What a week, huh? Wait, it’s Wednesday

Hey, folks – how are you feeling today?

This has been a heavy week. We, individually, don’t have much control over the situation, and that feels really hard. It feels hopeless sometimes, and I think as leaders, as changemakers, the biggest thing we can do is take care of ourselves and preserve our mental energy, so that we can keep doing the work that we’re doing.

This has multiple components. We need to do this individually. We need to do this organizationally. We need to do this for our teams. If you are in a team, or you manage a team, then we need to do this structurally across the social purpose world, and part of how we do that is we take care of ourselves.

This is a small example, but something that is helpful for me is Future of Good’s wellness days. Wellness days are meant to take medical appointments if you need to, either for an existing issue or preventative care, with the goal of staying healthy. I find this is a perfect example of organizational policy that supports employees taking care of themselves, and empowering employees make the choice to do so.

I took a wellness day on Monday, and I needed it. We had a productive and fun strategic planning week last week, but it was heavy. My partner was away, so I was solo parenting, and then the frenetic cycle of politics south of the border and the power vacuum and confusion in Canada weighed me down.

It was really nice to step away.

Usually when I take a wellness day, I unplug from everything, and I did that. I can tell you that I came back on Tuesday with good intentions and a lot of joy. And it seems ridiculous in this moment where things feel like they’re crumbling around us, but it also feels good to be able to come to work assuming the good intentions of people around me, of being able to support my team and support my colleagues with more resilience.

Wellness is more important than ever, and I encourage everybody to look at individual and structural ways that you can support wellness so that we can continue to do this work.

Two great sessions in our Changemaker Wellbeing Summit that might support your team’s wellbeing: Finding Cause in Crisis: Motivation, Climate Anxiety and Collective Trauma or Collective Wellbeing: A Shared Responsibility in the Workplace?

If you haven’t already, sign up below. We’d really like to talk about this with you.

(Editor’s note: This whole column gives me 30 Rock vibes.)