mental health – The Dream Magazine

Tried and Tested: 4-Day Work Week

Alana — Fri, 29 Jul 2022 11:17:52 +0000

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably noticed the headlines about 4-day work weeks. With trials taking place in the UK and businesses offering staff more flexibility than ever, many of us hope a 4-day work week will soon become the norm.

A wealth of research has shown that a 4-day work week can increase productivity, is better for the planet, boosts employee engagements and benefits families, particularly mothers.

As someone who’s adopted a 4-day work week for over a year now*, I’m sharing my experience.

About me

I’m a freelance writer & marketing consultant, and I typically work with 4-6 core clients at any time.

In April 2021, I trialled a 4-day work week for a month for an article I was writing. By the end of it, I was sold! Beforehand, the pandemic had killed my work-life balance, and I was working – albeit not very hard – 7 days a week. So, to reclaim my free time and sanity, I jumped at the chance to try a new way of working.

I took every Friday off for the trial, completely ignoring any emails and non-urgent tasks until Monday.

Work-life balance

Once upon a time, I wanted to be really, really rich. However, in recent years, I realised I wanted to be time-rich instead of cash-rich. As cliché as it sounds, we can always make more money, but time is something we can’t get back or buy.

It’s safe to say my mental health improved by having an extra 24 hours for myself each week. My Fridays quickly became a day to be completely selfish, filled with lazy mornings, yoga sessions and coffee dates. What made a real difference was that most of my friends were still working Fridays, so it felt like free time with no expectations from anyone else. In short, a 4-day work week made me noticeably happier.

Getting shit done

When I decided to pack my schedule into four days each week, I knew it would mean transforming the way I work. I’ve tried many productivity hacks and found what works for me. Now, I time-block each day, track my time and cut off all distractions to allow for deep work.

If you don’t like strict schedules like me, you might avoid time-blocking. However, my advice to you is to try it. Parkinson’s law is the adage that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” So, if you allow yourself an hour to complete a task that you could do in 30 minutes, it will take you an hour. Time-blocking is the perfect antidote.

Getting paid

It seems too good to be true when you hear people telling you that you can do less and earn more. However, I quickly found out that is indeed possible. In the 20/21 tax year, my total freelance income was £38,235.75. For the 21/22 tax year, it was £57,340.00.

Not only was I earning more, but my expenses halved as I no longer employed an assistant. The secret? By reducing my working capacity, I was more selective over clients and projects, prioritising work that gave me the highest return on my investment. Prioritising this way had a domino effect as working with higher-paying clients led to more high-paying work referrals. Side note; it’s true what they say, the lower the budget, the higher the audacity.

As a freelancer, I know that my work gives me much more flexibility than others. However, if you can trial a 4-day week or make it happen for your team, I highly recommend it!

*I’m a big believer in being transparent regarding business. In April 2022, I launched my new venture, Umara Jewellery. Leading to the launch, I was putting in more hours than usual and my 4-day week went out the window for a while.

Check out Umara Jewellery at https://weareumara.com/

How to be Your Own Wellbeing Champion When You Work for Yourself

Alana — Fri, 22 Apr 2022 14:00:49 +0000

Words by Sophie Coulthard, founder of Fidleaf.

Think back to when you first started your business. You knew it would be hard work, but you possibly also looked forward to the flexibility and freedom that working for yourself would offer. Maybe you’d be able to go to that lunchtime gym class you never could attend before. Or take Friday afternoons off to sip rosé with friends. Book into a cute AirBNB in the New Forest to work on something creative and get some quality fresh air.

Honestly, have you had the time to do any of those things since working for yourself? The chances are you’ve got a never-ending to do list, spend most evenings on your laptop on the sofa and the lunchtime gym class? Never happens!

We imagine that working for ourselves will bring about better work life balance, but the reality is that when you are the boss, your wellbeing often gets pushed down the agenda.

Why wellbeing is important for entrepreneurs and freelancers

You owe it to yourself to prioritise your wellbeing. Your wellbeing will power your work performance, so the more effort that you put into it, the more you will get out of work and life. Our research at FidlLeaf shows that when people don’t look after themselves and are stressed or run down it slows down problem solving ability and strategic thinking, drains creative thinking and makes people less intuitive, yet all of these things are pretty critical for success!

There is a fantastic book called Rest by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang that dispels the myth that the harder we work the better the outcome. Deliberate rest and taking time for yourself to fulfil yourself outside of work actually helps to make you more productive, have sharper ideas and more energy.

Companies are starting to realise this and are putting wellbeing policies in place or creating wellbeing champions to drive a culture change where wellbeing is encouraged and emphasised. Their policies might include an email ban outside of working hours to give employees time to switch off, and walking meetings so that everyone can brainstorm and get fresh air at the same time. There’s no reason why these policies can’t be pinched and adapted for solo workers, and it’s worth spending some time carving out a wellbeing policy-of-sorts for yourself.

Building a framework around wellbeing

It might sound a bit silly to write an entire wellbeing policy for one person, but even just a few bullet points on paper with some simple commitments, like taking an afternoon a week to work from a coffee shop to break out of the isolation of the home office might be a positive move for your wellbeing.

At FidlLeaf, we created a workplace wellbeing guide that focuses on four areas that were found in research from A Great Place To Work to be the key drivers of wellbeing in the workplace. I like to use those as the foundation for any wellbeing policy and think that they could easily be adapted for someone who works alone or runs their own business.

They are:

1. Values Aligned Behaviour

Good companies have strong values that are sewn through the culture of the organisation and their employees will have a strong alignment with those values.

For yourself, it’s worth thinking about your values, but also what you value spending your time on. What parts of your work light you up and inspire you? What could you potentially delegate or spend less time on? As well as this, are you able to work on projects or with clients that fit with your values? It can be difficult when first starting out as you may have to say yes to any work opportunity, but at some point you may be able to start to refine your ideal client or type of work.

Values aligned behaviour can go even further and become part of your pricing structure, marketing and sales strategy. It’s about what feels good for you and it may take a little time to really figure this out.

2. Teamwork

If you work on your own this one can be tricky! Feeling like you’re part of a team and contributing to teamwork is proven to have a positive influence on wellbeing, but how do you do that when you’re a team of one?

Joining a community of like-minded business owners is a great way to feel the team spirit. You’ll feel included, empowered and make friends. It will also save you from talking shop with your partner every night because you’ll have people who ‘get it’ that you can bounce ideas off. You could search for something local or join an online group or membership. I met my own group of ‘business besties’ on a facebook page through being fans of the same business podcast. We’ve been supporting each other for over 4 years through Slack, Zoom catch ups and occasional real-life meetings.

Another idea is to arrange co-working sessions with friends who either work for themselves or are working from home. Arrange to meet at a coffee shop and have a catch up and then get stuck into work. I try to do this every other week with a friend of mine and even though we do completely different jobs, there’s something nice about quietly typing away with someone nearby that you can occasionally break to chat with. For me it gives me that ‘office environment’ that I sometimes miss, and weirdly I find that I’m my most productive in a bustling coffee shop!

3. Processes

Processes don’t get featured in too many company wellbeing initiatives, but they should. Poor or clunky systems, policies and processes cause stress to employees, because they cause friction in day-to-day work life.

The same applies to people who work for themselves. Can you pinpoint exactly where certain important documents are? Do you have templates for emails you have to send out regularly? Have you got a folder with all of your brand assets neatly labelled and ready to send at the drop of a hat?

Taking the time to review your processes and have an admin audit could make a significant impact on the rest of your week, month and year. By getting organised you’re reducing the friction and frustration that comes with not being able to find things easily. Putting systems and processes in place for tasks that you repeat will save you time in the long run. You may need to set yourself a monthly reminder to review your processes and don’t forget to clear your downloads folder or organise your receipts at the same time.

4. Recognition

If you’ve ever had a great boss then you’ll know how it feels to be recognised for all of your hard work. A simple “thank you” can go such a long way at the end of a tough week. Many companies build recognition into their wellbeing plan, sometimes using a newsletter or notice board to highlight staff achievements. But when there’s no one else giving you a pat on the back, how can you do it yourself?

Think about what good recognition would look like for you. Do you appreciate a nice reward? Then make sure to book yourself in for a pedicure or take yourself out for lunch once you’ve completed that project. Does praise make you feel on top of the world? Create a ‘brag folder’ to save any client testimonials or kind words from customers. The brag folder also has multiple benefits – you can turn to it whenever you need to hear some positive words, but you can also share the snippets across your social media channels to help build your credibility and reputation.

However you decide to recognise yourself, it’s important to commit to it. Working alone can feel thankless, so you may need to pop a reminder in your diary to note your achievements at the end of each month and figure out a way to celebrate them.

Creating a wellbeing policy for yourself

The four drivers of workplace wellbeing make a great foundation for a wellbeing policy that you can create for yourself. It may consist of a few regular reminders in your diary, or you could get creative and design a poster with your wellbeing commitments and have it hung somewhere near your desk.

As you can see, wellbeing for business owners doesn’t have to be about taking a bubble bath or booking into a yoga class. It’s about finding out what will drive and power your own wellbeing and that could be different from person to person. Wellbeing is about more than self care, it could be about reducing loneliness, protecting your self worth, or feeling a sense of value and purpose.

Business owners wear many hats for the different roles in their business… make sure ‘wellbeing champion’ is one of them!

–

Sophie Coulthard is the co-founder of FidlLeaf, a workplace wellbeing company and personal development platform that powers wellbeing both inside and outside of work using Nobel-Prize nominated science. FidlLeaf has been featured in Forbes and works with corporate companies, tech, government and fashion brands.

What I Learned From: Becoming Addicted To Work and Toxic Productivity During The Pandemic

Lucy — Fri, 15 Apr 2022 11:22:18 +0000

Daisy Morris, founder of The Selfhood shares her story. With nothing else to do during the pandemic and the boundaries between work and life blurred, many of us turned to working longer hours than we should, as social media glamourised hustle culture, and made celebrities out of online biz success stories. As we slowly adjust back to normality, a generation of entrepreneurs are redefining what 'success' means to them.

The word ‘success’ historically made me feel a bit uneasy. When I used to hear or say the word out loud I’d have this visual connotation of material objects that would flash to my mind: a really expensive watch, someone holding a briefcase, a slick suit and really swanky office buildings. Essentially, anything related to corporate ‘work’. Interestingly, when you type ‘success’ into google the two below descriptions appear:

“the accomplishment of an aim or purpose.”
“the attainment of fame, wealth, or social status.”

Even more interesting, when you take a peep and browse google images the majority of the image feature clip arts made up of white men carrying brief cases, some even running up stairs that seem to depict some kind of ‘heaven’ (some may argue an escape route from corporate world but I’m not an art critic so I’ll leave that for another day)

For a long time I believed that the clip arts were a visual manifestation of future of success, I genuinely believed that to be a respected and accomplished person I needed to work my fucking arse off day and night. I’m a bit embarrassed to say this now but I aspired to have material objects that would one day act as my museum of achievements. I often had thoughts that went a bit like this: ‘I’ll be successful when… I own the massive house in London, when… my business is turning over 7 figures, when… I can buy a holiday home in the bahamas and drink pina coladas for breakfast”.

That all changed when I started finding clumps of my own hair in the shower and started having stress related heart palpitations. Like many of us the pandemic blurred my lines between 9-5 and I found myself working 8am-10pm sometimes later and without coming up for air because, really, there was nothing else to do. I became addicted to the adrenaline of working on multiple projects, I subconsciously attached my own worth and validation to being ‘needed’ aka ‘booked and busy’. I became so dissociated from my own self that I allowed myself to become really, really sick.

It was until a Doctor told me I needed to slow down that I realized the damage I had done. I walked home from the hospital feeling numb, disappointed and so confused. How had this happened? (I knew, but I couldn’t quite face that I’d done it to myself) I spent the rest of the day feeling so angry at myself. I realised that for the last 6 months I had been an anxious, emotional, easily triggered, irritated, tired and lifeless little soul. I had poured all my energy in to my work and appearing ‘together’ for my clients that there was no more juice left in the tank and my poor body had taken a battering.

So I decided to step back, I cut my work load down by a significant amount, and paused or cancelled upcoming projects that I couldn’t fulfill in the state I was in. I spent the month of August working enough to cover my bills and cost of living and spent the rest of the time doing the things that bring me back to me. I had genuinely become so disillusioned by the destination of a clip art ladder that I forgot to even take a moment to enjoy the process, let alone evaluate what wasn’t working.

The trouble with burn out (and I do believe burn out to be a problematic concept in our modern society) is that it’s become a bit of a buzzword. A badge of honour some might say. Nowadays it’s really not uncommon to hear people say ‘I’m feeling burned out’ and not feel alarmed because it’s become such a common theme throughout our work life. Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad we’re being more open and honest about our physical and mental health but we shouldn’t be normalising exhaustion and poor health in the name of ‘success’.

The problem is, we live in a hamster wheel of announcement culture where we’re constantly inundated by updates from others sharing their accomplishments, promotions, pay rises, new houses, new partners, screen shots of long haul flights with a countdown timer, and everything else that accelerates the speed in which we get to the top of that imaginary clip art ladder. So we keep pushing, and pushing until we reach clip art ‘success’.

I’ll be honest I’ve had to work through some deep conditioning, I still have those pangs of guilt and thoughts, ‘I need to be doing more’. It’s taken me a long time to understand that rest is productive and my friends, family, partner and business get the best of me when I’m well rested.

Success for me is happiness. It’s starting work at 11am because I went to my favourite gym class, it’s clocking off at 6pm to play netball with my mates, it’s meeting friends for lunch on a Wednesday afternoon because why not? It’s impromptu Fridays off, It’s spending my weekends with the people I love rather than chained to my desk, it’s creativity for fun and not monetisation, it’s taking time for myself without feeling like a lazy slob. We get so brainwashed in to believing that we’ve ‘made it’ when we’ve got the objects to show it, the accolades to announce and yes, those things are still great to aspire to. I’m not saying we need to bin our shoes and head for the hills and start living off of organic tomatoes and sleeping in hammocks. What I am saying is that we need to make space for those things and work towards them at a rate that works for us and not against us.

We need to evaluate if those things are even important to us in the first place, or if we aspire to them because we’re told we should. My advice to anyone working towards any dream is this: nothing is worth sacrificing your mental or physical health for, time is the most valuable commodity.

Connect with Daisy https://www.theselfhood.com/

Dopamine Dressing – How to Dress for Happiness

Lucy — Mon, 11 Apr 2022 15:54:44 +0000

Can one piece of clothing change your whole mood? Mary Mandefield explores the dopamine dressing trend - dressing to boost your happiness.

I’ve never been that interested in fashion. As a kid I would wear baggy jeans and oversized shirts. My priority was getting messy and as long as I was comfortable enough to climb a tree, I was happy.

As I reached adulthood and entered more corporate settings, H&M, Topshop and M&S seemed to be the go-to high street shops to create a more image conscious wardrobe. I reluctantly wore blouses and straight leg trousers. Trainers were swapped with smart shoes and rucksacks were replaced with over the shoulder bags. As my jobbs changed from office led marketing roles to working on more creative projects, I found my taste in clothes did too. Becoming more aware of the effects of fast fashion, I jumped into the world of styling myself with just second hand gems.

I trailed charity shops for the brightest jumpsuits, I’d scroll on eBay for hours to scour out pre-loved designer coats and shoes and I’d find myself checking depop more than instagram. I was hooked.

I saw a quote that said ‘my life is a simulation, I’m just in charge of the outfits’, and do you know what, I get it. I’m now a presenter and speaker, and the industry can be really tough and unpredictable. It’s hard to feel like you have a grasp on what you’ll be working on next, but one of the things I take pleasure in is the fact that 99% of the time, I get to choose what I’m wearing. I am in control of how I can express myself that way – I know that my choices are sustainable and can lift my mood. My love for bright colours and OTT textures means I usually leave the house looking like a kids entertainer, and I’m never mad about it.

Here’s some of the pieces which I know I can throw on an instantly feel the most ‘me’

THE purple jacket. A drunk Glastonbury purchase which was created for an attention seeker like me. It kept me warm for the rest of the festival and it meant £80 went to Oxfam for the great work they do. They know me so well on site because I shop at all their festival stores. Have you ever worn a jacket that has almost transformed you into a more vibrant character? If not, come over to mine and borrow the coat for the day.

Platforms. To walk a little taller and to make sure you can see the stage at a gig. No, but in all seriousness, platforms are the ultimate confidence booster for me.

An initial on your jumper so no one forgets your name. Wearing something with your name or initial on is a great conversation starter. In my industry you’re a small fish in a big pond and you want everyone to remember your name. I also love that this jumper reminds me of the type Molly Weasley would knit for the family in the Harry Potter films. Magical!

Always looking for inspiration for the next items I want to find, I chatted to some of my favourite creative thinkers, makers and doers. I asked ‘what piece of clothing changes your whole mood’.

Meet Jazmin, she loves to look sexy but with an edge. She shares that ‘I feel most myself when I mix contrasting prints, textures and cuts – it mirrors different sides to my personality. Silk slips with chunky leather accessories means I can play around with both feminine and masculine energies.’

For Kasia, it’s all about lifting her mood with bright colours – her ever changing hair colour reflects that too. She says ‘These jeans are 100% me. I hand painted them with all my favourite colours, and I purchased them second hand, so they’re sustainable too!’ Kind to the planet and one of a kind.

Musician Kenan shared a look which represents their vulnerability being their power. Spending a lot of time on stage means making an impression before the audience has even heard you sing. ‘My ‘No Tears Just Pearls’ look is about looking delicate & poised but also striking & captivating. In this outfit it reminds me that I’m here & whoever will witness me will have no option but to accept me for me!’

‘Confidence comes from within but the right outfit can make it come out!’ After knowing Ge to rock everything from band tees and skinny jeans to dressy dresses, seeing her in a suit made me stop my scrolling. We’ve been friends since we were teens and there was something I really love about this gorgeous green suit. She shares ‘I was once told that “you have to wear the suit – the suit can’t wear you”. And when I put this outfit on I feel like a boss woman.’

Mary Mandefield is a presenter, writer and content creator. Connect with her @mary.mandefield