The Truth about Self Care for International Development Professionals
In my last blog post I talked about hustle culture and asked the question, ‘does the constant hustle to do more and be more get in the way of innovation and impact our ability to create sustainable change?’
This month I want to focus more on the impact of hustle culture in the context of self-care and our own well-being as international development professionals.
In our hustle to change the world, have we lost sight of what we really want and forgotten how to take care of ourselves? How does this effect our ability to have the impact we want?
The Challenge
Last year was a particularly challenging year for me personally and professionally. I had a traumatic miscarriage and my mum passed away. In addition, I found myself feeling frustrated and a bit jaded at work. I felt more people wanting to tick the box instead of putting energy and resources into what was needed to make real change. Overall, I was feeling a sense of disconnection within the sector.
As I moved through my own challenges, I started to wonder what other people might be experiencing. So, I set out to find that out by interviewing people in the sector from Australia, the US, Canada and Europe. This month I wanted to elaborate further on those findings and talk more about self-care for international development workers - what it really means and why its important.
To begin, here’s a brief summary of what people told me about what they are feeling and what really matters to them.
Why do international development professionals do the work we do?
We grew up wanting to make a difference in the world
We’ve had personal experiences of violence, inequality and poverty
We want to help people
We love other cultures and want to explore other parts of the world
Curiously many people noted that perhaps their original intentions and enthusiasm were naïve (more on this later).
What are we experiencing?
There were 3 themes common to almost everyone and one theme more likely to be reported by gender specialists. Themes common to everyone were:
Anxiety, stress, overwhelm and lack of balance
Stress of managing expectations about the pace of change
Feeling pressure to perform and do more with less
Feeling constantly questioned about decisions leading to stress
Overthinking and anxiety
Overwhelmed
Juggling multiple contracts and work and finding it hard to do it all well
Finding travel more and more difficult to manage with family – lack of balance
There’s always more to be done and no matter how much we do it’s never enough
Guilt over not being able to please anyone
Self-doubt, feeling not good enough and lack of confidence
Are people taking us seriously?
Second guessing what we are doing
We don’t know enough
We are not doing enough to help
We should be doing more
Imposter syndrome and lack of confidence
We don’t want to let people down, so we put up with rubbish
People pleasing
Afraid of failure, not feeling good enough
Don’t trust ourselves, don’t believe in ourselves
Burn Out, Sinicism, Disconnection
People don’t seem willing to do what it takes to create real change
We want to make a difference, so we put up with poor work conditions or resistance and compromise myself
The people around us seem to be ticking the box mentality and don’t want to do it properly
People in development roles witness lots of hard things, especially when working on violence or other issues, yet we have no de-briefing in the industry and no support systems in place
Our organizations don’t live their values in the way they treat their staff
We feel burnt out and cynical and we are starting to wonder if change is possible.
What are gender specialists experiencing in addition to the above?
Resistance and Backlash, Compromise
Resistance is everywhere – gender specialists need better tools for dealing with resistance
Backlash
Lack of respect
Biggest challenge is dealing with challenging relationships with colleagues who are resistant to the work.
We battle to be meaningful and we take lack of interest and backlash personally because the work is so personal
Having to convince people of the value of gender is a really hard fight that wears us down
We’ve never experienced this kind of backlash in a professional setting
How do we meet people where they are in a way that does not present a conflict to our own personal values?
What do international development professionals want to be experiencing more of?
Freedom
Confidence in ourselves
To feel that we are not fighting every day
To be more present to life and our families
To bring humanity back to the work
To feel free and calm
To know that we are really making a difference
Less stress and anxiety
In short, I found that so many people I talked to grew up with a dream of changing the world or helping others and somewhere along the way in our hustle to create big change many of us have lost sight of the magic. Instead we’re feeling jaded, tired, frustrated, burnt out and stuck. In an effort to change the world we have lost sight of ourselves, our values and our value.
I should note here that a large number of respondents to my interviews were women, and there were definitely some gendered differences. Women in particular, reported feeling that every day we wake up feeling like no matter how hard we work there’s always more to be done. We find it hard to be present and connected with family and friends, so we feel guilty. Whether at home or at work we feel like there's never enough time and we are never doing enough.... more guilt. But we keep working longer and harder, giving more and more of ourselves...at the expense of our relationships and at the expense of ourselves.
Yes, there is still so much in our world that needs to change, more to be done. Yet more than ever as international development professionals we need to be reconnecting to ourselves, replenishing ourselves, experiencing what we want and need, remembering our value and ending our experience with stress, overwhelm, compromise and anxiety. This means taking the time to take care of ourselves.
What is self-care?
When people think of self-care often the first thing that comes to mind is getting a massage or a beauty treatment, taking a bath, making more time to exercise, or a night out away from the kids. While these things may give a brief reprieve from the daily stress of our work they are often just a Band-Aid for the underlying problems that we need to address if we want to have impact.
In my last blog I talked a lot about the scarcity epidemic, our belief system and all the ways that lack and “not enoughness” show up in our lives. I outlined how most of us have the “I’m not enough” message playing in the background in our heads and that we often go to great lengths to prove that we are in fact enough. We do this by working longer, harder, checking and double checking our work, censoring everything we say to please bosses or others. Afraid to put our most innovative ideas forward in case they are not well received. I also outlined how, if the never enough message is there, no amount of doing more giving more or sacrificing yourself at the expense of others will ever fill the hole. It just leads to perfectionism, anxiety, stress and overwhelm and kills innovation. If you’re feeling stressed and burnout you diminish the impact you can have.
I’m bringing this up again because it is directly related to self-care. What’s important to realize is that self-care isn’t really about doing things, or at least not the things society tells us we are supposed to do as self-care. Society tells us that when we fulfill today’s definition of self-care, that our cups should be filled.
This is especially true for women and the messaging we receive around self-care. Agree or not, it’s still socially acceptable that women carry much of the load when it comes to parenting, and often basic day to day tasks of being a human qualify as self-care for mum’s these days. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been asked who is taking care of my kids when I travel for work.
I found that mother’s working in international development faced additional challenges related to balancing their workload and travel with family responsibilities. It’s not to say that Dad’s don’t have these same challenges, but women deal with an additional overlay of societal messaging and a world where our worth as parents is not valued the way it should be. In the hustle culture of international development, mothers are expected to work like we don’t have children and parent like we don’t work.
Real self-care is actually a state of mind. It’s about taking the time to care for the way we talk to ourselves, and not giving power to our inner dialogue. Our inner dialogue, if left un-checked is 70% filled with negative content about who we are and what we can and can’t do and who we need to be in order to fit in and belong. This impacts on our choices, our decision-making, how we choose to feel about ourselves, and how we use our time.
Let’s face it, going for a massage is not helpful, if you just lie there and the whole time your inner dialogue is making you feel guilty for taking time out.
Self-care is having tools that help you get to a place where you truly allow yourself rest, joy, play, and to receive support. This requires moving out of the mindset of lack, perfectionism, and people pleasing, into a place where you know your own value, can set boundaries and truly allow yourself to receive support and nourishment. It means being able to disconnect from the rules, norms and messages of the sector that tell us to work harder and longer. For women it also means disconnecting from the rules and norms about how much time we’re supposed to dedicate to taking care of everyone else around us.
The first step to better self-care, is changing our own mindsets. It’s you deciding that you are more important than the work. It’s knowing you don’t have to make big change in the world to prove to everyone that you are something. You already are something. You get to make big change because that’s what you are meant to do as the fullest expression of yourself in this world. When you can fully embody this knowing, you can operate from a different place and what’s available to you will be limitless.
Why are we not having more of these conversations in our organisations and in our community?
Let’s face it, in today’s hustle culture we are often looking for a quick fix or to put a Band-Aid over things because we feel like we don’t actually have time to slow down and take the time we truly need to be taking to focus on ourselves, feel our feelings and step into our value. We’ve tied our value to the amount of stuff we can get done, how much money we can make or to the big difference that we can achieve.
We forgot along the way that our value is innate and that we don’t actually have to do shit to make a difference in the world.
But until we get that, the more we hustle, the more we do, the less time we take to be with our feelings and thoughts and to be with ourselves. We get a massage and tick a box in our head as evidence that we did do something nice for ourselves, but if we’re honest we didn’t have to really invest or connect at all.
So how do we nurture real self-care? It might be through coaching, meditation, yoga, hypnosis journaling, taking a mindfulness class, energy healing, or any type of practice that promotes and supports self-reflection, emotional growth and helps you to see your value.
It definitely means that our organizations should place more focus on values-based objectives and performance management, living their values internally, and providing access to coaching or other self-awareness programs for staff, particularly those in leadership.
I’ll reiterate again what I said last time, one thing that’s clear, is that within the sector we absolutely need more discussion around mindset, self-care and the relationship between mindset and impact so that we can create the change we all want to see and have more impact without working harder, burning ourselves out or sacrificing our relationships with those that we love. We also need more discussion about the gendered differences related to self-care and the impact of hustle culture on men versus women.
Want to explore this further?
If you’ve resonated at all with this blog and want to explore ways you can nurture your own self-care, feel free to download this copy of my connected living self-assessment so you can reflect on how you are showing up for yourself right now.
You might also like to check out these links to a couple of my favorite resources:
Brené Brown and her body of work on courage, daring greatly, belonging and vulnerability
Somatic Experiencing Training Institute
https://www.facebook.com/somaticexperiencingtraumainstitute/