Hi there! I am Ana García-Femenía, (@anagfemenia), PhD in Sociology and Political Sciences and independent evaluation consultant. I live in Spain and conduct evaluations for various international donors in different countries.
Have you ever been in the middle of an interview in an evaluation and felt some specific emotion with no reason for it? What happens when you stop and ask yourself: Why do I feel this way?
Over the years I have understood how important it is to take care of my emotional well-being, in order to do my job as evaluator. But one could say this holds true for any profession, doesn’t it? Well, yes it does. But it holds especially true for our profession where we as evaluators are confronted with constant decision-making requiring sound judgement and a special degree of calm, cool and collectedness. There is a list of situations and times when we need to exercise our best judgement not only during the evaluation process itself, but with clients and stakeholders in order to make the right decisions, to say ‘no’ when we need to, and to maintain our integrity.
There are no purely rational decisions. Whether negative or positive, our emotions always let us know when we are or not on the right track.
Lesson Learned: Make emotional care part of your self-care.
Two Hot Tips to increase your emotional care:
Meditating: for 15 minutes once a day. Meditation provides peace and serenity and opens your mind and your heart. It helps to improve your relationship with your emotions. It also provides a good preparation for full attention and deep listening.
Dancing: A lot of stress and tension are relieved through dancing. Dancing helps to free our emotions. And it is a great way to socialize, which is very valuable for those of us who work alone!
Rad Resources: A wonderful tool for the initiated in meditation and the uninitiated alike. It provides guided meditation ranging from 5 minutes to one hour.
Online resources for dancing are huge. It also will depend on the music you like!
Here are three links on the benefits of dancing for your emotional health:
And finally, for those interested, a beautiful video by one of the best world tango couples to get inspired!
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By the end of the video, I had a broad smile on my face. How lovely! Thank you for posting this.