Transcript from Video
Hello, LinkedIn. It's Mike here, and we're on our fourth video for the Happy Manager video series.
What we're gonna talk about today then is getting clear on your why. So earlier on in one of my videos, I hypothesized that happiness and work can mean a combination of being healthy and being engaged in your work. And actually, we talk about three questions: being healthy, being engaged the motivated work, and having a good world-life balance.
Now, The important thing to understand about all three of those factors is they require effort,
especially if you're a manager or people leader. they only happen if we put the effort in.
Work-Life Balance is only gonna happen if we leaders put in the effort, being motivated works is only gonna happen if we consciously put the effort in. Being healthy is only gonna happen if we consciously put the effort in. And for us to commit to putting consistent effort into something and actually making that stick. We have to lay the foundation first, which is getting clear on what our why is. Now, this is gonna help you be healthier, but it's also gonna help you be a better leader because it's a really good coach.
So before you commit to anything, get really clear on the why. Now, often your why will define your what. So if you haven't got a why in place, you're gonna jump to maybe the wrong thing. You're gonna start doing the wrong what? And a great example of this is health and fitness. So a lot of people decide towards the end of the year that they wanna get healthier. they don't really get clear on the why and what they want to achieve. So they just kind of sign up to the gym, start going for a month, and then before or February, March time to kind of fell off the bandwagon. And that's not because they're not we're not really genuinely interested in improving our health, but because we didn't get clear on our why and our what.
So the effort levels fell off. So let me give you an example outside of health. Let's talk about business. There's a really inspirational guy from that I learned a lot from reading and watching some of his mentorship groups. And that's a guy called Dan Priestley. And to Dan Priestley, there's this thing very well where he's good at defining different businesses. And when he's teaching groups often with startups, I always I've seen them do this a few times
and it just completely changes the way people are thinking and lifts a large weight off their shoulders.
So without getting too complicated, Dan teaches people that there's a difference between a lifestyle business and a performance business. And when he breaks it down to keep it very simple. A lifestyle business is a healthy profit business that needs about four to five staff
and doesn't need a huge turnover to achieve that a performance business is externally funded, gets venture capital, lots of staff, complex business model. And lots of people in business don't understand the difference between those two things.
So you've got these people, these startups trying to create a business and get a business off the ground running. And because they're not clear on where they're trying to get to,
they end up trying to do the things that you need to do to get to a performance business,
and they just feel lost and frustrated down the line. But once they realize, actually, what they really want is a lifestyle business.
Once they get clear on why they're doing business to give them the life that they want not to become the next Jeff Bezos. Once again, clear on the why, that defines the why, which actually looks like this. completely changes the approach they need to take towards it and is more aligned with them, which means they're more likely to stick to it. So that might feel like a bit of a tangent but applies to being healthier or let's stick with health. So let's apply that to being healthier as a manager. So you decide you want to be healthier. I sit with and deliver workshops to managers across a wide range of businesses and senior staff.
And I always liked it if we're talking about health because it's one of the three components.
I always like to ask the group how many of the people, how many of you in here are genuinely interested in fitness. And by fitness, I mean, training three to four times a week.
Performance goals being able to run fast, not lift weights, being able to complete sports,
having a six-pack, whatever it might be. And about on average, depending on the business, I'd say about twenty percent of the group put their hands up, normally less. Then I ask the group, how many of you in here are genuinely interested in health? And that means living as long as possible be in pain-free, having energy, and avoiding disease.
And by and large, a hundred percent of the room will put a hand up. And this is really important because lots of managers are struggling with their health because they need to put the effort in to make it better but they're not clear on what they're trying to achieve when they try and improve it. So they end up jumping into many different things that don't really work for them. And what none of them do is go from if we picture a pyramid, at the bottom here we've got unhealthy, then next in the pyramid we've got healthy, then after that, we've got I'm not flexible. After that, we've got a kind of fitness and performance. And what most people do is they decide they wanna be healthier. They wanna be fitter. They don't get clear on their why is ninety-nine percent of the time they wanna be healthier because they don't get clear on their why. They start pursuing they bypass the half stage. And they jumped to fitness and performance goals. So you've ever gone from being overweight and unhappy and tired to trying to run a marathon?
You've done that. You bypass the health goal and you've jumped to the fitness. If you've gone from that unhealthy stage again to go on the world's straightest diet you've bypassed a health stage going on to health and fitness and performance. And as I mentioned at the beginning, those things take effort and that sustained effort is unlikely to last because it is really hard to achieve those things and it's not actually what you want. So you're doing these things that feel hard that don't fit him of your life and not actually what you want to live longer, to have more energy, to feel good about yourself.
So get really clear on your why, ask yourself, why am I thinking about going to the gym? I think come out moving more. I wanna be healthier. Go three levels into your why because of a, why because of b, and why because of c Most of the time you're going to find out it's actually because you wanna live longer, not because you wanna be able to run a marathon. If you've established a way you can then choose the most appropriate path. And if you get lost on what that needs to be, that's when you ask somebody else. But To be healthy, for example, you don't need to run, you don't need to go to a gym, you don't need to lift weights, although there is lots of help to fit all of those things. What you do need to do as a very baseline is be hitting a minimum out of steps a day and eating more whole foods.
It's really starting to get simple as that. And once you get good at that stuff, then maybe you can look at the rest. But we need to get into a habit of asking what wires and then using that to define our that's a really good coach until not just for health but for work-life balance,
for engagement in the workplace, whatever it might be, for helping your staff, get into the habit of asking them why to get really deep into the why and then get from that why. Okay. Well, what does that look like? That's gonna help you turn to become a more effective manager, become a more effective people leader, become a more effective coach because if you're a manager, you are a coach whether you believe it or not, and to get better at sticking to the things that you want to achieve.
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Mike Jones Better Happy Founder
Mike founded Better Happy in 2018.
He now works with a variety of businesses ranging from small accountancies up to large organisations such as Travelodge on improving employee happiness. Mike's vision and the vision of Better Happy is 'Every employee happy, every business thriving'