Wellness Leading Up to the Holidays and Throughout the Year

Open Eye recently sat on a panel hosted by Amplify in Louisville, Kentucky. The event, which brought together founders of small businesses, start-ups, and bootstrap entrepreneurs, highlighted the importance of prioritizing wellness and self-care over the holidays.

Because self-care is largely thought of as something we do on our own time rather than at work, we can be reluctant to raise it to a team—as if by needing self-care, we are admitting to weakness (a myth that has led to many business professionals being severely burned out). The opposite is true and research consistently bears this out. When you are well-rested, rejuvenated, less stressed, etc., you are more creative, productive, present, and overall more successful. But the reality for small businesses is meeting payroll, and responding to 100 plus demands coming from different directions that often have extreme time constraints. So self-care is put on the back burner.

Amplify’s event challenged this myth, as the panel emphasized that down time and recharge time must find their way to the top of your priority list. From our perspective at Open Eye, this means looking after your inner world first and foremost, and becoming aware of when you might be languishing on caring for that world. Then, and this is the turning point, making a conscious decision to act and pull back.
It takes courage to change and challenge the status quo, but it’s essential if we want to move beyond burnout and team member disengagement. Chronic stress takes its toll. If you’re irritable, impatient, distracted, feeling overwhelmed and spread too thin too often; if you find your enthusiasm waning for work you once felt a passion for, be honest and take stock. Is overwork destroying your dream and weakening your team? Ask yourself if the situation is sustainable. If not, make a plan to change.

Open Eye’s Conscious Leadership services help clients make such plans by strengthening interpersonal relationships in their professional teams—whether it’s a team of three, or a team of 20 or more. Our work is 100 percent customized because every team and every team member is unique. We focus on building trust, open communication, self-respect, and personal accountability to promote unencumbered collaboration. It starts with becoming self-aware that something is off, identifying what that something is, and then putting action steps together that bring positive change to the team.

We work with teams because every individual’s commitment to self-care, well-being, and success, is made exponentially stronger with the support of others. Which brings us back to the brilliance of the Amplify group. The leaders, visionaries, and entrepreneurs through the span of an hour bonded as a team, and organically arrived at the conclusion we teach: find and maintain trusted colleagues who have your back when things are going well, as well as when they’re on the verge of crashing. Trusted others can sustain you.

We deeply appreciated the opportunity to sit on the Amplify panel and share with participants the work we love. We are here with our tools, techniques, training, experience, and enthusiasm to ensure our clients remain in touch with, or regain touch with the work they love. The bottom line: we value the work, service, and gifts our clients bring to the world and we are exceedingly happy when they are healthy, fulfilled, and successful.

Happy Holidays to you and your team!
Hilary and RuthAnn