You’re on the home stretch! Don’t forget to reward yourself for building new habits, and think about how you can incorporate these into your newsroom’s workflow. Whether it’s a calendar reminder, a sticky note or a moment during your morning coffee, revisit and build these reminders into your day.
- 🤝 Give trust: Deputize a direct report to represent you on a call
- Why? A key component of psychologically safe teams is trust — the belief that I can take risks, ask questions and be imperfect without fear of punishment. Researchers at Google, in their quest to build the perfect team, found that healthy and effective teams had higher psychological safety than others.
- ✋ Get help: Ask for what you need
- Why? We have to be open and willing to receive the help and support from others that we so often give. Asking for help isn’t a sign of inability; it’s a protective measure that increases capacity, connection and trust.
- ⏸️ Get decisive: Push back a non-mission-critical deadline
- Why? Decision fatigue is a very real concept, and it’s cumulative. The more decisions you make daily, the more likely you will feel drained or get caught in a brain fog. The symptoms can feel eerily familiar, including procrastination, impulsivity, avoidance and indecision. Remember: If everything is urgent, nothing is urgent.
- 🙅 Get bold: Cancel a meeting
- Why? Redefining importance and success go hand-in-hand with our mental well-being. We have to actively work on letting go of the “busy = important” frame that dominates so much of our newsroom culture. Busyness gets in the way of strategy, muddies up the vision and sets you on a path toward chronic stress.
- 📢 Get loud: Leave the office, or log off, loudly and on time
- Why? Organizational culture change can start with individuals engaging in different behaviors and practices. If we want stronger boundaries and healthier teams, we should start loudly displaying our own. Instead of talking about mental health, show it in the way you are unavailable.
Habit-building tip
The book “Atomic Habits” by James Clear uses a framework called the Four Laws of Behavior Change, which breaks down the process of building a habit into four steps: cue, craving, response and reward.
Building habits is hard work! Don’t forget to immediately reward yourself when you complete your habit. Keep a streak going by tracking your habits and try not to “break the chain” and never miss twice — if you forget to do a habit, get back on track immediately.
