YouHR Self Care: Thriving as a Working Professional in a Disruptive World
Emma Ross, Urban Wellness Hub
Perfect. Okay. Politics, policies and peopling. In a world of constant change, high expectations and cultural shifts, HR is where everyone turns to first report. You hold the space for everyone else, but who holds the space for you? You wear all the hats and you have a magical talent at plate spinning. You support people through big changes, hard conversations, and disruption. You’re the steady pulse that beats through the entire organization, but even pulses have highs and lows and they need a chance to recover.
So let’s have a quick self-care check-in. Close your eyes, no judgment on yourself, and just see what’s calling out to you for attention right now. Mental noise, body tension, the jaw or neck, energy levels. Just take a snapshot right now and acknowledge it. When your brain is overloaded, your clarity and sleep can suffer and your body may take on physical symptoms too. Like any skill, we have to train our mind to reset. If you’re feeling mentally full, you could try out the 90-second reset, change up your environment or use a grounding or anchoring technique. Your body, water, quality sleep and movement, they’re essential foundations. Sorry, I messed up my slides here. They’re essential foundations. They’re very important to your physical and mind health, and it also helps you make you a better human being.
So from here, we move to boundaries. They aren’t just barriers, they’re sustainable leadership and healthy to have. When you set them, it creates healthy habits. It helps you respect your time and helps others respect your time too. It can feel really uncomfortable to set boundaries. If people push back, it can be that they’re pushing back because you’ve set that boundary, but your job is to protect your energy, not to please everyone. So please remember, dear yourself, I love you. You lead better when you’re fully resourced and you’re well. When you’re well, you show up stronger for yourself and others. You’ll be able to make clearer decisions and handle disruption with ease and model the kind of wellbeing culture others will want to follow.
Now, you might look fine. Keep going. Your work calendar looks manageable, just fit in another meeting here. But your body keeps the score and your nervous system knows when it’s stretched. Ignore it, and it catches up. Stress is silent until it isn’t. Leadership starts with self-awareness. Resilient isn’t just about pushing on through. It’s also about knowing and getting comfortable when you actually might need to take that pause. You need to be able to find your rhythm, that pulse and your style, your balance, and no one else’s.
Now, close your eyes and let’s reset. Take an inhale into the body. Just breathe on in any which way. Breathe on in, and then exhale. Let those shoulders relax away from the ears. Let the face soften and let the tension go. Your nervous system is just starting to reset now. We’re going to look to take another breath in. So inhaling into the body. Breathe on in through the nose or the mouth. And then again, as you start to exhale, just let the body fall deeper into the seat. Let the arms go. Let the hands go. Just let that body start to wind down. And I want you to take another inhale. So breathe in as deep as you can into the body. Fill up that lovely respiratory system, and then just start to exhale again. Feeling that shift, that space that you’ve created right there, that’s your reset. It took less than 45 seconds. And fun fact, it’s available to everyone and it’s free.
So what we’re going to do now is we’re going to add in a little bit of movement. So I want you to start wiggling your fingers down by your sides and then coming up through the arms. And then I want you to come up to the shoulders. And if you’ve got it in you, just give yourself a little shimmy in your seat forward and back, and then maybe wiggle the toes, wiggle the legs, and just start to stamp the feet if your feet are planted on the ground. I want you to breathe on in, breathe out. That’s another reset. You want to try and be able to take your day on your way. So remember your presence and your starts with your energy, and it matters more than you think. So if you can model self-regulation and capacity, it will have that ripple effect through the workplace.
Now, let’s talk about your HR plan. If you can right now, pick a habit or a simple shift that will help you to support your week, more water and your boundary, a proper pause, just a simple act of self-care to you. Now, close your eyes and say, “Dear self, I love you.” If it doesn’t sit right, choose words that do. For example, “Dear self, I appreciate you.” Now, what I want you to do is I want you to those words to happy thoughts, some happy music in your head, just a feeling of joy, and use that as your anchor. So connecting these words like, “Dear self, I appreciate you,” is something that you can use if your day gets loud. If people start to push your boundaries or you push your own, take those words and use them to remind you about your pause.
So hopefully that served as a gentle reminder that your self-care isn’t an add-on. It’s actually essential and it fuels everything, both for you personally and professionally. You are not a machine. You are human. And in the chaos, remember, dear self, I love you.
Link to Emma’s talk on Vimeo >>> DisruptHR Aberdeen 2.0 – April 24 2025 on Vimeo
