How wellness affects our professional lives.
By Pete Mercer
Everyone hits a point in their career where they feel stagnant. This can be the result of a number of factors, but the solution is often the same: personal wellness. Our wellness is a significant contributing factor to how we perceive and inhabit our daily lives. In most of the modern professional settings, we can find ways to either improve our outlook or surroundings. All it takes is a fresh perspective on the obstacles you are facing and a game plan to overcome them.
Repertoire Magazine recently sat down with Eileen O’Grady to discuss her idea of intentional change. O’Grady is a nurse practitioner and life coach, who helps people disrupt their own self-defeating behavior. In both the clinical and professional setting, she uses the idea of “intentional change” to help people find healthy growth paths to improve their lives.
The basics of intentional change
O’Grady’s concept of intentional change is just about as straightforward as it sounds. It’s the idea that we can identify something that needs to change in our lives and take the active steps required to intentionally make that change. This concept is accessible to anyone who is willing to look inward and find ways they can improve themselves.
“People will come to me and say, ‘I’m overweight.’ And I’ll ask why. They’ll just say, ‘Well, I eat too much.’ And that’s often not the situation. It’s one or two very specific behaviors,” O’Grady explained. “Intentional change is this idea that each human being could have their own growth edge. Every problem has a solution, even if it means accepting the problem. That’s an intentional change.”
That intentionality is perhaps the most challenging part – it requires action that might be uncomfortable, especially if we are surrounded by things that will cause us to chase certain behaviors or habits. O’Grady said, “In order to be healthy and well in this society, we have to be super intentional. Just going out in the world, there are so many toxins that we get exposed to.”
O’Grady argues that we are heavily influenced by what we surround ourselves with, which can make any intentional change much harder. Essentially, the very thing that might be holding us back from our greatest potential is our surrounding environment.
Coaching the environment
Because of the highly suggestive nature of people, it’s easy to get swept up in old habits. This is why O’Grady and her team work on coaching people and their environment at the same time.
She said, “When we’re coaching people, we often will coach the environment. Anyone that is trying to stop drinking or smoking, they often have to change their friends because there’s so much contagion with those behaviors. We all have that one friend that we get into trouble with when we go out. I don’t think we appreciate the contagion effect of these social behaviors.”
The process of changing our environment can be as in-depth and as difficult as we make it. We have to highlight the things around us that trigger certain behaviors and habits and remove them. For example, if someone wants to stop drinking, they might need to avoid bars or restaurants that serve alcohol.
“It’s as simple as having some sort of sanctuary effect in your home. You don’t want to walk into your home and feel a cortisol hit because there’s clutter everywhere. Cleaning up our environment has a huge effect on our behavior,” O’Grady said.
The same is true for our workspaces. We spend most of our time in our workspace during the week, whether it’s a home office or an office building. When we let things like clutter and chaos creep into our working environments, it can create obstacles for productivity and unnecessary levels of stress that will interfere with our workflows.
Peace in the workplace is crucial to productivity. O’Grady said, “I think it’s really helpful to have regular meetings to talk about team norms and things like clutter in the break room. What can we do to have more peace in our workplace? We need open, candid conversations that address the tough issues to ensure that we have psychological safety in the workplace.”
Improving wellness in the workplace
The reason that our personal wellness impacts how we perform in the workplace is that all of our systems are interconnected. If we aren’t getting enough sleep or are otherwise ignoring some sort of crucial function, it can throw everything else off balance.
O’Grady argued that a lack of something as important as sleep often leaves us with short fuses, causes bad interactions with our coworkers, and significantly affects productivity. She said, “We have some pretty clear evidence that even if you spend a few minutes a day in meditation or prayer, we can change our brain and become less reactive to our environment. Who doesn’t want to sign up for that?”
For business leaders, it’s especially important to lead a life that includes habits that improve our mental and physical health. Without a model for healthy habits and behavior for your organization, it’s hard to expect that there’s any recipe for success for your employees. O’Grady said, “We really can’t lead other people unless we’re becoming the CEO of our own lives.”
Becoming the CEO of your own life
The idea of “becoming the CEO of your own life” means that we need to take back control from our surroundings and our bad habits, whether we are struggling with mental or physical wellness.
When we become the CEO of our lives, we can better regulate ourselves and our emotional lives. We need to come into work rested, fed, and watered: basic, bedrock behaviors that will help us to thrive in what can be a stressful setting.
This is especially true for people who work in high stress jobs like healthcare. It’s no secret that healthcare professionals have been put through one of the most challenging periods in recent history with the COVID-19 pandemic. There are countless (and continuous) stories of healthcare professionals who have hit a wall after experiencing high levels of stress and burnout. O’Grady said, “I really believe that having a high degree of well-being in ourselves and cultivating and promoting is a core leadership tenant. What we see, at least in the healthcare sector where I’m working, is that people can’t do this really hard job unless they’re really well resourced.”
That’s a universal truth for anyone working in a stressful industry or a toxic organization. Even if you aren’t in a leadership position to make changes within your organization, you can still make yourself the CEO of your own life. All it requires is making the right decisions for what you want and what you need to be productive in personal and professional settings.