Self Care As A Strategy For Ambitious Professionals

If you’re committed to big professional goals, then this one is for you.

I’m the type of person that very much enjoys what I do, I identify a lot with my work and I'm constantly looking for ways to improve my output in service of generating a bigger impact.

One of the perspectives I’ve adopted that any ambitious professional should consider is that self-care is a strategy. 

Taking care of yourself - your health and your energy - isn’t something to be deprioritized… It should come first and foremost. Yet many professionals work through their workout block, burn the midnight oil and don’t get enough sleep, and don’t allocate the proper amount of time for meditation or mindfulness. 

Their argument is that less time spent taking care of themselves means they have more time to be productive. Linearly that’s true, but it doesn’t tell the full story.

Productivity is the combination of quantity and quality, and the energy you bring to your work tasks is majorly responsible for your overall productive output.

While you may have an hour or two less a day to do work, the hours you do spend working are multiplied in effectiveness because you’re more focused, better able to fight off distractions, and more compelling in communication. At the end of the day you moved the needle more because your overall output increased. You pack more work into fewer hours, and you’re way less susceptible to burning out and can sustain a higher level of output for longer.

The reframe to consider is: Taking care of yourself is not a time tradeoff against working hours, but an investment that increases the overall capacity of your working hours.

Self-care is a high-performance strategy. If you want to get more out of anything that you do, you need to start there. You need to make that their utmost priority - or else everything else will crumble on top of a weak foundation and you're potential gets capped by the energy you bring to your work.