Image courtesy of Challenge Sophie
We love our jobs. We are passionate about delivering exceptional events and realising our client’s visions and dreams. Ours is a fun and energetic industry, and nothing can top the sense of achievement when we deliver our client’s events. But how do we achieve the seemingly impossible?
Our Director Libby is also passionate about looking after her talented team. Forbes recently rated event management as the 5th most stressful job, behind career choices such as firemen, and enlisted military personnel. As this week is self-care week, we’d thought we would throw our blog spotlight on the things we’ve learnt about self-care, and how we stay on top of our game, avoiding the dreaded ‘burnout.’
But what is ‘burnout?’ In 1974 Herbert Hreudenberger coined the term, describing it as a range of symptoms including work-based exhaustion, headaches, tiredness and irritability. Regardless of your career choice, burnout and stress can impact us all.
Here are some of our top tips which enable us to deliver consistently awesome events:
Space for breakfast.
We are told from a young age that breakfast is the most important meal of the day, and that’s right, it helps to fuel your body with energy and regulate blood sugar levels, but creating space and time for breakfast is helpful in other ways too.
Not everybody feels like eating first thing in the morning, but making time to sit down, enjoy a drink, be that a double espresso or a calming chamomile tea, and giving yourself time to wake up slowly and without diving straight into the tasks of the day is essential. It’s easy to think you don’t have time for the ritual of breakfast but building even a 10-minute window of time into your morning routine, to sit, contemplate and to just breathe before the rush starts is a wonderful self-care routine to adopt.
Image Courtesy of Epicurious
Drink.
We love the variety of quirky and innovative bar suppliers we work with, from kooky cocktails to smoothie bikes – the drinks menu is a key part of any event. But for self-care we are all about water.
It’s another busy day, you are rushing from one task to another, it’s very easy to forget to drink water when you are busy running around all day long. Even mild dehydration can cause headaches, dizziness and a lack of concentration, which is far from ideal when you want to be performing at your best. We try to ensure all of the team stay hydrated and one of our favourite water bottle suppliers is One Green Bottle.
Not only are you able to keep yourself hydrated in a stylish way, you can give yourself a karma point or two for reducing your disposable plastic usage too. Our top tip – the bamboo cups remain sterile and don’t develop the sour milk odour traditional thermal cups suffer with. Winning!
Image courtesy of Food for Thought
Eat well.
Sounds simple, but when you are busy and the to do list is still long, its all too easy to grab something unhealthy just to stave off the hunger pangs. Sausage rolls, a chocolate bar, a fizzy drink…. they might stop you being hangry with your colleagues in the short term, but all too soon the sugar high will drop off again and you’ll be feeling worse than before. Plan meals into your daily schedule, a quick 30 minute break eating a healthy lunch will make you far more effective for the rest of the day. It might seem indulgent, but we don’t expect our cars to run effectively with the fuel warning light on and our bodies need the same care. Healthy snacks throughout the day can be a short-term alternative if you really cannot find time to stop working completely. Our kit bag often contains a supply of nuts, dried fruit, and some healthy energy bars all of which are great for sustained energy release.
Teamwork makes the dream work.
Our events are successful because of our team. Looking out for one another in an event management team often comes as second nature, especially when you have been working together for a long time. Here are our top tips for making sure your team has a self-care focus:
- Make sure someone in the team is responsible for making sure everyone is fed and watered. A hangry team is no use to anyone.
- Check in with your colleagues, is there a more effective way of sharing the work load?
- Bounce it off – even just the simple task of talking about the workload together can make it easier to manage.
- Wrap it up – The EMA Events team likes to have a final check-in with the client before we leave for the night. It’s a great way to assess and evaluate in case any alterations need to be made for the following day, to ensure we are supporting the client as effectively as possible.
Sleep.
It’s been a long day; your feet are throbbing and the only thing you can think about is sinking into the mattress. Taking a few minutes before bed to prepare for tomorrow will make all the difference to the new day, here are our Bedtime Reminders:
- Jot down anything that’s on your mind. Making a ‘to-do’ list means you won’t forget anything important and allows your mind to stop thinking about the tasks so that you can rest.
- Get tomorrow’s outfit ready and repack your kit bag. It’s much easier to remember what you need in your bag when you have been using it all day.
- Don’t forget to refill your water bottle and pack some healthy snacks.
- Create your own bedtime ritual. It could be a warm shower, a bedtime drink, or some time reading a book. Dim the lights and wind down, turning your technology off. Studies have shown that the light emitted by phones, tablets and laptops delays the release of melatonin in our brains, which delays sleep. You have earned a good night’s sleep.
We have a number of effective ways of supporting individuals and teams to deliver great events, allowing our expertise and additional resource to remove some of the stress of achieving your event goals. If you’d like to chat about your event, do say hello!