Introducing Holistic Well-being
I am cautiously optimistic to share with you insight from my second dive “In the Oasis” – a founder’s blog on recalibrating life, work, and leading. We are diving deep in my oasis today as I share my journey, reflection, and outcomes from healing the most important connection in my life- that of mind, body, and soul.
Life-work integration is a holistic and evolved approach to well-being at work. It is a big future forward stride from the origins of well-being at work in corporate South Africa, which was mainly about employee wellness programs responding to physical illnesses like TB, HIV/AIDS and for the purpose of employee safety in industries such as FMCGs, Mining and Renewable Energy.
The next wave was work-life balance – a dance most of us have poorly performed especially for our family audiences. This is mainly because of its skewed order to begin with. It seems that we have somehow worshiped the workspace, more than our life space – where our “chi” is restored. This is the life force and power that contributes to our thriving in all the spaces we occupy.
With this article, I am diving deep and bringing to the surface the importance and science of holistic wellbeing, which forms the future of leadership development in a more human and humane world.
The Body
Physical well-being is perhaps the first point of reference when we speak about our health. It is said that we came as souls from Source into these physical bodies to experience the expansion of our consciousness. Isn’t it amazing that when you woke up this morning, your heart is beating as it should, youre were alive, and everything in your body is working as it should without you doing anything. Our bodies contain our physical intelligence.
While I grew up sporty and still generally fit, I used to undermine the intelligence of the body. I engaged with the world so cerebrally, it was almost as if my body was just there to carry my mind, ‘the real engine’. After noting my body’s connection to the mind and soul, I learnt that the brain is truly all over the body. Your neurological pathway running throughout your body carries messages that contribute to your health.
With practice I learnt to ask and listen to this wisdom. The strain in my shoulder when I’m stressed, needing a massage , the tingle in my head when I think of something inspiring, the ring in my ears when I need to pay attention, the grumble in my stomach when I’m hungry, the persistent headache when I’ve forgotten to drink water. Tell me, why do we automatically kiss the knee of a child who has hurt it while playing? Is it not because we intuitively know that the body is healed by love ?
The Mind
We have evolved our view of health to include a focus on the mind, through the rise in mental health awareness and a wide array of therapeutic interventions becoming more and more available. This shift acknowledges a) the importance of mental health in overall well-being, and b) the physio-somatic connection between the mind and body. For example, I have noticed that my shoulder and neck tension seems to be more apparent during times of stress and burnout. This usually requires a behavioral change such as taking mini rests, stretches, and breathing exercises within my day to release tension that would otherwise build up in my shoulder muscle area.
If you read my last blog, you will hear the story about how I became super successful, super early in life, driven by a super functioning mind that led to a General Anxiety Disorder diagnosis. This points to some of the dangers of working our mind on overdrive, especially when disconnected from the soul.
The Soul
The evolution of well-being is to bring the soul into the mix. Most of us share the view that we are also spiritual beings and tend to have some sort of practice to nurture our souls- but mentioning it at work is somehow Taboo. I have a daily morning Sadhana for example that involves prayer, meditation, yoga, and journaling which tends to spill into how I also approach my work.
I started doing this more intentionally the past two years as a big part of unpacking the next level of my soul journey. This is how my “Why” ( ie. the reason for my existence) became clearer to me and I had the courage to follow it.
How I slowly left my soul behind
This made me think about how I had slowly left my soul behind, particularly at work. These were not always big moments of betraying God, but little chipping away at my integrity and authenticity. Such as:
- Allowing unchecked trauma responses and triggers to claim my peace
- Overcompensating to fit into spaces at the cost of who I am
- Doing things for external validation, including making my mother proud
- Holding a limited view of a successful life focused on materialism
- Compartmentalizing self: Thinking my spiritual self only matters in some spaces and not in others
- Saying Yes, when I should’ve said No (or the other way around)
- Selling myself short and putting myself in a box
- Telling white lies to cover up my feelings of worthlessness
A Scientific Look at Balancing your body, mind, and soul
The health of the mind, body, and soul take form in different actions and practices, but they weave together to form the basis of health. This is not a new perspective. Once upon a time, before scientists decided to dissect everything, human well-being was considered a whole single unit with interconnected parts. This is also a truly African concept of health. The concept of the mind body and soul connection unifies our intellectual, physical, and spiritual aspects to understand us as whole beings.
I like this light description from A Little Spark of Joy blog:
- The mind: symbolizes our mental and intellectual functions, including our thoughts, beliefs, and attitudes. Our mind allows us to learn, create, and make decisions.
- The Body: allows us to interact with the external world. It houses our vital organs and systems that keep us alive and healthy.
- The soul: regardless of religious beliefs, the soul is generally regarded as our inherent essence or spirit. It’s the driving force behind our purpose, passions, dreams and the meaningful connections we form with others
The need for integrative mental health that combine mental stimulation, physical exercise, and soul connection is evident. And balancing the mind, body, and soul is largely personal, as it comes down to what you enjoy, what is doable for your lifestyle, and your baselines. However, finding ways to stimulate your brain with new activities, move your body, take in nourishing foods from nature, and recuperate is a general recipe for health on all levels. Balancing this connection helps us better manage stress, improve physical well-being, and enhance the quality of life.
The possibility of this excites me because when we address holistic well-being, we are not just trying to get well, but what we are doing is recalibrating a new holistic you that is connected to your true, regenerative power that is already within you, and is a gift that keeps on giving.
Becoming a Self-Healer: Bringing My Most Wholesome Self
I teach and coach on Inclusive Leadership and one of the things I emphasize is the importance of including self. As you learn to include and love the parts of yourself that you’ve demonized, it becomes much easier to be more inclusive of others.I am slowly learning that you cannot compartmentalize who you are and expect to be holistically well.
The self concept and cognitive dissonance are fascinating terms I remember from Psychology school that can better explain this phenomenon. Cognitive dissonance is the psychological discomfort you feel when not in alignment between your beliefs and your behavior. This happens continuously as the self engages with the world, conceiving itself, naturally seeking integration and alignment. Said differently, we are naturally wired for wholesomeness, and when we reject, judge too harshly, or disregard certain parts of who we are, we are actually doing ourselves a disservice which is likely to reveal itself in more unflattering ways like outbursts, depression, headaches, and other more serious ‘dis-ease’. Bringing your most wholesome self to work therefore requires an ongoing inner work of integrating your mind, body, and soul. In a world of work that seems to celebrate inauthenticity – at the cost of our well-being, this holistic approach is introducing a new type of self mastery that is less about behavior change, as it is about peeling off the layers of the not-true self and focusing on alignment to a self that is fundamentally, already well. This is how I healed myself.
Becoming a healer first happened to me before I could hold space for another person’s healing. I have gone through my fair share of 10 thousand hours (more like 10 years) as a globally trained Work Psychologist and am a powerful thinker (even though I do say so myself). This had me highly skilled at mind-body human development interventions at work. But when I tapped into the soul stuff (via clarifying my purpose), I truly felt more whole in the spaces and people I influence. Leaders are human too, and humans need to heal to be whole and truly change the world. That is why I hold true to the quote “if you want to change the world, start with yourself” or …”go love your family”. I did both, I first healed myself – facing hard truths about how I had found myself here. This gave me the capacity to hold a healing space for my family (ridden with grief for losing our father), my friends (navigating purpose, career, adulting), and then my clients (leaders who have started to see the light of holistic living and wanting to bring it into their work), and the ultimate forming somewhat of a new emerging role, Dr. Joy, the business healer…because business needs healing too.
The burning platform for holistic leader effectiveness
The Great Transformation is requiring us to engage with the world differently. The challenges that are emerging are going to need more parts of ourselves than ever before. A good illustration is how the VUCA world with increasing volatility, unpredictability, complexity, and ambiguity makes it difficult to plan business cycles too far out, needing our ability to hold space for what we don’t know. We can envision and strategize to some extent, but the nature of the world right now is emergent and requires us to listen more deeply to our customers pain points, prototype and pivot more often, be extremely flexible to change, open feedback loops, and creative improvisation.What ever that looks like for you in your industry and/or career path, it is a time to deepen your approach.
The basic anatomy of the soul
Our healing will have to start with healing the fragmented aspects of our feminine self that has long been seen as weak, not needed in business, and misunderstood. In ancient Africa, there is a strong belief that Spirit (via the soul) manifests in both ugogo (Divine Feminine) nomkhulu (Divine Masculine). Similarly in the East, they speak about the ongoing union between Shiva and Shakti- all symbolizing the need to be effective in both yin and yang aspects of who we are. Thus if we believe that we are made in the image of Spirit, and we bring that into a holistic leader effectiveness, we must therefore integrate the Feminine/Yin: Which is about listening more, creativity, flow, empowerment, being receptive to what is emerging and taking inspired action; And heal the intoxicated Masculine/Yang, so that it does offer the structure, order, and force to achieve the goals we have set for ourselves in more healthy ways.
A holistic approach mitigates hyper masculinity which has led to selfishness, violence, greed, individualism, and issues with ethical and responsible leadership that we find in the world today. Famous leadership and management Guru, Henry Mintberg writes a lot on how leadership has become selfish. If you are interested in leaning into his rigorous studies, that’s your guy.
The future is therefore not just female…it is integrated wholesomeness.
A little bit of hope: The soul is already at work
I once had a hearty meeting with the Chief People Officer of a global corporation on the soul of the organization. I asked her, if we reimagined our organizations to reflect the best of the people within them – how would we describe the soul of the organization? Where would that show in the income/business statement? (I know, wild).
When humans evolve from operating on survival instincts, Maslow suggests that they tend to move towards higher order needs such as purposefulness, psychological well-being, and ultimately actualization towards becoming their best version. How do we then expand and deepen the impact of our organizations beyond profit margins? Yes, I am talking here about transcendence…in a capitalist space…another wild thought. But please, stay with me.
The rise in topics around well-being, DEI, Human sustainability, Climate Change etc. all point to our shared interest to be more responsible in business, that continues to press on our collective consciousness, Ubuntu bethu. What I have learnt is that meeting these higher order goals requires the involvement of a higher self. Those who have integrated their mind and body with their soul are able to be the vessel that continues the “higher’ work forward. Integrated leaders are not necessarily religious, but reach a level of mastery where they have anchored their well-being on mind, body, and soul at work.
The shift towards bringing my soul along more intentionally seemed to bring a peace in my mind that “surpassed all understanding”. I tuned into an abundance of joy and well-being that I never knew existed with or without large sums of money in my account. I just feel extremely blessed to be able to purely co-create life with the Divine. Working in a hyper-masculine world has made us alienate this part of ourselves from spaces outside of churches and religious buildings, leaving business and government stripped away of the soul.
How I started to bring my soul along to work
- I trusted that I have a unique value proposition in the market and no one can ever be me
- I included aspects of my life purpose to my work
- I started making space for doing work that set me soul on fire
- I avoided gossip, small talk, and didn’t pressure myself to speak when there was no need to
- I started valuing my unique contribution instead of comparing myself with others
- I focused on using my natural talents and gifts eg. like intuition, to improve my work
- Risked listening to my inner voice and offered new creative business offerings
- I pray for my clients well-being and leadership around the world
- I used scripture and affirmations to guide my power and influence in the spaces I occupy
- I value myself more, noting that healed energy should not be easily accessible, it now also reflects on my rate card
- I approach work with a meditative state and can be the medicine that is needed wherever I find myself
- I speak to my higher self more …Nomalanga, what do you think about this problem, or solution, or product….? I am sure you have concluded that I am a little cray cray, and perhaps I am, crazy enough to care about such things.
Introducing “The Integrated Leader” Course
This is a time for anchoring in deep purpose and healing. Informed by loved experience, and collaboration with other Psychologists, we have designed the Integrated Leader course to allow participants to revisit their purpose as they enter new roles, understand what makes them thrive, and integrate those insights into achieving their work KPIs. At the end of the course, participants will have their personal leadership manifesto to shape how they master themselves and make an impact in their work environment.
The 7 week process includes 3 sessions with a coach and self paced learning in between the coaching sessions that focus on:
- Module 1: Intro to Personal Well-being & Thriving
- Module 2: Articulating your North Star & Southern Star
- Module 3: Integrating your work goals
- Module 4: Mastering my personal energy
- Module 5: Finalising your leadership manifesto (bonus)
At the end of this 7 weeks coaching course, you will gain the following skills:
- Set your own affirmations to rewire your brain to thrive
- Setting long term and short term SMARTY goals
- Inner Management skills and Personal energy mastery
Take the next inspired action
- CoachingOutside Sessions
Thank you to those who joined one or more of those 4 public CoachingOutside Jozi sessions. Please remember to complete the short survey sent to improve our processes.
Arrange a CoachingOutside Jozi session for your own team or a personalized one-on-one, email back on heal@tribenomalanga.com
Plans for CoachingOutside Ethekwini Public Activation are underway. We will be focusing on leaders and managers in the broader health and medical industry. If you manage a team in this industry and would like to be a part of our Durban pilot please reach out.
- The Integrated Leader 7-Weeks Coaching Course
Rolling Enrollment to the course begins October 2023. This coaching course is perfect for new managers or leaders, executives leading at a new level, people needing redirection and career pivoting
Book an inquiry 30 mins call via our community calendar with a member of our team to learn if this course is right for you.
Please follow the Tribe on IG and LinkedIn and share our message with others.
With wholesome goodness,
The Doctor of Joy