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Tips and stories to add value to you and your organisation

Well-Being For Beginners

30 April 2017

Yes, yes we work hard and sort the house and buy food and check emails and go to meetings and network and and and the list goes on. Let’s take it as read that life for a busy business person is busy. However, how often do we stop and take time to really assess our own well-being and think about how well our being really is?

Having a well-being week at work is a great thing to do and for those who label this kind of activity as ‘fluffy bunny time’ then I’d invite you to think again. Perhaps the arrival of a fruit tray might seem like trying to whistle in a high wind and yet even a fruit tray is a step in the right direction.

From fruit to training. From training to sharing. From sharing to making new decisions. From new decisions to greater health. This is the curve of a successful series of well-being events in our work-place, where over time people become confident that the initiative isn’t simply fashionable window dressing and is instead a hearty effort to create a genuine sense of awareness in people. Awareness often leads to long lasting change, greater productivity and a healthy bottom line.

Assuming we do care about ourselves (and if we don’t then see option B below), what can we do to increase our well-being? Here are a few options to have fun with…

C – Eat an apple. More fruit is good for us.

D – Drink more water. Drugging ourselves with caffeine to survive the day is a bad habit. We wouldn’t do it to our kids so why do we do it to ourselves?

E – Sleep more. An extra 30 minutes a day adds up to an extra 178 hours a year, or 22 more nights of rest.

F – Turn off the Wi-Fi. Removing the constant background hum of emails and social media alerts can calm us down and will enable us to fully relax over the weekend.

G – Run an event. Make the last week of every other month a well-being week and do one thing to improve our health.

A – Take a 2-hour break. If we are busy then suddenly stopping our work for a day may be impossible, but we can all find a couple of hours to sit in the sun, read a book, go for a walk, play a musical instrument, run a couple of miles, or bake a cake. Physical, or creative, activity gets rid of pent up stress and relaxes us.

B – Get support. I’m a big believer in support and don’t think we have to know all the answers in life. There are people out there who know how to help us increase our well-being and can share expertise and cheer us on if we falter.

C – Download a piano app to our smartphone and make a noise. The letters used to denote the options here form the C-Major scale. We can have a sing too if we like!

Being well can be a zero cost option. It can be about making one simple change to our working lives. It can be about us deciding to be important and putting our health before profits. The lovely ‘catch’ here is that healthy happy people tend to generate more profits anyway.

What will you do this week to be well? I’ve already moved my 2.00am bedtime to 10.00pm and wow do I feel so much better and have started to really enjoy being at my desk at 6.00am, instead of foggily falling out of bed and rushing to get into the day. We can all start to create good new habits for ourselves!

Next week: Are You A ‘Day-1’ Business?