self-care – Eugene Eric Kim

We Are Not Freaking Butterflies: An Update on Self-Care and Balance

Published May 27, 2017May 27, 2017 by Eugene Eric Kim

It’s been two years since I’ve blogged about how my self-care practices have been going, a marked contrast from 2013, which is when I finally double-downed on my commitment to take better care of myself and to live a more balanced life. That was the year I left the company that I co-founded and the team that I loved to start my life and my livelihood over again. It was a hard process, and I blogged about it many times that year, but I was committed and determined, and I was fortunate to have lots of loving support.

Things finally turned a corner in 2015. I am exceptionally proud of this shift, and I love the life I’ve been living, but I remain cautious.

My friend, Jodie, recently told me that she hated when people used the word, “transformation,” to describe changes in their lives. I wholeheartedly agree. We are not caterpillars dissolving into some shapeless goo and emerging, irreversibly, from mummy-like nests in new winged forms. We are human beings. Maybe some wires in our brains get crossed or reinforced in different ways, but our old habits are still deeply embedded, constantly threatening to rear their ugly heads.

People don’t transform. We practice with intention and vigilance, and if we’re really smart, we hack the structures around us to support the lives we want to live.

I started recognizing the shift I wanted and needed to make almost a decade ago, thanks partially to burnout as well as to a relationship that is now ancient history. It took me another two years to take concrete action — hiring a coach and taking my first vacation in eight years. It took me another five years after that to get to where I am now.

Seven years total. Change is hard. It’s also not permanent.

I’ve been obsessing about work the past few weeks. I’m not dealing with any toxicity-induced stress. Quite the opposite. I’m grappling with issues that are complex and stimulating, and I’m not wanting to let go of any of them. I find myself compelled to push through weariness, to keep attacking each problem from different angles. Warning bells have been going off reminding me to disconnect, to slow down, to let go, to exercise, to breathe… and I’ve been cautiously, but consciously ignoring most of them.

I’m concerned enough to write about it, but I’m also heartened, because I’m aware of my self-awareness. I know what’s happening, and I’m letting it happen for now, knowing that I’ll have to make up for it very soon. Hearing the symphony of warning bells is both cause for concern and music to my ears, because there wouldn’t be any sound if not for all the cool little safety mechanisms I’ve put into place over the years.

When I get into one of these work modes, I often start getting curmudgeonly. I’m not mad at anybody, it just helps me think. But it’s also not a good thing if left unchecked. Negativity breeds negativity.

One of my practices is a weekly checkin with my friend and colleague, Kate Wing, which we’ve been doing for three years now. It’s mostly about work stuff, but we naturally weave stuff about our lives into our conversations as well.

At the end of each checkin, we both share a beautiful thing from that week. It’s a simple ritual, but it’s had a profound impact on me. I know I have to share something, and so I pay more attention on a regular basis to things that strike me as beautiful. What I’ve learned from the practice is that I actually experience beautiful things all the time, but instead of lingering on them and letting them soak in, I often just let them slip away. Our weekly ritual has strengthened my muscles around noticing and remembering.

Still, sometimes I need a little stimulation to remember, which is why it’s so helpful to do this with a partner. At the end of this week’s checkin, I couldn’t think of a beautiful thing immediately, so I asked Kate to go first. She shared a story about a moment of repose in the middle of a big meeting, where she stepped into a courtyard to take a breather, and had a brief, lovely encounter with an unusual bird. It was a classic Kate story — simple, sometimes whimsical, often profound.

Not only did her story delight me, it helped me remember all sorts of wonderful things that had happened this week. For whatever reason, I received a number of brief, unexpected notes from friends, family, and colleagues that brought me lots of joy. I was aware and appreciative of all of them in the moment, but they all quickly slipped away in favor of my knotty little work obsession. Thanks to this little practice of ours, I managed to scoop them away from the vortex of oblivion, and they have lingered in my consciousness ever since, bringing a smile to my face each time I think about them.

In the midst of these moments of joy, I can still hear the warning bells ring in the distance. These pleasant little victories, like my memories, can easily slip away without constant practice and vigilance. We are not freaking butterflies.

Nevertheless, I’m happy that I can hear the bells at all. I’m going to listen to them a little while longer, before gently resetting them. I’ll do a little work this long weekend, not because I have to, but because I want to. But I’ll also spend lots of it outside, with good friends and good food in this beautiful Bay Area weather, and maybe a little stillness thrown in for good measure.

Making Hard Choices

Published February 15, 2014 by Eugene Eric Kim

Earlier this week, a familiar foe reared its ugly head: irritability. Every little thing was annoying me, and I found myself wanting to snap at people.

It’s something I used to feel constantly at my previous job, but that I haven’t felt in quite some time. Back then, I wasn’t taking care of myself, and I wasn’t in an environment that encouraged me to take care of myself. Last year was a giant reset button. I rested, recovered, and reflected. I got clear about what I wanted to do next, and how I wanted to do it. I started carefully putting into place the structures that I thought I needed to support me in being successful and in maintaining balance. On January 6, 2014, I pressed “Go.”

Six weeks into the year, I’m doing okay, but I’ve been slipping. Old patterns are starting to reappear. They’re patterns that come from a good place. I’m loving my work, and good things are starting to happen as a result of the seeds I’ve been cultivating. The problem is that, when I start seeing little seedlings sprout, I get excited and motivated, and I want to go faster rather than maintain my pace. This is how I overwhelm myself. This is how my performance starts slipping. Worse, the thing that suffers most is my health and my personal life.

What’s been different is that I’m far more self-aware this time around, and my structures have really been helping me.

I’ve been monitoring my self-care dashboard religiously, and I have obsessively made sure I’ve been maintaining these practices.
I’ve been good about playing basketball regularly, decent at seeing friends.
I keep a timesheet, so I know exactly how much time I spend working, where, and on what days.
I’ve been using SCRUM principles for realistic planning and a Kanban Board to track and prioritize my tasks.
I formed a “colearning” group with which I’ve been doing regular checkins, which increases my accountability.

All of these things have been working, and yet I’m feeling like I’m about to slip into the abyss again. The reasons are simple: I’m working too much, but I don’t want to slow down.

Earlier this week, I was in a meeting with Rebecca Petzel, where she said, “I’m better at setting boundaries than Eugene is, but I use his tools to help me do that.” She was paying me a compliment, but she was also being real, and she was right. All the tools in the world won’t help you unless you are committed to your goals.

So now I’m in an interesting place. I’m doing too much, and the pace is starting to get unsustainable, but I’m feeling the temptation to do even more. The solution is simple: Do less. Cut something out.

My brain and my gut knows all this to be true, and I know my body will eventually enforce it, but only after I put it through its paces. My heart hates this, and my habits are all oriented against doing it. I want to live a healthy, balanced life, but I also don’t want to stop doing anything that I’m currently doing.

So what will I choose? Because at the end of the day, you can put all of the structures in place that you want, but it still boils down to choice. Will this time be different?

2013 Self-Care Review

Published December 31, 2013 by Eugene Eric Kim

Here are my self-care “results” from 2013. Quick review:

My self-care dashboard is a way of tracking personal practices to keep me healthy, high-performing, and sane.
Practices tracked: Playing basketball, working out (other than basketball, including one-hour or longer walks), taking non-weekend play days, not checking work email after weeknight dinners, not checking work email on weekends.
Everytime I do one of the above, I get a point. I total up my points once a week. There is a theoretical maximum of 25 weekly points, but that’s completely unrealistic. My “ideal” steady state is 10 points per week.

I started tracking in 2012 and found that my four-week rolling average was the best way of tracking my current state of self-care. For example, if I did most of my practices regularly for three weeks, then had a week where I only did one or two, my four-week rolling average would still be relatively high. Conversely, if I had several bad weeks in a row, then had one week where I hit my “ideal” number of 10, I’d still have a relatively low four-week rolling average.

Here are my 2013 rolling averages (in blue) as compared to 2012:

Self-Care Rolling Average 2012-2013

Quick analysis:

Overall, I did a much better job of taking care of myself in 2013 than in 2012. My rolling average never hit zero in 2013, and it hit 9 at its peak — double my peak in 2012.
My numbers were up in all five categories this year except for working out, which saw a slight downturn. However, I played twice as much basketball this year than last, and I’m in far better shape right now than I was a year ago.
The biggest increases were due to me turning off work email. From April through August, I wasn’t working in the traditional sense, which explains the huge improvement. In August, I “officially” launched Changemaker Bootcamp. Later in the month, I started a project with the Garfield Foundation. My rolling average actually dipped below 2012 levels in that time period, again largely due to email. In October, I recognized the trend and adjusted, which led to my numbers going back up to peak 2012 levels, but not to peak 2013 levels.
The graphs are cyclical in both 2012 and 2013, and there seem to be some peaks and valleys in common. Some of it is coincidental. In April and May of both 2012 and 2013, I traveled quite a bit — for work in 2012 (where the dip was more unpleasant), for play in 2013 (where the dip was largely incidental).
I think my line will always be cyclical, given my personality and lifestyle. I’m good with that. However, I’d like a smaller amplitude, and I’d like the overall average to be closer to 10 than it is right now.

Bottom line: I took much better care of myself this year than last, but I have a ways to go before I hit the right balance. 2014 will be a good test as to whether I’m making systemic improvements, or whether my gains this year were more a reflection of me taking a break. I feel good about it being the former, but we’ll see. Either way, I’m happy about how 2013 went.

You can learn more about how I do my tracking at Faster Than 20. If you’re using my spreadsheet for your own tracking, please let me know how it’s going! If you’d like help getting setup, drop me an email or leave a comment below.

Structures that Support Good Habits

Published April 22, 2019September 16, 2013 by Eugene Eric Kim

Last week, Seb Paquet and I completed the third of our four-week experiment around regular conversations, including our regular “jazz hands moments” video (above). My “jazz hands moment” was the importance of self-care and how it applied to things as simple as determining whether or not to participate in a phone call.

However, upon reflecting on it some more this weekend, I wanted to highlight a different aside that came up in our conversation. At the beginning of our call, Seb complimented me for having our meeting notes prepared once again and said, “I’ve never met anyone as consistent about it as you.” It sounds like a little thing, but it was not only a nice acknowledgement, it was validation for the work I’ve put in around developing structures for supporting good habits.

One of the most important precepts of my work is good information hygiene. This is a concept coined by my friend and Blue Oxen cofounder, Chris Dent, almost a decade ago. I have long preached its importance, but in truth, I have not always been the best practitioner.

That is, until I started working with the team three years ago that would eventually evolve into Groupaya (which just celebrated its second anniversary yesterday). We agreed as a team on the importance of good information hygiene, some of our specific practices, and the basic roles that each of us would play. This included another principle to which I hold near and dear: Everybody works the line.

We developed a set of practices around project and meeting documentation, and we held each other accountable. I feel like we achieved about 80 percent of what I wanted us to be achieving, which was light years ahead of what I’ve seen anyone else — in our business or otherwise — do.

And, it was only the third best team I’ve been on when it comes to group information hygiene. Those distinctions go to my HyperScope team (seven years ago) and to my work with Chris (ten years ago). Both those teams had a higher overall literacy around information hygiene, which enabled us to distribute the roles more effectively.

However, what was different about the Groupaya experience was that I was much more intentional around building these practices into habits, and I walked away more disciplined about some of these practices than I ever had been before.

In addition to intention, the other key to my success in this case was my role as group “teacher.” In previous instances, we were all peers, equally committed and skilled. In the case of my Groupaya team, I played more of a “teacher” role, which gave me a heightened sense of accountability. I felt more pressure to model good practices.

I’m glad that I continue to model these practices, even after almost a year away from my old team. Information hygiene is a critical part of being a high-performance team, and I hope to continue to model these practices with every group with whom I work, regardless of the specific role I play.

My Self-Care Dashboard

Published July 28, 2013 by Eugene Eric Kim

When Kristin Cobble and I were starting Groupaya, we spent a lot of time discussing the kind of culture we wanted as an organization. In particular, we both felt strongly about the importance of integrating personal development into our daily work lives.

In order to meet this goal, Kristin designed a collective process for us based on Daniel Ofman’s Core Quality Framework. The premise of the framework is that our biggest pitfalls are our greatest strengths (our “core qualities”) taken to an extreme. We all reflected about ourselves and about each other using the framework as a guide. It was enlightening to compare the differences in perception.

For example, I identified my drive to learn as my core quality. Too much of that led to dabbling and lack of focus — my pitfall. Kristin and Rebecca Petzel, on the other hand, both chose to focus on my high standards as my core quality. My corresponding pitfall was my tendency to drive myself and my team mercilessly when my standards weren’t being met. They wanted me to be more accepting when people made mistakes and more patient with people’s learning curves.

As we explored this further, we agreed that I actually wasn’t bad at these things. I had evolved these skills through lots of practice over the years. The problem was that these were not natural qualities for me, and when I was stressed or tired (which was often during my stint at Groupaya), Grumpy Eugene would come out of his cave.

Each of us had to commit to a practice to help counteract our pitfalls. Because I was generally good at being patient when I was taking care of myself, I committed to self-care. And the way I would do that was to commit to playing basketball once a week.

I had asked my friend, Lisa Heft, to work with me as a coach the previous year. One of the things I realized from that work was that when I’m playing basketball regularly, I’m generally happy and centered. Needless to say, I was not playing regularly at the time, much less exercising at all. I figured that committing to basketball once-a-week was more than reasonable, easily trackable, and would pay off big.

Despite all that, I got off to a bad start in 2012. We were swamped with the usual challenges of running a business and dealing with client work, and as usual, I neglected my self-care practices. What was different this time was that I felt bad about my neglect, because I had made a commitment to my team, and I wasn’t living up to it.

In order to turn this around, I decided to track my progress in a simple Google Spreadsheet, and to share this with my colleagues, so that they could check up on my progress anytime. I had a row for each week of 2012, and a column for the number of times I had played basketball that week.

The simple act of tracking in the open had a transformative effect on my practice. It forced me to think about the practice regularly, and it allowed me to see in very concrete ways how I was doing.

Over the next several months, I evolved my spreadsheet to incorporate new practices and learning. For example, I wouldn’t always play basketball, but I would sometimes go on runs or long walks, and while that wasn’t as good as basketball, it was definitely good for me (and my colleagues) overall. So I started tracking that too.

I eventually added two more practices to my spreadsheet: turning off work email in the evenings and on weekends, and taking play days in the middle of the week. Every time I did one of my practices, I gave myself a point. Using a line graph, I charted the total number of points per week as well as the four-week running average.

I also added a notes section for context. There were weeks that were restorative despite not doing any of my practices, and I wanted to be sure I noted that. There were weeks when I was traveling or sick.

The chart essentially became my personal dashboard, and my practices became almost a game — keep the line above 1 (my commitment to my team). It was very challenging for me to maintain that on my own, so I started incorporating other tricks such as signing up for a fitness bootcamp.

Moreover, the chart helped my interactions with my team tremendously. Whenever I would get frustrated at somebody, before I unloaded those frustrations, I would first check my dashboard to see if I had been taking care of myself. I often found in those situations that I hadn’t, and it was a signal to me that I should go for a run before I said anything to anybody.

I have found the dashboard so valuable, I have continued the practice. Here’s what this year’s spreadsheet looks like:

Notice the different colors indicating whether or not I did a practice that week. Here’s what the corresponding line chart looks like:

As you can see, the four-week running average is a better indicator of my state of self-care at any point in time than my number for that week or of the overall average. You can also see that I’ve been doing very well with my practices over the past few months. If I were to compare this chart to last year’s numbers, you would see that I’m taking much better care of myself this year than last.

I’ve made the Google Spreadsheet template available for anyone to copy and adapt as he or she sees fit. I’ve also put together a screencast that quickly walks through how to use and customize the dashboard. Post your questions or thoughts below, and if you decide to use or adapt it, please let me know, as I’d love to hear how it’s working for you!