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In this episode, Maggie Gough, Chief Operating Officer of The Wellness Council of America (WELCOA) joins Brian to talk about the right & wrong metrics to measure life balance & wellness.
Today’s Guest
MAGGIE GOUGH
CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER OF WELLNESS COUNCIL OF AMERICA (WELCOA)
Maggie Gough, Chief Operating Officer of WELCOA recognizes the structure and depth of the corporate wellness industry and the needs of the professionals and employees they support. As the Chief Operating Officer of WELCOA, she ensures that members receive outstanding service and build sustaining connections as a whole community.
You can contact Maggie here.
RIGHT & WRONG METRICS TO MEASURE LIFE BALANCE & WELLNESS
For Employees
It's important to understand what's in your control and what's out of your control. When you focus on what you can control, your thoughts can empower you and can trigger positive productivity and you’ll feel like you’re moving in a positive direction. Give yourself the freedom to release the things that are outside of our control. This will drastically improve your well-being.
This simple shift in perspective is really helpful: Well Being is NOT a destination that you work towards and reach. Balance is not a destination that you work towards and reach. Well Being and Balance are a light inside yourself, and that light can be amplified or diminished by things both inside and out of your control. Focus on the things you can control that will help amplify your light.
Consider changing the way you view well-being as the things you do which allow you to be responsive and resilient in your work environment, not a list of tasks to do daily to be “perfect”
Self Care is time spent meeting your needs, NOT time spent becoming a better version of yourself. (Self Improvement would be the part about becoming a better version of yourself, and while that’s important, be sure not to lump self care and self improvement together, they’re 2 different things!)
Check in with yourself on your well-being
Am I spending my time in ways that care for my well-being?
Am I spending my time trying to perfect myself for others or for me?
Am I letting someone else decide how my time should be spent caring for myself?
For Front-Line Supervisors & Managers
Managers should NOT look at well-being and life balance as if this was an equation that we can manage.
Do not rate someone else’s life balance or well-being, only the employee can determine their own.
All organizations should be asking the question, in some manner, human to human, how can we better support your well-being?
A Bad Metric for workplace wellness is “participation”. Looking at “how many people got their flu shot.” or “how many people are using the gym benefit” or “how many people are getting 10,000 steps a day” does NOT serve the people in your organization.
Wellness should not be something your employees “need to do” for their job. If wellness means they need to “track this thing” or “report this number” and that’s part of their performance benefit.
Don't be afraid to ask people how to solve a problem together. Collaborate. As a manager, especially in life balance and well being, it’s not your job to “fix it”. A manager’s role is to actively listen, and assist with the individual’s problems that are inside of the organization’s scope and capabilities. Respect & honor the other problems you cannot assist with.
Maggie Gough
Good metric to use, Cantrell’s Wellness Ladder. Ask yourself and your employee, “If you are looking at a ladder, on 0-10 scale, where do you currently rate your wellness now? Why? Where do you hope to be in 3 years? Do they feel like they are headed up or down?
7-10 - Thriving — wellbeing that is strong, consistent, and progressing. These respondents have positive views of their present life situation (7+) and have positive views of the next five years (8+). They report significantly fewer health problems, fewer sick days, less worry, stress, sadness, anger, and more happiness, enjoyment, interest, and respect.
5-6 - Struggling — wellbeing that is moderate or inconsistent. These respondents have moderate views of their present life situation OR moderate OR negative views of their future. They are either struggling in the present, or expect to struggle in the future. They report more daily stress and worry about money than the “thriving” respondents, and more than double the amount of sick days. They are more likely to smoke, and are less likely to eat healthy.
0-4 - Suffering — wellbeing that is at high risk. These respondents have poor ratings of their current life situation (4 and below) AND negative views of the next five years (4 and below). They are more likely to report lacking the basics of food and shelter, more likely to have physical pain, a lot of stress, worry, sadness, and anger. They have less access to health insurance and care, and more than double the disease burden, in comparison to “thriving” respondents.
Using an individual’s biometrics to determine their well-being can trigger disordered or unhealthy habits, thus creating toxic narratives between weight and health. The answer is not a simple formula like: “your resting heart rate is elevated, you should drink less coffee.”
As a manager, if you’re feeling burnt out of yourself, hearing somebody else needs is really hard. The more that you can remain in a state of curiosity and asking someone to tell you more, the better it will be in order to hear feedback and more thoroughly understand how you can help. If you need to take a vacation or take a step back, that’s okay too, you have to be in a place in your life where you can show up for yourself AND others.
About The Creator/Host: I’m Brian. At age 4, I was diagnosed with insulin dependent (type 1) diabetes and told that my life was going to be 10-20 years shorter than everyone else. As a kid I took time for granted, but now as an adult, time is the most precious thing that I have. I teach overworked project managers how to level-up their life balance and pump up their practical productivity through my Productivity Gladiator training system. If what you’ve seen here intrigues you, reach out, let’s chat! Time is the currency of your life, spend it wisely.
Episode Transcript
00:00
I'm Brian Nelson Palmer. On this show, we talk about life balance and personal productivity. It's about leveling up the person as a whole with topics that help both at work and at home. In this episode, I want to dig into what are the right and wrong metrics to measure life balance and wellness. With me on the show today is Maggie Gough. She is the Chief Operations Officer of WellCoA, which is the Wellness Council of America. So Maggie, thanks so much for joining us on the show today.
00:35
I'm delighted to be here. Can you say a little bit about, for those that aren't familiar with Wellcoa, talk about Wellcoa. So Wellcoa is actually a nonprofit that was founded with a pretty simple idea, which is that we spend the majority of our time at work. And what if the workplace could be a place that amplifies our well-being and not just a place where we go to do a job and get paid and leave at the end of the day. And so it started really as an idea.
01:04
that was really closely associated with the insurance world at that time, it was in the 1980s, and it has grown substantially in its scope and breadth. But you know at work parties when people say, what do you do? If I say workplace wellness, people immediately get an image of their mind of a pedometer with this goal of 10,000 steps. And so what I'll say is, but not in the way that you're thinking about it.
01:31
We do workplace wellness as a nonprofit that sets the best practice and ethical standards for the industry. And what that means is that rather than looking at employees who are unhealthy and trying to fix them, we are looking at the organization and the ways that the organization needs to develop so that it can better serve those employees in their time in that company. Interesting.
01:57
And I think that kind of speaks to my next question, which was just how, how is Wocco a different from the other people that are in the wellness space right now? That seems pretty clear. What else would you say makes you guys a little different from the others? I think certainly the aspect of looking at the organization and instead of, I mean, we're certainly looking at the ways in which an organization can purchase vendor partners to serve the employee, a suite of resources that they need to support.
02:27
those individuals. But what also makes us unique is that we are vendor agnostic. And so there's no way in which we are tied to other groups that might be selling products to a business. And so we are truly there to support the professionals of this industry and the organizations themselves. So are you guys
02:49
providing packages of templates then or blueprints or is it actual introductions to all the different vendors or to what extent do you go in with the organization? All of the above plus some. So what we have is a platform that has a model for which an organization can follow to develop itself. And then each of, we call that our seven benchmarks model that takes an organization through each of the benchmarks. So things like...
03:16
You need committed and aligned leaders. You need cross-functional support for your wellbeing initiatives for your employees. You need to know what people actually need. So you need the right data before you just go, oh, we'll go buy that and it's one size fits all. And now we've checked the box, it's done. It's like, if employees say that they're stressed, don't just go buy a stress app solution because what if the cause of their stress is
03:44
your managers need better training on how to communicate. So make sure you have meaningful data, make sure that you're treating this like any other business imperative and you have an operating plan. That's benchmark four, create an operating plan. Benchmark five is choose the right vendor and we can help you do that. We have a tool called Welcoa Select and it's the only search engine of its kind in the industry to allow you to search for your needs for a workplace wellness vendor.
04:12
And then benchmark six is looking at your policies and procedure environment. And then benchmark seven is celebrating and iterating and communicating what you've done. And so there's the model from there. We have an analytical tool called checklist, which will evaluate how well an organization is doing within those seven benchmarks and then provide you feedback on that.
04:36
So I always say we've been asking employees to take a health risk assessment for decades. This is the health risk assessment for the employer and how well they're doing and what things they need to be doing to better serve their population. And each of those benchmarks has its own toolkit and then we have trainings online as well. So it's an entire platform that basically makes it easier for someone who is either
05:06
workplace well-being or someone who is doing well-being internally for an organization. That can be either a workplace wellness professional or someone in HR, sometimes the CFO, sometimes the COO. The wide landscape of people who have their hands in this responsibility can all utilize that platform. I love the... I feel like in our world right now, there's three kinds of ways you can help folks with stuff like this. There's the...
05:33
do it yourself version where it's like, look, here's the template, go do it yourself. Or then there's the do it with you and then the do it for you model. And it sounds like you guys are down in the do it with you, do it for you end of the spectrum. And that's, I know that has to be really helpful for organizations that engage with you. So this is cool. Thanks for, and thanks for chatting with me about this. Let's talk about metrics. Cause that's the part that I'm really interested in, which is, you know, and so for this.
05:57
My context or my target audience for this podcast is really the employees and then the frontline supervisors and middle managers that are working above those teams. So for us, it's not as much about the organization as a whole, but about the people. What can you do in those roles for yourself? You're not stuck waiting for the organization to change. So from that lens, let's talk about the metrics that you've seen. And so what are some of the common metrics that people might be seeing around there?
06:26
workplaces for workplace wellness. And what are the good ones and the right ones and the wrong ones? Okay, so bad metrics for workplace wellness are participation. And for a long time it was like, how many people can we get to do this thing? And that's a bad metric. But when you're talking about for the individual employee or even the supervisor, I wanna kind of, I wanna back up a little bit because I think that we need to level set on.
06:52
what a balanced life is. And I'm going to share a little bit of background story here. So I have been in workplace wellness my entire career. I started as a dietitian. I wanted to help people understand really complex ideas about nutrition so that they could take good care of themselves. And that was, I started my career in workplace wellness found me. And I went in trying to support people in the workplace to be healthy. And about
07:20
A decade into my career, my marriage was a mess. I was suffering from postpartum anxiety that had gone undiagnosed because we screened for postpartum depression, but not postpartum anxiety. I was way outside of my career well-being. I was working for an organization that really did not align with my values. I had these three things that were my whole life, motherhood, marriage, and work, massive portions of my life.
07:50
that were all out of whack and I was not okay and I had a total breakdown in the way that we talk about those things, the way you can imagine them. And I had this epiphany that all the things that I had ever done to help people be healthier would not have helped me in that moment. And so I didn't need to walk 10,000 steps a day. I didn't need to eat more fruits and vegetables. I did not need to drink more water. And in reality, I needed to take all of that away.
08:20
because I didn't need any more pressure on myself. And so because I was out of alignment in my values with my employer, I decided I would start my own business. Because, you know, what should you do but start your own business if you're in the middle of a massive life crisis, right? Right. Yeah, just make even more change, Maggie. Just keep piling it on. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, this is like, this is bad balance. Don't do this. Okay. Got it. And so anyway, I...
08:48
But I kind of went back to my roots as a dietitian of starting to go back and talking to people about their health and wellbeing and became a student of my experiences in those conversations because it was like we're missing something here. We're really missing something. And here's what I tell people now. Wellbeing is not this destination that we work towards and reach. Balance is not a destination we work towards and reach. Wellbeing is a light.
09:18
that you hold inside of yourself. And they can be amplified or diminished by things inside and outside of your control. So in our conventional wisdom about wellbeing and balance, we do this thing where we say there's who I am today, and then there's who I'd like to be if I were better. And then we say, okay, what's missing from who I am today and who I think is a better version of myself, a more balanced, a healthier version of myself. And then we...
09:45
build the Excel spreadsheet of ways I will improve. And then we say, starting Monday, I will insert all of the things that I have to do to be better. And when we do that, we create this version of ourselves that has wellbeing and the version of ourselves that is who we are today, and we separate ourselves from our own wellbeing. So when we talk about our wellbeing is already with us and it can be amplified or diminished by things inside and outside of our control.
10:12
that changes the entire way that we might even serve somebody toward their well-being. Right? So what I need to not do for you, Brian, is to look at your biometrics and measure that data and say, okay, Brian, you have high cholesterol and pre-diabetes. And so based on that data, I'm going to create a spreadsheet for you of all the things that you need to do to achieve well-being with lower cholesterol.
10:39
and you're out of pre-diabetes risk, right? So when you said, what's some important data that we can look at is I would invite people to sit down and take some time to tune inward and ask themselves the question, what amplifies my wellbeing and what diminishes my wellbeing? If you're a manager, if you were to ask an employee, what are the things that you're doing in your role here that amplify your wellbeing? And what are the things...
11:07
that are occurring in this workplace that diminish your wellbeing. Because as an employer, what we can't do is fix people. We are not in control of people's individual behaviors. That's a very toxic relationship. But what we can do is understand barriers that are getting in the way of people taking good care of themselves, and we can start to remove those. So data, to your question of what are good ways, what's good data that I can look at?
11:36
to create better balance in my life is first understanding what nourishes my wellbeing and what diminishes my wellbeing. And you know what's interesting is as managers, I feel like oftentimes the conversation is about us and them, right? Well, this is us and this is what we do. And instead, I think as a manager, if you actually are looking at asking those questions you just asked to yourself, and then looking at it personally,
12:02
You'll probably find more than half of the stuff that your employees are experiencing too, because you're in the same environment. You're not, your work might be a little different and each person is different. Right. So wellbeing is different for each person. But that question, the question you said, which is what increases or what, what did you say it activates or diminishes? What was the amplifies or amplifies. There we go. So if it's amplifying or diminishing, that is a very simple, as I think about that question and like my day job and other things that I do.
12:31
It's very easy for me to isolate. Yep, that's a plus. That's a minus. This is a neutral. And that's an easy conversation to have. So that's a powerful one. I like that a lot. As the employee, if you don't have power over some of these things, what kind of advice do you give in those situations where you've got a list of detractors now? I mean, obviously the first step is talk to your manager, but what else do you say to folks? Well, I think it's really important to understand, again, what's in your control and what's out of your control.
13:01
And we love to look at wellbeing in balance as if this is some equation that we can manage. And if we're not in wellbeing, that somehow we haven't done enough. We have this like meritocracy type of narrative in our society. And you know, a pandemic is outside of my control and impacts my wellbeing. A sick child is outside of my control.
13:24
and impacts my wellbeing. And so what we can do first of all, is give ourselves a little bit of freedom to release the things that are outside of our control and identify, okay, here are some things that I can invest in. Like I can go for a hike daily and that increases that fills me, it amplifies my wellbeing. And then when I do encounter those things that are outside of my control, that are negatively impacting my wellbeing, maybe I have a little bit more resilience to handle those.
13:53
For the things that are inside our control, that are diminishing our wellbeing, like in the case of my marriage was a mess, well, that's inside my control. I can go get a therapist. We can go get a therapist, right? We can do some work. So even identifying the things that are diminishing your wellbeing and even separating them from what's inside my control and outside my control is really important because then now you have data that says, okay, I'm gonna release these things.
14:22
I'm not accountable to a pandemic. I'm not accountable to these things. But can I, or like in the case of a sick kid, you didn't cause that, but you can respond to it in a way that cares for yourself, right? So making sure that you've given yourself the time and space to be present to the needs of that child versus like, I'm trying to get all this work done and this kid keeps nagging me because they don't feel good, right? So it's a really delicate balance and it's complex.
14:52
But I think changing the way that we even view well-being as not a list of tasks to do daily that perfect us, but something that allows us just to be responsive to the life that is happening that we're a part of. And you said, you know, this is one of those things where anybody who's a manager is also a person who's working for a company. Like, it's one of my favorite things to say is, by the way, if you do this work, you are somebody who works for your company as well. And are you creating things?
15:22
that you would want to do that would be helpful to you. And that's another really great question to ask yourself. There are a lot of people who've put wellness into play that would not do it. I have known CEOs. This is true. Share some of these examples. Yeah, like what? Okay. I know a someone in the C-suite who has their stay-at-home spouse.
15:47
do their online wellness platform for them. They have outsourced to their stay at home spouse, the wellness platform. And so it's like, why do you even have it? And by the way, if you're somebody who doesn't have a stay at home spouse that you can outsource the management of this platform, what about them? Okay, here's another one. When you say that, I'm not familiar. So when you say wellness platform, if you outsource the wellness platform, does that mean they have to go take a quiz online or they have to answer a question every day? What is that?
16:15
Yeah, it's like setting up this platform so that it syncs with maybe your iPhone watch or whatever your fitness tracker is and then going on and logging your points. Remember when I said participation is a bad data set? Because companies are like, we paid for this thing and now we want you to use it. When people don't use it, then they put incentives in place.
16:43
The incentives are usually a reduced insurance cost. You want that, right? Then who's managing all of this? Who's submitting the flu shots that your kids got? Who's submitting the well visits that you went to? All of that has to be submitted and approved and managed. This C-level executive outsourced it to their stay-at-home spouse.
17:10
So they don't even know what the platform is like. Oh, that's wild. OK. Right. But then the expectation is that the employees do it all. And so, OK, here's another one. A friend of mine said, I get my kids a flu shot every year because I want to get my kids a flu shot. And I understand the importance of that. But it is not worth it to me to submit the form to get the points for the reduced insurance cost. And now we have a situation where
17:39
is playing a role in our corporate wellness programs. Because if you're somebody who can't afford to not do that, you are now having to do the work where someone else said, I'll give myself the time rather than the effort. God, it gets back to this is what my TED talk was on and what I'm very interested in the, you know, the value of your time is a helpful metric for, is it worth it for me to, is it, you know, when the age old question, is it worth your time? I mean, I have a calculator on my site that we do this. If you haven't done that, I certainly hope you'll
18:09
Check out on the productivity gladiator site, go find out for yourself what your time is worth. But I share that not because that's a specific number you need to know, but because it kind of gives the, it gives a number to exactly what you just said, which is, well, is it worth it for me to go upload? That how long is it gonna take me to get the form from the doctor, get it signed, upload it in the thing? Then they're gonna have to follow up, and then I have to follow up with them sometimes. Totally understand the, not even worth my time to mess with that. I will just.
18:37
take the free flu shot and not get the points because I don't care that much. Exactly. Absolutely. So when we think about how do we care for ourselves, is it jumping through hoops or is it really tuning inward to our own needs? And to your point about time, am I spending my time in ways that care for my wellbeing or am I spending my time trying to perfect myself to some version of...
19:06
healthy and balanced that someone created somewhere. Right. Are you some algorithm's answer to what's good for you? Or did you create this picture of what's good for you? And are you working toward it? That's wild. I think you looked like you had, you seemed like you had another story that you were going to share on that. That was the CEO outsourced the chief, the C-suite person? That is one of them, which I just, I mean, there's so much in that story alone around.
19:36
privilege on multiple fronts. I think in that case, what's so frustrating for me is that it wasn't worth that CEO's time and yet that CEO would demand that other people do that, his or her employees to do the same. I think that when we think about whether or not people are healthy or okay and what in balance and what does that look like, we don't get to decide that for other people.
20:05
If we want to be a healthy community, what that looks like is believing that everybody wants to live a healthy and thriving life. And if they're not, there are likely challenges and barriers in their way. It's not just that they don't understand that broccoli has a good fiber source, right? There's a lot going on. Our lives are complex and we need for someone else to not decide how our time should and should not be spent to care for ourselves. Got it.
20:33
So wellness programs that are a little less prescriptive of thou shall do this, thou shall get 10,000 steps. Different, interesting. Are there, now what we just went through is kind of very personal or what we just talked about, you know, you have the, is it good for me? Or is it an amp, does it amplify or does it detract from your wellness? Are there metrics that you've found that are kind of measurable? I mean, certainly like what is your blood pressure?
21:01
or these are certainly indicators that you shouldn't ignore per se, but have you found good metrics for people and managers to use that are good indicators? This is an open source tool. It has been validated, but it's Cantrell's Wellness Ladder, and it's really simple. The question is, if you are standing at a ladder and zero is the ground floor and 10 is the top.
21:30
rung, where would you rate yourself in your wellbeing on that ladder? The secondary question is where do you hope to be on that ladder in the next three years? They've actually validated this to say, I believe it's zero to three is someone in crisis and four to six is moderating wellbeing and seven and above is someone who's thriving.
22:00
When I had my own business, I used as a baseline tool when someone would come in to do work with us, we would ask them that question and then we would ask them that in six months and then in a year. Because you want, if someone's at a four and they want to see themselves at a seven, then what do they need to get there? Again, now it's not prescriptive, but then I can ask them, why did you rate yourself as a four? What are the things that are keeping you?
22:29
at a four? What are the things that you think would help you get to a seven? So that's a healthy tool, a good tool that we've used. Can you imagine how different a performance review conversation would go if part of that conversation involved asking that question and that little part of the conversation? I feel like most performance reviews in many organizations are just, here's an hour, let's find some time. It's really busy, but we got to cram this in because the deadlines
22:59
by this date. So here, find a time and then here's what I think, here's what you think. And having a separate, if you're having your check-in meetings, you know, on how they're doing, it sounds like that ladder tool would be a great sort of metaphor or a way to check in with people in more than just, hey, did you do your job? That'd be a powerful thing. Well, Coa provides some consulting for organizations in addition to the services, if that's something
23:29
use us for. And we work with one of the major cities in the United States and they decided that they wanted to have wellness as a part of their performance reviews, as a part of their performance growth. And one of the things we have to be really careful about with that is that the people giving those performance reviews understand psychological safety. Because a performance review is me, Maggie, the manager, reviewing you, Brian, your performance.
23:58
And in that dynamic, I have the authority. So if I all of a sudden start talking to you about your wellbeing, am I starting to tell you why you are and are not okay in your wellbeing? Or am I asking because I need to, you're giving me feedback now about how I can be better supportive. And so what we did, it is really great if an organization wants to weave wellness into performance conversations. But if you do that, please make sure
24:26
that your managers understand that they are not rating someone else's wellbeing, because that's not their business. That is employee determined. And that it is an area where they are receiving feedback about ways in which they could be better at supporting that person's wellbeing. So maybe your communication style is really stress inducing as a manager and you need to work on that and you need to develop some skills.
24:52
Maybe the company needs feedback about flexible time or the total paid days off or my ability to take my kid to the doctor when I need to do that and how difficult it is to log my hours or ask for the time off. I mean, any number of things, but I think any organization, all organizations should be asking in some manner and human to human, I would say is best, how can we better support your wellbeing?
25:20
What's nice about a performance time to do that is you can aggregate that data at scale. That would be powerful to be able to see by what the employees are saying by group or by division or being able to slice and dice that on the different parts of the organization. I can see that being some interesting data to look at as an organization. But more important than that, it's about the managers looking at how for the manager to have that conversation with their own people and find out that everybody's at the bottom of the ladder.
25:49
is more powerful than a manager going to some tool and finding out that everybody is at the bottom of their ladder. Like the conversation that goes with that is probably pretty powerful. And when we're talking about data, you know, when I, and we talk about things inside and outside of your control, if I'm a manager and I find out that you, Brian, have high cholesterol, I have zero control over what you're eating or how much you're exercising. But if I find out as a manager...
26:17
that regardless of your cholesterol, you're working over time and you are unable to get ahead so that you can go take care of yourself and get some exercise or meal plan or whatever the case may be, that's actually something as a manager I can support and solve for. So I think that in some ways to give businesses permission and leaders permission to support individuals in this way.
26:43
is better than asking them to solve for how many steps you're taking in a day or your blood pressure. Right. Do you have your ears? You've you've sprouted off those ones, the steps in a day or blood pressure just lists off the top of your head. What are some other bad ones that you've seen over the years? The like, oh gosh, that's a terrible metric. Hmm. I mean, I think that when I think that whenever we get into an individual's biometrics weight,
27:10
We have done, it's not even just that that's a bad metric. We have created in this industry really toxic narratives around weight and health. I'm most certain that we have triggered people's disordered eating through our program, so that's a bad one. Another way I think to look bad data is to look at anything that is just like how perfect you're being.
27:40
I like to say self-care is time spent meeting your needs, not time becoming a better version of yourself. Ooh, okay. Say that again, because I feel like that's a really good point. Self-care is time spent meeting your needs and is not perfecting or becoming a better version of yourself. So let me put it in very specific terms since you're like the time and productivity guy. Let's put it like this. Yes. If I have time on my calendar.
28:09
to take care of myself each day, an hour each day. Then, and I go in and before I get to that hour, let's say I decided I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna run every day during this time. When I get to that hour, if running is not what I need, then I am improving myself. I am not meeting my own needs. So in the pandemic, my husband and I were like, what do we need? We have three children.
28:37
We lived in a very small house, which was great because we lived more life and we cleaned and managed less. But in a pandemic with three children, it was very challenging. And what we each needed, we were like, we each need an hour a day to have no one call our name, to have no one need us. So we did the calendar math. We made that time juggling schedules. We did the matrix every week. And I did the thing where I was like, okay, I'm going to do yoga.
29:05
And then I was like, every day resented that time. And I was like, right, because like, some days I need to go for a walk. Some days I need to go for a run. Some days I need to do yoga. Some days I need to pet a dog. Sometime I might need to call my mom or a good friend. So there are a lot of different things that we need and it doesn't have to look the same all the time. So bad, bad data is what is the prescriptive model for health and am I meeting it? Yeah, that makes sense.
29:31
Sometimes you need part of the planning is planning for time for yourself, period, not time for yourself for a specific purpose. That's a huge thing. Okay. Here's more examples, more story style examples. So almost everyone when they come into a health coaching session will say, I know what to do. I'm just not doing it. And that's because we have spent the past decade educating the death out of people, like educating people to death about health and wellness. People know that eating fish...
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the majority of people know that eating fish is better than red meat. Usually, if I'm teaching a class on general healthy eating, someone will raise their hand and say, but what if the fish is farm raised and what about the mercury levels in the ocean and how can it be organic fish if it's wild caught and I thought wild caught is better, right? We get into all of these things that we've been taught about how to be better and perfect ourselves, right? Then I go, are you even eating fish at all?
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I'm like, so you don't need to worry about this. And so we can think about our wellbeing in a lot of ways and we can choose to serve it in whatever ways matter to us. So I will often have people come in and say, I know what to do, I'm just not doing it. And I'll say, okay, what are the things you think you need to do? And I had a woman who said, well, I probably need to sign up for a marathon and I probably need to eat only organic food. And she rattled off all of these things that we in...
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commodified wellness have told her, I said, okay, what are the things that you like to do for your wellbeing? And she said, well, I live on a farm and so I love to hike and we grow our own food and I have a great marriage and so I love to spend time in the hot tub with my spouse. I was like, every single one of those things you just listed is good for your wellbeing. And yet this person felt like a failure because
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somewhere we, we being society have given her the idea that it has to be all of these other things. So learning to show up in time and tune into yourself. Do you have time on your calendar once a day to tune into your own needs? I think Adam Grant recently posted on social media, what was a couple months ago, he posted that research says that two to four hours a day of downtime is healthy, but more than that can lead to languishing.
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And I just thought two to four hours a day is bougie. Who has this amount of time? Right? What research group did they use to get that information? Because I'm pretty sure all the people I know don't have that amount of time on a survey. I mean, and I'm sure there are, but like I do not, and the majority of people I talk to who are in, you know, general working America do not have two to four hours a day of downtime. Yeah.
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What I often challenge people to do as they start this journey is to just start with, here's some good data. Do you have 30 minutes a day to tune into yourself and even understand what it is that you need for your wellbeing? Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And that might even be like solving for something that is diminishing your wellbeing. If I have a lot of stress about taxes or bills, maybe what's best for my wellbeing is giving myself time to go pay those things and take care of them, for example.
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It kind of inspired me with the thought is like, okay, all of this well-being and a lot of this is like you're looking at yourself and like what are the negatives and the positives and we're looking at that and there is this lens where Looking at it that way for a business or an organization or at work you have to choose It's like either well-being or productivity and prof stuff Can you share a little bit about your experience with that conversation and how?
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It doesn't, you don't have to be on opposite sides. They can be part of the same team. Talk about that a little. Okay. I'm gonna say this and it's not gonna come as surprise to anybody. We have a mental health care and burnout crisis in America. Your ability to keep your employees and to remain in business is predicated on their wellbeing, full stop. You cannot separate these two. If I asked any business leader,
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Is innovation imperative to your business success in the next 10, 20, 30 years? 100% of them would say yes. They understand that innovation, the ability to grow with the changing world is imperative to their success. Innovation is intangible. You're creating for something that doesn't exist yet, solving for a world you don't know yet. But we don't call innovation fluff, but many leaders
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will say or feel like wellbeing is fluff. It is the antithesis to productivity, right? Or self-care is the, and it's simply not the case. Your employees' ability to tune in to and meet their own needs and your ability to create an environment that allows for that is imperative for your business success because we don't have the great resignation and quiet quitting for no reason.
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That would be so would along those lines then if you're trying to sort of engineer a comeback or something in the well-being, you're an employee, you're a manager and your organization doesn't really do this well, what can you do? For me personally, I don't like the helpless feeling of it's all out of my control. Everybody's making decisions on my behalf and I'm just stuck. I don't really like, I don't subscribe to that necessarily. Just like you're.
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examples earlier about, you know, the pandemic is outside of your control, but your marriage wasn't. And that kind of thing, like there are things that you can do. So what can't, what kind of advice do you give for what you can do to make strides in this department because you don't necessarily have control over your organization's culture? That's for sure. So what would you say for the employees and then for the manager? Okay. So if you're an employee and you continuously exist in an organization that does not meet
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your needs or allow for your wellbeing. First, you can try to communicate those things. We're allergic to feedback, giving it. Why is that, right? Sometimes it's like pulling teeth. Feedback's not helpful. It is really helpful. Well, I think that for a long time, businesses have authority over us. We need to name that. That is true, and they always will. They get to decide whether we work there and whether we don't, and they get to decide.
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whether our performance is good enough for them, right? So that is authority. And so we feel like we can't say, hey, I need more from you because then we're risking something of ourselves. And if you're in a position where you can't risk your job, that's a big deal, right? So I think that to be fair, part of our reason we're allergic to feedback is we have, businesses haven't always been like, hey, listen, we would really love to hear how things are going and it's safe for you to do that. So, but I also think that we have,
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a society where we're just not good at being assertive about our needs. So, another specific example, in the middle of a pandemic, I was working to refinance my home and I emailed the loan officer a question and I got an auto reply that said, please be patient. We are adjusting to a new normal with children doing school from home and working full-time from home. I was like, this is amazing. Stating expectations and owning your needs.
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And so I wrote back and I said, or sorry, she answered my question within 24 hours, apologized for the delay. And I said, there's no delay. You answered my question within 24 hours. And I'm really grateful. Thank you. And then I said something like, hang in there, mama. And she wrote back and said, I am in tears at your email. Thank you so much for your care. And then explained to me that she had a child who had special needs who could not read the screen. So she was reading every...
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thing that was coming off of the screen while trying to work full time. And she had a kindergartener and anybody who's ever tried to do Zoom school with kindergartners knows it's not really a thing. And her spouse was out of town for work for three weeks. So, you know, this is, I often wondered what conversation she had with her manager when she set that boundary.
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But there are a lot of ways that we can own some of those boundaries and state those boundaries. I mean, I think that's why we have quiet quitting. Quiet quitting is not disengagement, in my opinion. It's simply boundary setting. There is a point at which I'm going to turn off my computer for the day. I'm not quiet quitting. I'm done for the day. I worked hard and now I'll be done. Right? So I think for individual employees, the better that we get at naming our needs and asserting boundaries to meet those needs.
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that's within our control. If you've done that and you continuously are met with more of the same, go find a new job. That's a thing that we can do. And when we say businesses will fail if they don't take good care of their employees, this is what we're talking about. If you are a manager and you're feeling burned out yourself, hearing somebody else's needs can be really hard. But the more that you can remain in a state of curiosity in learning and ask someone to tell you more, the better
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it will be to be able to solve that problem together. So it's hard to get feedback when we're already burned out ourselves as leaders, but it's also okay if you're burned out as a leader to step down from that role and let someone else lead for a little bit if you're not in a position to do that. And it's also okay to just say, how do we solve this together? Because you don't have to solve it all as a manager. That's the, you read my mind, that was the point I was gonna make, which is like, look at these conversations.
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it's often not your job to fix it. Like oftentimes as managers, you fix it. You're in fix it mode all day, but it's not your job to fix it. It's like, tell me more. And what do you think it would look like if this were better, a better situation? And what can we do together? And there are some instances where it is a grant that using our authority as managers to grant permissions for things. Yep, grant. And when they give you all those ideas, when you have that conversation and they offer all those ideas,
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See if you can pick one or two of those ideas that you could help with. Because some of them you're gonna have to say, no, we know that. They want, oh, they only wanna work three days a week. Okay, well that's not gonna work as much as that would be awesome. So like, all right. You know, so but find the one if they need to leave two hours early so that they can go take a dance class on Wednesdays because that just fills their cup up or they go with their family to do it or something. And you know, check those boxes. Yes, that, absolutely. I love that point.
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I was asked to consult once for a small company, it was a family-owned company, and they said, will you please come in and help us buy wellness? I said, okay, but first, can I just talk to your employees? It's a small enough company, I can just quickly listen. We did a quick survey. It was like five questions, and the feedback was, we work hard, we're really committed to this company. It's like a family.
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But like, I want to be able to coach my son's soccer team. And I can't leave at the end of the day and manage all of that. And so I'm sacrificing a lot. So I gave the feedback to leadership, you don't need to go purchase anything. You need to create some flexible scheduling. This was before the pandemic. Right. And you need to create some flexible scheduling. And the CEO looked me right in the face and said, well, look, literally, we are old school and we're not going to do that. And I thought.
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well, at least you know yourself and now your employees can decide whether or not they want to belong here because there was nothing unique that this organization did. Those people could go find jobs lots of places. And so, and then the irony of like going and spending money on something that your employees didn't ask for and then wanting some kind of return on investment out of that spend is nonsensical. So I think sometimes, I think sometimes the solutions are, are much simpler.
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Being a good community and serving each other as human beings and being a little bit vulnerable in that is really what we need right now. And oftentimes there's a lot of lovers we could pull. Seriously. Well, I want to bring us to a close. And one of the last things I want to ask you is if we can just kind of talk about this personally a little bit. Like I love the story you shared in the very beginning about how...
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your solution to all of the problems was to quit everything and start your own business or something. So can you share a little bit about like how life balance and wellness has gone for you and what this means to you personally? Yeah, I mean for me it's ongoing. Again, I'm never arriving and even the things I teach this for a living, I am an expert in this. I've been doing it for almost two decades now.
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And I still make mistakes like take the time on my calendar and put a prerequisite on it, right? Because doing it in a new way is quite countercultural. There's lots of people who are going to sell me something to fix me. And so me being in a mindset of having to fix myself and be better is not surprising, but really giving myself some grace and saying, you know, my job in this moment is to be able
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is to decide what I need. So I do have on my calendar a hike on right now based on the calendar matrix. And it can't just be the calendar, it has to be the calendar matrix because there's so much happening on that calendar with two working parents and three children that two days a week is all I get to have this time to myself. And I do have an activity on there, but there are days that I arrive to that time with that activity, which is hiking.
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trail running and I will decide I don't have the mental or emotional capacity today to take on anything harder So I will just walk with some music, right? Like I will do I will meet my needs in that moment and I still as I'm walking will have these feelings like I Should be you know, and it's like no, this is actually fine. This is actually okay and You know, so for me it's the work is never done and that
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One of my good friends recently said to me, a lot of us are walking around and we don't lead well-examined lives. And that just really hit me. And I thought, this is really what I'm trying to do is just pause enough myself to examine my own life and to understand what I need. And I'm gonna add one more thing because we've talked a lot about self-care and what's in your control. Sometimes what's missing is your community care. So that's, if I'm gonna talk about my journey from starting my own business to where I am now,
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I would say that a big part of that growth also to be able to care for myself has been ensuring that I had the right community care, which means that my spouse and I have an equitable workload in terms of child rearing and household management. It means that I outsource certain things. It means that I have really healthy friendships. So I have this community care so that I can also.
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meet my own needs when that time exists. I think there's power in that. I've been reflecting on that a lot with social media lately, and I feel like people, when they want their break or their mental break or whatever, they resort to social media. And the thing about social media is it's not as engaging. It doesn't mean nearly as much as a direct text message to somebody who means something to you or the communication back and forth that comes from actually engaging with someone on the phone or texting, direct, even if it's just texting.
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with your girlfriend or with your friend or whatever. That means so much more than scrolling Instagram and spying on what other people are doing that's been polished for the internet and happens to look amazing and isn't real. Like, ah man, my day sucks. And text that to your girlfriend. That means that's a way better conversation. Oh God, so I like that. So, well. Well, I have a tip on that. Ooh, yeah. One, don't put social media on your phone because then it's harder to access. Preach, sister. Yes, take it off.
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And two, when you have that moment where you're like, because we live in this world where we're like, operantly conditioned to like pick up our phone any downtime we have. When I am detoxing from social media, I have that all the time, I will scroll through my photos. And then I am reminded of how really truly beautiful my life is. Oh my gosh. Total side note here. The newest iOS, I just updated my phone.
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and there is a button at the bottom of your photos called For You, and they have basically taken this thing and what they've done is that your phone now picks this trip you did or whatever, and it will say this time four years ago in the Bahamas or something. And then you hit play, and it is a slideshow of all of the photos from that set to music. Like the first time I saw it, I cried. I'm a dude, I admit on this talk that I cried.
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When I saw like the fun time that I was having with my boys, I love that idea, Maggie. I love that a lot. Like, yes, look at photos instead of Instagram. Your own memories. Oh, yes. And then text that to the person you had the memory with. Yes! Oh, and on iPhone, you can, now I'm sorry, Android users. I know how to do this in iPhone. I don't know what it is on Android or the other ones, but man, there is a little share button and you share that little, it's like a 20 second video. I sent my family one.
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I sent my friend what like, oh, so good. Yes, I love that. It's just since we're like giving the full detail about how to do this, you can select a music option at the bottom and you have to select a music option that's like free licensing rights because if it's a music option that anyway, I failed at this. I was like, why won't this let me send? And then it was like, you have to choose music that you own, silly. And then I had to change the music and then it would let me send. Got it. Yep.
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I didn't even know that. That's good. That's a good tip. I hope there was music with the stuff that I sent. It let me send so I'm assuming so. Yeah. Yeah, it would not let you send with music that you don't own. Trust me. Kick me out several times. You can't do this. Stop trying. Got it. Oh, I love that. Well, so Maggie, Maggie, here's I want to bring us to a close. Here's what I love. I love that
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I love that this is just a personal story for you and this whole WellCoA thing and wellness is not just your job, but also kind of your passion that it really comes through in your talking and the way that you shared and what you do and everything. So I love that you're a part of this organization that does this and it makes me feel really good about your organization and the stuff that you do with this. And I love the tips that you shared. So thank you for taking a few minutes and sharing it with us today.
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Yes, it was my pleasure. It was a delightful conversation. And for those folks who want to engage or interact with WellCoO, what are the different ways that they can find out more? What should they do? So if you think that your organization needs to do some of this work, or you yourself would like more support to do this work as a manager or a leader, you can go purchase a license for this platform. And then you can have access to things like.
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surveys to get better data for your employees or you can tune into an event that we have. We have one in April of 2023 with Kristin Hadid. For those of you who know her work, she wrote the book, Permission to Screw Up. She talks about how we can develop leaders for how do you get great feedback from your employees and how do you lead in a way that supports this kind of work. From the trainings to the resources, it's all really grab and go.
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We don't need everyone to be experts in all of these areas, but what we do need is to make sure that you have the support to continue leading within whatever your role is in your organization. So you can purchase a license to Wellcoa and get access to all of that. Very cool. Well, I hope that you check it out in Wellcoa. I'll drop the links to this stuff in the notes for this episode, but I'm assuming is it Wellcoa.org or what is the?
50:01
If they're listening now. It is welcoa.org. Okay. Yeah, and people can email me directly. It's mgoth at welcoa.org. Got it. I'll reach out to Maggie directly. If you've had any of the stories she shared, you identify with, I'm sure she wouldn't mind a story like that in the middle of her workday. So don't be shy and actually do that. So, and for you tuning in, one specific request. Do you have a friend or colleague who identifies with today's topic?
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because I feel like this one, I feel like oftentimes you listen to these podcasts or you listen to these episodes and it often just goes by, oh, that was really interesting or something. But if there is someone who popped into your head and you haven't already done it, I hope that you hit share and share some of Maggie's tips with them too and send this episode to them and Wokoa. So thanks for watching. Thanks for listening. And if you're more of a reader or you like the short summary of things, I do that too.
50:57
So thanks for subscribing to the email list. These episodes will hit your inbox so you don't have to go looking for them. So I love sharing this productivity gladiator thing with you. So Maggie, thanks so much for joining us today. And that's a wrap.