Cerebral Calisthenics 5

Section 3 of the DHOS manual provides more details about prioritizing your health for optimum performance.

CC 5.1: Sleep Challenge

Choose one of the wind-down options below (or come up with another screen-free option) to encourage you to change your bedtime habits. If you live with other people (roommates, a significant other, children, pets, etc.) give them a heads-up that you’ll be needing some time to yourself before bed so they don’t interrupt your new routine or try and entice you to do something counterproductive to going to bed (videogames, late-night snacks). Finally, change your mindset: A new bedtime routine is not a punishment - it’s a present! This is a gift to yourself and your health, and you should embrace this time to slow down and reflect.

Possible wind-down options:

Journaling
Reading (a real book that is not on your phone, iPad, Kindle)
Doing a puzzle
Drinking some decaffeinated tea
Knitting/crocheting
Drawing/coloring
Listening to music or an audiobook

Optimizing Your Team & Organization

For more information and resources about organization optimization, please visit Leah Weiss at the Compassion Institute. Other optimization strategies can be found in Section 3 in the DHOS.

5.2: Assessing Your Team Awareness

Without a strong awareness of how your teammates work and operate, working effectively as a team is almost impossible. That’s not exactly a groundbreaking claim, but how can we actually measure and define team-awareness in order to improve it? A good place to start is by asking yourself the following questions about your team:

As a team, do we know how our personal strengths/weaknesses impact the group?
As a team, are we aware of each others’ needs and triggers?
As a team, are we aware of each of our members’ values and our collective values?
As a team, do we know our sense of purpose and how it relates to each of the team members?

5.3: 10 Minute Team Check-In

At a team check-in, take 10 minutes to complete Donald Super’s Work Values Inventory. After everyone is finished, take turns sharing out and discussing your results. Afterward, create a shared document with a list of each team member’s values to refer back to.

5.4: Exercising Autonomy

Think through the last month. Find 1-2 moments where you wished you had more autonomy. Start a conversation with your team about optimizing autonomy, using the steps below as a guide:

Share a recent example of a situation where you wish you had more autonomy and explain how that made you feel.
Illustrate how the lack of autonomy negatively impacts the team’s collective goals or performance.
Ask your teammates if this example resonates with their own experience.
Strategize ways to create greater autonomy in the situation you shared, and discuss how these strategies can be applied more generally to the team’s shared environment and habits.

5.5: Transition Rituals

For remote workers who have no physical boundaries between “work” and “home,” it’s even more important to actively create guardrails that help to separate work from personal life. One tangible way to do this is to create an after-work “transition ritual” that you complete when you’re finished with work for the day. When used effectively, transition rituals are a simple yet powerful way to tell your brain, “We’re done with work for today.”

What makes an effective transition ritual? A transition ritual should be a low-lift (i.e., it doesn’t require too much energy or motivation) restorative activity that you can repeat each day when you’re done with work. Listening to a favorite playlist after work? Go for it! Washing down a cheese pizza with a bottle of wine after clocking out each day? Probably not the best transition ritual (sorry to be the bearer of bad news). Other examples of an effective transition ritual include:

Gratitude journaling
Gardening
Listening to / reading fantasy novels
Yoga

What are a few transition rituals that can help you move from work to home?