Professional Practice (Week 5+6)

Resilience and Wellbeing

In these two past weeks we were given two classes on how to develop resilience and how to take care of our well-being in our lifestyle and career. Giving that I have been developing more and more stress with the coming weeks to deadline week, having two weeks or at least two days where the tone of the class has changed to a more relaxed and mental health topic was just what I needed to sit and take a breather. This class professional practice has been different to what I expected and has been a really nice class to attend throughout all of my lectures.

I’m unaware if this class has been within the curriculum for years or has been a new class developed to help us students deal with the stress that is an unusual time, however it is good to understand every aspect there is to survive a professional world and to make sure your mental health is not being affected negatively. I have really respected that keeping successful within a profession practice is both keeping up to date with work and working as hard as you can, but also keeping in check with your own mental health and how you are coping with daily life struggles.

This semester in professional practice we have both learned how to act and present ourselves within an interview, how to make ourselves an exceptional candidate when presenting our work to employers and the correct information to include within our showreel and CV’s. We have also learned how to handle stress when we feel our work is becoming overwhelming and we are becoming stressed, by using breathing techniques and thinking positively to relax our brain, manage our behaviour, tone and overall attitude when we express ourselves to others. Making sure we are respecting ourselves and being respected within the workplace. All of these topics can have a result on our personal stress, work stress and now the new added stress of the pandemic, but it is refreshing to have this class to help us deal with our well-being and resilience.

In these lessons our lecture began discussing the topic of stress and how this will most likely be a constant factor within our mental health, but how we are going to find a better way to deal with this emotion and understand what negative stress is and how this is different from positive stress. In my understanding stress can come from the smallest inconvenience in life, as much as it can appear with the important things in our life and how you adopt stress and handle this feeling can highly depend on the type of person you are. Stress can be a highly negative thing and can take a toll on your body when you are unable to differentiate the difference between the two, this can cause you to become a ball of stress and have a negative relationship with the emotion.

This is something I myself can struggle with, as I am either a person that depending on the topic, I can stress too little or not at all and can also find myself having unnecessary stress for unimportant matters in life. This pattern I have learnt is unhealthy for my mind and body and is something I have been trying to understand and will need to continue to do so.

I could help myself handle these negative feelings of stress and the side effects that come from it, by almost checking in with myself, who I am, how I am doing, what I am doing currently and what do I care about. If I am not stressing over something that I see others stress about or that is an important deadline or interview. I can take in that it is good I am not stressed, however that I know when it comes to a time I am stressed, I can use it to my advantage, and have it push me to work harder to achieve the things I want.

I could also apply this for scenarios where I am stressing too much. Evaluating whether I am holding onto negative stress or unneeded tension for myself and ask myself does what I am stressing about need all this mental energy and is it going to benefit my situation. Stress and learning the tool to become aware of the emotion and how to evaluate its effectiveness, is a journey and something that if you master, can really help you in so many aspects of your life.

There is a great benefit about understanding if the appearance of stress is positive or negative and understanding weather or not it is going to help you in your life and what you are stressing about. I feel that I am always trying to do what is best for me and my mental well-being, so if I become aware that my stress is actually positive, benefiting my work, providing me with some push to continue my work and to complete my tasks. Then I am aware that this stress is not here to hurt me or have a negative effect on my mental well-being and I can be thankful that I care enough about my work or project and am giving myself a mental push to keep working and finish the job. It is all about having that healthy balance and understanding your emotions.

Negative stress is something that in most terms is irrational thinking and something that your body does not need to feel. Your body is creating negative emotions and sometimes can make up scenarios attached to something that makes you worry and may be a deadline that you have enough time to finish, but your body is making you stress that you are running out of time. This is both a feeling that we can control and also need to understand it is something that is not permanent. It is easy to get overwhelmed by stress and almost lose yourself to the feeling, but if you take the steps to understand its origin, it can help you try to remain positive about what you are stressing about, and you may begin to relax and understand that your mind was just being irrational.

This is what was talked about in our lecture these past two weeks and was focused on the stress you may find yourself dealing with now and in your employment, regarding your performance. I think a major factor for stress and something that is apparent with being an artist and is a negative trait to do, is comparing your art and work to another artist. Although having healthy competition and something there to push yourself and your efforts when working. It is important to understand art is such a wide thing in this world and personal to each artist. There is so many variants of art when it comes to types, forms and reasoning behind, that if everyone simple aimed to be like another artist or copied, they would end up losing their own personal style and art would just become copies of one another and there would be no creativity.

This is why I think when it comes to stress in regard to performing positively or negatively, it is important that it is always to do with your own wants, desires and if it would make you happy to achieve what you are stressing about. When it comes to distinguishing the good and bad stress of your personal perform is it good to allow the positive stress to be your fire within and push you to push yourself and your limits that you know you can achieve. Healthy stress can allow you to create new works of art and reach new levels that you didn’t think were possible, all because you allowed some healthy competition within yourself and explored your art.

A time to revaluate your stress is when you begin to feel the stages of a burnout, which is when both your body and mind are weak with worry and exhaustion and that the stress is no longer helping you, but actually the reason for you not getting your work completed. In these times it is important to sit back and to be realistic with what you are able to achieve in this time. If you are working on a deadline, you need to be honest with what work you can get done in the time given and make sure that you keep up good communication with your employer or team. As long as you have been working your hardest and keeping up with your pipeline of communication, you may only try your best and have trust in the future to come.

In this workshop of understanding both the physical and mental effects of stress, we had a good discussion understanding your emotional self-awareness and being able to take care of yourself from the outside and within and maintaining this throughout your life. Understanding your own emotional well-being will be a learning journey that will have many ups and downs and different scenarios, but all which will prepare you for the future and having you walking away each time just that little bit stronger.

Although personally my well-being has its regular ups and downs, it is something the I am always checking in with and keeping an eye on. Sometimes it is easier for people to look after others, say it be family or friends and they would have the best remedies for care and the best words to say to help them out, but almost have no understanding when it comes to taking care of themselves. It is easier to overlook your own wellbeing and care about others before yourself or ignore your own care completely. This can be a result of stress or even cause more stress to arise, creating an unhealthy roundabout of stress and negative emotions.

This is why at some points in your life when it all gets too much, that you really take the opportunity and time to care for yourself as you would anyone else. It is important to be aware of the emotions you are feeling and why, to be kind to yourself, to take care of your emotions and to give yourself time to rest and heal. Take the breaks from work, give yourself a pat on the back when you are working hard and really learn to show yourself some compassion.

Something that I had learned, and we were told in our lecture is that there is help for us all around and that help will always be available when we need it and can include talking to friends or family, attending counselling through your doctor or at university and a number of helplines that are 24/7 access and have professionals there to help you in bad or good days for a chat.

We also were able to try out some techniques throughout our lecture that are aimed to help us when we need to de-stress, relax our mind and body and let out all the negative energy. We did some breathing techniques during the lessons which were a great way to basically breath in all the positive energy and breath out all the tension and stress that we as students were holding onto. Although these techniques might not seem like they are doing much or may not be giving an immediate relaxed mindset. The benefit of these techniques is that the more we do them and make them a healthy habit, they are actually training the mind to take some time, step away from the stress and to relax. I had felt my body and mind becoming more relaxed and calmer with each breath I was taking and was for a minute, forgetting about all my stress and worries.

Understanding my mental and physical well-being is something that at twenty-one I am learning each year and will be learning for all my years to come; it will make you happy to see the positive reinforcements you have made on yourself and just what you were able to come through. I have made it an important factor in my life to always take care of myself, push myself to work hard, have rest days, talk with others, to talk to professionals and to take care of my wellbeing just as important as the next upcoming deadline or work matter and I can happily say that I thank myself for taking care of me.