Executive Wellness: The Key to High Performance
It’s easy to simplify your role as a leader to managing your team, measuring key metrics, and delivering business results at all costs. But if you’re honest with yourself, you probably know there is a lot more to leadership than that.
In a profession where you’re never fully off the clock, how can you maintain peak performance consistently? Enter executive wellness.
A Whole Person Approach
In a leader’s mindset, it’s easy to get used to going all in. Your role can go from a professional role to all-consuming obsession if you let it. Maybe you’ve adopted “founder mode” — running your business and team with a hyper hands-on approach across all levels. While this full gas mentality may have helped your business grow, it can leave you feeling unbalanced over the long run. Wellness for an executive goes beyond physical health. As published in 2017, the intellectual, emotional, social, spiritual, vocational, financial, and environmental dimensions also make up your quality of life. We all know that when we experience stress across any of these dimensions, it runs the risk of impacting another. You might be falling into the trap of hedonic well-being — an external focus on pleasure and happiness. Instead, embrace eudaimonic well-being, or true satisfaction and realization of your potential. It’s only when our entire well-being is prioritized that we can reach mental clarity and the optimal performance required to operate effectively at an executive level.
Input and Output
What you put into your body, mind, and spirit fuel your day-to-day experiences. But self-care isn’t just about spa days and candles. It’s about what’s genuinely good for you— and what is good for you is also good for your business. When you’re under-resourced living with constant stress, improper nourishment, and sleep deprivation, your decision-making is impaired, your creativity is diminished, and your effective leadership skills are harmed. Executive wellness means prioritizing how you take care of yourself so that you can better lead and drive company performance. We know that, as a leader, what you model and prioritize at the top trickles down to the rest of the team. In a recent study, data shows that leaders displaying concern for their employees’ health and role modeling self-care is positively related to employee health. Putting yourself first doesn’t mean you’re neglecting your team — it actually means you’re putting them first, too. Doubling down on the inputs to your well-being and encouraging your team to do the same will be reflected in your company’s output. Whether it’s quarter over quarter growth or a breakthrough of a new product offering, the changes you make internally will be visible externally.
Minimize Noise, Maximize Potential
If you’re going to play the leadership game at this level, you need to resource yourself like a professional athlete of the business game you’re playing. The wellness industry is noisy, and it’s easy to get caught up in the newest trends to fuel your body and lifestyle with every hack you can find. But are your habits driving the results that you want? You must personalize your routines and habits to fit your lifestyle. Instead of taking every supplement, target vitamins to address measurable deficiencies in your body. Instead of wondering if you’re making smart personal investments, talk to a financial advisor. And instead of feeling overwhelmed by your role, meet with an executive coach whose guidance can raise the bar across your life — including in performance, resilience, and accountability. Prioritizing your well-being will undoubtedly make you a better leader.
You have the power to change the culture around leadership and make wellness synonymous with success. Remember, what is good for you is also good for the business.
