Integritus Prime

Recently, I met with several fellow wellness professionals in the San Francisco Bay Area. We talked about the delicate balance between using technology to promote wellness, and stepping away from technology when it starts to impinge on wellness. Ring a bell? Yep, that was a theme in my post about Hack Mental Health.

One of the most salient topics that came up in these conversations was startup culture and how it can damage the wellness industry. Think about it: startups often involve devoted founders, then a small team that works really hard, and then explosive growth that threatens company culture and sometimes isn’t survivable. I’ve coached enough founders, and executives and seen enough HR issues to know that scaling a company is difficult. It all boils down to culture and relationships. If you don’t get it right at the start, be prepared to fall apart. Woah, that rhymed – for my poetry on leadership, see Earth Champions.

When founders are poor communicators or don’t take responsibility, you know the startup is doomed. In the wellness arena, there are even more opportunities for hypocrisy and contradiction than in other startups. For instance, when founders subject themselves to working around the clock or when they have multiple companies or initiatives they are running, they are rarely rested or have the mental clarity to do a good job on any one of their responsibilities. They are left with high levels of stress and anxiety. How might they help others feel better when they are failing themselves?

Sound familiar? Recall that in the healthcare industry, those who shoulder the responsibility of performing surgery on us and taking care of us are some of the most sleep-deprived people on this earth. It doesn’t make any sense.

Back to wellness startups. Running a wellness startup by definition demands a different approach, because we look to wellness companies to show us how we can have engaged, healthy, psychologically safe, productive, trusting, creative, and thriving teams. This leadership cannot begin to germinate if wellness professionals are themselves stuck in an unhealthy muck of overwork and high anxiety.

Examples: that wellness professional who is too busy to discuss holistic approaches to building in wellness for herself and her team, or the software engineer who describes her current job as “chill” but is actively seeking a job which she knows will bring more stress – there’s nothing wrong with wanting to be challenged – but being addicted to stress is a concern.

The most effective way to break out of this unhealthy culture is to cultivate integrity and step off of the hamster wheel. It begins with the self. In this case, that means founders and all staff at a wellness startup need to focus on themselves. Wellness professionals can spread wellbeing only by demonstrating how it’s done, and doing their own inner work.

There is no more glaring example of hypocrisy than the stressed wellness professional who is experiencing burnout. Let’s take the time to get it right ourselves before we start preaching wellness to others. I’ve had to learn this lesson the hard way, and frankly, it’s the best way. For a list of tips on how to balance your energy and more often experience a state of creative flow, see one of my previous posts. If you’re interested in mindfulness approaches, you might like this post.

Like what you read? Drop me a note and let’s talk about how you can achieve your goals with integrity, and sustain the changes you need to make for your wellness startup or other organization.