INsight/ The Unhappy Ones

Photo by Anh Nguyen on Unsplash.

Jakarta, 28 December 2022 — Almost one in two workers suffer from stress ‘a lot.’ What will you do?

Story 

It happened in 2022. Calling it a blind spot of leaders, Jon Clifton, the CEO of Gallup, a polling company, told the story that almost one in two workers globally — and more women than men — experienced stress ‘a lot’ during the previous day. Anger, stress, worry, and sadness were reported to have risen to record highs, with the rate of unhappiness continuing to rise globally for a decade. Clifton shared the story of a woman in Vietnam crying out during a Gallup interview, “no one ever asks me whether I’m happy or not, whether I’m well or sick.” The stories of unhappy people are, however, rarely reported. While some are revealed in interviews, of which Gallup conducted more than 5 million in over 150 countries, many more stories of unhappiness remain hidden behind a facade of success and outward happiness, or behind the plain expressions that we can see on people’s faces every day, including workers like the woman in Vietnam. 

Sometimes, it takes the story of a publicly successful person taking their own life to shock us into realizing that there is so much suffering in people’s lives that we do not see. Including people who are doing well financially. Do today’s executives have the solution to the growing crisis of unhappiness? It seems not. While many employers have started paying more attention to the wellbeing of the workforce, prompted in part by the hardships during the Covid-19 pandemic, their focus is often limited to economic metrics and reducing sick leave and the number of staff quitting their job. That’s just scratching the surface and it fails to address the problem from a higher level of consciousness, as Albert Einstein, the 20th-century physicist and philosopher, would say. 

To have hope of bending the unhappiness curve downward, we need to first understand what causes the rising levels of negative emotions. For a good place to start, that draws on research, neuroscience, and the world’s wisdom traditions, turn to the work of Tal Ben-Shahar, a psychologist, the author of Happier, No Matter What, and a lecturer whose academic course on happiness received top ratings from the students at Harvard University. In his work, he points to five interconnected areas of wellbeing that need our attention to lead a happier life: they are our spiritual, physical, intellectual, relational, and emotional wellbeing. Unlike Gallup, Ben-Shahar includes and even starts with spiritual wellbeing, which includes a sense of meaning and purpose to which you commit, together with the ability to be fully present in the here and now.

Challenge

So how you are managing your wellbeing? I take that question very seriously for myself, and I practice expanding my self-awareness about it with a sense of curiosity, a growth mindset, and persistence. As a coach, I normally check in with the leaders I work with on how they rate their wellbeing in several areas. We do this when we start our coaching relationship. After that, during the coaching process, they will check in with me ahead of our sessions, not only about their progress and achievements but also about what bothers them and what they are struggling with in the challenge they are working on. These confidential exchanges help to make the best use of our safe coaching space for making progress while overcoming wellbeing obstacles on the way. 

Often, it’s the wellbeing obstacles that are the key to moving forward. That also applies to executives. As trust in the coaching relationship grows, we are able to recognize and address some of the underlying negative emotions of anger, stress, worry, and sadness that Gallup refers to in their study. And while we tend to focus in the coaching process on navigating a transition in their leadership, it’s the discovery of new ways forward that often involves a rebalancing of deeply-held personal aspects of wellbeing, such as the five interconnected areas described by Ben-Shahar.

Finding time — and a safe space — to unpack and address negative emotions isn’t only a personal concern for the leaders I work with. As the Gallup study points out, it also concerns their awareness of unhappy emotions (the suffering) in the people they work with, and their ability to reach out and check in with them and help them improve their wellbeing which is, of course, closely linked to their performance. That concern for others lies or should lie, at the heart of leadership. And yet, as Gallup’s CEO Jon Clifton attests, “leaders missed it.” Hence the full title of his book Blind Spot: The Global Rise of Unhappiness and How Leaders Missed It. Actually, that they missed it is not really surprising. As Ben-Shahar shared in an interview with The Economist, the day has yet to come for wellbeing to be taught in schools as part of the foundational education curriculum. Until that time, leaders need to catch up, urgently. 

Question

My question for you this week is about the state of your wellbeing.  Not just for the appearances you keep up to others, but deep down personally? To really work on it, who is the trusted person in your life you feel safe with to open up about the areas of wellbeing where you aren’t doing as well as you would like, and less well than you might be showing to others outwardly? For many leaders, as I discovered, that person is their coach. I never stop being surprised by what leaders share privately during our confidential one-to-one coaching sessions. Having a private safe space to share what concerns you is truly a treasure that makes positive changes possible. If you would like to start the new year being coached through a leadership transition that includes raising your wellbeing, then set up a free strategy call.

Once you have pondered the state of your own wellbeing, I’d like you to consider what you will do to help others improve their wellbeing. From Gallup’s research and Ben-Shahar’s teaching, the urgent need to attend to the wellbeing of others is evident. How often do you ask someone at work about their wellbeing, and take time to listen to their concerns? In Asia’s wisdom traditions, caring about other people’s wellbeing beyond your own is called compassion. In the West, empathy is a core pillar of emotional intelligence. Will you commit to learning and practicing compassion and empathy to increase the wellbeing of people around you at work?

We are all familiar with the inflight instruction to “put on your own oxygen mask before helping others.” The sooner you can manage your own wellbeing and raise it to a much higher level and better balance, the sooner you can help people around you who are experiencing suffering (a lot of stress) albeit quietly and without showing it outwardly. If you would like to learn and practice together with colleagues how to become a Trusted Leader to your teammates as well as to your bosses, clients, partners, and friends, then book a free setup call so we can discuss the result you want to achieve as a leader in the new year, and the obstacles to wellbeing that you need to overcome. I will be happy to answer your questions about our new LEADyear 2023 Challenge to become a Trusted Leader, in Grow3Leaders.