According to the National Institute of Medical Health, one in five adults in the U.S. live with a mental illness.
While there is a mental crisis on campus among your students, don’t forget about yourself and your team. All campus recreation professional staff need to be aware and take care of their own mental health and well-being.
One way to ensure this is to find a healthy work-life balance. However, this is a challenge for many in the campus recreation industry. But it starts with acknowledging there needs to be change and then coming up with a plan.
Workplace Well-being Advice
For example, Forbes’ “6 Tips for Better Work-Life Balance” offered up several suggestions to help the professional toward well-being:
- Let go of perfectionism.
- Unplug and make your quality time away from the office just that: quality time away.
- Exercise and meditate.
- Limit time-wasting activities and people. As noted in the article, “When it comes to being a good friend, spouse, parent or worker, ‘the better you are yourself, the better you are going to be in all those areas as well.’”
- Change the structure of your life. Ask, “What changes could make life easier?”
- Start small with healthy habits. Build from there.
In his 2019 blog, Matt Beck, the associate director for the department of Wellness at Oklahoma State University, shared there are a lot of barriers to his work-life balance. As such, he has several rules that he follows:
- I will attempt to not only put the phone down when I am at home or when I am having a meaningful conversation, but I will leave it in the other room in order to be truly present where I am. This would mean no work calls unless something is urgent, and no emails.
- I will set aside time each morning, a minimum of 30 minutes, for prayer, reading and reflection.
- I will set strict study time to devote to my classes.
- I will set aside time to work out each day no less than 30 minutes.
- I will set aside time each day to focus on my personal mission and vision as well as my team’s mission and vision.
- Read more of his rules here.
One More Tip on Email
Skyler Rorabaugh, the director of campus recreation at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs shared in this article that work-life balance is what you make it.
One tip he gave dealt with email, which can be a time-consuming task. “I utilize email folders to store emails I may need to refer to at a later date. And I keep emails in my inbox that need a response or pertain to an immediate project or task I’m working on during the upcoming weeks,” he said.
Check out more of his tips for being healthy in the workplace here.
Whether you need to find a better work-life balance, or you need to lead your team in workplace well-being, the time to start is now. While your focus is your students, you can’t help as well as you could if you and the rest of the campus recreation staff are drowning in personal mental health issues and a lack of wellness.
It’s time to focus on your workplace well-being.
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