What Today’s Leaders need to know about Wellness

For many us, we go about 90% of our day to day life on autopilot, without paying too much attention or asking too many questions. And when it comes to our personal well-being, it often takes a sobering event or incident for us to really wake up to it. For many leaders wellness can take a back seat as we continue to push our mind and bodies to the edge of their limits, trying to balance our ambitious career goals with managing a hectic social and family life, leaving little time for ourselves. For a start, we are all over stimulated, over caffeinated, oversubscribed and under pressure. We’re really good at looking after the needs of others but what about when it comes to taking our own medicine? We brush aside those little warning signs and reminders that constantly pop up telling us to take our foot off the gas and pull in to refuel. But instead we press down harder on the accelerator. Eventually we run out of fuel and our relentless surges forward come to a halt. In the workplace this looks like depleted motivation, exhaustion and burnout. What many leaders underestimate however, is that operating like this sets the culture in an organisation and the climate in a team.

So how can we harness wellness to increase sustainable performance in the areas of life that matter to us. First we must look to define it.?

What is wellness?

Official definitions from the World Health Organisation view wellness as "an active process of maintaining a state of physical, mental, and social well-being, and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity." But the only question that really matters is what does wellness look like to you and those around you? Wellness should be viewed as a continual process, a way of life and a journey that we can enjoy, not a destination that we? eventually arrive at. It’s not a place that we ever get to and can say “I’m done now” and drop our bags. But we can have various destinations and milestones that we want to meet along the way. This is where the psychological skill of goal setting when done effectively can be powerful.?

As we know wellness is not just limited to the traditional trio of exercise, nutrition, sleep. It’s multi-faceted and taking a holistic approach by looking at our entire lives as a whole is going to be vitally important to finding fulfilment, and understanding the wellness needs of those around us. Key elements of wellness include but are not limited to:

• Physical Wellness “Maintaining a healthy body through means of sleep, diet and exercise and seeking care when necessary.”
• Emotional Wellness “Understanding your feelings and coping effectively with stress. It is important to pay attention to self-care, relaxation, stress reduction and the development of inner resources so you can learn and grow from experiences.”
• Social Wellness “Having a strong support network and meaningful relationships.”
• Mental Wellness “Engaging in creative and mentally-stimulating activities. These activities should expand your knowledge and skills.”
• Spiritual Wellness “Developing a sense of meaning, purpose and a personal set of values.” Are these reflected in what you do e.g. your career?
• Environmental Wellness “Living in harmony with the environment. Cultivating an awareness of how your actions affect it, taking action to protect it and interacting with nature and your personal environment.”?
• Occupational Wellness “Enjoying your occupational endeavors, appreciating your contributions and finding personal satisfaction and enrichment through work.”
• Financial Wellness “Our ability to meet current and ongoing financial obligations, feeling secure in your financial future, and having the financial power and freedom to make choices that allow you to enjoy life.”

So what does wellness look like to you under each of these areas? Can you articulate this in three or four sentences? You might even rate your level of satisfaction out of 10. Have you an idea of how team members view these key areas and what concerns they may have?

How does my wellness interact with the different aspects of my life?

Each of these seemingly individual parts are strongly interrelated and come together to make up our wellness as a whole. For example, let’s say you’ve decided to take up regular exercise after years of contemplating getting back into it. You notice you have more energy and are a lot more productive at work. This improved performance doesn’t go unnoticed by those above you and you achieve a promotion as well as picking up a healthy bonus. This leaves you feeling pretty good about yourself, your mood has improved and this all seeps into your relationships with those around you. You’ve even got energy leftover in the evenings to go home and take the dog and kids to the park. We can see how the above example encompasses almost all areas of our wellness, and it all starts with one change which acts as the catalyst which creates a wave and has a domino-like effect on the rest of our lives. So we can see it’s tightly interlinked.

Our needs and feelings in relation to each of these wellness areas will be met through what we do each day, the way we interact with people and how we look after ourselves etc. The way I like to look at it is by dividing our life up further into five key areas. Most often these are:

• Career (and income)
• Relationships (family, spouse, friends)
• Health (physical & mental health; exercise, nutrition, sleep, stress, recovery etc.)
• Hobbies & Entertainment
• Personal growth.?

But you could break it down under whatever headings you like. Then what makes up each of these areas of our lives;

• Career- What is our role? What are the different aspects of it? How do we view it? What is success for us? What steps must we take to achieve it?
• Relationships - Family, Spouse, Friends: How much time are you spending with them? Quality time? How often? What have you planned with each? What are your roles in these relationships?
• Health - Fitness - What do you enjoy? Are you achieving the recommended amounts of exercise? Diet - Are you eating to provide your body with the nutrients and energy that it needs? Or are you eating to satisfy emotions and stress? Sleep - Are you getting 7-9 hours per night? Is it of good quality? How is your sleep hygiene?
• Stress - How do you switch off? How do you view stress? Do you have any methods for managing it?
• Hobbies & Entertainment - What are our hobbies? What do we do for entertainment? List all the things you enjoy doing. How often are you making time for them?
• Personal Growth - Are you learning and growing your knowledge and skills? Are you getting enough intellectual stimulation?

The Behavioural Audit

Under each of these areas, which of the above aspects of our wellness are they satisfying or detracting from? (It may be the case that some satisfy one area but detract from another, but are a sacrifice we need to or ought to make when we believe the trade off is necessary or worth it).

So back to the key question, what does wellness look like for you in relation to each of these? What are your needs? What are your ideals? Once you have an idea of what these are then you can start to assess where you are currently at in relation to those.?

Most of us fall into the trap of being on autopilot and just doing what we always did 90% of the time without ever questioning anything. Essentially living as a puppet to our feelings and the habits and learned behaviours that were ingrained into us over the course of our lives. But we don’t have the act on every feeling or temptation that arises.

By deciding to question things, and doing an audit on our current everyday behaviours and deciding which behaviours are enhancing us and taking us closer to where we want to be and which behaviours are taking away from this, will serve us well.

Underlying all of these are two things;

• The time we have available to us (168 hours each week, 24 hours a day - where’s it going? How are we using our time?)
• Our mindset and approach to all of the above?

We need to be able to answer questions like: where’s most of our time being spent? Are we only looking after the needs of others? Are we saying yes all the time to every request that comes our way? Can we articulate where we would like to be in relation to each of these areas? Where are we currently? What do we need to do to bridge the gap between them? Which behaviours are either bringing us closer to this ideal and which are taking us further away? Then we can make a decision on what hindering behaviours we want to eliminate.

The first step on our wellness journey: Identify your needs.

These are our first steps, to identify: what wellness looks like for us, what our needs are in relation to each aspect of our wellness, what the key areas of our lives are, what makes up those key areas, where are we now in relation to where we want to be, what behaviours are taking us closer to this, which behaviours are holding us back. Once we can identify and articulate these, then we have our foundations. It’s all well and good reading about it but taking pen to paper and giving it the time and consideration it deserves is how you’ll really start to take control.

So now we know that we want to make a change. But how do we go about making a change? One that will last? I know I want to eliminate some bad habits but I don’t even know what I should be doing instead? I want to make wellness a focus in my team but dont know where to start?

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