We’re in Danger of Losing the Plot on Well-being

We’re in danger of losing the plot on the role of well-being in our workplaces. There’s a creeping sense that well-being is soft, that it somehow means treating employees as fragile, unable to deal with obstacles and challenges. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. Decades of science have made it clear that when we prioritize our well-being across six foundational behaviors — sleep, food, movement, stress management, focus and connection — we’re more resilient, more productive and more creative.

When the pandemic hit, employee well-being rightly shot to the top of the agenda for nearly every company. But mixed into the response was a seed of the idea that well-being was about coddling and removing challenges.

It’s a fundamental misreading of well-being, and we can see it popping up in stories like this one in The Wall Street Journal on a new push to get rid of the word “feedback” and replace it with “feedforward.” “Feedback” is supposed to be too “anxiety-inducing” and leaves employees “feeling defeated, weighed down by past actions.” Whereas “feedforward,” according to its proponents, “encourages improvement and development.”

But getting real and honest feedback is how we grow, evolve and improve. That’s a fundamental part not just of having a job but of being human. Of course feedback, and all workplace communications, should be delivered respectfully and in a way that encourages improvement and development. That’s why at Thrive our core company value is compassionate directness . But hiding feedback — or making up a new word for it — is neither compassionate nor respectful. It actually does a disservice to the person on the receiving end, denying them the opportunity to learn and grow. Real feedback is feedforward, we don’t need to euphemize it.

Now that we’re in more challenging economic times, some companies are questioning the value of employee well-being. And it becomes easier to question when we use a misguided definition of well-being.

Well-being is about empowerment, not entitlement. At the heart of well-being practices is building resilience so we can deal with whatever challenges life, including work, brings — and yes, that may include constructive or even difficult feedback! That’s how we become stronger instead of more fragile. Well-being, properly defined and practiced, is indeed a productivity multiplier.

A culture of well-being and resilience isn’t about removing challenges. It’s about believing in employees and their capacity to meet those challenges, and then giving them the tools (including honest feedback) to realize their full potential.

Read More in TIME: We're in Danger of Losing the Plot on Well-being

Grit, Grace and Gratitude

It was a real pleasure to introduce Nicole Avant to speak about her new book Think You'll Be Happy: Moving Through Grief With Grit, Grace, and Gratitude at the home of Crystal McCrary McGuire . Since meeting Nicole in 2007, I’ve been struck by the same qualities that permeate the book, especially grit and grace. The book is about how Nicole turned the darkness of her mother’s murder in a home invasion in 2021 into a source of light and inspiration for us all.

As she writes, “This is not a book about death, this is a book about life.” It’s also a book about grit, how to face the most terrible thing you can imagine and make a choice to experience the pain but also transcend it and move forward with grace. In brilliantly weaving together her family story, her mother’s death and how she got through it, Nicole makes a moving and inspiring case for the most important cultural themes at this moment in our history — faith, resilience, gratitude, service, and, especially, forgiveness and redemption. You can get a copy here .

The Future of Health at the HLTH Conference

We know our healthcare system is broken, with chronic diseases eating up healthcare resources in ways that aren’t sustainable. But there are solutions, and that’s what the annual HLTH USA conference in Las Vegas was all about. One great example: a conversation I moderated with 亚马逊 SVP of Health Services Neil Lindsay and One Medical Chief Medical Officer Dr. Andrew Diamond . After Amazon transformed books, e-commerce and the way we shop for nearly everything, they're now on a mission to transform healthcare. Amazon is famously customer obsessed, and right now our healthcare system is whatever the opposite of customer obsessed is — customer indifferent? Sometimes even customer hostile?

One thing that will be critical is using the miracle drug of behavior change to augment the prevention and treatment of disease. That’s the foundation of a new partnership, which I also got to announce at HLTH, between Thrive and ōURA. We’ll be bringing together ōURA 's best-in-class sleep data and insights with Thrive's behavior change platform and personalized resources. By integrating sleep and stress data from ōURA, we’ll be able to give Thrive users even more personalized recommendations to improve their sleep and reduce stress.

In a panel with ōURA CEO Tom Hale and UCSF psychiatry professor Dr. Elissa Epel , we talked about how even though stress is inevitable, cumulative stress — the sort that leads to burnout — is avoidable. And that’s what this partnership is about: helping people move from awareness to action so they can better manage their stress and recharge more fully at night.

Swimming With the Sharks

It’s not every day you get to go from watching one of your favorite shows in your living room to being on stage with the stars of the show. That’s why it was so much fun to moderate a conversation on “Shark Tank” at Advertising Week New York with Mark Cuban , Barbara Corcoran , Daymond John , Kevin O'Leary and Lori Greiner.

And it’s not just about entertainment — the show has real-world impact. Over 15 seasons, they’ve done over $226 million in deals, resulting in over $8 billion in sales, and created thousands of jobs, improving not just the lives of the entrepreneurs but a growing number of families and communities. As I found out in my sneak preview of the new season, they’re a long way from jumping the shark!

BEFORE YOU GO

Moment of Wonder

As we fall back with the end of daylight saving time, one thing to do with that extra hour — or to make time for at any point this week — is to find some fall foliage. As Albert Camus wrote, autumn is “a second spring when every leaf’s a flower.”

Book of the Month

Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things , by Adam Grant . In addition to being a celebrated professor at Wharton and organizational psychologist, Adam serves on Thrive’s Scientific Advisory Board and is a dear friend whose every writing I devour. But I particularly loved this book. As the founder of a tech company devoted to behavior change, I found Hidden Potential deeply resonant with our mission. It’s about how, in a culture that celebrates talent, we overestimate innate advantages and underestimate “the range of skills that we can learn and how good we can become.” In short, it’s about how we can all “improve at improving.” The book is also one of Adam’s most personal, as he tells the story of his own history of perfectionism, for which he says he’s “still in recovery.” As he puts it, “The true measure of your potential is not the height of the peak you’ve reached, but how far you’ve climbed to get there.”

Study of the Month

Machine learning is all the rage, but how, exactly, do machines learn? The best way, it turns out, is to learn the way children do. In The Wall Street Journal, psychologist Alison Gopnik reports on a new study in the journal Nature Human Behaviour showing that the best AI imitates children. To illustrate how, Gopnik uses the example of how unruly kids can be at an airport (as a mother of two daughters, I can declare this hypothesis validated). In the same way, AI systems can have different temperatures. Hotter temperature AI means more creativity and wildness. Cooler temperatures produce more reasonable but banal answers. The best AI starts out wide-ranging and hot — like kids — before cooling down to settle on plausible, adult-like responses. This mirrors our own process. “We need to start out as those crazy kids in the airport to become effective, intelligent adults,” writes Gopnik. “But, of course, the children can only thrive if the grown-ups take care of them, too.” Which means the best AI will need adult supervision. As for us, even though we “cool” with age, we also need to run hot and keep that childlike sense of wonder and exploration. As Einstein put it when writing to a friend, “People like you and me never grow old… We never cease to stand like curious children before the great mystery into which we were born.”

Cartoon of the Month

A Halloween scare courtesy of Ellis Rosen in The New Yorker :

Best,

If you're interested in bringing Thrive's Behavior Change Platform to your workplace CLICK HERE.

Subscribe here and browse my previous newsletters and articles here .