Healing Space | The year to be your own unicorn

Note to readers: Healing Space is a weekly series that helps you dive into your mental health and take charge of your wellbeing through practical DIY self-care methods.

Start-ups take time, energy and resources when you’re building them. But here’s the thing – by the time you do, it depletes you. You’re putting the best of yourself into what you’re building, but to maintain momentum, you have to put the same or more into yourself. Going by the simple principles of physics, your input has to exceed your output for it not to drain you. Based on anecdotal evidence and media exploration, mental health has been an area of rising concern for start-ups in 2021, and the backlog of self-investment is catching up. 2022 is a year to put those resources into yourself first.

It’s easy to misinterpret self-care as a few days off, a vacation, or running, exercise or meditation practice. While these may make one feel good in the moment, a practice only extends benefits into the working day and life if it is not an exception but a continuation of how you live. You may adopt techniques here and there, from philosophy to art, but if these techniques are not inherently applicable to life, they don’t serve your purpose and become one more thing to do.

Start-ups work best when they're solving a problem or filling a need-based gap. As individuals, we work best when we feel valued and purposeful. We tend to confuse this with productivity. So we assign ourselves timer apps and productivity tools to boost what we’re putting out. But value comes from how we feel about ourselves regardless of how we’re performing. If I did nothing quantifiable today, would I be loved, needed, wanted and by whom?

We have trained ourselves to believe we have an obligation to work ourselves to the bone, to be measurable, to hit specific numbers, and we pressure ourselves to hit the socially accepted measure of worth, even if we are not there yet. A couple of recent IPOs come to mind. That’s what functioning in the gap between productivity and value looks like. We think it’s great to be overvalued, but it’s as harmful as being undervalued because it creates a pressure we are not able to realistically meet.

We know all this when we speak about the start-up, but we forget it when we come to ourselves. Undue pressure will do to you exactly what it would do to a potential unicorn. Don’t run a body without the right nutrition. The mind also needs to be fed and rested, and seen for its full potential. It needs an outlet. It needs resources and tools. It needs support. It needs a dream team. It needs a feedback loop. It needs a recognition of its own customer persona; a recognition of self identity, how do you react and what need of yourself are you fulfilling at this time?

Invest in yourself this year. Resolutions usually get us considering the physical aspects of that – eat healthy, drink lots of water, get rest and exercise, we may even pencil in "take a vacation". But we neglect the mental, emotional, cognitive and spiritual aspects of that. This ranges from personal goal setting, self reflection, debriefing, recognising one’s stress patterns and anxiety triggers, developing healthy coping mechanisms and support structures, and keeping an eye on that self-worth.

The two years of the pandemic have shown us that you can go as long as your resources will last you, but with or without resources, you can only go as far as your mind will allow you to go. The mind is what has to hold out, against death, loss, miscalculations, force majeure, and other clauses and conditions that interrupt where we want to go. We’ve also seen tiny home-based businesses boom. The mind can be a genius at resource allocation in times of scarcity. We have the lessons in hand, we just seem to be applying them outwardly instead of inwardly.

You are your best resource, your own dream team, and the best investment you will ever make. Be your own unicorn.

How to be your own unicorn

1. Value yourself correctly.
2. Don’t confuse your productivity with your value.
3. Find a sense of purpose.
4. Build a dream team that supports you.
5. Have personal goals separate from organisational goals.
6. Build a feedback loop for your emotional self.
7. Don’t leave mind and or spirit behind when you take the body forward.
8. Know your own consumer persona: who do you cater to when you cater to yourself?
9. Check that your personal inputs exceed the output demanded of you.
10. Have a Plan B for your mental health, emotional growth and cognitive health.