From the course: Driving Change and Anti-Racism

Self-care: Focus on your needs

From the course: Driving Change and Anti-Racism

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Self-care: Focus on your needs

- As an advocate for change within your organization, you're probably wondering why there's even anything about self care in this course. And that's a great question. The reality is what you're doing is incredibly emotionally burdensome, and we need to take the time to engage in self care to make sure you're at your best. When it comes to effective self care and doing things like getting enough sleep, the benefits are significant. You're going to be less emotionally reactive. You're going to be more patient. You're going to have more energy. You're actually going to be perceived as more attractive and research shows all of this and this will make you more persuasive, which is exactly what you need if you want to be an advocate for change within your organization. So let me give you a personal example. So I am a chess nerd. I love playing chess on chess.com and for the last 11 years, I've been trying really hard to break through that 90th percentile and a few weeks ago I was able to do it and I had to stop and ask myself how, because I didn't read a book on the topic. I didn't change my strategies or tactics. What changed? Here it is. I took the time to get great sleep. That's it and it made me smarter. So for you as an advocate for change in your organization, we need you at your best. Take the time to take care of yourself. There's this fallacy out there that you are not truly down for the cause unless you are approaching it as a martyr. That doesn't help anybody. You're of no value to yourself and you're of no value to the cause if you are breaking down in the process, we need you at your best. So take the time, take care of yourself, get great sleep and you will be at a higher level cognitively, a higher level emotionally, and a higher level physically, which is exactly what we need if we're going to break through and truly create the change that we want to see in our companies and in our society.

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