For most us coming back to work after a highly enjoyable family holiday is neither a welcome or pleasurable experience. Isn’t it ironic that we take our holidays so that we can have a rest from work and hopefully return invigorated and refreshed and yet often what we achieve is the absolute opposite. However the truth for many of us is that coming back to work really can be quite depressing.
So what are the solutions then that might help ease you back into your treadmill and get you pedalling again at full tilt?
The answer I believe is quite down to earth and simple; it is to resume you routines as quickly as you possibly can. When we holiday we abandon and escape our routines but the plain truth is that we can’t manage in the real world without them… indeed without routine life will eventually become chaos. So my advice to you is to ‘numb out’ your mind, put one foot in front of the other and simply immerse yourself into your many routines. Do this and you will find that it won’t be too long before you drop back into your work.
From a slightly more profound viewpoint I would like to share the following incredible insight. My wife and I lost a dear friend in March this year to breast cancer. The lady in question knew prior to this that she only had a very limited amount of time left. For my part I could not help but observe how she chose to spend this most precious of all time. She did not choose to go on a round the world cruise and nor did she make some strange pilgrimage to some obscure far away land. What Carole chose to do with those precious few months she had left was the ordinary things that she had always done. Things like walking her dog, taking her daughter to school, lunching and meeting with her good and close friends and finally spending Christmas at home with her family just like she had done every other Christmas.
The lesson for me was massive, for I always craved the sensational and often will endeavour to create special and unusual experiences for myself and others that are close to me. What Carole taught me was that life does not comprise of the sensational, what life is actually made of is the ordinary stuff, the stuff we do every day and perhaps don’t even realise that we do it. When Carole realised that she only had so much time left it was this ordinary stuff that she chose to do and nothing that could be considered to be sensational.
In closing I would just like to say to you that holidays and other things of this nature are sensational, put another way, it is not really how most of us spend our lives. Carole’s passing teaches us that when the chips are down it is this ordinary stuff that probably we’ll value the most. So if you’ve got the post holiday blues try and remember that what you are doing now is actually a lot more valuable than some sensational fantasy that you have just enjoyed for just a couple of weeks.
P.S. If you were expecting me to advise you to revisit your goals and your vision for your life as a means to motivate yourself then my apologies. However these are both good ideas so do this too and hopefully you will re-kindle your motivation.