You know when you get on an aeroplane, and you’re given the safety instructions, and some of the instructions they tell you that in the event of an emergency, an oxygen masks will fall from the overhead compartment. And in the event that something bad is happening, you need to put that mask on yourself, before you assist others with putting theirs on. How often have you broken that rule? Why does that rule even exist?

That rule exists because the health and safety experts know that if you don’t put your oxygen mask on first, then you’re going to be useless at helping other people anyway. It’s this idea of we can’t help others until we’ve actually helped ourselves first. How often have you broken that rule in your life? Not on aeroplanes, hopefully you’ve never had to break that rule on an aeroplane or even had to experience an emergency procedure on an aeroplane. But how often do you break that rule in your own personal life? Prioritising other people’s needs and other people’s care before your own.

I’m a parent and I’m a husband, I’m a friend, a brother, a son and I’m an employer. And so there’s times when I prioritise other people’s needs ahead of mine. It’s not doing it every now and again that’s the problem, it’s when it becomes extended periods that we don’t prioritise our self-care. That’s when our resilience becomes really affected. Our wellbeing and performance takes a hit, and in the long run we typically risk fatigue and eventually burnout. 

Highly resilient people know that prioritising their self-care enables them to perform effectively. By taking care of themselves first, they are actually more use to their team, their unit or others who rely on them. And they’ve figured out a personal formula for how they prioritise their self-care. They’ve got techniques and have learned optimal habits to do it effectively.

In a previous article and podcast we covered that resilience is about your ability to cope with three different environments, the physical environment, the psychological environment, and the social environment. And each of those environments requires you to prioritise some self-care specific to coping with those environments.

In our Resilience training we get you to assess what your current level of self-care looks like. What are you currently doing to take care of yourself. What are you doing well, but more importantly, what could you do to improve. Then once you’ve explored that, we explore what high performing individuals and teams do in each of the essential self-care areas, and identify the daily habits and rituals you can do for optimising your resilience and maximising your outcomes going forward, and in turn maximising your effectiveness in supporting others.