way.  I’ve already shifted money for investments.  Some of these have been home repair things (replacing the hot water heater has been AMAZING!) and some of these are investing in fun vacations for later in the year.  I do acknowledge that I was wasting too much money on junk food and stuff as I was super stressed.

Have a jolly good day,

Andrew Embry

Wellness and Sustainability (11-17-21)

This is going to be the last in a series about wellness.  This week we will look at wellness and sustainability.

Pretend for a moment that I forced you to sprint as hard as you could for 60 minutes.  How long could you do it before it caused damage to your body?  5 minutes? 10?

No one could make it the full 60 minutes.  Sooner or later the fatigue would set in and we’d be injuring ourselves trying to run.  Now imagine for a moment we changed it up.  You sprint as hard as you can for 1 minute and then you walk for 10.  You repeat this until 60 minutes are up.  Which way of doing things is sustainable?  The one that has the higher chance of being sustainable is the sprint/walk combo.  It will still be hard to do this, but it is something that can more than likely be done without causing devastating harm.

You might be wondering where this is going.  This entire series has been about wellness and taking care of ourselves, so we can keep going.  The above example causes us to reflect on what it means for an action to be sustainable.  It’s more than just whether or not you can do the action.  Sustainability is about being able to do the action without causing significant harm to yourself. 

Recently I was talking to a colleague, and they said something along the lines of, “The company is expecting more, stretching people beyond their breaking point, all in the midst of a pandemic.”  My colleague wondered how sustainable that is.  Have you ever wondered that?  While I agreed to an extent, I also challenged the idea of sustainable.  We keep saying, “I don’t know how long it will be sustainable.”  This assumes that what we have demanded of people WAS sustainable at some point.  I’d argue it never was.  Per our analogy, we demanded people sprint constantly by having unrealistic expectations and requirements in the midst of a pandemic.  Those expectations never let up or changed.  Throughout the past couple of years it feels more like individuals have been in varying states of breaking down, at least I’ve felt that way a fair amount.  The unspoken question being asked is, “How long can this go on before people are broken into pieces?”, which is very different from asking about sustainability and how long we can keep this up before doing harm to ourselves.  That unspoken question is a scary one, especially because it’s going to be hard to glue people back together after they are shattered.

The challenge: As a leader, how are you creating an environment that promotes wellness AND sustainability?  What are you doing to help people keep from breaking?

Have a jolly good day,

Andrew Embry

Spartan Race, Wellness, and Energy Flows (11-10-21)

Last week was about managing your energy and watering a cactus.  This week is about a Spartan race, wellness, and understanding how energy flows to and from you.

Back in September, I accomplished a fitness goal and completed my first ever Spartan Sprint.  It’s a 3 mile race filled with obstacles (monkey bars, mud, cargo nuts, bucket carries, rope climbs, etc.) you need to overcome.  Leading up to the race, I made sure I ate foods that would fill up my energy reserves, so I would have enough in the tank to get through the race.  During the race, I exhausted a lot of those energy reserves trying to get through all the obstacles.  After the race, I spent most of the day just being lazy.  I also did some foam rolling and took a nice nap to recover.  The rest of the week I did stretching and active recovery to fill my tanks again.  (Look, it’s the cover of Bucket Carry Magazine😉)

How does this connect with energy flows and wellness?  Last week I talked about wellness as it relates to managing your energy.  If you look at my Spartan story, throughout the day I was either adding energy (eating, napping), being energy neutral (lazy sitting around), or spending energy (racing).  It’s important to understand how the energy was flowing in each of these situations, because it helped me figure out what was best for my recovery to refill my tank.  Now think about work/life for a moment.  Have you ever done an energy audit?  What actions/projects refuel you?  What is neutral for you?  What causes you to spend energy?  What sucks your soul and causes you to lose a lot of energy very quickly?  I do an energy audit from time to time and the reflection helps me build a life that refuels me in the right ways, which leads to better holistic wellness for me.

Embry Energy Audit Learnings–  On the work side, I avoid roles, situations, and people that will primarily drain me and take roles that have more work that will refuel or at least be neutral.  I invest time in “non-critical” work things, like blogging, mentoring, sending memes because they energize me (I put “non-critical” in quotes because I’d argue these things are probably more critical than some “official work”.)  On the life side, I used to workout at night.  I’ve found that working out in the morning gives me a boost throughout the day, so I’ve changed my routine.  As I get older my appreciation for sleep and active rest have increased a hundred fold.  Work will always be there, but once you lose hours of sleep you never get them again.  I’ve learned how much being at a computer all day drains me, so at night I try to minimize my screen time at night and instead read from an actual book.  I’m also more cognizant about whether an activity (or person) truly refuels me or if it’s just neutral.  Sometimes you just need a neutral activity, but sometimes I’ve found that I confuse neutral with replenishing and those aren’t the same.  I try to spend more time on refueling activities/people than neutral ones.

The challenge: How is your energy flowing?  How are you adapting to make this flow work better for you?

Have a jolly good day,

Andrew Embry

Wellness and Watering a Cactus (11-3-21)

Let’s pretend for a minute that it’s your job to water 3 indoor plants.  You’re given a watering can and told to split the water evenly between the 3 plants.  You water the first two plants, and come to the final one.  It’s a cactus.  You know that the cactus doesn’t need that much water, so instead of giving it 1/3 of the bucket like you were told to you just give it a little.  Later, your boss asks you why you didn’t use all the water.  You explain that the cactus doesn’t need that much water.  Your boss tells you it doesn’t matter, give the cactus the rest of the water.  From then on, you divide the water between the 3 plants equally, even though it doesn’t make sense.  You begin to realize there are other flowers, and they are dying.  You can’t do anything for them though, because you don’t have any water left.

What does this weird plant story have to do with anything?  What if in this story water represents energy and the plants represent different projects.  Have you ever been in a situation where you had multiple projects and even though 1 of them was clearly more important and impactful, you were still expected to invest a lot of energy into EVERYTHING you were doing?  This has happened to me.  This is like overwatering a cactus.  It doesn’t make sense.  Projects are a lot like plants, you should give them the amount of water (energy) needed, and no more.  Then, we should invest that extra energy for all those other important aspects of life like being a human, taking care of yourself/others, socializing, etc.

How do we practice this?  Leaders needs to first UNDERSTAND and then REALISITCALLY set expectations about the energy required to do things.  As individuals, we need to be focused on expending our energy where it really matters.  The challenge: As a leader, are you encouraging people to overwater a cactus (overinvest in something that isn’t worth it)?  As an individual, how are you managing your energy supply?

Bonus story 1: One time I was talking to a boss of mine during a 1 on 1.  They asked how I was doing.  I explained that with everything going on, I was on my B game right now.  I wasn’t putting in all the energy and having the impact I’d normally like to, because I was putting my energy towards handling other things.  My boss replied by saying that was understandable and that they’ve been there.  In fact, they were feeling that way right now.  I went on to say that all that matters is I’m on my A game when it actually matters.  My boss agreed and then said something like, “If we’re honest, now is an okay time to be on a B game.  We can get through that and then get back to our A game when we need to.”  When is the last time you had an open conversation like this with your boss?  How would it feel if you did have a conversation like this with your boss?  For me, the conversation had a huge positive impact on my wellness and engagement.  If you’re a leader looking for what you can do to promote wellness, this could be a good place to start. 

Bonus story 2: I recently sent the below email to my agency partners.  I don’t run a team, but I partner with folks.  I can set expectations with them, so they the freedom to use their energy in better ways.

I know that in a perfect world we would launch X tactic in mid-February.  Let’s be more realistic.  If the tactic  is launched somewhere in the end of February/early March we are still in good shape.  I don’t want us running ourselves to death on this.  I don’t want the pursuit of perfection to lead to burnout.  You’re worth more than the tactic.  If you ever feel like I am asking you to sprint like crazy toward burnout, please tell me.  It’s likely because I’m not realizing an ask is creating substantial work for you.  At that point we can regroup, I can learn, and we can figure out how to adjust. 

Have a jolly good day,

Andrew Embry

Parenting, Leading, and the Burden of Wellness (10-27-21)

This week I want to kick-off a series about wellness.  We will start by thinking about parenting, leading, and the burden of wellness.  Fair warning, this one might hit hard.

There are times when my girls struggle with their mental/physical/emotional/social health.  They get tired, stressed, grumpy, anxious, and lash out.  When this happens, my wife and I get together and figure out how we can adjust the environment to make it easier for them to be well.  We don’t swoop in to save them.  We help create the space for them.  There are a lot of different levels to pull.  We might say no to extra activities, keeping things off their plate.  We might adjust our expectations of them, asking them to only fulfill their minimal chores and obligations vs. asking for more.  We might do our best to slow everything else down, so we can spend quality time together.  This environment then helps them find their path to wellness. 

You might wonder where this one is going.  It feels like “wellness” has been the biggest corporate buzzword since COVID started.  It has also felt like the burden of wellness often falls on the individual, instead of the company and systems the person operates in.  To me the focus on wellness sounds like this, “Andrew, you’re already burned out, so please make time to listen to this webinar about burnout.  You’re overworked, so take a course on time management.  You don’t have enough time for your commitments, just take a day for self-care.”  Do you ever feel this way? 

In the story this week, I don’t put this burden of wellness on my daughters.  They can’t do this on their own.  They need an environment that supports them.  As a parent, as a co-leader of the family, I am responsible for creating this environment that promotes and enables wellness.  What if our companies, leaders, society, and systems we live in did a better job of creating this environment that promotes wellness?  What if instead of always asking for more and more and more and then telling you to take care of yourself, they did a better job of building wellness into the fabric of the way we do things? 

The challenge: As a leader, what are you doing to create an environment that makes achieving wellness easier?  What strategies and tactics can you execute to create this environment? 

The hard reflection:  If you aren’t creating an environment that promotes wellness without putting the burden on individuals, you’re likely inadvertently causing harm.  Is that okay with you?

Additional thoughts: Even if you’re not a leader with formal authority, I think you can do things to help the wellness of others.  I don’t lead a team, but I can make sure I’m recognizing people and showing them how much I appreciate them.  This doesn’t solve all problems, but it does give help fill their bucket so they can keep going.  I don’t lead a team, but I can spend an extra second making sure I’m clear on what we are trying to accomplish with a given project.  This clarity minimizes swirl, which minimizes how much energy a person has to spend doing something.  They can use the energy they didn’t waste to do other things in life without going empty.  I don’t lead a team, but I can tell someone, “This isn’t urgent.  Don’t rush to get it to  me.  I’m not going to look at it for a couple of days anyway,” which gives them time to breathe.  Reserving speed and urgency for only the things that truly require speed and urgency allows people to save their energy for when it matters.  I’m not perfect at any of these things.  I am trying to be more cognizant, so I can do better because even my actions as an individual contributor make a difference.

Have a jolly good day,

Andrew Embry