Corporate wellness training needs mind health focus

The workplace wellness training approach has been relatively physical health-centric and not proactive enough in the case of mind health.

Why is it a problem?

Most leaders and employees lack the inner ability to notice when their inner downward spiral starts.

When people lack training in preventative activities to sustain their mental wellness, external pressure and challenges often cause worry, stress and anxiousness. When those become chronic we see burnout, anxiety and depression. We see people who are at work, but unable to work due to unfit minds.

When it comes to mind health, most of us hope blindly to stay well.

Today most of us are aware that intentionally keeping our body well doesn't happen without any early proactive activities, thus we go to the gym, jog, eat healthily, drink more water, etc. We might even take a massage or go to SPA.

Why do we, then blindly hope it would be different in the case of our minds and brains?

Resilience and agility

Resilience and agility are vital when the ride is rough.

Resilience represents our ability to bounce back from setbacks and it's dependent on our mind health situation. When our minds are well, we can stoically endure difficulties relatively easily. A calm mind allows us to have moments of inner clarity, and this allows us to always find a way.

Agility is our ability to react quickly to changing conditions. Our agility depends on the quality of (self) leadership and governance that allow decisive and bold moves.

Resilience and agility will not insulate individuals and companies from all the possible economic downturns and financial bumps that lie ahead. However, resilient and agile people will significantly improve your team's ability to navigate those downturns and bumps and increase the probability that they will wind up at a better destination after the stormy season.

Resilience and agility allow us to identify more options than just a negative scenario.

Optionality allows course change as it is founded upon our ability to discern the important from the less important and employ our creativity to discover alternative paths forward. The ability to discern and be creative are excellent examples of practical intrapersonal skills.

Your team's optionality is underpinned also by the open-mindedness that comes from having a fit mind but can also include different background phenomenons like diversity, culture and experience. Our habits define very narrow patterns and rob us of options. You can diversify people or you can diversify how you see things.

For example, we can only think of something we know.

Thinking allows no new insights and restricts creativity. Using more thinking to improve thinking isn't a diversified approach. Using awareness to observe and inner calmness to access creativity allows one to discover different paths.

We all know the situation when there is intense thinking, but no solutions. When you give up and take a pause, mind can calm down and now you can access creativity. Then an insight appears. Yes, you need to explain your insight to others with thoughts, but the insight itself was beyond thinking.
 

Learn how your inner domain operates

Corporate wellness training needs mind health focus as our inner domains remain a mystery to us. We need proper mind health training to remove stress and burnout risk and to have a calm mind. When crises hit us hard, it becomes increasingly important to remain the calmest person in the room.

Only a calm person can find solutions. You can watch even action movies and see that the hero always knows what he/she is doing while others run mindlessly amok and scream. The usual workplace climate isn't so harsh. However, when people gossip, procrastinate and perform perfect acts of presenteeism business results drop hard.

Being present at your desk or workplace isn't often working. In today's world most of us use our minds to work, but what happens if that mind us unwell?

As a result, we see that employee engagement levels are just around 20% and only a one third is thriving in their overall wellbeing according to Gallup study from 2022. And what do you do to change such a poor situation?

3 crucial corporate wellness questions

Every leader and HR manager should ask:

1. Do we have systematic mind health training in place?
2. How many people in my team have proper intrapersonal skills to face difficult challenges and reduce their stress levels before burning out?
3. Do we train engagement-supportive intrapersonal skills like creativity, intuition and initiative?

As an HR or business leader have you ever properly trained your own mind? And we don't talk about meditating here. Meditation can be supportive. However, you can't meditate with closed eyes when things go highwire and you need to respond adequately to your customer complaint.

Intrapersonal skills are usable by a trained mind with open eyes and 24/7. Once you learn them properly and start using them you see improvement in work engagement and productivity.

Conclusion

During calm and peaceful times, it is elementary to remain calm. Being well while performing a routine and easy task remains always easy. However, when the ride gets harsh and challenging, retaining a fit mind is crucial for (personal) sustainability and success.

Systematically learning interpersonal skills allows you to use those skills in any situation. Being the calmest person in the room in really challenging situations is always rewarding.

Is your team made of calm minds or stressed minds?

What is your stress level? Find out now and then take purposeful action to improve your mind health, so that you and your team can thrive!
 

This blog post is written by Kaur Lass