work life balance

Stress levels are on the up.

Recent surveys show that 54% of Brits have rising stress levels, and that 8 in 10 US workers are feeling under increasing pressure at work. Many of us, it seems, are so consumed by what we’re doing that it’s affecting our health and happiness.

Not surprising, then, that talk about wellbeing is also in vogue. At a macro level ill health and less than great productivity affects the economy at a time when it’s still getting back to pre-recession performance.

And while all the high-level, organization level stuff is interesting to me, I’m more interested here in what you, as an individual leader, entrepreneur or creative can do to support your own personal wellbeing. Because, the way we look at it, it’s fundamental to your ability to innovate, compete and perform at your best out there in the world.

If you don’t nurture it, I’d argue, you’re under-performing. Indeed you’re doing yourself a huge disservice.

Wellbeing

But what is wellbeing? So, the Oxford Dictionary puts it this way:

The state of being comfortable, healthy, or happy.

I’d go a little further than that.

Way I see it, wellbeing is a measure of how you feel about your life. It’s a holistic thing that has deep roots in all areas of your physical, mental, emotional and spiritual health.

If you Google the word “Wellbeing”, you’ll come up with about 52 million results. Look at a lot of the key articles and they’ll talk to you about the tools you can use to help you in your quest for wellness. Of course, so many of us are so keen to improve our wellbeing that we’ll try all kinds of things. A lot of them are not sustainable. Here’s why:

So much of the advice is written on the assumption that wellbeing as a place to achieve; something you can work towards if only you follow this or that anti-stress tactic.

But what if that was wrong?

What if wellbeing is something we already have? A place to come from. Our natural preset position. A state you can nurture and enhance.

Regardless of your current health or happiness, just notice how it feels to consider that you’re already okay. That there’s nothing you need to do or to fix in order to be well. Take the pressure off yourself to try to be well, and just be well already!

That framing kind of changes everything.

Nurturing Wellbeing

From that place, then, we believe there are 4 ways in which you can enable and support your wellbeing. They are:

Develop a few core practices that enable wellness. These could be as simple as limiting the amount of coffee or alcohol you drink each day; observing routine bedtime and waking up time; drinking a couple of litres of water a day; avoiding sugar.
Develop your consciousness about the quality of your thinking. Thought, as we’ll find out, is one of the fundamental principles of life. It’s a never-ending stream that flows through our brains. That’s a given and, at core, it’s not the problem. The problem is then what we think about our thinking, and the affect that has on us at a feeling level.
Create some basic habits and rituals to keep your wellbeing a priority for you. This moves wellbeing-supportive behaviors from the realm of chore, to the realm of routine and therefore makes them things you do automatically.
Reframe what it means to you to be successful. Many professionals have big ambitions. No harm it that. But sometimes we attach conditions to our ambitions that make these once laudable goals toxic and therefore stressful to achieve.

If there’s one of these that weighs more heavily than the others, it’s the point about thinking. We’ll be digging into this, and saying why in the weeks to come. So make sure you don’t miss the subsequent articles by getting your name on our VIP email list here!

Photo attribution: Copyright: / 123RF Stock Photo

Look, I know.

I’ve been there.

Telling myself that I want to quit. Do my own thing. Get more balance.

While still sitting in a job that feels like family, no matter how dysfunctional, and that puts money in my bank account every month.

It can be tough to believe that not only does the grass look greener on the other side, but also that you can create it that way.

The number of people going self-employed is rising, both in the US and in the UK.

Here are 5 signs that you’re not going to be one of them any time soon:

1. You’re all talk, no action

Go on holiday, have a night out with mates, drink yourself to the bottom of another bottle of wine and you’ll tell anyone away from the office who will listen how you really want to pack in your job and do something else.

You may well have an idea.

Maybe some fabulous new product offering. Or a way to sell your services on a more freelance basis. Or to work in more of a helping space.

You talk of how you’d love it if only you could do something with your life that was more satisfying and fulfilling. And you mean it. It lights you up. Sets you aflame.

But you never do anything about it. You just talk.

And, since at the end of the day, it’s only ever action that gets results, chances are, if this is you, you’re not going to be realizing your dream any time soon.

2. Action equals moving jobs

Okay, so maybe you are doing something, imagining it’s furthering your self-employed dream, but that “something” means doing another job.

Either within your firm, or beyond it.

How you’re justifying it to yourself is to say that THIS one will give you the skills or resources or contacts that are going to be critical for when you make the leap.

Things that may indeed be long term beneficial.

The real warning sign is when you allow yourself to get just as embroiled in a different kind of overwhelm as you were in your old gig, and are pretty much back to square one.

3. Your key motivation is escape

Another danger sign is that, when anyone asks you about your business dream and what it entails, it doesn’t take you too long before you come back to bitching about what it is you’re doing just now. Why it’s so awful. Why all you want to do is escape it.

Your dream is just that. A dream.

It’s the white to your current black. But it’s undefined and very idealized.

And so long as you keep thinking only of escaping, and rarely in a concrete way of the challenge of creating your own thing, your dream will never be firmed up enough, or grounded in enough reality, for you to bring it ever to life.

4. You’re doing nothing to free yourself up

There are two ways I see this playing out, and both are big warning signs.

First, there’s the overwhelm monster.

Most of the people I work with these days have full schedules. And that’s a polite way of describing it. Many talk of being completely overworked.

So much so that burn out is never very far away.

Meaning that, if you ever want to line up some kind of self-employment while you’re still working, you’ve first of all got to get to grips, not just with the amount of work coming in your direction, but the time and headspace you give to it.

If it’s always easier to roll with what comes, you’ll never be free enough, or clear enough to hatch plans your alternative ideas.

Then, of course, there’s money.

If you really want to do your own thing, you have to have thought through what that means financially. How you’re going to fund your new venture. Where the money is going to come from in self-employed land.

It’s also critical that you have a grip on your personal finances. That you’re paying down any debt that you have and spending within your means.

Keeping your finances in a state of disorder is one of the surest ways to never allow your self-employed dream to come true.

5. You’re still caring too much about what other people think

People will have their opinions about you.

One of the things that’s holding you back is always needing to be seen to be perfect in the eyes of the people you’re around. That’s one of the biggest challenges as you actively disengage in order to create your own thing.

If it’s still important to you to get the top performance rating in your existing firm, and for everyone to rave about you, you’re focus is off, and you’ll find it very tough to have the kind of discernment you need to go solo.

The Real Issue?

The obvious advice for me to give you is to beef up your confidence, make a plan, get into action, sort your money, kill the overwhelm and give less of a shit.

All of these will go a long way to help.

But, I also want to leave you with an off-the-wall question, and a thought:

What if these things weren’t the real issue? And…

If they weren’t the real issue, what would be?

What if they were symptoms masquerading as the real problem? The real one being of your inner happiness?

How happy do you think you deserve to be?

Where do you think happiness comes from?

What would you do; what would you choose if your happiness was never in any doubt?

Wellbeing: What Is It and Why Should You Care?