Hard worker? Create your High Intensity Interval Recovery (HIIR) Routine
What does Sustainable Ambition mean if you are a hard worker? Some of us are wired to be. I know I am. My Responsibility and Achiever strengths drive me. And I enjoy the dopamine hits of getting things done.
My husband and I both often unknowingly say to get ourselves kick-started after taking it slow for the morning or getting distracted in the afternoon, “I have to go get shit done!” As a gift this year, he bought me the below post-it notes to accompany the new standing desk he built for me off our kitchen (his hobby is woodworking).
Can you imagine if someone else gave these to his wife? It might be the equivalent of a 1960’s housewife receiving a vacuum cleaner for her birthday. That thought made me laugh out loud. I thought they were hilarious and a brilliant representation of a shared insider joke of sorts. They now have a cherished spot on my desk.
Yet, even though I’m a hard worker doesn't mean I don't want a more sustainable work+life. It means I need to find ways to sustain myself and build resilience to support how I like to stretch myself.
To be sure, I also need to manage how many hours I work. In fact, for most of us after 48 hours of work in a week our productivity and impact starts to drop. Maybe there are a few mortals that can sustain longer working hours and who need little sleep (e.g., Tim Cook, Tom Ford, Martha Stewart). But that’s not the majority of us.
I’m coming to think hard workers need to be even more diligent about building habits for recovery and resilience. Those could include breaks and pauses, time to create, investment in activities that fuel us, and more. And it’s not about being in balance all the time. There may be times of intensity that you need to plan for and build in resilience measures.
To that point, I don’t think it’s about the adage: work hard, play hard. Play hard just sounds way too extreme and like it won’t serve the purpose playing should provide—the recovery we need and building up our resilience stores to support us during the work hard times. Instead, it might work more like HIIT (high-intensity interval training)—a hard work interval followed by a rest and recovery interval.
This time of the pandemic continues to present opportunities to rethink how we shape our world and our habits. For those of us who are hard workers, perhaps it looks like building new habits that honor our desire to work hard, but also factors in rest and recovery to build our resilience.
What are the activities you want to build into your work and life structures to sustain yourself? What’s one small step or action you can take today to put that into an existing routine or ritual?
There’s no reason to hide behind a costume and be ashamed of being a hard worker. It frustrates me when hard work gets villainized. Be careful if you claim you’re busy or you say you work long hours. Now, to be sure, it’s not for everyone, but we’re not all the same. Some of us are hard workers, yet you likely also want to show up as your best self and avoid burnout. So be just as committed to sustaining yourself as you are to your other goals.
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