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!