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Committee: Business & Life Coaches
Business coaches assist and guide the business owners in running businesses by helping them clarify the vision of their business and how it fits in with their personal goals. Business and Life coaches will help by scaling up businesses by giving their insights. DLC platform will assist its members in goal planning through these coaches.


			


			












	

			

	

		
8 Pillars of Wellness for Extraordinary Leadership
	

	

		The Prosperity and Wellness coach Christopher Salem brings interesting insights on battling addiction and fighting one’s own demons through his own life experiences. He focuses on the “root cause” that leads to changes and results, while he shares key 8 pillars or dimensions of wellness for breaking free to experience a higher level of Prosperity, Health, and Wellness in alignment, thus empowering lives towards improving their business and personal life.	


	

			






	

			

	

		
How to Battle Workplace Burnout For Those Working Remotely
	

	

		
Just this week I saw a screenshot of a participant in a leadership training program (not mine, haha) who was not only lying in bed during the program but fast asleep with his camera on. So, one of two things must be happening, I thought. Either this guy really didn’t care about his economic community, or he’s so burnt out digitally, that he’s entirely detached from reality. He’s a “Top Talent” in his organization, so I chose to believe the latter rather than the former. Perhaps you, like Mr. Snoozey-Pants, have become so digitally burnt out and jaded that you too are in danger of completely losing the plot, and showing up to a meeting wearing just a towel, or worse.  


    

  1. Routine: Humans love routine. Too much routine is boring, but too little is what leads us to become mentally overwhelmed. So even if your commute now consists of a meander from the bedroom to the dining table, you need to be going to sleep and getting up at regular times, eating at regular times, checking email and making calls at regular times, and taking breaks at regular times. Sticking to a routine will keep your brain and body happy in a stable pattern, and this will reduce your cognitive load, and improve your general state of mind.  
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  2. Daily check-in: Humans need connection. That goes for you, and for your team. So make a point of checking in with your boss, teammates, and other key stakeholders each day. It doesn’t need to be a long talk, but a short chat will help to keep you and them all feeling more humanly connected. And remember, the text is the lowest form of communication, so try using your phone as a phone instead and add some tone and cadence to your words. You and your team will appreciate a bit of voice-to-voice contact. 
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  3. Breathe: Humans forget to breathe too often. You are living in the most incredible time in human history, and most of what you face in your life is manageable, and very little of it is a real threat to you or your wellbeing. I mean, how serious is it that you have a deadline to meet? Is anyone going to die? Not likely. I’m not saying you should miss your deadline, but I am saying that there’s a way to work quickly without all of the adrenaline and cortisol that your brain produces when you have a stress response. Remind yourself that whatever you are facing now is not a real threat, it likely won’t kill you no matter what happens, and ask that stressed out piece of your brain to take a step back, and breathe. Taking 5 deep breaths can significantly reduce stress hormone production and help to clear your thoughts. 
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  4. Organize your Tasks: Many people use a notepad for this. I use Trello. Putting tasks on to-do lists serves 2 purposes. First, it reduces cognitive load by removing information from your pre-frontal cortex. Your brain knows you’ve recorded the information elsewhere, so it allows itself to let go of it for now. Second, when you check items off of your to-do list, your brain gives you a hit of dopamine, the most pleasurable chemical on the planet. One of the best mental highs you can get comes from a good steady pace of checking things off of your task list. 
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  5. Curate your environment: Humans are biopsychosocial creatures. That means that our bodies, minds, and environments are all connected in our experience of the world. As tempting as it is to run your staff meeting from bed in your PJ’s with last night’s Cheetos bag still lying beside you and your camera off, make an effort to put your body into an environment conducive to your work. Put on nice clothes. Brush your hair. And sit down in an space that helps your brain to recognise that it’s time to focus on your economic community for a while. Having a specific chair in your house that you only use for work is a great start to bringing your mind, body, and environment into sync. 
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Remote working has become a common practice, and it looks like for many companies, it’s here to stay. Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet (Google) says that a good balance would be 3 days in the office and 2 working from home. I agree with him, but we haven’t taken the time to adapt slowly to all of this remote working, and humans are fundamentally both social creatures and resistant to change. This is leading many of us to experience some kind of digital burnout or another. We’re simultaneously increasingly isolated, chocking on the volume of Zoom meetings, and gasping for clearer communication on collaborative projects. In short, we haven’t adapted to all of this change yet, but making small adjustments to your daily behaviour can make a massive difference in your mental wellbeing.  

	


	

			






	

			

	

		
Could Machine Thinking be Limiting your Organization’s Human Potential?
	

	

		
There are many things within our organisations that continue to limit human potential on an on-going basis. We spend hours, months and years working to ‘value our most important asset’ and ‘unleash human potential’. Worthy phrases yet sadly, in many instances, remaining just that, worthy phrases.


We continue to look though the wrong end of the telescope and wonder why we can’t see clearly. Even the phrases themselves grate on those they are meant to inspire. ‘I am not an asset, I am a human being. I don’t need you to unleash my potential, I just need you to get out of my way’. It has been the never-ending story for many decades.


And here we are. At an almost unique point in human history. A moment in time when artificial intelligence increasingly touches all aspects of life, while our everyday existence has been shaken to the core following a global pandemic. Challenging? Certainly. Opportunity? That depends on what we do next and no more so than in the workspace.


For decades we have organised people around work and work practices that hark back to the 18th Century. Practices based on hierarchy, structure, process, and standardisation. All very controllable and all very predictable. Today, Innovation, human networks of collaboration, energy and ideas, are essential for organisations to thrive, bringing forth services and products not yet imagined, yet essential for our collective health and that of the planet.


Machine learning will support and continue to drive progress as intelligent machines develop and learn at an exponential rate, taking over roles and activities once performed by humans. All at a speed and accuracy we humans simply can’t match. Consequently, many existing activities and roles will disappear forcing a sea-change in the way we work and develop as humans.


Machines are programmed to achieve certain objectives, for example, speech recognition or translation. They do not have an IQ and they certainly do not, as yet, benefit from emotional, social or attentional intelligences. We humans have the full range of intelligences and can do many different things alongside rational, logical thought. We are emotional beings, vibrating with creative energy and a deep-seated curiosity. We can mentalise, share ideas and build relationships. We have the potential to excel in areas AI and machine ways of thinking cannot touch.


However, to excel we must harness and practice skills that have largely remained dormant in our post-industrial age world. As we liberate ourselves from repetitive, mundane tasks and learn to manage the complexity of interaction between machine and human, we can take ourselves to new levels of wellbeing, productivity, and innovation.


Successful organisations will be the ones who remain in continuous dialogue, thinking deeply and engaging diverse minds, to design work around their people. Challenging the existing work paradigm, relinquishing control and dispersing autonomy and decision-making accountability across a flexible living system. In this way the structured work environment humans have often been instructed to adapt themselves to, will fall away, leaving a space for latent human potential to flourish.


Could machine thinking be limiting our organisations potential? If we compete and contain our thinking to the logical, linear ways of the past then, yes, not only will we fail to match the speed and power of our algorithm-fuelled co-workers, we will also slowly strangle all aspects of human motivation and creativity. However, if we turn the telescope around, focusing attention and thinking on our uniquely human skills such as empathy, vulnerability, relationship and caring, we have an opportunity to break the boundaries that currently hamper human potential. This collective release of energy and innovation will no doubt reshape how we work, the organisations within which we work and the wider society within which we are all situated. The potential, if we choose to accept the challenge, is limitless.

	


	

			






	

			

	

		
Sustaining Employee Engagement During This Pandemic
	

	

		
Marna used to think of herself as a team player. She was the one who brought balloons and cake to the office for everyone’s birthdays. She used to make a point to walk around and say hi to every member of the team at least once a day. She was the first to contribute in brainstorming exercises, and often the last to leave the office at night.


Then one day, she was told to stay home. “Work From Home,” they called it. Suddenly remote work was not an exception to the rule, it was the rule. She received an email telling her that if it wasn’t necessary to come to the office, she shouldn’t. Instead, she should work from home.


This was a dramatic change for Marna, who was used to shaking hands with her colleagues every day, setting the bar for energy and enthusiasm in the office, and caring for the social environment of her colleagues. Now she was alone, in an empty apartment, struggling to remain connected and engaged.


There are only so many Zoom calls you can take in a day before the frustration of never being able to make direct eye contact start to wear on you. And pyjamas are so comfortable, and Netflix so accessible, and the refrigerator so close-by. It wasn’t long before Marna’s quality of work started slipping. Instead of charging through her work, she started “getting through the day.”


Months later she was allowed back to the office, only to find that on a day to day basis, dozens of her colleagues were missing due to “close contact” and quarantine restrictions. The office she was so looking forward to returning to had become a ghost town. And since half of the staff was gone, the meetings were still online. And that meant there was still no eye contact. The isolation she felt at home was bad enough. Now, she felt it at the office as well.


It’s a sad fact that the flexibility that comes with remote work is often accompanied by social isolation and disengagement. Many of my clients are struggling with change fatigue and digital burnout among their staff, and they’ve been sharing stories with me about how historically high performers like Marna are finding it hard to remain engaged in the new norm. If that describes you or your team… here are three tips for improving employee engagement during a global pandemic.


1. Flexibility: Encourage your staff that are working remotely to work during times that are conducive for them. With the exception of meetings that they should attend, employees will work better if they can work at their own high functioning times. Some people function better at night, others in the morning. Having that flexibility can help employees stay engaged.


2. Mental Health Checks: Employees won’t tell you if they’re struggling with loneliness, depression, or isolation, so you’ll need to ask. Remember, they’re humans not resources, so they’ll have hard times, and the isolation of an empty apartment and remote work can be mentally draining for people. Humans are social creatures, so make sure to ask about your teammates’ emotional support structure and mental wellbeing.


3. Over-Communicate: Without the break room chitchat and the water-cooler gossip, remote workers are missing out on a lot of the informal information sharing that usually goes on at work. So even though we are still receiving emails and making calls, we might not realise


that the general quality and volume of information goes down considerably when we’re not in the office. As a rule of thumb, you should be checking in on everyone every day, and meeting on video chat at least twice a week.


These quick tips will help employees remain engaged while working from home. Humans haven’t evolved to live and work in isolation from each other. So managers and leaders need to work extra hard to keep remote workers engaged and bonded with their teammates. If you are struggling with managing remote teammates, consider checking out my course Managing Remote Teams here: https://learn.drcorrieblock.com/courses/managing-remote-teams


If you are struggling with your own mental health during a time of quarantine or remote working, remember that what you’re feeling is very human. Reach out to a mental health professional, or send me a message and I’ll try to help.

	


	

			






	

			

	

		
2022 The Year of Disruptive Distinction
	

	

		
2022 The Year of Disruptive Distinction


Every year I strategically give a year a title. 2021 was “the year of timeless distinction”, 2020 was “the year of legacy distinction” and 2019 “the year of global distinction” etc etc. It’s no coincidence I’ve called 2022 “The Year of Disruptive Distinction”, why, we’re living in truly unprecedented but extremely exciting times, the era of creative distinction. We’re seeing the crashing of systems, the calling out of governments but also the creation of a new creative and value driven disruption. Disruption is not necessarily good and it’s not necessarily bad but disruption is real. TM Lewin a British menswear retailer was founded in 1898. Over the years it led with design and product disruption. COVID_19 came and delivered an unprecedented disruption which unfortunately in 2020 caused TM Lewin to close all its 66 UK stores. Because of disruption, do you know history can dissolve in the space of 12 months but an intentional disruption in a 12 month period can cause a future disruption to become a now disruption?


In a time of disruption many leaders will be made while others will break. Throughout history, we’ve seen leaders rise in the midst of adversity to end up living their legacy and leaving, their legacy. During the great depression of the 1930’s, IBM CEO Thomas Watson made two decisions that took IBM from faltering in uncertainty to 45 years of cutting edge leadership. Now, IBM is again taking the lead with cutting edge technology such as IBM Watson. So, in the year of “disruptive distinction”, what’s your disruptive and creative legacy? In this era of creative distinction, being resilient, bold and intentional are vital traits in becoming a leader of distinction. As a leader, your disruption will come from seeing what no one else is seeing then creating a value driven disruption which can be received and understood on a local, national and global level. During Nokia’s reign as a mobile phone giant, the iPhone appeared with their creative distinction. Nokia didn’t know how to quickly pivot and instead of focusing on disruption, they focused on the competition. Do you know focusing on the competition and not on disruption can cause you to become an agitated thinker rather than an agile thinker?


To become an agile thinker and leader of distinction will mean you use disruption as a platform to see new opportunities and possibilities even in the midst of obstacles and problems. So, we’re not just in the year of disruptive distinction but also, we’re in the era of creative distinction and with these truths, the world is looking for leaders who are selfless rather than selfish, who are agile thinkers rather than agitated thinkers and who are visionary minded rather than have a victim mentality. The call has been made, so, will you ignore and divert to voicemail or, will you answer and become a leader of distinction who is disruptive in nature and results. But, what actually is leadership? Below are four timeless insights that give a short, structured and simple answer.


“Leadership is bringing people into new realms of excellence and challenging them to become distinguished in their chosen field.” ~ Onyi Anyado.


“Leadership isn’t about age but rather, leadership is about influence, impact and inspiration.” ~ Onyi Anyado.


“Distinction in leadership isn’t a mindset, distinction in leadership is a state of mind.” ~ Onyi Anyado.


“Distinction in leadership isn’t about me, myself and I, distinction in leadership is about him, her and us.” ~ Onyi Anyado.


Onyi Anyado is a UK based Global Leadership Speaker, Futurist and Corporate Trainer. Onyi coaches and trains senior management teams, leaders and organisations on how to lead with their distinction in the 2020’s and beyond.