The invaluable skill of regulating yourself

We all get hijacked when we have feelings of negativity, stress, anxiety, blame, self-doubt or guilt. When you experience negative feelings, this is a signal to pay close attention to what is happening and adjust to avoid further pain. Take the example of putting your hand on a hot stove. The heat you feel tells you this is dangerous and you almost instantaneously pull your hand away to avoid injury. Our interconnected signalling system takes milliseconds to do this. Why don’t we respond the same way when negative thoughts enter our minds? Ruminating about a stressful event is like keeping your hand on the stove. Does that make any sense? The heat, similar to the negative thought, is information that needs to be processed for you to take the appropriate corresponding action and help you move forward. The real question is, how long does it take you to recover to a centered state? The answer depends on two things: your skillset in coming back to the present moment and the relative weight of the challenge before you. As you practice, it takes you a shorter time to recover. Mastering this skill saves you heartache, decreases stress and helps your relationships. A significant thing that differentiates successful leaders is the speed of their recovery from failures, mistakes, receiving bad news, and negative interactions. If you are not an owner of a pharmacy or healthcare executive, you are still the leader of your dispensing team. You have assistants, technicians and even cashiers depending on you for workflow leadership and setting the tone for your workday.One of the greatest tennis players of all time, Roger Federer, recently gave a commencement speech to the 2024 graduating class at Dartmouth College. When you watch the video you’ll see what he attributes his success to—it is the ability to continuously recover back to center after a setback. During his career, Federer won 103 tournament titles and amassed 1,251 wins. Amazingly, he won 80% of his matches, yet only won 52% of the points. He was present during key moments that contributed to his success and legacy. So how do we emulate this? You have to find a method that works for you in many ways. One of the most common is through connecting with something that is always accessible to you, your breath. Unsurprisingly, another tennis great, Novak Djokovic shared his method for staying in the present during high-stress situations on the court during the recent Paris Olympics. Djokovic talks about the important skill of conscious breathing to center himself and connect to the present moment. Watch his short response here.In the fast-paced world of pharmacy where we have competing tasks vying for our finite time, we must develop ways to stay present. This decreases errors, enhances our interactions with our patients and helps develop an engaging environment to work in. Furthermore, the long-term impact of chronic stress has been shown to contribute to burnout. We have a limited supply of patience and willpower. When our reserves are emptied it leads to chronic stress and ultimately burnout. Although we all know this, how many of us learn practical steps to combat and deal with these overwhelming feelings? This leads to a conversation about investing in yourself. I remember my earlier years as an investor. A friend would share a stock tip they read somewhere or were told about and without thinking, I would put $500 to $1000 down to buy it. However, when presented with an opportunity to pay the same amount of money towards a course to improve my knowledge or a coach for mentorship, I would spend hours contemplating whether or not I should move forward. The best investment you can make is in yourself. Learn, gather knowledge and check back with your mentor about how you can improve. As James Clear writes in Atomic Habits, if you continue to improve by even 1% per day, you will be 37x better after a year. Action StepsWhen you are in a dysregulated state, how do you release this energy? Is it through anger, frustration, sadness or verbal assault? Reflect on how these feelings and subsequent actions take you away from being your best self. Awareness is always the first step towards any form of change.Consider the last time you questioned investing in yourself. What limiting thoughts crept up to prevent you from moving forward? Action steps are not meant to solve your problem. They are meant to initiate some internal reflection to have you move towards awareness. Change comes from you wanting something different, and then taking the steps to make it happen. Manjit Hansra is the founder of Rx for Renewal (www.rx-renewal.ca). Through keynote speaking, 1:1 coaching, corporate wellness programs and curated retreats, he shares evidence-based and practical tools to help pharmacy organizations and pharmacists prevent and manage burnout. Subscribe to his weekly newsletter HERE.

The invaluable skill of regulating yourself

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Manjit Hansra

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