Make an appointment with yourself
Carl Jung, the Swiss psychoanalyst, once put off an impatient patient who wanted to make an appointment to see him at a particular time on Friday morning. Jung demurred, explaining he already had an appointment then, and arranged to see him in the afternoon instead.
Imagine the patient's anger when on Friday morning he was crossing a bridge, only to see Jung on the riverbank below him quietly fishing. At the afternoon's session he remonstrated with the eminent psychiatrist: "You said you had an appointment this morning, and yet you were skiving off fishing!"
"On the contrary," explained Jung. "I had a very important appointment this morning. It just happened to be with myself."
As we jump from one Teams Meeting to another Zoom call through a day of distanced working, Jung's fishy appointment resonates today as plain good sense. When do we have time to think about the issues that were brought up by that concerned client? When can we put our feet up and read that research paper that has been dogging our desktop all month? When do we have time just to think about our own work: our needs, our hopes, our goals?
Just make an appointment with yourself. A real one, with a solid subject line and a 90 minute duration, so no one else can bother you. Then make another one for 60 minutes the day after. You probably won't have time to go fishing; but you should manage to feed your own soul and maybe ending up catching a good idea or two.
Or you could take all of this Thursday off....
Development Communication| Employee Communications| Corporate Communication| Social Impact & Sustainability enthusiast|
4 年So so true! We never really take some self-care moments and just sit and breathe and really not do anything. We should make it a thing ??
Founder / CEO @ Coolr
4 年Nice piece Marc.
Chartered communicator leading teams across Internal communications | Brand | Social media | Digital experience
4 年At Bromford , we’ve just announced the ‘Time to switch off’ initiative. Two hours (x2) for every colleague to take as they need it before Christmas, just to log off, or start late, or drive their van to a park, and just do what they want. Read a book, relax, paint, whatever helps them relax and forget work.
Communicator. Writer. Linguist. Runner. Chair of Council at Chartered Institute of Linguists.
4 年Marc, in 1972, Man, a Welsh rock band of reasonable renown, released an album. 'Be Good To Yourself At Least Once A Day' was a decent title and remains very good self-care advice. I decided to apply it today by resisting the lure of LinkedIn, where I often find the noise to signal ratio unhealthily skewed. Then I read your Jung piece. Glad I did. Good story, well applied to a major preoccupation of our times. Thank you.