Can presence affect your business?
Life in the 24/7 ‘rushaholic’ existence can become a little overwhelming. You get caught up racing from deadline to deadline and living for the next dopamine hit. This is the fast track to burnout and a slippery slope to poor physical and mental health, below par performance and lost productivity.
In 2023, work isn't just about showing up, it's about making a better contribution. At a cost of £15.1 billion per year to the UK economy1, presenteeism is a huge overhead to carry. The reality is, as an employer, making it easier for employees to take action with simple solutions is a no-brainer.
It’s time to tune in to support your total wellness and turn up better in business (and life).
What is tuning in?
Tuning into your mind-body connection is about being present. In other words, your thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and attitudes can influence your biological function, either positively or negatively. Your mind directly affects your body’s wellness!
Tuning into your body and your mind helps you to be present in the moment, embody being in harmony with your senses and understand why it’s so important for optimal wellness. Using a deliberate practice helps you to regulate your awareness of your thoughts, emotions and body. The effect being, if you can tune into and acknowledge your own wellness needs, you are better able to take action to remedy or resolve the issue, which helps you to turn up and perform better in your work life (and home life).
It is time to tune in to yourself, so you can turn up in your life.
Here are five lifestyle tweaks that can dramatically improve wellness, and help employees to tune in to themselves to turn up their presence in work (and life).
1- Setting boundaries - everyone needs an off switch and work life is no different. I am sure you’ve all answered calls or responded to emails on the weekend, or completed unpaid overtime in the past. If you are an entrepreneur or business owner this means even more so that you need to set some boundaries to separate your work life.
The biggest boundary- turn off your phone. You may start to break out into a cold sweat at the thought, or you may feel totally lost without having your phone with you at all times, so here is a compromise:
I highly recommend using airplane mode on your phone. It’s one of the easiest ways to disconnect whilst still being connected. Use it when you absolutely must focus on work without interruption (or distraction from doom scrolling), at mealtimes, when you are with family and friends, and at night so your sleep remains uninterrupted. By not being continually ‘on’, distracted or needing to be occupied makes you more present with what you are doing. Being present can help move your body and mind into a state of flow and ease and still the ‘busyness’ of life. This allows you to move from the left brain of logic and into the right brain of creativity, ideas and inspiration!
If you are really concerned about not being available, then you could turn on your out of office, have an automated voicemail response, or forward calls to an answering service.
2- Creating space - when you really are busy at work it is so important to create space to step away and unwind. Being on a tight schedule means actually blocking space out in your diary helps as a reminder, while also helping with accountability. If your days are crammed full, putting the space at the start or the end of the day as a non-negotiable can work well. Colour coding it in your diary and scheduling this regularly, or placing it on repeat, means that it will stand out and stop you from overbooking yourself.
Setting aside time for you to tune into yourself can be as simple as five minutes of breathwork, or taking yourself off on a week long retreat. By making more time for you, you will enjoy each moment more.
Space for you provides an interval to think, to cultivate ideas, expand your thinking and supports enhanced decision making. When you are rushing at work you become a taskmaster and can miss the bigger picture. The days of ‘heroic’ leadership are being sidelined for more transformational leadership, allowing for a greater collaborative and reflection based approach.
3 - Gratitude practice - Being thankful and actively practising gratitude is an often overlooked way to support your wellness. It brings your awareness to the things that are going well for you, which is hugely positive in satisfying a higher psychological need of ‘becoming the best you can be’.
You may often think about gratitude in your personal life, but not so much in the workplace. Being grateful at work to your colleagues, employees or employers supports a sense of belonging and helps to find meaning in your work. This supports everyone with feeling appreciated, valued, respected and empowered to reach their fullest potential.
Being grateful makes you feel more human and part of that is recognition of yourself and others. It creates a ripple effect that makes you more appreciative and happy2, which promotes enhanced staff wellbeing, morale, enthusiasm and engagement at work. This leads to a positive company culture and influences performance, productivity and staff retention, along with positive business outcomes.
It can be as simple as saying ‘thank you’ to someone. Everyone wants to feel seen and valued.
4- Breathing- Obviously you already do this, but it is something we take as a given. Taking time out to breathe well, even if only for a few minutes, can be enough to calm your mind and relax your body. You only really think about your breath when it becomes an issue, but it can be critically important in work situations.
If you have ever felt stressed out or overwhelmed at work, with adrenaline and cortisol pumping, you’ll know that making decisions is tough when you are in this highly activated state. By activating your parasympathetic nervous system, which is responsible for ‘rest and digest’ responses, you can not only slow your heart rate and reduce your blood pressure, but it also helps you to digest your food better too. Thus, offering the calm necessary to process and make measured decisions.
Calm breathing is one of the key influences you can incorporate to help you regulate your nervous system and calm your body and mind. It is something that you can access anywhere at any time to help you feel more centred, focussed and in flow. Find a quiet space where you can sit or lay comfortably, begin focussing on your breathing and close your eyes. Breathe in and out through the nose and focus on how the breath feels as it moves in and out of the nostrils. Breathe deeply and imagine drawing the air deep into your abdomen. Now slow the speed of the exhale, you can count if you like. Aim for an inhale of a 4 count and an exhale of a 6-8 count. If your mind wanders, come back to focussing on your breath. Try it for 10 breaths.
5- Body Scanning- This is a simple method of checking in with your body and shifting your attentional focus to notice the different sensations in each part of your body and being mindful of them.
Have you ever got so busy at work that you forget to pee, eat lunch or move from your desk? You leave dehydrated, with no energy and back ache. Ignoring the basic needs of your body3 leads your nervous system into a stressed sympathetic state and feeling unsafe. Definitely not conducive to optimal performance, especially if this is your daily practice.
So what is a body scan? If I asked you ‘how does your right big toe feel?’ you’re going to think about your right big toe and whether there is any pain or pressure, whether it is warm or cold, how the floor or your footwear feels against it. This is you scanning your big toe, checking in and drawing your awareness to how your toe feels.
You can complete a simple scan of the whole body by checking in and noticing how it feels, noticing any areas of tension, pain, heat, or any other sensations. Start at the top of the head and work through each area of the body all the way down to your toes.
Once you have scanned your whole body the idea is to rescan to promote a sense of calm and relaxation. Move back to the head and imagine that it feels calm, warm and relaxed. Move down through the body imagining each area feels calm, warm and relaxed. Once you get down to your toes, your whole self should feel warm, calm and relaxed. It takes around five minutes and you can do it at your desk.
How it helps in business (and life)
The business world moves pretty fast, so slowing the mind to calm the body helps create space and opportunity to be present, regulate the nervous system and provides space for decision making, creative flow and to see the calm through the chaos. Having space to take time out and breathe helps with the quality of decision making and helps to keep up with real time action in a changing economy, when fast decisions are necessary.
When you are better able to respect and protect your time with clear work boundaries you can take that much needed down time to recharge and restore your batteries. This means that once you return to work that you are firing on all cylinders.
Everyone wants to belong, so creating a positive work culture can ensure a fair, holistic and transparent workplace where employees feel involved in the business, recognised for their contributions and validated as a whole human being, not just a number.
Recent studies indicate dopamine4 (your reward hormone) may play a role in influencing how the brain evaluates whether a mental task is worth the effort. By rewarding or recognising employees' efforts is a sure fire way to motivate them to complete tasks at work. A thank you can go a long way. The brain loves rewards, so the biggest dopamine release is when you receive a reward or good news unexpectedly.
As an employer, prioritising your employees includes choosing what you can do to advocate for their wellbeing. There is lots that can be done, although it’s the individual employees that need to take action, so accessibility, creating opportunities and simplicity are key to supporting their needs and well-being.
Harnessing the power of presence is one of the gamechangers for improving wellness for work (and life).
What one thing can you implement today that will support your staff in slowing down and relaxing?
References
2https://www.centreformentalhealth.org.uk/sites/default/files/2018-09/managing_presenteeism.pdf
3https://www.simplypsychology.org/maslow.html
4https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9072633/
Author Bio
Tracy Richardson is a Therapist, Wellness Alchemist® and Educator at Serendipity Wellness®, where she helps employers and entrepreneurs to support physical, mental and spiritual wellness with actionable solutions that simultaneously enhance health, performance & business life. “Wellness makes you a Well-being’.
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