Continuous self-healing as a team

I won’t tire you with the challenges of building a company but let’s just say that I’ve ticked every box when it comes to founder stressors.

Working overtime to overdeliver and keep the customer happy so that they send us a check when we issue an invoice, getting paid just enough to get by, to leave money in the company to pay employee salaries and to support growth - the list goes on. In this way, I feel like a stereotypical founder.

The COVID-19 era made all of this worse because we got worried that business would drop because people got defensive, we pushed for more projects and me and my co-founder Manos ended up with 16-hour working days for ourselves - we did not imprint this to our employees.

It took us both more than 3 years from the start of COVID-19 to recover our health and psychology, and I am still dealing with the side effects of the chair use from those times, with rehabilitation of my knees that is still ongoing.

We knew it before, but it is crystal clear now - health requires balance, and balance requires feedback.

When your body needs water, you feel thirsty - that’s feedback.

Granted, people learn to ignore this feeling by attending more to external feedback such as screens, notifications and other outer world demands, than they attend to their internal feedback - the sensation of thirst.

That is how we end up with absurd but well-known rules like “drink two liters of water a day ” even when it is not based on scientific findings , instead of acting on our instincts as nature intended*.

At times of increased stress, our focus leans even more to the world outside of ourselves and we are more likely to ignore our body’s feedback. Add coffee to the mix, which masks the need to rest or sleep, and the fact that when we are responding to stress, several of our systems, including the immune and digestion systems are underperforming significantly and it is a recipe for disaster.

This is where your company’s culture and your co-workers come in.

Me and Manos will often point out to each other we may be burning the candle on both sides as they say and that we should take a moment to evaluate our needs for rest or even… God forbid, entertainment.

It is a principle that we are imprinting in the culture of Zero to MVP. We are asking our team’s members to look out for each other.

Periods of increased stress need to be followed by periods of reduced stress to give us an opportunity to recover from it. This is communicated to our clients also, in a professional manner.

More than that, we actively monitor each other’s responses to every day challenges and our overall appetite to be creative and productive. If we notice that someone is… simply not thriving, we make adjustments.

In my opinion, the pinnacle of satisfaction in life is to feel that you are in an environment where it is easy to be authentically you, even encouraged to be more so, and actively participating in molding its present and future.

Offering a private insurance perk is good, and we offer it as standard. The problem is that by the time someone seeks medical assistance, a problem has taken root and our job is to eradicate it at its source.

It is what lead us to adopting an “unlimited holidays ” scheme.

We invest in our people with a long-term view. If they are collapsing due to external demands, whether caused by personal or professional predicaments, we must take action.

I hope you do too - after all, a team ought to be a unit, and the collective health of its members is your responsibility also.

*Take some time to read the linked articles, you will be fascinated to find that people living in the Sahara desert consume less water than you.