Adrijana Vujadin says “Cultivating a positive mindset is key to becoming a successful SEO professional. By shifting your attitude and perspective, you can avoid stress, overwhelm, and burnout, ultimately enhancing your effectiveness in the field.”

How do you change from someone who is perhaps stressed at the end of the day to someone that is quite comfortable with what they've accomplished?

“Once you know how, it's much easier to change your mindset because there are specific techniques for your brain to help change your perspective, the attitude while you are working, and even the way how you handle the stressful situation itself. So at the end of day you can resolve the same challenges or problems that you have, but without stress.”

Can we talk about just a few specific things that people could do to improve things, because obviously, you're not talking about changing what people do during the day, it's just their perception of what they do is that is that right?

“Yes, we are not changing our identity and are going to remain the same person after it, we are just changing the pattern of how our brain operates. So for example, if you are having a stressful situation, once you have tasks and checklists for how you can approach the issue, when your perspective and attitude can remain stable is when you will have clarity, then you also need to train your brain so that you can get this feeling for resolving situations, but without that stress, without being anxious, and without being frustrated.”

So how do you recognise that you're on a negative pattern and do something about it?

“I start by recognising the feeling inside of me. Am I feeling anxious or stressful or is there any kind of ‘bad feeling’ that I can see on myself, am I nervous, overwhelmed, unmotivated, etc. Follow your body and how you're feeling. That is the first step to actually try to do something about it. Because if you're just ignoring all these things, that will just like make it worse, and then you suffer from burnout, and you will want to quit your job.”

So how do you change these feelings that something isn't normal and something that you shouldn't be feeling. Are there certain alerts or a greater sensitivity that people have to have to how they're feeling at a given moment in time?

“When we have a meeting, or if we are doing something and feeling nervous, and we don't know how it will go or if we will do a good job, then we can start just with a few simple questions. For example, if I’m going to a meeting to present my SEO report, then I might be nervous if I'm not sure if that report is good enough. It's just like simple situations that we are handling every day. So we can start with a question.

Is this feeling useful for us?

If it's not useful, then we want to change that. So we can ask another question.

Is the feeling that we aren’t good enough, or that our report that isn’t good enough?

At first, we might think our feelings are accurate. But when we ask that second question, we are actually asking ourselves if this is 100% true in ALL situations. We allow ourselves to think about any situation in the past where we thought our report hasn't been good enough, but it turns out it was good. Especially if you are in the few first years of your actual experience, your report is enough. But remind yourself that there are also so many things that you will improve over time as you gain more experience. Try to put that pressure off, calm yourself down, and then create another thought, which will be more peaceful for you for you, like “I did everything that I could for this report, I want to learn more, and I will do in the in the future. But just for this meeting, that is like in 30 minutes, I did my best and I will try my best to present that.”

You’ll start seeing that you're getting different feelings now and that you're calming yourself down. After using these few questions, you’ll can see that they are making an impact. But what won’t work is not even trying to check these questions in a couple of minutes.”

Do you always have to manually check yourself to do that? Or can you start to automate your feelings so that you never get to that stress level in a work situation?

“Once you’ve asked yourself these questions a few times, then you'll start to automatically ask yourself them. It won’t even take you 10 times dealing with these situations, before you're picking up that pattern automatically. So after one month of doing this, you'll already know your answers, so you’ll automatically be more calm, and because you have that clarity of why you are having these stressful situations, you’ll also know what the answers are.”

Sometimes feeling stressed is quite a normal emotion to have in a certain situation, for example you might have a client that's being unreasonable, you might have committed yourself to be working many hours a day, or maybe you find yourself in a situation where it is stressful to do work and it's quite a reasonable response to be stressful. If someone's in that situation, do they need to work towards working less, or do they need to be replacing clients or otherwise reasonable responses and actions to have?

“We can't avoid these stressful situations, but what we can do is actually change our attitude toward that stressful situation. So being stressed is not normal. Being stressed is not something that we want to be. But there is an industry that is encouraging this hustle culture, which means people are thinking that being in stressed everyday is something normal. It's not normal. We don't need to think towards that, instead, we just need to find the right mindset for handling these situations so that it's not impacting us and our body. We can solve any situations when were stressed, but we can also solve them when feeling peaceful. If you approach these situations from a stable background, then your decisions will be even better. You’ll have that 'clear thinker' mind, and the result is going to be even better. The main thing to do when you're starting to change your patterns is actually practice these questions.”

You used the phrase there ‘the result is going to be even better’. So what are the results of this? Are we talking about being able to serve as your clients better, or is it simply giving yourself a better healthier approach to life?

“That is the measurement of the coaching sessions that I do with my clients - we have a view of the right return on the investments. So first type of the ROI in coaching sessions is actually are you accomplishing your goals? Because if you're not accomplishing what you want, then there is a barrier.

The second measurement by these coaching sessions is actually the ‘motivation’ ROI. How are you satisfied and fulfilled by your current position? Are you satisfied with where you are today?

Another measurement is the happiness return on investment. Are you having these kinds of happy feelings in your body or are you still anxious, stressed, or overwhelmed?

The final return on investment by coaching sessions is actually the financial return on investment. Do you have enough money that you are envisioning that you would like to have? If you would like to have more money, then you need to figure out how you will get that money, because if that is something that you want, it doesn't matter if it's salary or doing additional job, it’s something that you would like to gain money from.”

So if you're an SEO agency owner, if you're a director, if you're a manager, if you have a team of SEOs underneath you, is it worthwhile paying money to have your team go through some kind of training course to improve their well-being and their ability to handle stress? Is that a reasonable investment to make in terms of the ROI that you can measure from that?

“Definitely, because these employees will actually make a bigger impact for the company when they are fulfilled, and when they are satisfied compared to if they feel overwhelmed by all these things. The coaching industry is definitely the future for the companies, so being an able to recognise the power of coaching for your employees is definitely the direction we are heading towards.”

How has working from home impacted stress levels, because obviously pre-COVID, SEOs worked from offices almost five days a week. Now quite often they're working from home, either full time or perhaps three or four days a week or so. Has that impacted the way that SEOs encounter and think about their work?

“Yes, especially because they're not changing environment. When they are constantly in the same environment, then even when their jobs for the day, that stress is still there. For example, if they work from home in their kitchen or their bedroom, they are working and living in the same stressful environment. Before COVID we were in the offices of our companies and aligned that stress with the office. Then when you leave the office for the day, your body is in different mood because you aren’t in that the same environment. So being in this post-pandemic stage, and especially recently with all these SEO updates, algorithm changes, AI, etc, we haven’t been taught how to handle all these new things that can impact mental health significantly, and how to separate that from our home life.”

I would say that a good thing that a lot of employers could actually do is take time to understand the work at home situations that SEOs have, because some SEOs might be working from the end of their bed, they might not have a separate office or a decent environment to be able to work in, and others might be privileged enough to have a spare room that they can use as a separate office. So do you think that this is something that employers are taking the time to understand?

“I would say they are so busy with the different challenges that they are facing and there is a lack of communication between employer and employees about these things. These days people are oriented towards technical things, and they forget the most important things are actually their personal health, mental health and the feelings they face during the situation.

I would definitely encourage higher communication levels regarding employee satisfaction and fulfilment, because the bigger cost is actually losing great employees and not resolving these issues that are more and more important these days.”

So you’ve shared what SEOs should be doing in 2023. Now let's talk about what SEOs shouldn't be doing. What's something that's seductive in terms of time, but ultimately, counterproductive, what’s something that SEOs shouldn't be doing in 2023?

“I would say that SEO professionals shouldn't work more than eight hours per day. Not even if you think that working more will be to your benefit. It doesn’t work like that. Staying busy these days is just counter-productive. You lose that clarity and you lose that clear decision making process when you are overworked and overwhelmed. If you work too much, then you don't have enough time in the day to make that clear headspace and clear your head. That’s how you will make the biggest impact for yourself or your company. To make progress in our career we need free time.”

Adrijana Vujadin is SEO manager for Affirma and you can find her over at adrijanavujadin.com.