If you feel like you’re having trouble expressing yourself and feeling overworked, overwhelmed, and underappreciated at work, exhausted, on the verge of burnout then here is an exercise that can work to help you out of the doom and gloom!
Written language and communicating with words might not be your thing. Words don’t always work in expressing your true frustration. There are other ways to communicate, work through stuff and break through blocks in your career and life. Going through these complex, abstract emotions and taking these forms of frustrated emotions and putting pen, crayon or marker to paper with them can help you. As an artist myself, I can attest to the power of art as it helped me process some of my own trauma. It was actually the one thing that really worked for me. I tried therapy, church, read, prayed and more…but ultimately it was creativity that guided me through the darkness.
If you feel exhausted like you’re about to burnout or if you feel overwhelmed and nothing seems to support you, this could be the way that can help you explore and move through this. Go for it!
It’s as easy as getting out a notebook and a pen. Once you have the paper in front of you, let your frustrations go onto the paper. So if you are really mad, just scribble, scrape and scratch as much as you need to. Let the emotions course through you otherwise they end up lodged in your body and can make you sick, nervous and anxious. This exercise allows the emotions to roll through you so that you can have a clear mind. It creates space in your thoughts to acknowledge the simple root of what’s getting to you. As simple and clear as: ‘This job is not the right job for me’, ‘This relationship isn’t working with this co-worker’. By processing the emotion and seeing its message, you are then free to take bold action, without the emotion attached to it.
I have experienced many times of scribbling or taking a piece of wood and a hammer and hammering away. You can let the emotion out on any inanimate material you choose (I personally love to use wood and salt!). The purpose is to unblock your mind and get clarity, not to make a beautiful piece of art.
Need more? My workshop ‘Avoiding Burnout: An evening of Art Making to Soothe the Soul’ has passed but if you find yourself wanting a different space to process, join my next workshop ‘Avoiding Career Burnout: Salt Therapy Edition’ for an evening of reflection and creation of how to make your life at work worthwhile and reconnect to yourself and your dreams!