Climbing Back to Your Well-Being: Steps for Employees and Employers Alike
By Scott Poynton, Skytop Contributor / October 15th, 2021
Scott Poynton is an Australian forester. He founded The Forest Trust (TFT) in 1999 and grew it into a global non-profit working in 48 countries, impacting more than $1 trillion in supply chain transactions.
Scott supported some of the world’s largest companies to be more environmentally and socially responsible. He brokered major transformations across the wood and agri-commodities sectors, pioneering responsible sourcing and launching the world’s first No Deforestation, No Exploitation commitments.
In 2020, Scott founded The Pond Foundation. Its My Carbon Zero program helps individuals and businesses take their own strong, credible climate action. He also leads a different way limited, supporting C-suite executives and their organizations to grow values-based leadership while sharing the lessons of his experience through writing, presenting and lecturing.
Understanding Well-Being
Employers and employees alike are grappling with the many deep stresses and strains created by the COVID-19 pandemic. The focus on employee well-being has perhaps never been stronger. Company programs to promote employee well-being existed before the pandemic and have taken off in recent years. As the general strains on our mental and physical well-being are becoming better understood, interventions to help are going deeper than ever before. This is a positive development.
What about well-being itself? How well do we understand its inherent layers and nuances? What does it mean for you? How is it best measured and tracked? Measuring physical well-being is more straightforward than mental well-being. There are well established measures for fitness for example. We can look at diet, nutrition, exercise, and many other factors that we can monitor over time and use to track apparent ‘improvements’; apparent because though there is perceived wisdom at to what ‘good’ looks like, we must acknowledge that what appears to be progress for one might be torture for another.
Mental well-being is harder to measure, and far harder to track as the things that affect one person’s mental well-being can be blissfully unimportant to another. These can change over time as new experiences come to shape us. A sense of being ‘happy’ is a good measure also but is somewhat intangible and difficult to compare between individuals. How is it defined?
When things are complex, one way to grapple with them is to go simple. In the case of my own personal well-being, after more than 30 years being a leader, being led, mediating serious disputes and inspiring change, suffering stress, fatigue and deep burn out along the way, I’ve come to view my well-being as existing along something of a spectrum, a ladder.
What’s clear to me is that I can travel up or down that ladder based on how deeply aligned I feel I’m living with respect to my fundamental values and whether I’m doing the self-care practices that sustain me.
Understanding my values and these self-care actions have been critical to my own well-being oscillations.
I’ll explore these things in future posts. For now, let’s look at the Well-Being Ladder itself.
The Well-Being Ladder
Our well-being reaches dizzy heights when we feel super connected to everything we’re doing. We’re dancing! Yet, for so many, it can also plumb terrifying depths with tragic consequences. We rise up or fall down depending on the resonance we find in our lives.
The Well-Being Ladder helps us visualize where we are on that spectrum.
Let’s start in the middle, with the threshold state, “Living.”
“Living” means we’re just going through the motions. We turn up, but that’s as far as it goes. We eat, sleep, breathe, go to work, live in relationships, whatever; we just roll, nothing inspires us, nothing gets us down too much, we exist. It’s a nothingness, null state of being that by definition means we’re neither well nor unwell. That might sound desirable if you’re living a more stressed life, and it’s better than what comes below. But it’s tenuous, and from that place of relative disconnection, we can easily fall lower.
Conversely, if you’ve experienced heights of well-being, simply “Living” is deeply unsatisfying and by definition, is an unhappy place.
Below “Living”, we’re doing it tough. We’re just “Surviving”, hanging in on a white-knuckle ride. Here, we’re under great strain and pressure, life isn’t fun, things go from bad to worse. Depression and despair, self-doubt and other dark emotions can visit us. We truly are just surviving, day to day.
Below “Surviving”, we’re in trouble. This is where, after so long hanging on, people can fall to “Burn Out.” Physical and mental burn out is on the rise in workplaces all over the world. People aren’t coping with the strains being placed on them over great, long periods; they eventually hit walls. Once you’re in “Burn Out”, it’s super tough to emerge, just taking a week’s holiday cannot and does not do it.
Then we’re in grave danger. Below “Burn Out”, we can tumble not only to “Derelict” where all is a big mess but can easily bypass that step altogether. I speak from experience. After more than 20 years travelling the world, often under great physical and mental stress, pushing my body beyond all reasonable limits and failing to pay due attention to my self-care, I had a burnout that meant I could have dropped to “Dead” – which needs no explanation – at any moment; perhaps I was “Derelict” but didn’t know it? Two heart operations later and I found a path to recovery, but I was lucky.
What about above the threshold?
We reach the first rung, “Connecting,” when we feel we’re in a good place values-wise and we’re being intentional about our self-care routines. We start to feel a buzz, something good is happening for us and we connect not only to our own values, but to the people and places around us. Alignment is entering the room and we start to tingle.
“Thriving” is when things are really coming good. Our work and family life are both aligned with our values and we’re growing and flourishing as people. We’re making good time to do our self-care routines properly and these are helping us find calm, and the mental, physical and spiritual well-being that comes with it. Here, we’re living much of our life in what we consider a good place.
Above “Thriving”, yes, we’re “Dancing.” There is true alignment here and we’re our best selves. We feel great about everything we’re doing, about who we are. This is where resonance reigns.
From Home Back to Your Work World
Where do you feel you land on this ladder?
My experience is that a large number of people exist at best at “Living” and oscillate between that unsatisfactory high point and “Surviving” and “Burnt Out.” Employee well-being programs that focus on perks like gym membership and other physical, self-care actions, do help them hold onto where they are but struggle to help them move up rungs.
What else might we do to go higher up that well-being ladder? To help people flourish?
That’s where living with resonance and focusing on your self-care comes in and that’s the subject of my next post.