Why business owners must treat wellbeing as a strategy, not a luxury

Boxers & Briefs Podcast #44: How prioritising your health can increase your income with Sophie Kaiser

Business owners fall into a predictable loop. Get recharged and re-energised. Begin the cycle in business. Slowly burn out. Realise you need to do it again. Recharge, relax, repeat. But what if you didn’t have to be on that loop?

Sophie Kaiser is a wellbeing coach who helps business owners move from survival to thriving by aligning their personal and professional lives. Your personal life is not a break from your professional life or vice versa. It’s one whole thing.

For the past three years, Sophie has made her own wellbeing a core business strategy. Not something she does when she has time. Not a personal matter separate from work. A core strategy that sits alongside finances and marketing.

The result? It correlates directly to increased income. Every time she stops focusing on her wellbeing and falls back into old habits, her income goes down. When she focuses on it, even when she takes a holiday because she genuinely needs a break, she often makes sales while away.

Where the realisation came from

Sophie learned this through her own experience. When she started running her wellbeing coaching business as an independent mum, she tried to manage her household, her children, the business, and general life admin. She realised she needed to put herself first. She’d learned that the hard way too many times before.

When she spoke to her coaches about her business, the conversation was always about the doing. The finances, the marketing, the operations. She thought to herself, what about me? What about my wellbeing? Why is this not a core strategy of my business when I’m the person running all of this?

So she changed her approach. Now, at the beginning of each year, when she looks at what she wants to focus on, she also looks at what aspects of her wellbeing she wants to improve or explore further. She makes that part of her strategy. It’s been a game-changer.

Creating space to receive more

The key is creating space in your life. If you don’t create space, how are you going to receive more of the things you want?

Sophie uses the closet analogy. Your closet is full of clothes. How are you going to put more clothes in if you don’t have space to hold them? It’s the same with your life. If you don’t have space to receive more income, more time, more special moments with your children, more breakthroughs in your business, how are you going to have them?

This doesn’t mean being on holiday all the time. Everything in the world works in cycles. Seasons change. Women go through their own cycles. Men go through hormonal cycles. Even in business, there are cycles when people are more likely to look for certain services.

The goal is to use small, easy steps to continue looking after yourself on a continual basis. If you don’t burn out, you don’t need to spend as much time and energy regenerating. You have that energy available to move forward. You progress faster because you’re keeping on top of yourself.

The root of the burnout badge

Being busy has become a status symbol. Burnout is treated like a badge of honour. But why do business owners feel they constantly have to be busy?

Usually, underneath all of that, somewhere deep inside, is a feeling of not being good enough. Sophie’s counsellor told her years ago that all roads lead to “I’m not good enough.” She’s found this to be accurate.

When people burn out repeatedly and feel they have to say they’re busy, it’s because if they’re not busy, they don’t feel like they’re doing enough. That’s a version of not being good enough.

Shifting that mindset requires looking at more than just the mind. Sophie teaches her clients about ‘the being,’ not just the mindset. We need to talk about our physical being, our mind, our emotions, and the spiritual part of us. Spiritual doesn’t necessarily mean religion. It means the lens through which you view the world, your belief system. That belief system drives everything we do, including whether we believe we’re good enough.

The long-term impact of not looking after yourself

The impact of not looking after yourself when you’re in leadership is always long-term. Our bodies are designed to deal with short periods of stress, like running from a woolly mammoth and hiding in a cave. We can handle a large output over a short period.

But if we do that long-term, it starts to deplete us physically. If we deplete physically, it depletes our mind, emotions, and spirit as well. When you’re feeling depleted, you’re not excited, you’re not motivated, you don’t feel inspired. You don’t have the water in the cup to do something with it. You’re not brimming with vitality.

If you don’t look after yourself for a short period, your body can deal with that. You go through a regeneration process and start again from your status quo. But if you stay in stress mode for a really long period, you’re constantly running on empty. You start to be impacted physically.

Many chronic diseases people experience these days come from high-stress lifestyles. When you’re running away from a sabre-tooth tiger, regenerating or keeping your skin young isn’t a priority. It’s about survival. Your body starts taking nutrients away from parts that aren’t immediately necessary. That’s why highly stressed people can look older than they are.

If you want to stay young, look after yourself.

The people-pleasing problem

The most common pushback Sophie gets from leaders is time. They don’t have time for self-care. But there’s also an underlying belief that if they spend more time on themselves, they’re going to let people down. They won’t be able to do all the things they feel they need to do for people.

When you’re someone who overexerts yourself and feels like you have to be busy, chances are you have some people-pleasing habits. People pleasing is a response to experiences that have left us feeling less than, feeling like we’re not good enough. We overcompensate by people pleasing, by overstepping our own boundaries, by overexerting ourselves to please other people, even if those people didn’t ask for it.

Sophie starts by looking at whether her clients are overexerting themselves in other areas of life. Are you doing more than is beneficial for you and, importantly, for the other person? People pleasing is not good for other people either. It’s a codependent and imbalanced relationship. In business, that can get tiring quickly and seriously impact your bottom line.

The first step is not doing

When Sophie suggests people need to understand where their feelings come from, the immediate response is often, “What do I need to do now? Do I need to sit for an hour a week to reflect?”

That’s still doing mode.

The challenge is not to focus on the doing. Focus on the being. The question is, who are you being and where does this come from? It’s like trying to build foundations for a house without knowing what soil you’re dealing with. You need to know how deep it is, what kind of soil it is.

Creating awareness around where your habits and behaviours come from, where your ways of thinking and believing about the world come from, is essential. Sophie spends weeks with her clients building this deep self-awareness. The process doesn’t stop. It’s ongoing because, as you go through the work, you uncover more layers about yourself.

If sitting down for an hour a week to reflect works for you, do that. Sophie reflects in an ongoing way. She’ll be in the car thinking about something, or on her way somewhere, or having a conversation when something comes up and she notices it for the first time. That’s how she processes.

Journaling is a good way to start. If you’re a people person, sit down with someone you feel safe having those conversations with. Everyone has to figure out what their own awareness-building looks like.

Setting boundaries without guilt

One of the core parts of setting boundaries is communicating them in a way that helps the other person understand why you’re setting this boundary.

People with people-pleasing habits stretch their boundaries. They please people in ways they think they need to, even though it doesn’t work for them. They moved their boundary from where it was to way further out. Other people get used to those stretched boundaries. Then you start resenting them for accepting it.

You need to have conversations. “I’ve realised I’ve been overextending myself. I’ve been doing this for a really long time. What I’ve realised is it doesn’t work for me anymore. This is what I would like to implement, and this is the reason.”

Sophie’s friend calls it the no-surprise quest. Boundaries let people know what you’re okay with and what you’re not okay with, how you want to be treated. If we move boundaries without communicating, we surprise people. That’s why there’s friction and arguments. The other person is caught off guard.

These conversations are uncomfortable. They feel vulnerable. But your vulnerabilities are your strength. If we lived in a world where more people showed their vulnerabilities, we’d all get along better. As soon as you show your own vulnerabilities, as soon as you let people know you haven’t done things the way you’d like, and this is what’s happened, you give other people permission to have those conversations too.

When one person starts to get vulnerable in a workplace, organisation, or family, and allows themselves to be seen for who they really are, with all the good, the bad, and the ugly, you give other people permission to do the same. It’s a ripple effect.

The way you start your day changes everything

The wellbeing practice that makes the biggest difference in how somebody runs their business is the way they start their day.

The way you get up and begin your day impacts how you feel for the entire rest of the day. Have you ever overslept, missed your alarm, and woken up in complete panic? Think about what the rest of that day looked like. You felt like you were chasing your tail.

Whereas if you have a morning where you get up and do something for yourself, whether it’s meditation, sitting with your coffee without it getting cold, staring out the window, journaling, listening to a podcast you enjoy, doing something that feels nourishing and calming and inspiring, sets the tone.

What happens over time is the positive stacking effect. When you stack positive experiences over and over again on top of each other, then a few negative experiences come along, they just knock off a few positive ones. You have heaps of positive ones left, so it doesn’t matter as much.

Whereas if you’re having lots of negative experiences over and over again, you have a pile of negative experiences. When a couple of other negative experiences come along that happen to be bigger than normal, that’s when the plate overflows and people lose it.

You must get intentional about how you start your day. Avoid looking at your phone for the first hour. Biologically, something happens when we look at LED screens first thing in the morning. Our eyes are designed to wake up to natural lighting. An optometrist told Sophie this affects not just eyesight but wellbeing. Your nervous system is designed to be exposed to natural light.

Create practices you enjoy. Not everybody loves meditation. That’s okay. Start a gratitude practice. The cool thing is you can do positive stacking throughout your entire day. Even if you’re driving somewhere, think of three things you’re grateful for.

Gratitude biologically changes us. It releases hormones like oxytocin and serotonin. The more of those positive hormones pulsing through our bodies, the more inspired we feel, the more inclined we are to do our greatest work.

When you’re already overwhelmed

If you’re experiencing overwhelm more often than not, it means you’ve been running in stress mode for a really long time. It’s harder to deal with overwhelm than to deal with stress when it happens.

The first thing you do is stop. Sophie knows this is hard. Many of her clients come to her in overwhelm, feeling like they need to be doing all the things. But you must find even half an hour or an hour to just stop and breathe and be in the moment.

If your mind is racing, find something positive to focus on. Allow yourself to be in that moment. Once you’re feeling calmer, take a piece of paper and write down everything you feel overwhelmed about. Put it on paper because everything in our heads makes it harder to deal with. It becomes a jumbled mess, like a yarn basket where everything has tangled together.

Stop, allow yourself to put it all on paper, make sense of it, and start with one thing. Just one thing.

The return on investment question

People want to know the return on investment with wellbeing. It’s incredibly hard to measure. In the beginning, you won’t necessarily see much of a change. You’ll feel a bit different. It’s about long-term sustainable change.

The question has to be, what does return on investment even mean to you when it comes to your wellbeing?

We’re stuck in a generational gap. The older mindset is work hard, play hard, or work really hard and go home to your family. Work becomes something you just have to get done. There’s been no place for wellbeing in the workplace. Younger people understand better about looking after themselves and the long-term results. Many people are stuck in this middle ground where they’re just expected to work.

The reality is you can’t convince people who don’t want to be convinced. You can’t make people do what they don’t want to do. If you have a manager, or CEO, or a boss who doesn’t want to invest in your wellbeing, you have a choice. You don’t have to stay in that workplace.

Chances are, you have amazing skills, incredible experience, and are a valuable employee or business owner. You don’t have to stick around people who don’t value what you do and who aren’t ready to value and give you space regarding your wellbeing.

The businesses that fail to invest in their people’s wellbeing will lose talent and end up closing doors long-term. We’re in a huge shift from a profit-driven culture to a people-driven culture. The companies really taking off and building sustainable companies that do groundbreaking work all have a people-driven model.

Simon Sinek talks about this in The Infinite Game. In the 1960s and 70s, the average life expectancy of a business was around 63 years. When the book was written around 2016, it was only 18 years.

In the 1980s, there was a shift from a people-driven culture to a profit-driven culture. That’s when businesses started prioritising investors and profit at the end of the year. The effects we’re seeing now from a profit-driven culture are only 40 to 50 years old. We’re already seeing the effects of this short-term thinking because that’s what a profit-driven culture is. It’s not connected to a bigger cause.

What are you trying to create as a business? Why are you even operating? Sure, you might want to make money, but what’s the purpose underneath all of that?

For Sophie, it’s about wanting to change the business world for her children. She doesn’t want them to grow up in a world where being burnt out, stressed, and overwhelmed has become the norm.

We’re on the cusp of a huge change. We’re moving back towards that people-driven model. It’s starting to show that, economically, this will improve people’s bottom line in the long run. It’s about long-term sustainable approaches.

Imagine if our companies and businesses had a life expectancy of 30, 40, 50, 60 years. How many businesses close their doors after five or 10 years? A huge amount. The economic cost and the cost in people are incredible. It’s not sustainable.

This article and podcast is proudly brought to you by Gilligan Sheppard, the problem solvers in business who believe in thinking differently.