Rebecca White

Following a holiday I experience that familiar energising feeling – it’s akin to a new year and inevitable resolutions fall out of it too.

I read recently about how the warming and slowing of the brain (like during a holiday or even a long hot shower) really does make it respond differently and generate new ideas. And so when when I returned from my holiday without the new ideas I was disappointed. Until I acknowledged that this August instead of the lightbulb moment there had been smaller and apparently less impactful realisations instead.

As a non-goals setting, non-long-term-planning commitment-phobe, I set about making a series of small action focussed plans for the coming weeks, months and years. These are partly personal, but all impact on the year ahead.

Struggling, like many, to fit everything in I realised I simply have to make a change to the email tyrant in my life. The popping up of new emails thwarts progress throughout the day. What I didn’t realise were the huge added benefits of restricting email checking to before work, after work and once during normal working hours.

They are:

• The freeing up of my time to focus. If I put an hour aside to write a report, I actually have a whole hour and the report gets done.
• Picking up the phone – I expect there will be some mishaps when people email me that day about a cancelled meeting and I won’t find out. But we’ll all just have to learn the hard way. Picking up the phone is a dying art and one I want everyone at YOP to do more of – so it should probably start with me.
• Being more present. This is almost one of the greatest benefits. When the team arrive in the morning I’m not in the middle of an email and when I am rushing to meetings, the meetings are more productive because I’m not distracted by that tricky email I shouldn’t have opened half way down London Street.
• Less email traffic for the team. In a tiny office we shouldn’t be emailing each other. Knowing that I won’t reply means they are more likely to find the answers themselves or come and talk to me. Great all round.
• Better quality of communication. Because I now focus time just on emails and probably on a desktop, the responses I make are better. It’s dedicated time to respond and with any luck by the time I’m responding the matter will have been dealt with already anyway.

I’m three weeks in, with the first week of September being the most challenging as the volume of email traffic climbs. But right now it feels it’s a very necessary ‘new year’ goal.

With the start of the new academic year, it feels like the right time to talk about things getting busy. When things were busy a colleague once likened me to a duck. Serene above the surface but wiggling wildly underneath. (Naturally I would have preferred to be likened to a swan!).

However, I had never seen myself that way and felt pretty frazzled at the time. As time has gone on, the pressure has mounted and will continue to do so. Oddly however, I feel calmer today than I did then.

And this is my observation of people who are very busy and under pressure – whether they are self employed, running their own businesses, CEOs, leaders, politicians – that they have an inner calm.

It’s as if there’s an inverse proportionality. The more pressure people are under the calmer they appear.

I’ve said before that I’ve got to meet fantastic people in this role that I would never have managed to otherwise. And the people that impress me (other than the kind ones) are not on their phones replying to emails, they are fully present, they are giving you their whole attention, they are quietly and calmly getting on with it.

Where does this inner calm comes from? Could it come from their humility – that they trust their team and believe it doesn’t all depend on them. Or perhaps arrogance or nonchalance – that they’ve got it all in hand.

The more pressure we experience the more important this ability to manage calmly becomes. If things feel messy and chaotic around you, it’s really important not to mirror that. Not just for your own health, but for the team and business too.

The risk of being calm is perhaps appearing not to care, being blasé or taking risks. The reality is that making decisions constantly, changing plans, finding solutions all whilst juggling the endless demands of people and business requires a resilience and approach that ensures survival. Staying calm has to be part of that approach.

So when people give meaningless lists about the behaviours of leaders, ‘being calm’ should be in there too.

More on the ‘how’ to be calm next week.

This is a blog, not just about mental health, but about how our interaction with it plays out in a world of social media and self-publicising.

As someone who has set up a social enterprise and truly believes in what we do, I find myself more public than I would like, because to some extent, the end justifies the means. Social media allows this and has been my friend.

Social media and our Instagram obsession however has made us not just more comfortable talking about our emotions, but what we look like too. Is it just me or do people feel more able to make comments about appearance? Having had a gap in this from about the age of 20 I assumed it would simply wain with age.

However scarcely a week goes by without someone making a comment about the way I look and most sadly of all, if it’s a woman, they are usually making self-deprecating comparisons. As an adult I cope with most comments and increasingly make a conscious decision to ‘big up’ the other woman whilst making no reference to appearance. With my nieces playing out their lives (and holiday bikinis) on social media, how equipped are they to protect themselves and support their peers?

In an age of memes, leadership speak, authenticity and workplace cultures I understand why CEOs, footballers and other would talk openly about their mental health.

As someone building a values-lead organisation I desperately want staff to feel they can be appropriately open about it. We have an additional role in modelling these behaviours for the people we support too.

It’s undoubtedly becoming normal on LinkedIn for people to talk about their mental health and be a bit personal. As the pendulum on mental health swings I feel this can only be a good thing that is the silver lining to much of the status envy, downward comparing and trolling that occurs when people lay themselves bare (sometimes literally!) online.

Everything has a flip side however and it’s important to see it and prepare people for it. But this isn’t about the importance of digital resilience, it’s about my right to a private life. As a deeply private and introverted person, this remains my right.

We’ve all got s*** we could share and some of us do. Not always relevantly or appropriately in my view. But because I don’t talk about it publicly doesn’t mean I don’t commend the pendulum swing and more open conversations about our mental health.