Hayden: [00:00:00]
Hello and welcome to my second solo podcast, Leadership and Wellbeing by Hayden Fricke. Today I'm going to talk to you about why is wellbeing important for leaders and I'm also going to share with you actually the detail of exactly what it is. Starting point though, is the understanding that you're not going to be any help to others if you can't help yourself.
I was once coaching a CEO for a large financial services company. He had only been in the role for three weeks when he shared with me that he had just separated from his wife. It was extremely traumatic for him. They had two young children, and many other challenges. And yet he had to turn up and play a major role in running a large company in his first CEO gig.
How could he take care of himself first given this situation? It [00:01:00] was incredibly difficult to do that and successfully lead the organization. If he couldn't manage his personal life, he was highly unlikely to be successful as a CEO of this company. Another CEO I was coaching, after about three coaching sessions, shared with me that his wife said, my wife thinks I'm lying to you.
I said, what do you mean by that? He went on to explain that she said that she thought that he was suffering from depression. And he wasn't telling me this, he wasn't being honest with me about this. And he was also running a very large insurance company. Can you imagine trying to run a successful company, drive high performance and show up positively day when you're possibly suffering from depression?
After a long conversation with this, we agreed that he wasn't suffering from clinical depression. However, he [00:02:00] was certainly deeply unhappy. And so we worked on this to help him move from one state, to another state towards thriving and flourishing. I've got one more story for you. Another CEO revealed to me that she was not sleeping very well.
In fact, she hadn't slept well for about three weeks. She was getting about three hours sleep each night and was waking up at about 2 or 3am and not able to get back to sleep. This had been going on for a long time. The definition of insomnia is actually somebody who's struggling to sleep. Either get to sleep, uh, stay asleep or waking up too early for more than three weeks in a row.
And the research around this shows that this is similar to somebody who's over 0. 05 percent alcohol content. This significantly impacts somebody's cognitive performance and ability to make decisions. So, of course, with this situation, I paused the performance and leadership aspect of our coaching and spent some time on [00:03:00] helping my coach eat a fine ways to sleep better and longer.
So, once we achieved that, we focused back on the leadership and performance aspects of our coaching. These are three examples that highlight the analogy that I like to use, which is the announcement on an aeroplane. First, put on your own mask before helping other people put on theirs. these are examples from, uh, the work that I've done of how crucial that actually is for leaders.
There are many other aspects of leaders performance that are impacted by physical and or mental well being factors. Diet, for example. We know that, for example, there was a study at Deakin University by Dr. Felice Jacker that showed that there is a confirmed relationship between the quality of people's diets and their risk of depression and anxiety.
There's also a positive correlation between diet and cognitive capacity. These factors can either inhibit or enhance performance. Other aspects, [00:04:00] include alcohol. So the topic of alcohol is incredibly complex, particularly in a Western society where there's a high social desirability to have a drink with friends.
However, if we put the social benefits of drinking aside for a moment, drinking more than the standard guidelines, which is roughly 10 drinks per week, It can lead to diabetes, weight gain, brain damage or heart disease or heart issues. It can also lead to social problems if not controlled. Each of these is clearly impacting on the leader's performance.
Now I need to point out that and acknowledge that in cultures where alcohol is the norm, having a drink with friends can enhance your social well being, as long as it's controlled somewhat. It's a way of connecting with others and creating a sense of belonging, which is crucial to social well being, which we'll hear a bit more about later on.
The connection between exercise and performance is also very clear. [00:05:00] The guidelines for the right amount of exercise vary globally, but some guidelines suggest that 30 minutes a day of mild to moderate activity is what you need to do. And there's a strong link in the research between the mind and the body.
A person who's fit is more likely to have a positive mind, which links directly to performance. The above points are all about physical wellbeing. So what about mental and emotional wellbeing? So, mental or psychological well being includes being satisfied with one's own life, having a good relationship with others, and being good at managing the responsibilities of daily life and even liking yourself.
That's mental or psychological well being. What about emotional well being? Well, that includes things like happiness. The ability to produce positive emotions, not just the absence of negative ones. It's about moods and feelings and adapting when confronting with challenges. [00:06:00] It's also about resilience.
There's a huge amount of research. that connects both mental and emotional wellbeing to better performance. For example, recently in April, 2023, Flair conducted analysis of over 1, 500 working Australians, and they found a significant positive correlation between employee mental health and wellbeing and their overall performance and productivity.
This, new research aligns to years of research demonstrating that connection between performance and wellbeing. For example, another study in China, Lu and Yu and Shan studied 239 firms in China and they found that employee health and wellbeing was positively related to job performance.
So there's a lot of research. I've just pulled out a few to demonstrate this connection. If we link this back to leaders, leaders have to be able to cope with a wide [00:07:00] variety of stressors. They may have back-to-back meetings, they may feel overwhelmed with the amount of activity and complexity they need to manage, and they may not feel they can find time to relax and recover from stress.
If they can't do that and take care of themselves, it's likely to lead to burnout. Now, Professor Michael Leiter, who's a good friend and colleague of mine, has conducted over 25 years of research into burnout. He explains that when people feel, burnt out, they feel exhausted. Their energy is depleted.
There's feelings of negativity and cynicism and ultimately reduced professional efficacy. So we need to ensure that leaders don't burn out and they take care of their wellbeing so that they can also manage the wellbeing of others and manage the performance of the business they lead. So, what do you do to manage your wellbeing?
Now, I don't think anyone would be surprised by some of the [00:08:00] points I've made so far. The research is pretty clear. However, many people still fail to take care of themselves. So, why is that? Us psychologists call it the knowing doing gap. That is, we know we should take care of our wellbeing, but we don't.
Just because we know something is true, doesn't mean we do it. This is all about habits. Our daily habits and bad habits are just as easy to develop as good habits. And we know that changing our habits is extremely hard. There are many barriers to changing our habits. Sometimes these barriers are external to ourselves, such as the social norms of the society or community we live in.
Or it could be internal to ourselves, such as our own mental and emotional capacity to change. Including the tools we've learnt over our lifetime. I'm going to talk to these elements in future podcasts, but the starting point on changing yourself is to believe that well being is critically important [00:09:00] in our lives, and as leaders, we must want intrinsically to make positive changes, because we truly believe in the crucial nature of well being in our lives.
Once we believe in this, and we have the motivation, only then can we begin. Sometimes we note that our well being dips because of things outside of our control. So I mentioned the example of the CEO where only three weeks into the job, he told me he'd separated from his wife. He had many challenges such as where to live, uh, who had the children, all sorts of challenges whilst he was trying to make his mark as the CEO.
We worked through these challenges together and I was amazed and I was also inspired at how good he was able to manage. He did a number of things, such as coming and getting some support from me. He had a counsellor. He found a way to cope with the personal challenges and perform as a leader. The [00:10:00] key point is that life will continue to happen on the home front and sometimes personal challenges happen at the worst time in your career, but leaders need to Take the necessary time to take care of themselves so that they can continue to perform well and take care of others as well.
So I've spent some time now explaining why mental health and well being is important. We probably should pause for a moment and dive deeply into what is health and well being to understand it a little more deeply. Health and well being actually means different things to different people. I was fortunate enough to be able to interview some amazing human beings as part of writing my book.
One of those was Cadel Evans. He was a Tour de France winner, as many would know, and, probably one of Australia's greatest ever road cyclist. He said, it's all about a balance of physical [00:11:00] and psychological well being that leads to long term happiness. So that was Cadel's definition. I also interviewed Sam Gash, who is best known as the only woman in the planet to have run four ultra marathons in four of the hottest deserts in the world.
She thought that there were six elements to well being. Food, sleep, hydration, green space, interestingly, exercise and quality relationships. She said to me, if I don't get these things, I really feel it. So, what does the research show us? It shows us the definition of wellbeing is complex. I like the definition that's provided by Dodge, Daly, Heighton and Sanders 2012, which I'll share with you now.
And they say that wellbeing is a delicate balance of an individual's social, emotional, psychological, and physical assets, their resources, and the liabilities or [00:12:00] challenges that they face in life. And they say that when individuals have more challenges... Then resources their well being dips. So that shows that well being is not static, but changes with life events.
Another definition that I like is that it includes mental, emotional, social, and physical well being. So those four elements I'm going to talk about as we go through this. Probably important to share information on a really important person in this area who's Martin Seligman. He wrote a book in 2011. called Flourish and it explains the PERMA model of wellbeing and that includes positive emotions, engagement, relationships, meaning and accomplishment.
So, it's really important that we have, uh, go back through those, and that's a model that's used a lot today in the wellbeing and positive psychology area. So, wellbeing includes a feeling of, of positive emotions like joy and [00:13:00] happiness, et cetera. Engagement and flow in what you're actually doing, being totally in the moment, in the flow and being engaged in what you're doing.
It also includes having some positive relationships with others, the community connectedness and belonging to others. Uh, another one that's in a lot of the research now is meaning and purpose, having a meaning and purpose in what you do and, and understanding your why, as Sinek would say. And interesting last element of his model is accomplishments, that it's about a sense of accomplishments in your life, no matter what those things are.
These definitions show that wellbeing is actually a really broad concept and it's a changing concept and often people misunderstand what it is or have a narrow view of what wellbeing actually is. They often think of it, wellness from a, an illness perspective and sadly it's something that my profession has, done really badly over, over the years.
because clinical psychologists have focused on,[00:14:00] work with people with mental illness, so ill health. It's only really been the last 10, 15, maybe 20 years that there's been an increase focused on normal people and how we can help the normal population to learn to thrive and flourish rather than assuming you're either mentally ill or you're fine.
Now I'd like to start by breaking each of these things down a little bit and talking about physical health and well being first. So, even in the concept of physical health and wellbeing, it's often misunderstood because it's limited to say diet and exercise, so the concept should be expanded to include say diet, exercise, hydration, sleep, rest, it's much broader than just diet and exercise.
So good physical health is actually the balance of all these key elements. The fascinating thing from my perspective is that Even if we focus on one of those could lead to a weakness in the other. So let's look at each of these elements. So diet is [00:15:00] definitely part of it. If we focus though on having too much of a perfect diet, it's not sustainable for your entire life.
So that's what I'm interested in. How do you eat in a way that is sustainable for your entire life? So there's a few simple things that impact your physical health. The most important small thing you can do, if you live in a Western culture, is to reduce or eliminate sugar from your diet. Sadly, sugar is included in significant amounts of processed foods for years, and often now many people don't even notice this.
It's the added sugar that we don't see that's extremely dangerous for our health. And so for me, one of the things that you can do if you take not only diet, but behavioural psychology into account, is that actually, what's the smallest thing we can do to have the biggest difference to our diet, and it's to reduce the added sugar.
In addition to this, when I think about [00:16:00] alcohol, alcohol's got a lot of sugar in it, and that's a part of Western culture as well. So, eliminating alcohol from your life may be too difficult in a Western context, so minimizing the negative impacts on your physical health may be the best option.
Particularly, uh, that's true when social well being is important and connection to other people. And some may say that it's equally important to your physical health. So balancing out your social well being needs and the need to have alcohol within a context where it's socially normal to drink alcohol.
It's about balancing that versus your physical health that's important. Exercise is a huge topic and I'm not going to go into it in, any detail at all. The only point I'd like to say about exercise is that this is not about running a marathon or being a super athlete. Exercise is about building habits of doing something physical on a daily basis, building movement and physical activity [00:17:00] into your daily routines.
So, it's about incidental exercise, it's about, moving more than we often do. We often sit down too much, and so it's about building in mild to moderate physical activity every day, and that's a key, I think, to health from a physical exercise perspective. Something that's not spoken about very often is hydration.
We don't tend to talk about this when we talk about health, but it's a crucial aspect. Water keeps every system in the body functioning properly. The human body can last weeks without food, but only days without water. How about I say that again? The human body can last weeks without food, but only days without water.
The body's made up of 50 75 percent of water and forms the basis of our blood, digestive juices, urine, perspiration, etc. Harvard Medical School, in 2020 noted that water [00:18:00] helps to aid digestion, regulates the body temperature through sweating, moisturises the skin, prevents constipation, and many other aspects of our daily bodily function.
If you don't drink enough water each day, you actually risk becoming dehydrated. So how much water should you drink per day? For generally healthy adults, most people need about eight to ten cups of water per day. However, that'll vary. For example, if you lose water through sweat when you're exercising, then you'll need to drink more water.
Similarly, if you're outside on a hot day, you need to drink more as well. So eight to ten cups of water per day on average, but there are other factors that need to be taken into account. Talking about drinking, I'm going to have My herbal tea for a moment,
which is also another drink that you can have to help you keep hydrated, which is really important because sometimes you think about what [00:19:00] to, um, drink. You need other good options as well. So milk is 90 percent water and tea is an important source of fluid. You need to be mindful how a typical black tea has caffeine in it and is a diuretic.
So herbal teas are a healthier alternative. As well as that, you can be a bit creative to drink other things other than water. You can add lemon and lime to your water for a bit more flavour. Um, you can keep a bottle of water handy on your desk. You can drink water when you eat. Or even add ice cubes, made from fresh fruit to a glass of water.
I think finding a way to have a variety of drinks, is important to making this a really good habit. What about sleep? If you don't sleep well, your self discipline and resilience will be lower, and this may be leading to some poor health choices. Therefore, learning to sleep well is really crucial to long term health.[00:20:00]
At one time, any one time in Australia, roughly 2 million Australians suffer from insomnia, which is actually defined as either struggling to get to sleep, as I said earlier, staying to sleep, or waking up too early and not getting back to sleep. So, sleep can have similar negative effects on performance, such as driving a car, similar to the impact of being over 0.
05 alcohol content, so lack of good quality sleep can impact the quality of life, concentration, decision making, and many other areas of life. So how much sleep is enough? Research shows that on average, seven hours of sleep for adults is ideal for optimal health. Usually, it does vary for individuals, though.
It's not just about how many hours of sleep you get, though. It's also about the quality of your sleep. In particular, we need to get deep sleep, which is known as Stage 3 or 4 sleep. This is where we get the deepest rest [00:21:00] and recovery. The good news is there's some very practical and simple tips and tools that you can use to help you learn to sleep well consistently.
if you're not a good sleeper. First thing is to have good sleep hygiene during the day and then again in the evening. During the day, getting some activity and exercise into your routine will help you to sleep well at night. It's really advisable not to exercise later in the evening at eight or nine p.
m. because your body takes time to wind down. Your endorphins may be flowing at this stage, and it will give you a feeling of excitement and energy, which is not very helpful to winding down and slowing down and moving towards sleep. Good hygiene, uh, and sleep hygiene is, crucial in the evening. Eating after 8pm or thereabouts is not advisable.
So trying to eat earlier in the evening, your body needs to work hard, then if it does to digest the food. And if you eat too close to bedtime, it's [00:22:00] another factor that keeps you awake in the evenings. Drinking coffee or tea. With caffeine in it in the evening is not helpful to your sleep habits as well And in fact, you should be avoiding drinking any drinks with caffeine from around midday Because caffeine locks into cells and can stay there for up to 12 hours A lot of people don't understand that.
I'm going to say that one more time for your benefit. That, uh, caffeine can stay in your cells for up to 12 hours. So you should ideally stop drinking coffee or caffeine, after about midday. One of the biggest issues in recent years in relation to sleep is actually the use of technology. Using email or working from home on your computer late at night before you go to bed is particularly a poor habit.
These devices are mentally and physically stimulating. So if you need to work or respond to emails, you need to learn to switch off at night time. And so you need to try to make sure that you've got at least an hour or so before [00:23:00] bed where your brain is switched off. Also the, the light from iPads and phones suppresses melatonin.
So it's important to, uh, understand that because melatonin is a sleep inducing hormone. Final issue relating to the use of technology close to bedtime is that when we use our devices in bed, we create a learned association as bed being a place of study or work and not a place for sleeping. That creates a cycle of difficulty learning to fall asleep because we use our devices past the time of bed and that inhibits our sleep and it goes around again.
Another huge issue that makes sleeping challenging for some people is that our brains struggle to stop thinking. We've got too many thoughts running around in our heads. In fact, I think this is one of the most challenging parts of sleep. We're often thinking about the past, or planning something for the future, or [00:24:00] ruminating about problems.
and we're thinking about tomorrow, or potentially worrying about the list of things that we have to do. It's really important to develop a routine in the last hour or so before you go to bed that helps you stop thinking about the past or listing the things to do tomorrow. This may include listening to quiet or relaxing music, doing some, some kind of relaxation techniques or reading for 30 minutes or so, simply maybe practicing mindfulness.
This period of relaxation should be followed by a slow routine of getting ready for bed. including all the necessary steps around cleaning your teeth and putting your pyjamas on, et cetera, and doing this slowly and mindfully. The final tip about getting sleep relates to the time when you transition from being awake to falling asleep.
You know, what do you do when you turn the lights off and begin that process of actually falling asleep? It's very difficult, in fact, if not impossible to tell ourselves [00:25:00] not to think of something in particular and it's easier to give our mind some kind of instruction. I often think of an example I was taught at university, which is if you say to yourself stop thinking of pink elephants, stop thinking of pink elephants, stop thinking of pink elephants, what is in your mind?
Pink elephants. So instead of saying, stop doing something, we need to actually give ourselves an instruction to positively do something, to put our mind on something. One of the things that I've actually been doing for the last few years around this relates to the concept of gratefulness or gratitude. And, uh, what I do is in that time when I close my eyes, I immediately begin to list in my mind all the things I'm grateful for during the day, starting at the start of the day working through the day. And these are tiny things, it might be like, I had a lovely cup of in the morning. Or someone said, thank you, I was really grateful for something. Or I did a really wonderful coaching session and so I saw someone [00:26:00] grow and develop.
It could be a whole range of things, they're all small or big. Usually, once I start, I don't get through the day and I fall asleep thinking about all the good things that have happened during the day. So that's an example of some way you can put your mind that helps you then relax and go to sleep. So how does that relate to your broader and longer term health?
Firstly, quality sleep is And it's necessary to enable our bodies and our minds to recover from all the effort we put into our daily lives. Poor sleep quality impairs cognitive functioning. these kinds of things, impact our sleep and our lives. And it's really important to train ourselves to sleep well.
Uh, to stay and get healthy and fit and well for life. Let's move away from physical health and talk about mental health and well being. According to the World Health Organization, mental health is a state of well being in which an individual [00:27:00] realises his or her own abilities, can cope with the normal stresses of life, can work productively and fruitfully, and is able to make a contribution to his or her community.
The World Health Organization goes on to explain that mental health is not merely an absence of mental disorders or disabilities. Mental health is fundamentally our shared ability as humans to think, emote and interact with each other and enjoy life. Mental health includes positive emotions and positive functions.
I think that definition and that last bit is really important. It has to be an absence of ill health, but also has to include the positive emotions and positive functioning. There's a model of mental health that I'd like to share with you, which is developed by Keyes and Lopez and it's a model of the relationship between mental health and mental illness.
A lot of people inaccurately, think [00:28:00] that you have mental illness on the one side and, mental health on the other side, but it's, it's not true. You can have a mental illness and have high mental health, or you can have low mental health and not have an illness. And so you can think of it that way. So if you are say languishing and really struggling in life, That may or may not be related to the fact that you have a mental illness.
Likewise, you can have a mental illness and be flourishing and thriving. And so that model is a really healthy one and helpful one, rather than thinking it as a continuum. You're either mentally ill or you're not. That's an old kind of mindset. Another area of wellbeing that I think is really important to think about is the social wellbeing that we've touched on before.
So what is social wellbeing? It's a feeling of being part of a community, a sense of belonging. Contributing to society, having a good core group of friends that you love, and that love you, and trust [00:29:00] you, and that you can call upon at any one stage. I like to tell people about one of the most amazing studies I've ever heard of.
It's the longest ever study into happiness. And research has followed over 700 people from birth in 1938 till now, and looking at what are the keys to happiness over life. The study was actually expanded to include their children and spouses of those original participants back in 1938. And there's now 2, 000 people in the study.
They found that the strongest predictor of happiness was strong relationships. Whilst many people over their long lives had adversities such as wars, illnesses and other losses, the single dominant factor in making people happy was connections with family and friends. It was a cornerstone of [00:30:00] hope and happiness in their lives.
Interestingly, as they aged, participants also shared regrets. And what they found was, they sometimes bemoaned how little time they'd spent with their friends and family, and how much they cared about success and money. So that was their biggest regret. Not that accomplishments are not important, but when we sacrifice, our relationships, that's what we end up regretting.
Balancing all these areas of your life is never possible at all times. However, having this framework in mind and aiming and striving for balance is actually very healthy. So if I summarise this area, the connection between the mind and the body is strong. Lower mental wellbeing is correlated positively with lower physical wellbeing.
Therefore, many problems associated with poor physical health are also [00:31:00] typically associated with poor mental health. When we combine mental and physical issues together, we should all be striving to deliberately enhance our collective and individual wellbeing. We all benefit in some significant and sustainable ways.
And whilst it is impossible to have a perfect balance in all the areas of wellbeing, striving for this is a healthy aim and it's the journey that matters most anyway.
