Is there really a place for wellness in the workplace?

This unfamiliar rate of change can for some, subtly increase underlying levels of stress, while for others it may trigger their tipping point of where it impacts their ability to perform.

Stress due to the rate of change is now being layered onto an experience of a pandemic of which the full impact on individuals and performance has not fully yet been realised.

Anyone who has managed and led teams through deadlines and change will understand that consistent transparent communication and improving each individual’s capability generally tends to boost team morale and satisfaction.

Without clear communication and goals, confusion and stress ensue. So when challenging situations are navigated in the right way, the satisfaction of growth diminishes the focus on stress, when they are not, stress impacts wellness.

What impacts a human’s ability to handle stress and their stress narrative?

It comes back to two simple elements, biology and nurture. Biology, humans are designed with a primary need for safety which their nervous system largely governs.

Nurture, exposure to adversity in developmental years allows you to understand what is safe and what is not safe activates a stress response.

Too much or too little adversity can result in behaviour that is reactive, demanding of excessive attention and abrupt or the exact opposite of being quiet, nervous to speak up and a need to avoid conflict and attention.

This is why you need to have a basic understanding of Adverse Childhood Experiences and form your own opinion on how they are impacting the performance of your organisation.

If you have ever wondered why a group of employees could go on the same training course and not all come out with consistent learning, their ACE scores could be a large determining factor.

Briefly, the ACE questionnaire was developed in the West. 70 percent of people in the West have an ACE of 1 or more.

The questionnaire is a measure of trauma, and also neglects some key external influences such as war and poverty which many in this region are directly or indirectly impacted by.

What is important to understand about ACE scores is that they impact an individual’s need for safety and their response to authority. If they do not feel safe in the team dynamic, fearing their peers or managers, stress will be present and will impact performance.

While Coaching and Training do upskill and improve performance for those that the organisation invests in.

The rest of the organisation now is being offered Wellness initiatives as an incentive to come back to the workplace.

Most of the current narratives of Wellness, offer the reduction of stress using mindfulness and health education as the solution.

And some of your organisation will apply this and be able to calm down and refocus, for anyone who has more than 1 ACE score, and has been in a stress response for a prolonged period of time, this does little to provide relief.

As a leader, reflect now with the lens of ACE on the performance of individuals and teams in your organisation.

Use your instincts and logic to assess whether coaching, with its origins in performance sports, typically of high potential individuals identified at a young age (with a moldable mind and nervous system).

Are the techniques used really effective for the majority of your team?

You may argue that the growing trend of neuroscience-based Coaching, where neuroscience is the study of the nervous system, will provide improved results by accessing a state of flow for peak performance.

When you watch top athletes, how often are they able to move from non-flow to flow states in high pressure situations? And how much coaching and practice have they had?

Flow, a concept of peak performance, which has been around for a while by Csikszentmihalyi, is a state of relaxation where there is less activity in the prefrontal cortex, which most of us have highly active throughout the day.

Now, reflect on the collective everyday state of your organisation when a pandemic, living in a foreign country and a rapid change in technology impact it, how much flow is there?

Stress often activates feelings of frustration, overwhelm and anger, which typically suppress underlying elements of sadness, disconnection and helplessness (all originate in childhood).

When you address and release these, what you do is move out of victimhood and stress into action which is on the path to being resourceful which for most would improve their levels of satisfaction.

How to do this? When Neuroscientists and Psychiatrists at *Stanford start talking about the effectiveness of hypnosis and mindsets, would you take this as a sign to investigate how to incorporate this in the workplace?

Personally now, reflecting on years of leading teams, working in functional and dysfunctional environments, and now contrasting that to working with individuals and groups using hypnosis, nlp and mindsets, what is clear to me is that stress activating trauma impacts performance and wellness in both the workplace and life.

As the saying goes, everyone has baggage. You can climb up the mountain with or without it.

Coaching will get you moving in the direction and provide assistance in navigating obstacles, training can teach you how to navigate technical areas, however carrying excess baggage will wear you down and impact your performance.

Are you ready to lead your team up the mountain without the baggage?