January 2019 Advisor’s Corner

Recharging Your Batteries!

I hope your holiday season was filled with a little down time (yeah, right) and you were able to spend time with family and friends. Holidays are usually busy, but it’s a different kind of busy for most of us. Even though my holidays are busy, it’s a time that I use to reflect and take inventory as well as take a deep breath and focus on a little “me” time.

For my own sanity and mental health, it is important to have that opportunity to have some time, and sometimes activities, that focus on me. We spend so much time in our profession focusing on the needs and developments of others, it can be very easy to neglect yourself. Our professional culture is one that focuses on hitting our numbers and/or contributing to our team(s), documenting our growth (or lack thereof), and developing plans for improvement. The corporate language, production goals, implementation, and measurement styles have trickled down to everyone’s work setting. Like most systems, there are pros and cons to it, but most will use it until something better comes along or we all burn out from it.

One major drawback of our use of corporate culture to chase goals and productivity is that the individual can sometimes fall through the cracks. It is very easy to feel like just another cog in the machine with days and weeks running together, blurring into a very hazy memory that is not very memorable. The positive impact that we have on the people we serve can get lost in the background noise of protocols, checklists, memos, endless meetings, and phone calls. I hope that the holiday break has propelled you into the new year with a charged battery and a fresh perspective. But if the holidays weren’t restful for you, take a day off, play hooky and do something fun, or just be lazy and do nothing! You can allow yourself that as the world will go on, the sun will come up the next day, and the economy won’t crash. I hope this is a great year for you with continued success!