The secret to wellness isn’t necessarily doing more, but doing what’s right, however the art of simplification can be quite complex.
Shannah Kennedy and Lyndall Mitchell are educators and authors, specialising in empowering professionals and business teams to harness mindfulness, and use it to take control of their lives. Their training enterprise ‘The Essentialists’ facilitates Wellness Masterclasses, designed to help individuals improve health, productivity, and success.
Today’s workplaces are fuelled by stress, sleep deprivation and burnout. It’s time to rethink this equation as an unavoidable reality of modern life. It is vital that executives make a visible, long-term commitment to improving the education of essential and fundamental skills that support and upskill staff to thrive both personally and professionally.
We need the basic essential skills to be taught to work around life’s constant distractions in our time famined world and go from the chaos into a feeling of calm confidence and reconnection with who we are. This is the foundation of what is needed for humans to thrive with optimum health and wellbeing in life both personally and professionally. The three skills to master are:
Boundaries.
The foundational principle of boundaries is looking at your life from a point of view of what I want to be doing and investing my time in versus what I feel obligated to be doing and ultimately creating a toxic resentment over time. Whether that be feeling obligated to constantly keep up-to-date on social media, attending the budget-destroying destination wedding of a distant friend, going to every sport game of your child’s or attending a function that you feel obligated to. Creating and maintaining our boundaries allow us to fill our diaries from a position of what serves us best versus what I feel I should do.
The science of breath.
The breath is the richest fuel for the confidence tank. It links the brain to the belly, to feel more rather than overthink everything and create stress in life. It is the lifeskill to master for calm confident control in our everyday living. We have learnt that the best way to boost our self-confidence when we enter a room for a presentation is to take several deep breaths. The best way to make a decision is to take a breath first, the best way to sleep is to breath before we sleep and repair. We take on average 17,000 breaths a day and we are only using 50% of our lung capacity, hence living life with a half tank of fuel.
Personal and professional vision.
A good healthy vision, based on your values, is what drives your decisions and actions that support the foundation of confidence. You can make informative choices as you have thought things through and become familiar ahead of time with the path you are taking. It is not so much what should happen, but what could happen if you are open to growth and evolving as a person.
“A vision is not just a picture of what could be; it is an appeal to our better selves, a call to become something more”
Remember ‘like attracts like’. Whatever we focus on we give energy to. If we focus on stress, we get stress. If we want joy, we need to feel and acknowledge when there is joy, if we want wellbeing we need to feel and focus on space for wellbeing. What are you envisioning for the next year of your life? Our unconscious minds work in pictures so it is time to get creative and own the story with which you want to move forward.
Be clear about what you want in life. We are living in a time where many of us are feeling too tired to keep running and yet we are too scared to stop. We know that if we could simply give ourselves permission to put ourselves in a loving and compassionate “time out” to catch our breath and reconnect with our true selves we could realign, carefully re-invent and absolutely re-member who YOU really are. Mastering the basic life and wellness skillsets will give us the opportunity to cope with the pace, rise above the stress level that is set and get back into the drivers seat in life. it is truly time to revisit and master the basics in life that support us rather than rob us of life happiness.
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