In the corporate environment, prosperity is almost unthinkingly associated with “hard” variables: market share, sales, or profit. “Thrive” is the name of one of our clients ‘ wellness program. Thrive and wellness? In this case the client decided to walk the path considering people. How? Doing some specific activities with the employees. The purpose of these is to account for the benefits that can be achieved by introducing, among many others, mindfulness in the company and train employees to change some habits that cause discomfort. What would Mindfulness be? It’s a technique that allows you to reduce pressure, stress, and improve your skills to relate to other people, whether they are friends, colleagues or clients. It has been shown to be effective in improving both mental health and job performance and, among other issues, is related to prevention against depression, resilience to stress, an improvement in the relationship between diet and overweight, and even it was shown to serve as a possible approach to insomnia.

So, two years ago, I started attending, every three months,  an event in Montevideo called the Thrive Week. During that week, I stay in the hotel and they create an agenda with various activities, such as talks about healthy habits, physical training on the rambla of Montevideo, yoga classes at different times for the employees from all shifts to attend, visiting sectors of the hotel for active breaks, individual talks on healthy habits.

In the talks, various causes that alter well-being are mentioned (stress and its daily demands, how excessive thoughts disturb the balance, the toxicity of complaints and their influence on physical and emotional health, how to eat, sleep changes) and, for all these issues, different options or “ways to prosper” are provided to achieve a more harmonious life.

Workouts are about physical and aerobic structure -both forms generate well-being. They explain how you should train and what things are essential to be in good physical condition. In yoga meetings, in addition to practicing stretching, they seek to learn the different types of breathing. The idea is to delve into the spiritual part. This also translates into the incorporation of the active pause. The reason for active breaks is to instruct people not to go through their daily activities without stretching after prolonged and repetitive movements. For example, finance clerks who do not move all day, or maintenance workers who are constantly on the go. The purpose is to have the initiative to modify the usual routine to avoid discomfort.

The counseling talks are individual so that each person tells how they live, how they eat, if they sleep well, how they train, and what their schedules are like. It is about organizing the way of living.  As in any other corporate activity, there is always a metric that allows us to measure results. The company asks for feedback to know the state of the members of the organization and a detailed description is made of what was observed during that week. However, tangible results come beyond the metrics report. With one of those weeks, the long-term benefits of the proposed techniques in a daily application can already be observed: it improves the management of complex or stressful situations, without feeling nervous; it favors emotional intelligence, creativity and innovation over our mathematical intelligence, our most rational side; it allows to gain clarity for conflict resolution and decision making; it promotes better communication between colleagues and, mainly, reduces the level of anxiety and thus gives way to calm and stability.

As a consequence, the energy levels and productivity increase. And so, we arrive at the final metric, the one that marks this “prosperity,” not at the expense of people but based on their physical, emotional and work balance

 

I live in an apartment and I really miss going for a run on my 8km (Monday) and 6km (Wednesday) circuits. I used to do it frequently, I had my Alondra (person who wakes up in the morning) routines so well planned so that I could feel physically prepared inside a soccer field. These training sessions were complemented with a personal trainer’s help and a team of five friends who trained specifically for soccer on Tuesdays and Thursdays. As a result of a solidarity movement in which a runner proposed to run several kilometers to unite Argentina, I decided to run 5km within my apartment. If the challenge had been proposed to me four months ago, I probably wouldn’t have done it. Now, I had been suffering from confinement on Sundays and there was also a good cause in it (the kilometers were going to be transferred in food donations for dining rooms), so I DECIDED to join the initiative. 

It felt so good to finish what I had promised. What makes me feel good? In the first place, a mixture of peace and movement. An ocean where we can drop anchor and rest in its stillness without having the need to look for more company than oneself, combined with the adrenaline and endorphins that generate movement and connection with other people. The secret of well-being has to do with the physical, the mind and the spirit. Paradoxically, today the world paused and forces us to think, how do we want to continue? How do we want to be remembered? What will our legacy be? 

From HR PERFORMANCE we create a segment where we help companies to promote the balance between body, mind and spirit.

Do you want us to help you think?

That balance between body, mind and spirit is what makes us feel good. Generating and promoting these spaces is going to be essential to maintain people’s morale.

Companies will not be able to control all situations, but they can decide how they will be remembered in times of coronavirus. Both employees and consumers will be aware of what companies did in this context.

 

The emotional GPS to get through the crisis. The pandemic, the economic crisis, the new modality of work and “life with social distancing” require an adaptive effort, an effort greater than usual. This means a higher demand on our inner GPS: our emotional system. 

However, the care and development of our emotional system is usually relegated or, even more, not even a topic on the organizational agenda. Perhaps this is due to the inheritance of that old attempt to separate personal life from work. 

Times of change require adaptation, creativity, and responsiveness. The amount of new information and uncertainty that we face and will face will be greater than what we are used to. Fortunately, nature provided us with a system for interpreting reality: emotions, a system that we have been trying to despise and silence. Not only do we live in a culture that has not taught us to harness and use those emotions, but some of them are somewhat frowned upon. Emotions as basic as anger, joy, sadness and anguish, fear, love are censored. It is frowned upon to have a laughing fit in public. Not to mention crying… “well, think of something nice”… as if sadness were not an invitation to dive into the inner world. Not to mention the anguish. That’s weak, better get a pill and move on. Is love forbidden? Yes. “I come here to work, not to make friends.” Thus, the only emotion that we seem to manifest, and this is particularly noticeable in Latin American culture, is anger. Everything angers us. Nothing makes us happy, anguished or saddened. 

All this hardening that we have endeavored to build goes against the adaptive effort that we will have to make to build the “new normal” that will require, to go through –and use- a range of emotional states. Emotions, then, should not be seen as pathological symptoms to be eliminated to return to the state of normal. This would be equivalent to silencing the colors of a painting to return to the whiteness of the canvas. It’s not funny … nor does it work.

We can use emotions not as a symptom of the individual’s pathology, but as a wonderful source of information about the world around us. 

Then there is a crossroads. So much a choice. Do we choose to train and develop emotional wisdom to encourage ourselves to fully live joy, sadness, anxiety, anger and all the emotions that the creative process will require to adapt and co-create the new reality, or will we prefer to silence these annoying alarms? 

My proposal is, of course, the first option. I believe that we need to expand consciousness, that is, the ability to go through with acceptance -which does not mean with pleasure- what we have to go through. Do not turn fear into anger because it is weak, nor cover laughter because it is immature, nor believe that anguish is a fault.

The skills to be developed are: 

  1. Appreciation: It’s easy to complain about quarantine. We woke up on equal days, days of confinement, day of crisis. The option is not to wake up. Waking up is being alive. Reason enough to thank. And I’m sure most of you who read me have a lot to be thankful for. Putting the focus there puts us in a positive attitude and leads us to creativity.
  2. They see the glass half-full. It is the cognitive exercise of focusing on what I have and not what I lack. I do not focus on the problem but on the resources I have and the solution I want. This requires the following skill
  3. Will. Starting with giving responsibility to the individual and the team.
  4. Resilience: we are faced with a new situation. We are going to try things and we are going to be wrong. Resilience is the difference between each mistake making us weak or making us stronger as a learning opportunity. Success does not depend on the result of what we try, but on our ability to manage our mind and our emotions. Resilience is that it is not about what each experience generates, but about how we take advantage of each experience, how much we learn from it.
  5. Troubleshooting: The focus is not on the rational aspect of problem-solving. Problems are solved by thinking, as long as you can think. This requires emotional management strategies that help the brain to function well. From techniques like how to recite the alphabet backward to meditation techniques.
  6. Humor: In addition to generating endorphins, humor is the basis of the game, it is what allows us to create new senses, see things differently and it is the emotional basis of creativity. Without humor, there is no creativity and without creativity, there is no adaptation or co-creation. And if we don’t unleash that urge it can turn into anxiety. And anxiety in panic attack. If you use humor you can play and thus create, but if you cannot laugh you take things very seriously, you breathe short (wanting to control everything) and when control comes out of hands, anxiety transforms into panic attack.It’s better to laugh, right?
  7. Self-acceptance: If I am not going to work because I have the flu, it is valid. If I’m not going to work because I argued with my wife and I’m distraught, it is not. We do not validate emotional states. And not only the system does not accept them. We ourselves do not accept them. If I am anxious, I consume sugar and fat, if I am anxious, I eat my nails… instead of inhabiting the emotion and using it as a guide, I deny it. Self-acceptance is the unconditional collaboration with what it is. I’m sad. It is valid.I’m going to be sad. Not to wait for the sadness to go away to continue with my normal life. My life, now, is this sadness. Happiness is living that sadness with awareness. Emotional support means: “Come on, experience it, the team is with you.”
  8. Stress management: Ultimately, this point should be resolved with the previous ones. Once I become aware of my tiredness and my need to rest, I rest. No, I don’t have to be infallible. Curiously -or not- I am convinced that the systemic acceptance of this does not constitute a threat to productivity but quite the opposite.
  9. Faith: In a non-religious sense. Simply suggest the conversation about the meaning of life. What do we work for? What do we care about? At the end of the day, all the companies we admire have their statement of values, their purpose. Faith is that. Values Purpose Direction Something more important than the commercial result for the quarter. There cannot be a company with values without the courage to connect with what I call faith, which, again, has nothing to do with religion.
  10. Trust: Successful teams enjoy a sense of psychological security that allows their members to expose themselves emotionally in front of others (for example by showing an idea, we open the possibility of being judged.) Adapting requires innovation, innovation requires creativity, creativity requires confidence to expose ourselves. This idea was developed in the article “Tension and Creativity.”

In the midst of the pandemic, the crisis and uncertainty, where nobody seems to know what to do or how to process so much information, we have a GPS that has thousands of years of development: the emotional system. 

Let us focus on the development of emotional potential as the engine of adaptive co-creation.