Improved World of Work

Recently I took a long and good afternoon walk and meanwhile I was listening to a very interesting podcast with Mel Robbins. Yes, some of my colleagues and contacts from the corporate world might find that strange, but I often find her very inspiring and giving me a good nudge, which I sometimes need.

Can listening to our bodies improve the world of work?

In this podcast she was interviewing Dr. Mark Hyman, Head of Strategy and Innovation at the Cleveland Clinic Center for Functional Medicine, who was talking about the healing power of our bodies. How our body knows how to heal itself when we, for an example, cut our hand. And if we take good care of our bodies, how we can optimize its function. Also, how we only need 6 days to figure out if a change in our diet or lifestyle is improving our health or not, i.e. our body knows what it needs and what is not good for it.

I started thinking how this could apply to the world of work.

Can we use our gut-feeling (instinctive feeling, that we often feel in our stomach, or our guts, as a response to something that we are doing or experiencing) to know what kind of work, workplace, coworkers, manager etc. we need to be able to thrive at work. For us to increase our job satisfaction and job performance. To improve our success and contribution while enjoying our work even more.

It has been said that our gut is our second brain. And by taking good care of ourselves and having healthy guts will we maybe make better decisions?

Can better self-awareness improve the world of work?

My friend Andrew Bryant, CSP , who has been researching and writing about Self-Leadership for years, wrote an article about Secrets to Body Hacking with Self-Leadership. In it he says that self-awareness is the first step towards self-improvement.

Me and Andrew have talked about our health when we have had discussions on how we practice Self-Leadership, but never about self-awareness through our guts. Next time I meet him I might take it up with him. Consider this a warning Andrew.

With good self-awareness, we will make better choices for ourselves, to help us thrive in life and work, and boost our overall well-being. Jennifer Fisher, Chief Well-being Officer at Deloitte, is one of the people that I follow, and she talks a lot about how to thrive in life and work. Recently she wrote about how we can’t practice self-care without self-acceptance.

And to me self-acceptance is part of allowing yourself to believe in your choices and decisions, whether they are based on gut-feeling or not.

Make better decisions for yourself to improve your world of work.

I have made changes in my career based on a gut feeling. Changes that I just knew were right for me, based on my gut feeling, my insight, or whatever we like to call that. Changes that turned the world upside down for people around me, but I just had to go through with it – and which turned out made my happier and able to be even better at my job.

I have also made changes in my career when everything inside me told me I was not doing what would be good for me – and my body, my gut feeling, my insight turned out to be right.

Over the years I have become more courageous in making decisions, but it has not always been easy for me.

Could we maybe improve the world of work by listening more to our bodies, the messages it may be sending? Can we increase job satisfaction, job engagement, job performance, business results and the happiness index in the world by making better choices for ourselves, based on signals from our bodies?

According to research we make over 30 thousand decisions a day, make sure that your decisions are good for you. That they make your life and work better.

Now I leave it up to you to find your ways to improve your self-awareness, to make better decisions for yourself, and how to make your life and work better. Here you can find 20 questions to ask yourself, to boost your success and well-being.

One thing might be to go for a walk with an interesting podcast, or maybe better yet, to go for a walk without listening to anything but your own thoughts and what your subconsciousness is trying to tell you.

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If you want to have a conversation with me on how to make the world of work better, on #hrmanagement #futureofwork #selfleadership or #360Success then I’m looking forward to hearing from you. Your thoughts on this topic will also be welcomed in the comments below.

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Herdis Pala is an experienced leader, with 20+ years in management positions, there of 13 years in C-Suite positions. Her responsibilities have mainly been within HR but also in Operations, Marketing, Service, Facilities Management, and more.

She is also a highly appreciated Speaker, Lecturer at Universities, Corporate Trainer, Executive Coach, and Management Consultant – now working as Head of HR at EFTA.

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