Love is an important component of life. Loving someone and being in love provide feed the life force and optimism in us. Thus, love can also boost our productivity.  

It makes sense that being successful and contented in our relationships  accelerates our performance and boosts our productivity. How so? Love motivates us to do more and be a better version of ourselves.

On the other hand, lack of a loving relationship or relationship issues lead to frustration, anxiety and depression, which consequently impact our performance and productivity.

One thing that people often forget is that love includes many things and takes many forms. Love is not just about loving others and getting loved by them. Love is also self-love and all its forms i.e., learning to love yourself, accepting yourself wholly, practicing the rituals of self–care, bolstering your self-esteem and self-worth,  and much more.

Self-Love and February

The need for self-love is pertinent throughout our lives. However, February is the month when we need to practice self-love more than ever because of the ubiquitousness of the commercialized version of Valentines Day.

Naturally, those of us who are struggling in the area of relationships are bound to feel lonelier and depressed in this month. It’s not uncommon to subject ourselves to negativity and self-sabotage in an attempt to understand what might be wrong with us to be unable to find and sustain loving relationships.

This emotional struggle increases our stress levels and eventually impact our performance and productivity at work. Hence, learning to accept ourselves the way we are, learning to show ourselves acceptance and compassion ultimately pave way for personal and professional growth. Self-love includes both: self-care and self-worth.

The Unrealized Link Between Self-Care and Productivity

We need to realize that the care, compassion and empathy we show to ourselves not only improve our mental health but this self-care can improve our performance at work and productivity.

Similarly, a positive sense of self-worth enables us to improve our personal and professional effectiveness and overcome challenges related our job and work. It also helps us overcome professional setbacks and failures. It helps us set realistic goals for ourselves, assess them realistically and adjust them, if need be. Thus, self-care is actually a very powerful tool for professional progress and excellence.

Self-Care VS Self-Criticism

The tendency to criticize and doubt our own abilities, undermine our own progress is very common in the professional world. We try to be hard on ourselves, push ourselves hard to get ahead and stay ahead. For an overachiever or perfectionist, nothing appears to be worse than to slack on your goals, experience failure and get left behind in progress.

Consequently, we try to drive ourselves harder and harder to stay ahead in the race. Also, we tend to criticize, brutalize and self-sabotage ourselves on purpose and excessively in an attempt to improve or to perhaps shield ourselves from others’ criticism.

Hence, every disappointment and failure, big or small, tend to be a source of anxiety and self-doubt. You end up calling yourself incompetent, not good enough, not worthy or deserving enough for a good thing. Lack of progress, failure to meet a goal or close a deal, losing on a project, getting bypassed on promotion, losing one’s job, all these setbacks strike us big blows, seem like the end of the world. All these professional missteps, shortcoming and failures make us spiral downwards towards the depth of anxiety, sadness and depression.

Self-Care and Career Advancement

All this self-criticism, the obsession with perfection is not the best path towards professional progress and excellence. If you don’t take care of yourself adequately, you are more likely to get burnt out in personal and professional life. You are more likely to quit on your dreams and goals when your self-worth happens to be low.

It is, in fact, the reason behind so much unhappiness and depression in our lives is not because we don’t have anyone to love us, give us importance and worth. It is because we don’t take care of ourselves in our personal and professional life. Similarly, we don’t consider ourselves deserving self-love and self-worth.  Hence, the failure to regulate and acknowledge our own needs and feelings lower down our productivity and performance.

The Bottom-line

February is the month that puts love in the spotlight. For those of us who are struggling on this front, this is not an easy month to go through! However, this month also highlights the need for not just love but self–love, self-care and self-worth. All these things impact not just our personal happiness but also our professional progress. Thus, when we have the right attitude towards ourselves, it improves our productivity and helps us create a better roadmap towards professional success.