Values and self-care help you hit your numbers!
As a sales rep at the European headquarters of LinkedIn and an entrepreneur days never really end. There’s always an email to answer, a client to support or a marketing campaign to optimize. Above all, sales quotas are breathing down your neck day in day out. From a young age I’ve always been keen to perform well and work hard to obtain the results I was searching for. This strategy worked fabulously for me when I first started working at this tech giant. I’d often work late and finish reports on weekends to get ahead of the game. After a while though I started to get tired and stressed which definitely had an impact on my well-being and performance. I had to change something...
As a coach I love trying different techniques to understand what works for me. I’ve tried so many things! From yucky Chinese herbal teas, to acupuncture and time management courses, you name it and I’ve probably tried it. I discovered two simple things that really help me:
- Starting my day with journaling and writing down which values I will apply to my day that will remind my why I’m doing this job and what the bigger picture is. I write down three values that describe how I will get things done (i.e. persistence, growth and patience) and three values that I will embody in the way I will treat others (and myself) around me (i.e. kindness, empowerment and respect). Super simple, write them down on a post-it or in your journal.
- Self-care, whatever it looks like that day, is key! Doing exercise is a big one for me in order to get out of my head and ground myself back into my body. Leaving the office on time to buy organic groceries and cook up a delicious dinner. Studying something I’m passionate about or calling one of my best friends to have chat about life.
It all comes down to understanding how you can manage YOU, because YOU are really the only controllable you can fully control ☺. And you’re the basis of everything.
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My number 1 lesson is to not compare myself to other people. It's basic but true. I think the world is so often set up to pit people against each other "if someones doing this at a certain age then I should be doing this". It forces us to make bad decisions. At school, at university, on grad schemes we're graded and compared to our peers but I've forced myself to let go of that mentality.
There's always someone who will be younger, prettier, smarter, more successful than me, so why allow that negative energy into my life?
I make decisions based on what I want to do, live life to the beat of my own little (weird) drum and fundamentally am happier for it. When you're pushing yourself to try new things you're opening yourself up to a lot of rejection, criticism, people knocking you back. You can listen of course, but fundamentally there's nothing wrong with living life on your own terms. If we start to think about the world as winners, losers, better or worse, we start to feel unsatisfied with what we have and lose our sense of community. Life's tough enough, why add more things to worry about to it?
Kim Konsten
Founder of Ruwa Coaching, Client Solutions Manager at LinkedIn and life coach extraordinaire.
