The One Thing Your Business Must Do to Survive the Coming Times

The one thing your business must do to survive the coming times?  

Increase your wellness budget.

Employee engagement is low.  Stress is epidemic.  Absenteeism, turnover, and health care costs are killing your company.  So what can you do?  Nurture healthier employees. 

Increase your wellness budget and shake things up.  Re-think wellness.  If you haven't noticed, what you're doing isn't working.  External incentives like cash bonuses work temporarily, but do they sustain change?  Do they help build a healthy, engaged workforce?  No.  Wellness has changed.  You have to think beyond weight loss initiatives and smoking cessation. 

Better health begins with the individual and happens from the inside out.  The hot trends in wellness are meditation and mindfulness.  Why?  Because these practices breed ownership.  They involve inside work, introspection, brain re-training, internal balance and personal empowerment.  In the workplace, this translates to more mental clarity, better productivity, conflict resolution, increased self awareness, creativity, compassion, elevated emotional intelligence, and innovation.

Employees focused on their own mental, emotional and physical well being will make better choices for their own health, create work-life balance, and thrive professionally.  

Boom!  A bottom line game changer. 

Parakeet Parable

Recently I was working with a Los Angeles client via FaceTime and I noticed she kept looking to her left.  After a few times, curiosity got the best of me and I asked what she was looking at.  She told me there were parakeets outside her window.  She went on to explain that a local pet store had burned down, some parakeets escaped, and now they live in the trees in her neighborhood.



I think this is a great story and it offers a lesson for us humans.  Please indulge me.  I'm going to provide the parable from the perspective of the parakeets:

 

So we lived in a cage in a pet store, and we thought the pet store was the whole world. A big fire came and burned down the walls of the pet store.  Everything was chaotic and so stressful.  We were very afraid.  We thought the world was ending.  But we were brave and we flew away.

 

Imagine our surprise to learn there was an even bigger world beyond the chaos - an amazing, beautiful world we never knew existed.  Now that bigger world is our home.  We are free.  We live in trees and fly around and sing all day.  We are happier than we ever imagined possible.  Every day we marvel at the beauty and freedom of this new world, and we realize the chaos was a gift.

 

Lesson:  If their home hadn't burned down, the parakeets would have never known this exhilarating happiness.  Initially, it seemed like the end of the world.  Ultimately, it was a ticket to freedom.
 

When life is stressful, frightening and chaotic, remember the parakeets.   

Breathe, meditate and be brave.  Trust me, there is a gift in the chaos.

Top 5 Reasons You Should Meditate at Work

This week's blog is short and sweet.  Why should you meditate?  Because super successful people do it. 5.  Oprah is a meditator. Annd, all of Oprah's employees are granted time in their workday to meditate.   4.  It might make you a billionaire.   Ray Dalio, billionaire hedge fund guy, credits meditation for his success. 3.  Pop divas do it. Katy Perry says meditation changed her life. 2.  It's endorsed by the great and powerful Dr. Oz. When the daytime god of all things healthy says to do something, you do it. 1.  It may create moguls. Russell Simmons, hip hop uber-entrepreneur, worth a reputed $500 million is quoted as saying, "I don't do $h!# before meditating." Boom.  There you have it.