It’s three weeks into the working year for me. At the end of last week, I started get that overwhelming feeling of dread creeping in as the workload started to increase and new ‘urgent’ requests for deliverables started popping up from stakeholders. I found my self slipping into my old people pleasing habits at the end of last week and going above and beyond to help stakeholders. Our team underwent a mass change (and lost a lot of team members) last year as part of a restructure, and acquired another three divisions to look after.

As requests for work started coming in from these new areas, I noticed they were all ‘urgent’ according to the stakeholder. I found myself feeling out of control with how I was to tackle these tasks on top of my existing work load. My people pleasing nature also saw me want to help as much as I possibly could. I found those feelings of stress starting to creep in and then... boom, Friday afternoon, I had a realization. Somewhat silly but none the less it made everything click. When I help people I get this nice feeling inside. I’ll go above and beyond to make the stakeholder's life easier yet I won’t stop to think how to make my own life easier. I even considered that it’s my ego of helping and getting that warm fuzzy feeling that is getting in the way of my own self-care.

Which reminded me of the old Chinese proverb by Lao Tzu, “Give a man a fish, feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, feed him for a lifetime.”

So from that point forward, I realized that in order for me to thrive over the next six months as my new responsibilities are established, this is what I am going to do. Rather than being overly helpful and essentially doing the work for my stakeholders, I will become a teacher and pass onto them the steps to take for what they need to do. So that next time, they can fish for themselves. Sure, it may mean a bit more work initially, but it will also mean I am upskilling these stakeholders, ticking off my need to help while empowering them to do the activity. When I start to do more than is necessary, I am going to remind myself of the proverb and reframe; what will be more helpful for the stakeholder in the long run is to do the activity themselves and not have to engage another team.

As these random requests for urgent work started to rise, I also reflected that what was causing me unease was not getting traction on the activities I needed to complete. Having previously read my fellow contributors post on “Steps you can take to stop being a people pleaser” I thought this was a pertinent time to put these actions into play.

So come Monday morning, I wrote myself a mental list and powered through the tasks I had to get done that week. It’s incredible how much work you can get through when you have a few uninterrupted hours. I did however, get a few phone call distractions during this time. In hindsight when undertaking a few ‘power hours’ of work I should not answer phone calls. It took me another five to ten minutes after the call to get back into my rhythm. Not to mention being a bit ticked off about the requests and not really grasping the purpose of the conversation, but anyway all part of the fun. After my power hour, I then set up the regular meetings with stakeholders I’d been meaning to do but had other ‘urgent requests’ get in the way. I also decided to start each week with a list of must do activities and promise myself to prioritize these. Having said that, I am not so rigid that if an actual request pops up that is actually urgent, I’m not going to ditch this work because I have to get my to do list done. We’re all professional here, so flexibility is a necessity. This outlook will provide me with a greater sense of control and calm which is important.

Finally, I will be making sure I participate in self care activities to get continue performing at my best. Prioritizing exercise, sleep and eating right! The importance of these activities was reinforced during a seven day happiness challenge I recently completed, but that will have to wait for another blog.

Until then, keep in control and try and be a teacher this week rather than feeding the fish.

Blog Photo by Luke Brugger on Unsplash.