It is the third year in a row that I have dedicated a whole reflection blog for professional self-care & happiness. Check out “My little ‘astuce’ to professional happiness” from 2022 and “Professional self-care for 2023“.
Since my last International Day of Happiness blog, I started to:
🎯Focus more time on my self-development
📅Reclaim my calendar and stop being goody-goody
🧘♀️Walk away from places and connections that do not value me
Focus more time on my self-development
Early 2023, I had invested in a Life Mastery course, in which I seriously started to engage in May 2023. And later in early Oct 2023, I got a least-expected award, I became the winner of Season 24 Life Mastery Achiever programme, a grand prize worth $10,000 of coaching by an international coach for World Class Achiever for a duration of 5 days – check out my blog on “Behind the scenes of being a winner“.
I have been spending about 100 hours over six weeks to work on self-development, with another six-week gap in between. I have stopped keeping count of how many such six weeks I have had so far. One thing is for sure, I have developed more assertiveness as a leader, I have more clarity and focus on what I need and want, and more importantly I have developed integrity in myself and learnt to keep my word – check out my blog on “How you do one thing is how you do everything” and “Being a humble student“. Let’s say that now when I say I will do something, I will get it done!
Over the years, more like 16 years, I have spent time and energy on various projects around inclusion. One observation I had made, is that there is a large group of people who prefer to play victim than to progress in life. Self-development helped me to take massive action and focus more on impact.
Reclaim my calendar and stop being goody-goody
Two years back, I wrote about how I usually avoid meetings and Friday afternoons, and last year, I wrote about how I added a note to my email signature to have clear boundaries. Sadly since then, I had found myself being goody-goody and too supportive towards a few people and scheduled meetings on Fridays. It is with much pleasure that I write that I have reclaimed my Fridays.
I have also started to cut down meetings on Mondays, and reserve my Mondays to impact mentoring & coaching sessions. I provide many free services to deserving students & staff from Asia and Africa, so I absolutely needed to reclaim my time from less gratifying and less valuable interactions.
Walk away from places and connections that do not value me
Removing toxic connections from my professional Social Media platforms (LinkedIn and Twitter) is something that I do once or twice a year. However, this year particularly, I decided to altogether cut out projects and collaborators that do not value me. I call it practising what I have learnt in all the hours of self-development.
I had an interesting conversation last year with a collaborator who argued that they would pay me less because I am so efficient and I would get the work done in one-fifth of the time that most people would take for the same tasks. Very flattering of course, but beep! Wrong reasoning! I have acquired skills, knowledge and experience because I have spent my time and money to acquire them.
More recently I resigned as Chair of a committee, I used to love doing what I was doing, but I had to walk away. I walked away, not to teach them a lesson, but because I had learnt mine. After all, how many more chances should I give? How many more times should I allow myself to be disrespected, unappreciated, manipulated, and undervalued. My worth was repeatedly undermined and my needs neglected, even after I had explicitly elaborated everything. I know my value well enough to say enough is enough. I decided to put myself first and safeguard my well-being!
It is such a relief to not only do a digital detox from my professional Social Media connections but also those that I work with more frequently.
It feels good to own my time!
It feels good to own my work!
What are you doing for a pinch of happiness in your professional life?
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