The wellbeing of yourself, your team, and your organisation as a whole must be regularly tended to. Wellbeing isn’t just about putting a few strategies in place; it’s an ongoing, ever-changing process.
Our needs change over time as we grow and develop. Within organisations, wellbeing needs change when even one person leaves or starts in the company. Levels of wellness on individual and collective levels change all the time, and we have to be paying attention to how we are feeling in order to best support ourselves.
I use the phrase emotional agility when speaking of wellbeing. Paying attention to how balanced, present and centered we feel doesn’t need to take a huge amount of effort or time. When we develop the skills to check in with what’s going on for us, and what’s going on in our teams, we can do so quickly, and then easily and effectively bring in strategies to help ourselves or those around us.
In the next few decades I predict many of us will quickly be able to recognise ‘hey, actually right now I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed and worried, what I know is helpful in these moments is to talk to person X, write down a few of my thoughts, and remember the bigger vision I have for myself or this project I am working on.’ We’ll all be so blinking emotionally agile.
But this change won’t just appear. We have to continually look at our wellbeing, we have to pay attention.
When individuals become emotionally agile society works a whole lot better. We can communicate more clearly, we can bring more of ourselves to the conversation, we can think more creatively about problems, and we end up feeling better.
Focus on wellbeing is good for us individually and good for society as a whole.
Here’s to treating it as an ongoing priority.
With love, Hannah