With September coming to an end, we’re stepping back and taking stock of what we’ve learned over the past month as part of our focus on wellbeing.
Each Friday for the last four weeks, we’ve reserved 30 minutes to bring our team together for a process we call ‘tea for the soul’; sharing our experiences, wins and lessons learned throughout the week, all while we sip a range of great aromatic teas. This means we finish our weeks with a sense of gratefulness for what we’ve experienced as a team and head into the weekend replenished, rejuvenated, and a little bit wiser for the week ahead.
In our first Fulfilment Friday session, we focused on the importance of gratitude both in our personal and professional lives. We looked at how many of the world’s most successful companies and thought-leaders – from Nike’s Phil Knight to the one and only Tony Robbins – place a common, high value on gratitude, and how it’s proven that focusing on the positives helps lift our spirits, puts things into perspective, opens doors to more relationships and opportunities, and improves physical health, self-esteem, mental strength and sleep, all while reducing aggression, anxiety and depression.
As we learned about this, we shared a cup of relaxing tea, including a mix of chamomile, juniper berries, lemon verbena, hibiscus, lemongrass, lavender and rose petals. Allowing ourselves to wind down, shed negativity and acknowledge the good in life and in others, which left us feeling fulfilled and motivated to start the month.
In our second Fulfilling Friday, we learned about happiness, joy, and how feelings of accomplishment – of wins, big or small – activate our brains’ reward system, filling us with a sense of pride and achievement, and how this feeling, in turn, energises and motivates us to achieve more. The recognition and celebration of wins – and the rejection of negative mind-chatter and self-doubt – therefore plays a crucial role in reducing anxiety and improving both job satisfaction and overall mental health.
Feeling peachy, we shared our wins with the team over a sweet and punchy tea featuring peach, papaya, apple, white hibiscus, blackberry leaves, marigold petals and roasted chicory.
In last week’s session, we discovered the importance of learning itself; how a growth mindset, curiosity and the will to constantly improve and develop skills leads to a greater (and self-perpetuating) sense of achievement, happiness and sense of self. And, in a business sense, the ability to understand, document, share and apply lessons learned can vastly improve business processes and fast-track goal attainment.
With a detoxifying mint tea mix featuring zingy peppermint, sweet spearmint and invigorating lemon verbena, we finished the week feeling energised, revitalised and ready to start all over again.
Finally, in today’s session, we’re spoiling ourselves a little with a focus on indulgence.
There’s a strange, internal conflict we occasionally fall victim to: That while being organised, productive, goal-driven and hard-working are generally encouraged as positive human traits necessary for success, the concept of ‘self-indulgence’ or rewarding oneself is often associated with selfishness. We often put work before wellbeing, and others before ourselves. But while there are obvious benefits to be gained from hard work and being considerate, it’s imperative that we never lose sight of our own mental health in doing so – and rewarding ourselves for lessons learned, celebrating small wins and pursuing a positive growth mindset are all key to this.
Ultimately, everything we’ve learned this month has been about how these concepts can co-exist: How we can work harder and treat others with respect, all while improving our own physical and mental wellbeing. And, at the end of the day, allowing ourselves to treat ourselves as needed.
And so, with that, we finish our final Fulfilment Friday with some crazy good cocoa, fresh from local farmers in the Solomon Islands. De-lish!
