The troubles employees face impact their performance
But the root causes are often much deeper than we think
1-1 sessions with employees
Organisations that don’t promote health and wellness are four times more likely to lose talent in the next 12 months. (1)
The reality is, many people find work depressing. It causes them endless angst. They are constantly exhausted trying to get by in this modern world. Add rampant institutional corruption that drags us all down, and we’re dealing with a very big problem.
The employee that comes in looking joyful and has the best job on paper, may have just cried for ten minutes in the parking lot before plastering on a smile. This can be true even if your company is amazing.
This issue is so big that people often feel powerless and hopeless in the face of it. Yet it’s the elephant in the room. Mountains of data, as well as common sense, shows that when people are in this state, their wellbeing and performance suffers.
Stress related presenteeism and absenteeism are directly costing Australian employers $10.11 billion a year. (2)
Why a lunchtime meditation class isn’t the full solution
Common wellness practices such as yoga and meditation can be fantastic, but for the average person they only provide a temporary improvement in wellbeing. They don’t solve the problem.
When someone is dealing with an intense challenge where their mind is chaotic and their stomach is in a knot, trying to meditate or do yoga to resolve it can feel like using a watering can to put out a house fire.
Plus, these practices can be met with resistance. Because even if done with good intentions, it’s asking someone to feel better without addressing the very real problem.
Most practices that I’ve come across do not help us genuinely resolve what’s happening at a root level. And if they do, it often takes a long time.
The benefits of going deeper
When we genuinely address the problem instead of trying to bypass it with meditation or another keynote speech, we get lasting transformation. This is partly because at the core of the problem are solutions and wisdom that operate at a deeper level.
A simple example of this is that if someone is overweight, the knee jerk reaction can be to eat less. But if we explore more deeply and resolve the reason for why someone is eating more than they need, their entire relationship with food changes. Now they don’t have to exhaust themselves trying to control their diet and push themselves to exercise. Instead they honour their body, they listen to the deeper wisdom of what it’s saying (which also helps them avoid future problems), and ultimately they find freedom.
The weight loss becomes a minor result in relation to these much more profound transformations.
Using a mind-body-spirit approach, we can work deeply with a person's inner world, such as thoughts, emotions, beliefs and unpleasant experiences, so that those solutions and deeper wisdom can emerge. It doesn’t require willpower or daily practice and is often a nourishing process.
When we release some stress in this way, it doesn’t come back. When we transform a subconscious belief, it often nourishes us for life. But if we try to ‘calm down’ or use some coping strategy that doesn’t get to these deeper layers, the stress and limiting perspectives often get stored within us, causing innumerable problems that often get worse over time.
Improvement in wellbeing creates an improvement in performance. The ideal situation is when the wellbeing of employees is addressed both at the individual level (such as with a mind-body-spirit approach), as well as at a company level.
Employees that are healthy, emotionally regulated, resourced, and listen to their gut instinct are immensely valuable.
Research shows that healthy employees are 3 times more productive than unhealthy employees. (2)
Benefits | Yoga | Meditation | Performance coaching | Mind-body-spirit |
|---|---|---|---|---|
General wellbeing improvement | Yes | Yes | Sometimes | Yes |
Develops physical body | Yes | No | No | No |
Quickly transforms problems at a deep level | No | No | No | Yes |
Quickly and permanently releases stress in a crisis | No | No | No | Yes |
Reliably provides solutions to problems | No | No | No | Yes |
Lasting results without consistent practice | No | No | Sometimes | Yes |
The above is based on the results typically obtained by the average person
Mind
The mind can be used to focus on the problem we want to solve. However we cannot logic our way out of the challenges we face. If someone feels like they aren’t enough, they can’t just decide to feel enough. There are deeper elements at play.
Body
When we’re freaking out about a problem, it’s not just in our heads, it’s also in our body. For example, you might have a knot in your stomach or tension in your jaw.
Much like hugging a distressed child can provide far greater comfort than words alone, working with our body can help to resolve our adult problems in a much more intelligent way.
Using methods that are far more sophisticated and comprehensive than a hug, we uncover the wisdom and intelligence in our body that we are often unaware of.
When we do this we can process extremely intense and visceral experiences very directly and uncover the deeper root causes. A bonus is that we can often do so without necessarily needing to talk. By working at this deeper level, results are often more genuine and lasting, as opposed to having an insight that we shouldn’t get mad about something, but still having the same knee jerk reaction.
Spirit
“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”
Albert Einstein.
Working with spirit / our intuition / gut instinct / deeper wisdom (or whatever term makes sense to you) allows us to more easily find solutions that are beyond our current way of thinking.
A simple way to think about spirit (substitute your preferred term here) is that it’s like having an incredibly intelligent and wise invisible friend right beside you, helping you out to solve a problem. When you don’t see a way through, they whisper a creative solution in your ear and it feels like you’ve just gotten an idea out of nowhere. Your gut tells you it’s the right thing, the fog clears, and you see a way forward.
We can generate that on demand. No machine can do this. Even better, by using a mind-body-spirit approach, we embody the wisdom. For example, if the solution is to let go of something and move on, you genuinely experience letting go of it in a way that honours your humanity instead of having the insight yet still holding on and experiencing the turmoil (whether consciously or subconsciously).
This works regardless of a person's faith. It’s simply tapping into a greater intelligence that sees the big picture, that knows the root causes and all the facets of your challenge and how to best address them.
What is so brilliant about this, is that no matter how complex or unsolvable a problem seems from our limited perspective, when we work with spirit using doable mind-body-spirit methods, we can be guided to solutions and possibilities that are beyond our thinking. This is spiritual problem solving!
Intuitive skills developed in one area can be used in all areas. An employee who is tuned into their intuition can help avoid bad business decisions even when they might look good on paper. The ripple effect of that is immeasurable.
Benefit to company
Employees become more resilient, have better focus, are better at problem solving, can create a stronger culture and are all around more effective.
Your company benefits not just from employees who’s wellbeing is improved, but from people who are genuinely, deeply transforming, which ripples into everything they do at work. Someone who can think more clearly, who is more tuned into their intuition, more empowered, resourced and less focused on just trying to hold it together will find creative solutions that no amount of “hard work” would achieve by people who are barely holding on. They are able to suggest improvements in the workplace that would benefit everyone including the company in a more intelligent way.
Benefit to employee
On a basic level, this mind-body-spirit approach allows us to directly work with problems and create transformation at a deep level. And because it’s laser focused, it can help someone in a crisis right now.
On a deeper level, evidence shows that our inner and outer worlds are interwoven, and that everything is made of energy (take a while to digest that if you’re unfamiliar with it). So when something in our external world seems impossible to change, we can create an inner transformation, which generally results in a miraculous outer transformation. There are no limits to what energy can do.
People may experience problems falling away, people who once triggered them now treat them respectfully, opportunities that would make their life better falling into their lap and more.
This is a magical and empowering experience which is strong medicine for the mundane, soul crushing experience that so many have. Yes, there are big problems in the world like corrupt institutions, but humans that can nourish their inner world, hear their intuition and deeply connect with their humanity have a deeper power, and are able to find a way through the chaos.
The methods I use are supported by varying degrees of scientific evidence, collectively there are hundreds of scientific papers demonstrating the efficacy of these kinds of methods.
Research shows that corporate wellness programs result in:
-
25.3% decrease in sick leave absenteeism
-
40.7% decrease in workers compensation costs
-
24.2% decrease in disability management costs
-
$5.81 saving for every $1 invested in employee wellbeing.(3)
Logistics
1. You offer my services to one or more of your employees. I’ve created a webpage which you can simply send them which contains all the information they will need. No further work is needed on your end. The amount of people I can work with varies over time depending on how many other people and companies I’m working with.
2. Each employee you offer this to gets to choose if it’s a good fit for them or not. People who are excited to do this work have the best results, and provide the highest return on the company's dollar. For the benefit of all involved, I exclusively work with the people who choose to opt into it.
3. I am located in Melbourne Australia, and can work remotely with people all over the world. I offer session times during and outside of business hours. Research suggests that the best results (for both employee and company) come when wellness services are part of an employee's work schedule instead of something outside of it. It's when there's a genuine intent to make changes in the workplace that supports employees.
4. I work 1-1 with them twice a month. I typically see significant transformation after 6 sessions, though this varies person to person. Over the course of this process they will begin to learn how to work on themselves so that they are not reliant on me.
They also get 2 emergency sessions per year at no extra cost. This means that if they are in the middle of a crisis, they can reach out to me and get help ASAP.
5. This costs $300 AUD per person, per month
You or the employee can cancel at any time.
Whilst I have found this work to be tremendously effective for helping people with these intense and complex challenges we face, it doesn’t make all problems magically disappear and it is not for everyone. I cannot guarantee that my services will produce a positive ROI, lower turnover rates etc, but that is what the research I have seen strongly indicates.
Research indicates that in organisations where workplace health is
managed well, financial performance increased by more than 2.5 times. (1)
We might be a fit if
-
You want to help improve your employees wellbeing and performance in a way that honours their humanity and creates genuine, lasting transformation.
-
You are open to offering employees mind-body-spirit work.
-
You are open to different perspectives and alternative ways of going about things.
-
You want a better workplace culture, and for your workplace to be more innovative, alive and inspired.
-
You're open to taking one step at a time to create a better workplace that benefits everyone including the company.
We might not be a fit if
-
You want to offer support to your employees that is more mainstream or you’re not open to alternative perspectives.
-
Your company is in favour of things like: increasing surveillance in society, restricting human rights such as freedom of speech, and having more powerful governments and establishments instead of making the world more human and free.
-
Your company is in favour of merging humans with technology / AI just because we can (eg: a chip in the brain instead of having a phone).
-
You believe in equality of outcome over equality of opportunity and other woke ideologies.
Next steps
If you want to get in contact before making a decision, you can either email me: hugo@hugomenard.com, or schedule a chat with me.
You can also find out more about me.
If you want to go right ahead simply email me at hugo@hugomenard.com, saying you would like to offer this service to one or more of your employees. I’ll send you a brief document going over the fundamentals for you or HR to sign, and a link that you can send to HR or your employees which will provide all the info they need to get started.
References
1 Right Management (2009) ‘Wellness and Productivity Management’, [online], Available: http://www.rightmanagement.com.au/assets/x/50990, [2009, October 16] Cited in HAPIA Best-Practice guidelines: workplace health in Australia.
3. The cost of workplace stress in Australia. August 2008. Medibank Private
2 Chapman, L.S. (2007) Proof Positive. An Analysis of the Cost Effectiveness of Worksite Wellness. Seattle, WA:Chapman Institute. Cited in Best-Practice guidelines: workplace health in Australia Launched 30th November 2009 Revised 29th October 2015. Workplace Health Association Australia