Remember when work and life were like two separate things? Well, that’s changing. Now it’s all about blending the two. This means more than just working from home; it’s about making your job fit your life in a way that makes you happy and productive. This is why Dr. Steven MacGregor aims to promote wellbeing at work, not just in our daily lives.
Dr. Steven MacGregor is a teacher who has taught over 30,000 executives face to face, and a further 250,000 online through his Sustaining Executive Performance program. He also taught at IMD in Lausanne and CIBS in Shanghai. His varied clients include McKinsey & Company, Salesforce, and Uber. This global exposure has given him a keen sense of cultural awareness and a deep understanding of how to inspire and change behavior.
He’s currently an adjunct professor at Madrid’s IE business school and is a prolific author who, over the past 11 years, has either authored or co-authored a total of six books. These include Sustaining Executive Performance, Chief Wellbeing Officer, and The Daily Reset.
In this article, Dr. Steven breaks down the importance of integrating workplace wellness to unlock our performance and potential, and the great need to promote work-life integration in today’s modern workplace landscape.
“Wellbeing starts with ourselves, but it has to involve the people around us – our teams at work, our families and friends, wider society. And that’s the path to happiness as well.”
– Dr. Steven MacGregor
Adaptability: Finding Joy in Failure
Dr. Steven’s book “The Daily Reset” focuses on daily practices for enhancing well-being, and he emphasizes one nudge from the book: embracing the process of trying, failing, and persevering, rather than just focusing on achieving a successful outcome. This idea is super helpful for our well-being at work. It re-establishes the fact that success is not the absence of failure, but the persistence through failure to achieve a goal.
“Sometimes it may be the failure that could be your biggest achievement. It’s okay to make mistakes, not to finish, because there is no finish line. It’s about growing for your next race.”
– Anil Ramjiani
In both our personal and professional lives, enduring through challenges and learning from failures can be as valuable as achieving success. Valuing our experiences and learnings breaks the stigma around failing and encourages others to embrace their vulnerabilities. This way of thinking helps us achieve workplace wellness, strengthening our courage to take risks and the opportunity to learn and cultivate our continuous growth to be able to achieve more.
Resilience: Equipping a Growth Mindset
Instead of focusing on our failures or limitations, we should focus on what we can learn from each experience; this is what having a growth mindset is all about. This approach is crucial for building resilience, as it shifts our perspective from seeing ourselves as victims of our circumstances to being agents who have control over how we respond and grow from our experiences.
“Resilience is something we can learn. We can become antifragile. It’s all about what we pay attention to and how we reframe in the moment. Because what we manifest becomes our reality.”
– Ashish Kothari
Resilience, learning, and growth are not innate traits but habits that we can develop. By paying attention to how we frame our experiences and what we focus on, we can transform our reality, turning challenges into valuable lessons that contribute to our personal development as well as our workplace wellness.
Community: The Value of Meaningful Connections
Community and genuine connections have an impactful role on our workplace wellness and in our personal lives. One of the new nudges in Dr. Steven’s book is “People Make Glasgow,” which highlights the power of meaningful interactions in fostering our sense of belonging and happiness. This goes beyond casual encounters, suggesting that deeper, more intentional connections can significantly enrich our lives.
In one of our podcast episodes, Happiness Expert Jessica Weiss, mentions how our well-being is deeply intertwined with the quality of our relationships and the communities we nurture. It reminds us that in a world that can often feel divided, the simple yet profound act of genuinely connecting with others is a key to a more fulfilling and happier life.
Work-Life Integration and Flexibility
Being flexible at work matters. It’s not just about choosing to work from home or the office; it’s about mixing work and our personal life in a way that feels right for us. Dr. Steven points out that sustainable leaders understand the importance of work-life integration and are open to new ways of doing things with their teams.
They’re leading in a way that nurtures the well-being of employees because they know that when people get to work how and where they want, they’re happier and do better at their jobs. Workplaces that are flexible and consider what their employees need can create a much better and more productive environment, significantly enhancing workplace wellness.
Moreover, balancing our work life with our personal care is just as important. As per Dr. Steven, instead of just working non-stop and then trying to relax after hours, we should bring little bits of well-being into our workday. We should be able to recharge whenever we need to, just like we’d charge our phones when they run low. This could mean taking short breaks, doing some stretches, or just stepping outside for fresh air.
Remember, blending self-care into our work isn’t just good for us; it makes us more creative and productive, and that’s a win for everyone.
Conclusion
To sum it all up, being happy and healthy at work is about more than just our work environment. It’s about finding balance – or better yet, harmony between our job and our personal life. So try to find that sweet spot in your work life where you’re learning, growing, and connecting with others, and don’t forget to balance it with the moments that matter to you as an individual. That’s the key to a great work and life experience.
Dr. Steven MacGregor, International Speaker & Chief Wellbeing Officer
Learn more about Steven at his LinkedIn.
Listen to the podcast with Ashish, Anil, and Steven below.
Access and subscribe to all of the episodes of the Happiness Squad Podcast here.
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