Navigating Your Successful Return To Work
Managing your return to work, be it post summer holidays, returning to academia, post illness or maternity leave, can be conflicted and feel tumultuous.
There can be equal amounts of excitement and fear, because, whatever type of return to work this is for you, things will have changed in your absence. Don’t forget that you too will have changed whilst you have been off-ramp. Be it through summer travel or journeys of the mind in your studies. Equally, if you have been in the huge soul reconfiguration that is new parenthood, you will be ‘more’ that when you left all those weeks or months ago.
“Enhanced Skills, knowledge and capabilities”
You will have new skills and knowledge and capabilities to bring TO your role. You may also have new needs you desire OF your role too. You may be walking through what you perceive to be a really familiar door, only to discover that what you find there is no longer enough for you.
When there has been some kind of pause in normal services, wherein there inevitably lay new experiences, we have a change of perspectives as a result. We cannot help but embody a little of what we have learned and thus our stance is changed. Our different perspective informs different needs once normality is resumed. 
Even 10 days on a Cretan beach have changed my professional world. It was there, soothed by the regular breaking of tiny warm waves, that I could really stand back from my professional role and assess what my business needed next.
In fact, to be thinking of my return to work on a sun-drenched beach was not a conscious choice at all. What happened was, disconnected from devices, engaged with family and the natural world, there was created a little space…. and into that little space crept an idea. And that idea was unlike any idea that I had ever had, and, before I knew it, I had my note book and my pen and I was scribbling it all down in a frenzy before it evaporated in the heat. These ideas grew In secret and they matured all by themselves.
“And this has all happened due to NOT looking at our businesses”
The final night of our stay found my husband and I (both of us entrepreneurial types), animatedly sharing our respective business insights with each other over dinner. This was much to the dismay of the 6-year-old who went and found some new friends swiftly. So we have both returned to our professional realms, changed. We are much changed. We are more focused and ambitious, more excited, more skilled and wise…And this has all happened due to NOT looking at our businesses, as opposed to studying them intently.
Navigating Your Return To work
If such huge shifts can happen in 10 days, never underestimate what can be gained in the months of long nights of new parenthood, or indeed during the years of studying. Take a minute or two to recognise this. To take account all you have gained before you walk back through that familliar door. Reflecting will assist your confidence and counteract the fears arising from the anticipation of returning to work.
Affirm yourself for your change in skills, perspective, knowledge, and wisdom. When you have made this visible to yourself you can then consciously take this new information through the door. Standing tall in the new-you will literally enable you to face whatever your return to work throws at you! One of the tasks that I set many of my career coachee’s is The Dreaded” 40 List”. That is a list 40 skills, capabilities and personal attributes that you have. By which I mean 40 of EACH. Everyone struggles with this, but, once it is all down on paper and shared, each has been grateful for the benefits of harnessing and recognising the diversity and depth of their skills, before taking their next professional steps.
Navigating A Successful Return to Work
Try this: find a peer-mentor. Ensure it is someone who inspires you and holds you in good heart. Agree to share the exercise. Separate and spend several days adding these lists and then risk reading them back to each other. This action is enormously freeing of the belief that ‘we shouldn’t boast’, that we hold so close in northern Europe. It is brilliant preparation for taking on a new professional challenge and or for re-entering a known environment. It is fabulously affirming to KNOW, to have named and claimed these gains These are enormously nourishing things that you have acquired through hard-won effort, so, do name them and take them into your professional world with pride
I Dare You.
You are ready and you have all you need: