In this episode Nathan is joined by the founders of Wellity Global, Simon Scott-Nelson and Sadie Restorick. These two amazing entrepreneurs are changing the way businesses are looking after their teams by creating phenomenal health and wellbeing programmes that are designed to help break the confines of work expectations and pressures whilst allowing you to feel empowered to manage your own wellbeing.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
- We’ve made some progress in breaking down stigmas and taboos around mental health in the workplace, but there’s still a long way to go. What managers can do to encourage people to open up… it’s got to be persistent patience, it does take time. If you think of it as a wall or a barrier that some people put up in relation to showing what they’re really felling, that wall has to be broken down brick by brick, you can’t come in with a sledgehammer and smash it down and expect everyone to allow themselves to be vulnerable because that’s really difficult to do.
- Wellity covers everything to do with the individual, once we can help the individual they can bring their true selves to work. But that depends on a myriad of different things that make us up as humans. What Wellity is is training and consultancy, we have about 300-400 titles of wellbeing which they can access by group seminars, webinars, e-learning facilities, downloadable resources, posters and engagements. We help to create the culture within your organisation that makes it an everyday, normalised conversation around mental health and allows them to really realise that they’re not alone with their thoughts, that everyone has these things.
- Stress hormones make us blinkered and reactive. People don’t realise how they’re feeling until they get to that breaking point. This is because of the way the stress hormones make us feel “now, now, now, do, do, do, I must fulfil these appointments, I must churn through all these different things to make that money”. It’s about teaching people how and when to take off those blinkers, and how to recognise the signs. Chronic stress affects our creativity, innovation, things that are really important in relation to work and when that starts to diminish we push ourselves harder to try and achieve. It's a slippery slope.
- People want to try to fix things straight away, but you might be coming at that from your angle, not theirs. People don’t need fixing necessarily if they’re coming to you with some sort of problem, they might want you to observe it, but they don’t want it fixed. They want you to step into their darkness and just sit there for a bit and see it through their eyes, only then will you get a feel for the emotion, the temperature, whether it’s going darker.
BEST MOMENTS
‘Managers need to go first and openly talk about their own experiences, the struggles they’re navigated and that it’s generally OK to talk openly in the workplace about your mental health and wellbeing in the same way that you would talk about having a really bad headache. We have to normalise it.’
‘Last year 89% of professionals reported suffering from burnout. It’s something that’s quite a concern across the working population at the moment.’
‘Any effort to promote, encourage and optimise employee wellbeing has to come across as genuine and authentic, it really has to be felt by those individuals that “my company really cares”, not just because mental health is all over social media and the news at the moment and is the current thing on trend. That has to be positioned really really well.’
‘Essentially, psychological safety is taking...
