After lending his insights on the importance of nature for the future of business and humanity overall for our article on nature-deficit disorder, personal coach and author Csaba Lucas sat down with BeautyMatter founder Kelly Kovack for our Nowhere to Hide: The Emerging Wellness Culture webinar.
The webinar is available on demand, but for those eager to find out the key talking points, we have compiled the nature-focused leader’s biggest insights and talking points. You can also catch Lucas as a guest speaker at the upcoming BeautyMatter NEXT Awards in Los Angeles in September.
Stop multitasking
“If you're multitasking, you're not listening to your highest wisdom. All you do is basically act out certain automated patterns that you already put in place. Therefore you're not going to be able to focus with your best attention.”
Create workplace wellness through adequate wages
“If you look at your employees, financial matters and pressures is a very viable stress for most people. Chances are most of your employees belong in that number. If you have an employee that has those pressures it is going to affect many aspects of their lives. Another aspect is spousal problems. As a leader, I think I should care about this. That person sitting there applying themselves to my business is not giving their best because they are stressed out.
“When you're stressed out, cortisol hormone levels are elevated in your system, and what happens when your focus narrows, it's limiting the amount of things it’s going to be able to think about, you're not able to see outlier processes.. So you essentially have an individual there with a bunch of potential, but they are never going to be accessing that potential at work because with the stress and the narrow vision, you’re getting a shadow version of them.
“As a leader, part of your corporate wellness program is to pay the people, and this needs to be very specific to where you're located. You need to understand the amount of financial comfort this person needs to have, which is generally talking about 20% net disposable income. If you don’t have that, the individual is stressed and you will not have the best employee.”
Emphasize social connection with employees
“We are wired for that social interconnectedness, interdependence, and every time we make choices where we don’t access that, we don’t make the best choices.
“If you have a company and you spend 8-10 hours a day with a group of people, that’s a heck of a lot of time. If you’re okay with not caring about those people, that says something about you. Ask yourself, are you really participating in relationships the way that you want to?”
Shifting to a wellness-focused enterprise
“Everything is coming full circle. The future of business is where the business is going to have to stand for more than maximizing a profit, at least for a while. We are standing on the edge of this cliff as corporations, where this new level of care is taking place, but most companies have been hovering in this place for the past 15 years.
“Focus on what kind of environment and culture you want to create with your business before profit. Every decision you make with a company needs to be filtered through that cultural view.
“If the leadership does not live and breathe the change, nothing is going to happen. If you are not ready as a founder, leader, CEO, to go with these ideas, the culture is never going to change.
“Big companies should use some small companies that have that personal touch and bring them onboard. Let that small company try to inject that way of being into the bigger corporation. But it’s got to be non-judgemental.”
Don’t think employees first, but leadership first (in work and at home)
“A burnt-out founder will have no shot of creating anything but burnt-out cultures. That is a personal responsibility. People, when they have an opportunity to lead people, they have to go home inside of themselves a little bit and see what is going on there. If you are making decisions in business, those are decisions you are making at home as well.
“You need to be braver than ever to make changes in this ever-changing, fast-changing world. There is a level of bravery that is needed, trusting that the other people [they have hired] will be there for them.”
Use technology as a tool, as needed
“The future is when you really profoundly understand and learn from the past: what we are wired for,, what are the prerequisites for human existence, the wiring. And then look at our technological amazingness that we created, and now understand what is the place for what.
“Technology is a tool, it’s not you. People forget what I am and what are the tools, and become one with them. We need to separate ourselves from the gadgets and use them where they need to be used, and be very linear in this regard. My physical body is my number-one tool, and the rest are tools that we need to use effectively.”
Attracting a strong new workforce through a paradigm shift
“IQ is important. EQ as well. It is extremely rare that the proper amount of both is present in a leader. Marrying those two creates an amazing capable partnership. Let’s talk about the ideal scenario: someone who has that balance. In my opinion no one with that balance will touch a corporation today. The future is to attract the people who, right at this given moment, are so balanced and so well that they would never go to a corporation. If someone is able to create this meaningful, cohesive group, then suddenly a new layer of extremely good workers will surface. There is a layer of employees hovering out there that they [corporations] could access if they create this paradigm shift.”
Practicing true meditation
“Doing nothing is one of the tools that we can use to just be. That got lost somewhere along the road. Meditation and all these types of things have been fashionable for a reason. We all collectively know it is good. If you sit down, close your eyes, and allow whatever is coming to you to circulate in your brain. Learning how to be without doing and just be—that is a tool you can just use, all you need is you. The real key to balance is not the high-tech things. The bottom line of meditation is shutting the 3D world away from you so that you can find the meditation within.
“People overestimate the importance of conscious thought versus when the background is working while you're doing something else. Einstein when he had a problem with something that he came up against, did he do what most people today will do, which is go out and figure it out? No. He played the violin and, eventually as he was enjoying the music and focusing on it all, something came to him. Many people who succeed for a long period of time, all have this tendency.”
Never-examined xenagogue transformation
“Essentially, it’s a never-examined set of guiding structures that need to be transformed. Most people never go deep enough to go, ‘What are the things guiding my decisions?’ That examination process is required for things to start to change and that will lead to transformation. Look at your guiding structures and look at the things you don’t know. If you knew the answer to your problem, you would fix it. You need to be humble, open up, so you can actually dig deep to find those xenagogue aspects of yourself.”
Here are five action points for creating a wellness culture, based on our webinar with Csaba Lucas:
