Developing Self-Direction Skills (On Leave Series)

Show Notes:

We are continuing our series around being on leave and how we can support ourselves in recovering well while off work. Whether we’re off work for a physical injury or a work-related mental health concern, we discussed last week that the experience of being off work can be trying and difficult. Without a plan and intention to ensure the best outcomes possible, we can be left floundering and this can either create or exacerbate things like depression, anxiety, hopelessness, and/or uncertainty and can magnify things like sleep concerns, meeting basic needs like nutrition and movement, isolating from relationships, and feeling detached from interests, hobbies and activities. Total honesty, without a plan, going off work can be a recipe for disaster – not because it needs to be, but because no one guides us through it. No one lays out for us the challenges we’re likely to face and the tricks for circumnavigating these with the least amount of friction possible. That is, until now. I hope that this series gives you tools that allow you to feel like whether you are in a time off work or considering going off or concerned that someday you may have to go off, that you will have the ability to walk that journey with awareness, foresight and capacity. I hope you’ll feel prepared for the stumbling blocks to watch for and feel equipped with tools to side step them or reduce their degree of impact, allowing you to use a time off work to focus on your actual job, which is to recover, and that you would have what you need to do that WELL.

On last week’s episode I named the most common concerns I hear about from the many clients I have served over the past many years who have been off work due to various injuries and mental health concerns. The very first challenge I called out in the episode was the difficulty we as people face with self-motivation/self-directed decisions. And that’s what we’re diving deeper today. 

I shared last week that most of us have been trained from very young to experience motivation from external sources. The amount of time we are left in a day to do self-directed things is pretty limited. We’ll be picking up some pieces from James Clear’s book, Atomic Habits. Find the link to the book and his Ted Talk in the “Additional Resources” section below.

·        The Backward Myth of Motivation: Here’s the backward myth about motivation. We have been taught to believe that motivation is a magical unicorn that spontaneously shows up one day. We treat it the same as inspiration. It is this random thing that strikes and is awesome but then leaves and we sink. Here’s the backward part: motivation does not come before action. Motivation comes as the result of action. As we do a damn thing, we feel increasingly motivated to continue doing the damn thing. But it starts with the doing, not with the magical feeling of being motivated to do. And here’s the myth part: that we need motivation in order to take action. That we are somehow reliant on feeling this magical unicorn feeling as a prerequisite to taking an action. 

·        Benchmarks: You have likely always had some benchmarks that marked the course of your day. When you wake up, when you eat meals, when you do certain activities, when you go to sleep. Likely these have, to some extent, been dictated by outside factors. At one time in life your parents told you when to do these things, then an employer told you when you had to be at work and you made the other pieces fall around that. While off work, the benchmarks often quickly fall to the wayside. Sleeping in until random times, having nowhere to go and nothing specific to do any given day, not participating in regular routines like getting dressed, brushing teeth and hair and preparing for the day within certain time parameters all become tempting. 

·        Incentives: We are most likely to have successful outcomes when we experience small rewards that keep us in the game. Especially as we work to develop, implement and maintain new routines, it is important that we experience some incentives. Human brains are wired to engage with things that feel rewarding – which is part of why we tend to fall off of the bandwagon around routines and other kinds of personal growth changes pretty quickly – they feel hard and if they don’t come with some immediate and ongoing wins our brains struggle to stay in it. When off work and trying to develop an internal drive to do the things that are good for us, it takes effort and intention and just straight up work. It can be tiring and lack any sense of immediate reward or value. If we want to be able to do this well, we’re going to need to stack the deck in our own favor and this means coming up with ideas of what feel rewarding to you – big and small things – and finding ways to sprinkle these into your days and weeks. 

·        Make it easy: James talks about making new habits easy for ourselves. He gives an example of wanting to develop a habit of playing guitar. In this example he suggests that you leave your guitar in the middle of your living room, making it something you are more likely to stumble upon several times in a day. If we take this idea and extrapolate it, really he’s talking about removing friction. It’s about reducing the barriers to doing the damn thing, and elevating our chances of being successful

·        Limit the numbing: Too often I hear things like video games and TV to be the answer to this question. I also hear about alcohol, smoking, and other substance dependence use as means to pass the time. While these things can have some value here and there, these are not activities that should be occupying the vast majority of our time when we’re off work. Now, let me say that I totally get why they are the go-to things. They are easy, they can feel rewarding, we tie them to our impressions of relaxation and that feels good for a bit. They are accessible, and given the kind of work you do they are also delightfully mind-numbing, which is often the thing we crave when our brains have felt overstimulated from the work and just want to disconnect from life. Again, in small doses a lot of this is fair and fine – but when we have a lot of time on our hands, these pieces do not tend to help us, they tend to sink us. 

·        Find Productive/Meaningful Interests: Productivity and a sense of being contributory and meaningfully engaged in our own lives and our family’s life is actually a significant human need. We crave feeling a sense of purpose, clarity of expectations, and a path from where we are to where we want to be. Work likely filled this for you and without that thing we go to every day, we can struggle to identify other areas that can bring this out in us. So, we get a bit lackadaisical and veer towards activities that ask little of us, but also give little back to us. 

This is actually one of the reasons I so strongly encourage you guys to work at developing interests and activities that bring you a sense of meaning outside of your work even when you’re working – because these are the things that can float you if you are ever off work. It’s so much easier to just keep doing or do more of things you already have in place. It is so much harder to explore and consider what you might do when you are in the thick of it and needing access to something that brings a sense of purpose and meaning quickly. Having hobbies and interests can give us something to focus on that can be not only a great way to fill the time off work, but can actu...