As a working professional, you spend a lot of time at work and often set goals oriented toward your professional success. Whether your goal is to get a promotion, earn more commission, or simply excel on a project you are working on, professional success is valuable. If you are struggling with addiction and/or commonly occurring mental health disorders, getting treatment is vital to your ability to be successful as a working professional.
While it can be difficult to fit treatment into your life, getting help is well worth it. Often you also have to overcome the stigma in the workplace associated with receiving addiction treatment. However, by getting the help you need, you can improve your ability to focus and manage tasks at work. Additionally, the skills you learn in treatment will transfer into other parts of your life, making you more successful in all aspects.
The Foundation for Professional Success
Professional success may look different for you compared to others. You define success in your own unique way depending on your career field and personal goals. However, a research study published in 2017 in Academic Medicine: Journal of the Association of American Medical Colleges looked at clinicians and scientists from across the country to better understand what elements are important for professional success. The study findings indicated that the following factors helped researchers achieve professional success:
- Networks
- Persistence and resilience
- Initiative
- Autonomy
- Personal and professional balance
Treatment centers offer ways to develop all of those qualities. Psychotherapy with a compassionate counselor helps you increase your internal resources and build various life skills. Group counseling helps you feel more valued and understood and improves your communication skills. Learning mindfulness and stress management improves your resiliency and sense of balance in life. Treatment centers also offer goal setting, creative expression, educational programs, and fun outings to help you ultimately achieve your goals while maintaining work-life balance.
Treatment Improves Focus and Mental Acuity
Regardless of what professional success looks like for you, being able to think clearly and focus will help you to meet your goals. Going through detox and treatment will help you improve both. Researchers have found that long-term substance use causes deficits in cognitive processes, including the following:
- Cognitive flexibility
- Attention
- Working memory
- Ability to learn new skills
The type and intensity of these changes are unique for each person. However, long-term substance use does create issues with mental processing and focus. For working professionals, this means a diminished ability to complete tasks, solve problems, and ultimately excel at work.
Learning Skills to Improve Professional Success in Treatment
When you seek treatment, this regimen will also bolster your professional success because you will learn new skills for dealing with stressors in life including at work. Finding ways to deal with stressful situations is crucial for maintaining sobriety, but it will help you in all areas of your life as well. By learning how to care for your needs, communicate better with others, and cope with the stressors you face, you can advance at work.
Self-Care Skills
It is well known that self-care is vital for recovery from both addiction and mental health disorders. By learning to pay better attention to your mental and physical needs in treatment, you’ll decrease your risk of relapse. However, self-care also will help you to advance in your career.
Self-care is a term that covers a lot of ground. It included exercise, eating healthy, and drinking enough water. However, it also means managing stress, sleeping enough, and taking prescribed medications. When you care for your needs as a whole, you are far more functional and successful at whatever you pursue. By helping your body and mind stay healthy, you are giving yourself the best chance to complete your work in a timely and successful manner.
Practicing Communication Skills
Learning how to communicate your feelings, thoughts, and needs is a skill that is taught in treatment. As you partake in peer groups, group therapy, and individual therapy, you will practice different ways of communicating and creating boundaries. The specifics of what you communicate are important. However, the basic communication skills you’ll develop have many implications in your life.
As a working professional, you are required to work with many different types of people. Your ability to communicate affects the boundaries that you draw, the expectations you set for yourself and others, and how socially accepted you ultimately become. By improving your communication in your professional life you are more likely to work well with others. You can set yourself up for success by having clear and healthy communication in all your working relationships.
Resilience and Coping Skills
Being a working professional is not an easy task. To be successful, you must manage stress and cope with multiple aspects of your job. While this can feel challenging, you can learn or improve these skills in treatment. Your needs are unique, and part of your treatment is addressing and learning the skills you need to be successful in living a sober life.
The added benefit to improving your resilience and coping skills is that you are more effective and able to thrive at work. When you can manage your emotions and stress levels, you are more likely to keep a level head in a frustrating meeting or stick with a project that is causing issues. Regardless of the type of work you do, staying with it and coping with stress and frustration is a must for building a successful work life.
Addiction is a serious disease that impacts your ability to think clearly. As a working professional, your ability to think, manage stress, and communicate are vital for your success. At Pacific Sands Recovery Center, we help working professionals like yourself who are struggling with addiction and mental health disorders. We help clients detox and return to their full capacity to think clearly. As a part of our programs, we also help clients to learn new skills that improve their ability to cope with adversity, manage stress, and practice better self-care. If you are struggling and in need of help from a treatment facility geared toward accommodating working professionals, call us today at (949) 426-7962.