What is professional wellness?

Even if you are deeply embedded in your life’s calling, work cycles through phases ranging from elation and ease, to despair and frustration. When you feel tossed around in the waves of success and failure, it may seem that it’s impossible to enjoy work or to control how you feel. ‘Enjoying work’ becomes an oxymoron.

Apart from the ups & downs of my own career, I’ve had the chance to reflect with many clients on what keeps them motivated. Wellness, when thinking about the whole picture of professional life, is more than being physically fit or having a good diet. Here are some questions that may help you determine what keeps you well in a more rounded sense, and able to enjoy your role.

1.  Body and Mind

Yes, physical, mental and emotional fitness – which Tony Schwartz addresses in his work on managing energy – are an important foundation for intellectual work.

• Recovery – do you have a recovery process that you know will restore you after great effort?

• Sleep – do you sleep well and know what influences that?

• Meditation – do you have a regular activity (it might be walking the dog), during which you discover you relax and let ideas emerge without chasing them?

2.  The world

Work is about influencing the world, helping those you care about or an issue that you consider important. This gives us a sense of worth, connection and achievement.

• Caring – does your work make better the lives of people you care about?

• Passion – do you feel connected through your work to the big issues that matter to you, or does it give you the resources to pursue your enthusiasm in life?

• Purpose – is your work inherently worthwhile?

3.  Time

We can be continuously conscious of time, aware of how long things take, or absorbed in our task and unaware of the time. Our daily rhythm may have periods when we are inclined to be swift and others where we need to be acting slowly. We can be aware of a long horizon of time, or focussed on what’s just about to happen.

• Pacing – is your work relentless or does it match your natural rhythms, circadian and otherwise?

• Timeframe – how far into the future does your work have an impact? Does this sit comfortably with you?

• Stamina – is your work something you can do for as long as you like?

Attention

Our capacity to sustain the effort of work depends on how much we can sustain our attention to it in a fruitful way.

• Focus – does your environment enable you to focus the way you like, either in intense bursts or over sustained periods?

• Variety – does the rate of change in your work leave you bored or does it unsettle you?

• Innovating – are you engaged in a process of refreshing your professional work, on something interesting, that will make a difference and with people you respect?

 These and other questions lead to fascinating insights into what keeps us going, what sustains us, excites us, energises us; or plain drives us nuts.

As a result of working through these and related questions, my clients have, variously:

• Taken charge of the innovation process in their firm.
• Left to set up their own firm with their own written set of rules about work.
• Started exercising and meditating before the kids wake up.
• Accepted the promotion they were anxious about.
• Dropped something that had been precious, but was now an distraction – and re-engaged with their role.

The facts of professional life require us to be expert not only in our specialist learning, but also in the conditions that enable us to deliver consistently and with ease over our whole career. Yet the tempo of work, and the simple fact that we change over time, can make us unaware of aspects of work that can slowly erode us. Not only in how we work, but in how we feel generally.

These questions are good provocations for a reflective, exploratory conversation with someone who knows you well. They especially useful when you feel you at a cusp or turning point in your career. I’m sure you’ll unearth at least one area where a little more attention will yield an idea for your future that means more impact and enjoyment at work.