How Mindset Defines Our Wellbeing

“Every stage of evolution eventually runs into its own inherent limitations, and these may act as triggers for the evolutionary impulse.?The inherent limitations create a type of turmoil, even chaos.? The system either breaks down or escapes the chaos by evolving to a higher order.? The new and higher order escapes the limitations of its predecessor.”

Ken Wilber

A prevailing Sacrifice Mindset in society inhibits us from adapting healthily to a more uncertain and demanding world.

Perhaps even more than the circumstances we find ourselves in, this mindset inexorably pulls us into burnout, blocking us from seeing and challenging the underlying assumptions we make about what we need to thrive in a more disruptive environment.

In this article, I explore the Sufficiency Mindset through the experience of Ben Osborn, a leader who has intuitively figured out how to evolve ahead of the demand curve.

Ben Osborn is an outlier.? Over the past 20 years, he’s been one of the most successful managers in the Pharma industry. As the UK Country manager for Pfizer, he was responsible for the success of the world’s first Covid vaccine rollout.? Whilst numerous achievements hallmark his career, his mindset differentiates him. He’s developed a set of values and self-awareness that has set him apart, capable of managing extraordinary demands at work and his family's well-being.?

The Sacrifice Mindset and its Limits

We believe the answer lies in a mindset where meeting our needs is the means to achieve fulfilment, live our values and maintain our well-being. Rather than seeing needs as something to trade for success, we need to make the counter-cultural move and see them as the means of creating value.

In the past decade, we’ve talked to thousands of employees, managers, and leaders worldwide about their experiences managing their well-being as demands and disruption have increased.? A recurring theme has been the mounting frustration that their attempts to adopt healthy habits typically fail after a few days or weeks. ?As workloads mount, they retreat into coping as best they can until, as one manager told us, ‘I get too toxic, tired and testy to get away with being in denial; but often the damage to myself and others has been done.’

Growing numbers of alarming burnout studies reflect a negative normal cycle that defines people’s lives where it’s normal to feel constantly tired, irritable, and detached. Depending on the sector, between 25 to 80% of employees are experiencing burnout symptoms, with younger people and women being most likely to suffer the impact.? The psychoanalyst Josh Cohen describes burnout ‘as the feeling of exhaustion accompanied by a nervy compulsion to go on regardless, and this double bind makes it very difficult to know how to cope.’

Despite differences in the working generations, what I’ve come to understand in my work with leaders and organisations operating predominantly within a Western culture is that what unites us is a mental model of success (the see part of mindset) that says you must be ‘all-in’ to succeed. Despite the greater awareness of how overworking adversely affects our well-being, being ‘all-in’ is acknowledged as culturally essential by over two-thirds of everyone we speak to about what it takes to progress at work.

The underlying and unspoken assumptions associated with this model (the think component of mindset) include that you must sacrifice your needs (physical, emotional, mental, social) to achieve financial success, status, power and, ultimately, freedom. Another associated but generally more cloaked assumption is that if I can’t get what I need, others can’t either. This is the way it is. If I can’t spend time with my children, why should you? ?Many men, for example, may not acknowledge the advantage they gain from being able to double down on this mindset because their partners take a disproportionate share of domestic needs and childcare. This has contributed to another set of societal problems, including rising divorce rates and mental health issues among children.

This mindset's third component (feel) is how physical feelings and emotions are interpreted.?Mostly, they are ignored, stuffed down, justified or laughed away because the primary feeling we experience when we can’t get what we need is resentment, a toxic inhibitor of motivation, focus, learning and adaptation. Instead of acknowledging these feelings, they are often externalised, placing us as victims and defining what we can’t do at work and home.?

In the past, the balance sheet of being ‘all-in’ may have worked, particularly for senior managers. The rewards often seemed to justify the sacrifice. Today, this deal increasingly looks broken. Rising lifestyle diseases, divorce rates, addictions, suicide and the impact of unhappy families on children’s mental health are just some of the symptoms of the sacrifice mindset when it is confronted with rising demand and uncertainty.?

For leaders, losing connection with their needs undermines them most profoundly. When you fail to acknowledge your needs and must justify the knowing-doing gap, it’s hard to inspire others and impossible to be seen as authentic.

Perhaps most importantly, the sacrifice mindset, shaped by unconscious resentment, dampens self-awareness and our willingness to accept and respond to change. A sacrifice mindset rejects new realities, ideas and innovations that question our sacrifice because acceptance seems only to lead to a sense of futility.? ?

You can see this dysfunctional ‘pay it forward’ mentality at work in the dangerously long hours that young doctors have worked for decades in the belief that they will benefit by learning faster. ?In 2022, the British Medical Council research found that 62% of junior doctors suffered from depression, anxiety, stress, burnout, and emotional distress. Aside from the benefits of long hours never having been evidenced, how many of us want to have a life-threatening condition evaluated by someone who has had 4 hours of sleep a night for many weeks? ?

A sacrifice mindset operating at scale creates a culture where our core needs are not prioritised and meeting them is an impractical prospect. Regardless of espoused values and goals, in ‘real-world’ situations, needs are rationalised away in pragmatic realism. ?This is why gender equality quotas attack a leader’s sense of fairness; people getting what they need seems to confuse ideology with meritocracy.? Or why many leaders perceive well-being investments as giving people additional benefits rather than increasing their ability to perform sustainably.

So, how do we break the deep either/or dilemma that well-being poses in the modern age? How do we move past the mindset that says, ‘It’s either my well-being or my success that must take precedence?’? We believe the answer lies in a mindset where meeting our needs is the means to achieve fulfilment, live our values and maintain our well-being. Rather than seeing needs as something to trade for success, we need to make the counter-cultural move and see them as the means of creating value.? As Artificial Intelligence automates routine work, focusing on what makes us unique in this new world further makes a case for tapping into our needs so we can fuel the most precious sources of human value creation: situational analysis, creative problem solving, judgement and forming and enriching relationships.?

How a Sufficiency Mindset Can Help Us Evolve in an Age of Uncertainty

A Sufficiency Mindset is grounded in a self-awareness of our core needs: including physical, emotional, mental, social, purpose, and our sense of volition, to have control over these things.?The principal mechanism for building this mindset is increasing our attention and sensitivity to our needs, which we become numb to when the Sacrifice Mindset is at work.

When we reframe from sacrifice, which is fundamentally about hours rather than value, and, instead, focus on meeting our needs, we ironically tap into what drives performance. When our physical needs for sleep, rest, nutrition, and movement are met, we have and can put more energy into what matters in our lives. When our emotional needs to feel valued and safe are met, we bring more commitment and more of ourselves to challenges. We feel empowered to create a greater impact when we have the appropriate information and resources. When our social needs for connection and belonging are met, we’re happier and suffer less depression; and we can get more done as trust and collaborative problem-solving increase. And, when our needs for meaning and significance are met, it unlocks intrinsic motivation, which is well documented in terms of enabling greater resilience and creativity. Cumulatively, meeting our needs creates a sense that we’re more in control of our lives, regardless of the uncertainty that might be operating in our environment.

What Ben Osborn has Learnt About Building a Sufficiency Mindset

The more I’ve tuned into my needs, the more in control I’ve felt, and the better outcomes seem to be.”?

Ben Osborn’s career started at Pfizer in 1998 and was shaped by role models and his friends who shared the belief that success meant being ‘all-in’.? “My mindset embraced the belief that the more you put in, the more you could take out – more rewards, more happiness, more sense of being valued and valuable. Your job defined you in so many ways, and so the underlying assumption was that I needed to make progress as fast as possible to get promoted and gain more status and money. As I look back, there was no real ‘why’ to this; it was what everyone I respected did unquestionably.”

Being all-in served Osborn well for the first half-decade of his career. He made rapid progress up the corporate ladder, partly because he could considerably de-prioritise other aspects of his life. He reflects, “I wasn’t married, and increasingly time with friends and family was only on my terms, and my passion for sport drifted.”? When he married his wife, an intensive care nurse, there was an unspoken belief that his career was more important and that she would make sacrifices as they had a family.

This tacit deal continued until a heart-breaking event forced Osborn to rethink his fundamental expectations about success and fulfilment. Their first son was born with life-altering health issues and was constantly in and out of intensive care. “It was the lowest point of my life”, Osborn reflects. “My job was everything and demanded frequent travel and being constantly on, but my instinct told me I needed to drop everything altogether, as nothing could be more important than my family.? Sitting by my son’s bed for many nights as he struggled for life forced me to challenge my mindset and what I wanted. I went through anger and denial – ‘Why was this happening to me, this wasn’t part of the plan?’ It made me question everything.”

This period triggered an instinctive process of building a sufficiency mindset. It was anchored in a deep understanding of what he wanted his life to represent, to live values that matter to him and maintain the depth of self-awareness that this event had forced in him.

“The shift from work-first to family-first wasn’t, as some might imagine, a reduced commitment to my work or Pfizer. I have a profound sense of purpose in what our company and industry do for society. ?In fact, my lived experience of being a father to a patient reinforced and further energised my passion for the life science industry. I wanted to be successful at work and home, which meant making non-negotiable commitments and drawing clear boundaries.”

One of these was the decision not to live outside the UK.? “There was no way I could take care of my family and live in New York (Pfizer’s HQ), which immediately ruled out several major career path advancements. I knew that if I compromised on this and tried to live a life shuttling back and forth across the Atlantic, I would live in a constantly depleted physical state and increasingly resent my work and family.” When he first told his managers about this decision, it was met with understanding, but given Osborn’s potential, it was likely seen as a phase he would work through before eventually getting back onto the international track. “Although I made it very clear this was a red line, I have been asked several times if I mean it or if I might see a time when I will change my mind.” ????

In the ensuing years, Osborn focused on confronting the challenge of developing his self-awareness to manage the delicate balance between being fully present with his family and being successful at work. One pivotal experience was a business school programme that helped him reflect on his most fundamental leadership values.

“Two values emerged as being of primary importance in how I wanted to be a leader: fairness and empathy. I now see them as a powerful way of making better sense of situations and effective decisions. ?By shifting my focus to how others are experiencing situations, I can better understand how my emotions and physical state might influence my judgment in a sub-optimal way. For example, I’ve been through a very traumatic period with my family, and it would be easy to compare my situation and ability to cope with someone else going through something that I perceive as being much less demanding and make an unfair comparison.”?

Maintaining an empathic lens helped Osborn dial out emotional judgement based on his capabilities and allows him to see things more clearly through the situation others find themselves in.? This enables him to avoid the bias psychologists call fundamental attribution error, where we wrongly attribute a specific character-based motivation to people’s behaviour. For example, we might believe someone acts the way they do because they are lazy, weak-willed or selfish, rather than the circumstances they find themselves in. “Now I triangulate between focusing on people’s needs, what’s fair given their circumstances and the organisation's needs and how I feel. This enables me to make much better decisions, particularly when it’s uncertain or stressful.”

Another principle Osborn began to understand as critical to building a sufficiency mindset was to channel his strong competitive urges in a new way. ?Instead of comparing himself with others, he needed to be the reference point. “As I shifted my focus to being the best I could, I realised that I didn’t need to exert energy on worrying about how others were doing in their careers, particularly peers who were getting major roles that I couldn’t because of my choice not to relocate.”

“Similarly, as a competitive runner, I couldn’t train to the level I might have wanted to in the past, and again, I needed to be content with this. I couldn’t let others’ achievements define my satisfaction. Instead, I focused on why I run and the experience this gives.” This is integral to building a sufficiency mindset, focusing on our needs, and allowing that to guide our goals.

Osborn’s redefined sense of leadership purpose and values had a significant impact. Before I knew him, I’d heard from many people at Pfizer that Osborn was somehow different: an inspiring, values-based leader who profoundly lived what he stood for and was remarkably positive and present regardless of the challenges he faced personally and professionally.??

In 2015, he applied for his dream role as Pfizer’s UK country manager and didn’t get it, leaving him feeling bereft.? However, only a couple of weeks later, he was offered the Chief Marketing Officer of the company’s international business. “From what felt like a crisis, I got another incredible role. Until then, I’d only had a UK-centric perspective on our business. I soon recognised that my playbook wasn’t culturally transferable and went on a huge learning curve. My value of fairness kicked in as I saw the inequalities in our smaller markets, unable to get our therapies into the hands of patients fast enough and the emotional impact this had on our local teams.” It unleashed a passion in Osborn to act and remove the blockers to creating a more equitable system.

After three years, he was offered his dream role and took the helm of the UK business.? While he knew he was taking on a post-Brexit landscape, he didn’t know Covid was just around the corner, a period that would likely be the defining point of his career. “In a matter of weeks, our strategy and focus completely changed. Everything became about caring for our teams and figuring out how to do something no one had done before. All eyes were suddenly on me, everyone asking, ‘What now - what do we do? – our teams, the NHS, partners and the Government.”

Osborn recognised that the scale of the challenge meant he had to reset the scope and nature of his strategy immediately. “I took a couple of weeks to stand back and figure out our priorities and what needed to be paused.? We set a threefold focus; ensuring all colleagues were safe and well, that we continue to supply medicines and vaccines at full scale if at all possible, and that we use our resources to make a meaningful contribution to the country through the societies in which we live and work.? Within a few months, we’d added the ambition of getting a viable Covid vaccine to patients within a year.”

This took Osborn on a two-year odyssey of uncertainty, incredible demand, and, ultimately, fulfilment. “I had never been so challenged as a leader. Every minute of every day, I was dealing with questions that ranged from the most detailed and forensic to the most strategic, difficult trade-offs and existential dilemmas. The constant Zoom calls created the perfect storm of little movement and physical, emotional, and mental stress.? I realised that if I didn’t prioritise taking care of myself, I wouldn’t be able to look after my family and colleagues, so I became even more focused on my needs, delegating where possible and starting and ending the day with renewal. It meant I could operate at my peak without burning out.”

Osborn was committed to finding a way to support his colleagues through the pandemic. “There was no question that we were operating in unknown territory, with enormous challenges and ambiguity.? I also knew from our previous attempts to increase people’s well-being that simply providing resources, like virtual relaxation or yoga classes for people isn’t enough. They can be a problem, seeming like something else to do that competes with their work. Instead, I wanted to create a climate of deep trust where people could take control and do what was right for them, their families and Pfizer.? This ability to balance looking after your needs and responsibilities was about recognising that we can’t solve everything for people; we needed to trust that they do it for themselves.” It transformed Pfizer’s ability to deal with the pandemic.? “For example, we gave all of our healthcare professional colleagues paid leave to go and serve the NHS on the front line if they wanted to. Our ‘trust-based’ approach took away much of the constraint and stress colleagues felt of juggling lockdown life with work. Colleagues recognised that a strategy of integrating home/work life was required rather than a decision prioritising one or the other.

The pandemic learning curve became vertiginous as Osborn ramped up to launch the world’s first deployment of a Covid vaccine. He found himself in extreme logistical and political challenges, managing the tensions between the goals of Pfizer, the NHS and the Government. “Whilst the intent between our stakeholders mostly overlapped, there were frequent moments where they were pulling in opposite directions. I had to draw on my moral compass to make judgement calls as there simply wasn’t time to check the big calls with everyone. Even though I took real personal risks in these moments, I had to be happy that I was doing the right thing.”

Today, Osborn believes he’s built a new relationship with uncertainty. “The old school leadership mindset is about getting clear and being confident and unyielding in your strategy and goals. I’m now more comfortable accepting that whatever position I’ve created about our opportunities is simply the best we can find now. If things change or we discover something we didn’t see, that position has to be updated considering new information and be agile with this. Like scientists, we need to hold a provisional position and constantly be enquiring.”

After the Covid challenge, Osborn took another major role at Pfizer, leading a large part of its international businesses. Whilst not burnt out, he was tired and started to neglect the focus on his needs that had sustained him. This meant slipping back into some former habits, working too continuously, multi-tasking and deprioritising what he knew would sustain his energy. “I could see a negative cycle starting to form – fatigue during the day, being less able to focus; as a result, feeling less was possible and then carrying tension from work into my home.”

What now see is that it’s easy to lose sight of what you’ve learned about your mindset when situations change. It made me realise I need to reset and commit when things change. This meant ensuring his diary reflected his goals; his fitness, sleep, and nutrition became high priorities, including no alcohol mid-week or when travelling. “I’ve also found that dedicating Fridays to reading, meeting new people, reflection, and learning has been transformational. At first it felt a luxury, but now I realise it is critical to my continued growth and leadership experience. ”

“All of this comes together in the emotional experience of my life. The root cause of feeling defensive, irritable, and negative is often simply tipping into feeling I have too much on my plate, and suddenly, you’re triggered by an unrelated situation or demand. I’m not in the moment, rushing and looking at my watch instead of being present.”

“I’ve come to see that when this happens, there’s no instant fix; I have to recognise what’s happening emotionally and then start to peel back my commitments, seeing where I’m over-extending myself and regain a sense of control. Sometimes, this is simply saying no to a weekend packed with social events and activities or deferring a meeting that is not critical. Instead, I might sit and be in the garden, go for a run, or be with my family. The more I’ve tuned into my needs, the more in control I’ve felt, and the better outcomes seem to be.”?

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