Author: Anand Kalra
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Self-Care Guide & Assessment
When I’m in a more stressed & compressed period of time, I tend to focus in on “what needs to get done” and reduce my own needs to the bare minimum. At the beginning of a longer stretch of intensity (work, family, personal health challenges, etc), I can hold my boundaries pretty well, keep my morning journaling and stretching practices, eat decently (if imperfectly), sleep on time, take breaks to walk around the block, remember to stay in touch with my friends.
But as the marathon wears on without an indication of when it will end or ease up, my self-care practices start to fall apart. Once they do, it’s a pretty quick slope down to feeling trapped, isolating myself, showing a grumpy demeanor, secret cookie-eating, and the other sides of myself that come out when I’m not meeting my needs in direct and healthy ways. Sound familiar?
If you’re newer to thinking about self-care as a regular practice (vs an escape you do once in a while), or you’re worn down and could use a refresher, take a look at these helpful images from Deanna Zandt’s 2019 graphic essay, “The Unspoken Complexity of ‘Self-Care’” (click to enlarge any image).
I really appreciate that Deanna’s take situates self care as occurring at multiple levels of society, so that we can zoom out and shake off the shame that tends to arise when we’re past our limits and blaming ourselves or others for our dysregulation, dissatisfaction, or general feeling of everything being fucked up. It’s a balancing act for sure — yes, each of us has the individual responsibility to take care of ourselves, and also, the degree to which a specific person has the power to do that effectively depends on their social location and access to time, money, and social resources. That is, freedom of choice isn’t equally distributed across society.
Wherever you find yourself in this moment, I recommend using this self-care assessment (below) as a snapshot of your current practices. One thing that I like about it is that the authors break self-care down into different dimensions of self, including physical, psychological, emotional, spiritual, relational, and workplace/professional. View it as a guide, not a prescriptive list of what has to be most important for you.
Reach out – I’m here for you.
If you’re in one of these ongoing stretches of enduring an illness or providing care to someone who is and you could use some support, drop me a line! I would love to help you shift gears from “oh god this is hell all the time” to somewhere closer to “wow, I didn’t know it was possible to feel calm and supported and only be in hell some of the time”.
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Burnout Assessment
I was not a perfect executive director. But one thing that I did well was to periodically have our whole staff fill out this burnout assessment in staff meetings. I didn’t require anyone to share their specific results, but we would talk about anything that surprised us and what we needed.
One time, I filled it out on my own and scored in the highest category (Passion Depleted — Get help now!). Whoops. Despite my best efforts to self-regulate, the unrelenting pace of leading the organization had overpowered me. In my case, I ended up transitioning out of the organization. I’m proud to say I did so with a 6-month advance notice to the board and overlapped for 3 weeks with the excellent interim director we were able to hire. But I was burned to a crisp by that point, and I know our staff felt the edges of my stress more than I wish they had.
In many other cases, people just hit their wall and leave suddenly to protect themselves. Or, they go on working with a crumbled foundation for months or years in a holding pattern of fear and distress. No fun any way you look at it.
This self-assessment is also not perfect. It doesn’t account for learning differences or neurodiversity. It won’t solve all the problems that burnout (aka toxic stress, aka cumulative stress) causes. But, it can help you get a snapshot of where you are at a given moment in time. You can view the Burnout Self-Assessment below or download it using the buttons at the bottom of this post.
Source: Kanter, B., Sherman, A. (2016). The Happy, Healthy Nonprofit: Strategies for Impact Without Burnout. Germany: Wiley.
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Non-Profit Life Cycle
Community organizations are just individual people doing their best to work together. Which means we’re subject to the strengths and weaknesses of…people. These days, I like to measure things on a scale from SNAFU (situation normal: all f***ed up) to FUBAR (f***ed up beyond all recognition). It helps us remember that we’re not working in ideals or fantasies, but the messy, frustrating world of real people with limited time and resources.
I first encountered Nonprofit Organizational Life Cycle model from Susan Mooney, who was leading a series of staff development workshops for Transgender Law Center when I was an ambitious and headstrong program manager for the health advocacy project.
Seeing it for the first time, I had such a calming “Aha!” moment. Suddenly, all the mess and dysfunction I’d observed in different places I worked made sense within this road map. The top-level view shows six stages (Grass Roots -Invention, Start-up – INcupation, Adolescent-Growing, Mature – Sustainability, Stagnation & Renewal, and Decline & Shut-Down), organized by the key question, obstacles, and opportunities in each stage. My internal frustration of “it doesn’t need to be this way!” and “why can’t people just do better??” eased as I read deeper and understood that the problems I’d seen in internal communication, overall strategy, and operations in particular were all totally normal.
But, just because something is normal doesn’t mean it’s healthy. Which means: acknowledging that things are the way they are is a first step, not a shoulder-shrugging endpoint. Using this model can help to narrow in on where to focus attention and time in readjusting the breakdowns.
The Nonprofit Organizational Life Cycle model is helpful for:
- leadership to identify WTF is going on / why things feel hard in the particular ways they feel hard
- saving time diagnosing what’s going wrong where, and what needs to happen to course-correct
- getting board, staff, and volunteers on the same page about the organization as a whole, vs just the corners that each person sees regularly
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Staring at the Sun
Irvin Yalom’s book, Staring at the Sun, is a profound and accessible psychological exploration of death anxiety and how to navigate the world as a living person, knowing that you will die at some point in the guaranteed future. Just as the text of the book takes readers on a journey from agitation to peacefulness, the evolution of the book’s subtitle over the years reflects a parallel journey. The first edition had the stark subtitle “Overcoming the terror of death”, which softened later to “overcoming the dread of death”, and finally evolved into the most recent subtitle, “being at peace with your own mortality.” What a change!
I read this book in the spring of 2016, shortly after my maternal grandmother and last living grandparent passed away. Before this, I had been organizing my life through the “life design” concept popular with personal coaches, with the idea that each of us has the power to identify a central focus of joy for our lives and pursue it. There’s nothing wrong with that. After reading Staring at the Sun, though, I had a gentle realization that the far-away “north star” I was chasing, that ultimate unknowable thing at the center of my passion, was really my own inevitable death.
Don’t get me wrong– it’s not like I had “base jump Mt. Everest without an oxygen tank” on my vision board or reckless abandon in my dream journaling. It’s just that there always seemed to be a deeper pull behind the board, another layer I had yet to reveal. Staring at the Sun helped me understand that, in aiming to “seize the day” and “suck the marrow out of life”, I was fighting against the unconscious fear that I will cease to exist and that my life’s work will wash away like footprints on a beach.
It sounds sad at first, but there’s a deep peace that comes with acknowledging the inevitable temporariness of my own individual life. Instead of feeling limiting, it actually frees me up to prioritize what’s meaningful.
In one section of the book, Dr. Yalom discusses his interviews with octogenarians who are either deeply unhappy or peacefully satisfied with their lives. From these interviews, he distills several commonalities among the satisfied group, and from this infers what might make a meaningful life.
The one that sticks out most clearly to me is that the people in the satisfied group could point clearly to their ripples of impact in the world. For some, this was in their children and grandchildren; for others, lasting work in the form of writing or art or a bridge they laid cement for. It’s not about banner parades and major accomplishments, public recognition of individual greatness, or the number of publications on a CV. According to Yalom,
“Rippling, as I use it, refers instead to leaving behind something from your life experience; some trait; some piece of wisdom, guidance, virtute, comfort that passes on to others, known or unknown.”
Despite its intimidating subject matter, the book is very readable, thanks to Yalom’s deep desire to be understandable and his frequent inclusion of real stories from and dialogues with patients over the span of his career.
Publisher’s description of the 2020 edition: “Each person fears death in their own way. Despite turning to the comforts of children, or wealth, or belief in a higher power, death anxiety is never completely subdued: it is always there, lurking in the hidden ravines of our minds. In this book, master psychotherapist Irvin D. Yalom faces his own fear of death and examines its role in many patients’ fears, stresses and depression. With characteristic wisdom and illuminating case histories, he shows how confronting and coping with death allows us to live in a richer, more compassionate way.”