You are listening to My Freedom Grove podcast with Gretchen Hernandez, episode 63

Welcome to My Freedom Grove podcast. The all inclusive podcast that teaches mindset and business tools. We'll help you rise as your authentic self. Be unshakable with your emotional freedom and unstoppable in achieving any goal and living your purpose. I'm your host, Gretchen Hernandez. If you want to put your mental health first in life, relationships and business, you've come to the right place.

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Hi, my strong friends. So this week I wanted to talk to you about the importance of mental health support at work. So whether you are an employee or a business owner, challenges with our mental health, come up all of the time and it can really cause problems in your business. And I'm going to go through all sorts of different metrics that this can directly impact.

I wanted to share an experience that I've had in the last few weeks, just as a crystal clear example of how this can cause some problems in your business, especially if you're a business owner.

So I've been going through a certification course for becoming a certified life coach. So I'm already a certified lean six sigma business coach. But I wanted to go through the full experience of the certification through the life coach school, because I have had so many results with the model that is taught through that program.

So this last couple of weeks, there was a few modules on sitting with your emotions. Like not actually doing a mindset change. Just sitting with the emotions that are coming up for you. And then also how to process pain, like just how to feel it, how to allow it to process.

So I want to be a really good student and experience the full range of the program. So I submit myself as a client to the work so that I can really feel it. So what came up for me in the last two weeks was instead of doing any of the mindset changes so that I could get back to work, I decided, okay, I will process my emotions. I will just sit in it and I could see some benefit from this. And I have experienced this years back when I first started studying with the life coach school. That it definitely helped to allow the emotions instead of resisting them because allowing it and just letting it process does go faster.

But the problem is the length of time overall for processing can be substantial. It could be just a few hours. It could be a week. It could be a couple of weeks. And it reminded me of what it was like before I learned about this mindset model. I used to have so many mental health challenges. And, you know, throughout my whole life and that amount of suffering and sitting through the pain and just trying to process it, could completely derail me from being productive. And that's exactly what happened. It had an impact on my business and as a solopreneur, you're the only one that is doing the work. So you kind of need yourself to be productive.

So the impact that it had is the last couple of weeks, my podcast episodes were delayed in their publishing by a day and sometimes two or three days. And there were times where I wasn't able to show up fully ready to coach my clients, and that had an impact on them. It had an impact on me. And during this time I even lost a client. I suspected that he needed extra support. And I held back from giving that extra support because I was trying to process my own stuff, That I wasn't fully there for him. So that's a problem for me in my business. I want to make sure that I fully support my clients all of the time and that I'm being productive. If I have certain commitments, I want to make sure that I'm hitting those.

And I also was not able to create all of the workshops that I wanted to create for February and March. Now it was okay because I'm going through the certification program, it's a learning experience. It helps me to see the contrast of when is it helpful to sit and process our emotions and the timing. That's a big one. And when is it better to quickly apply the model, get the mindset shift so that you can get back to work. So great learning experience. It did have an impact on my business. So I thought this episode would be very, very helpful because in business, we don't always have that luxury to take a pause in our business and allow our employees to process their emotions for hours or even a couple of weeks. And as business owners, we definitely don't have that time. So what is that right kind of balance?

Why is it important to have a coach that can be there to help you with any mindset shifts so that you can get back to work? Are you experiencing those same types of challenges in your business? So, even look around, if you're an employee or a manager, look around at your environment. Do you see mental health challenges happening at your workplace? I bet you do. Here's how I know this. It's because you're human. And you work with a whole bunch of other humans.

And us humans, we have these minds that like to create a lot of meaning out of everything that happens in the world. Sometimes that meaning is really good and very positive and helps everybody have these great feelings that produce actions that move everybody forward. But a lot of times our human brains can come up with other thoughts that are completely unhelpful. And it can cause a lot of feelings that are not productive and actions that are definitely not productive, or they may be counterproductive.

I've seen this firsthand even before I started being a business coach. I saw this even when I was a teenager and growing up in all of my odd jobs throughout the years. I've worked in movie theaters and I've worked at film, developing places, in restaurants, and I could see all of the dynamics happening. I could see people getting their defense mechanisms triggered by different things. I could see tempers flare. I could see the dynamics of one person saying something to another person. And then all of a sudden that person who was having a good day now, their day is completely ruined and they're not being productive. So it has this cascading effect. One person having a mental health challenge creates actions that cause the next person to have mental health challenges.

And when everybody is having mental health challenges, then things can come to a screeching halt.

So I have 10 different metrics that I think would be helpful to look at. Why am I bringing up metrics? Like if we're talking about human beings and mental health challenges. Well, this is because it has an impact on our work. And some of these can be really small. Some of them can be very large and very expensive. So when we're looking at metrics that helps us to drive our business. But it also helps us to know, when is this a problem? And when is it not a problem?

So remember I mentioned, when we're processing our emotions, that sometimes there is a good time and if it's not impacting any of these types of metrics, then it's perfectly fine when it comes to business, allow that to happen. But here are some where it impacts your business and as an employee or an employer or a business owner, this is when we might want to get a little extra coaching. A little mindset coaching to try to help us so that these metrics are pointed in the right direction.

1. Productivity

So the very first one is productivity. So when we're having a mental health challenge and we're having all of these extra thoughts, it can cause us to slow down. And a concrete example. The very first time that I saw this, I was a project manager. The VP would come to check on this project. So it's a team of 15 people and he would come and he would get so stressed out about the due date getting hit. And he was having thoughts that it wouldn't and that it was all the employees' fault. He would say things to the employees of "I'm so disappointed in you." And you know, a few other choice things.

Before he even got there, everybody was in a great mood. They were being very productive and we were moving forward on the progress. In fact, we were getting caught up and even ahead of schedule. And then when he would come, because his mental health was challenged, he'd say some things to people. All of a sudden he's impacted all of their mental health. They stop. They stop working because now they're so stressed out and they're thinking about him. They're thinking about how they hate their job, how they want to quit. And it sends all of them into this spiral downward. And all of them stand around and start complaining about this guy. And they're not getting back to work. They could be derailed for hours because of this. So as a project manager, then I had to stop the work that I was doing, because I was also doing some of the work executing the project. And I had to coach all of the 15 people through all of their mental health challenge with this one person so that people could get back to work productively.

If you're in a creative job where you have content that you're creating, whether it's a book or a speech or a piece of art, all of those mental health challenges can get in the way. That cause a lot of insecurity. A lot of self doubt. Thinking that we need to go and educate ourselves on more things. All of that gets in the way of actually creating the piece of content or the piece of art that you're working on. So you can imagine if all of a sudden you have this insecurity that you don't know how to do something, and you're going to go and read a bunch of books, or you're going to take a bunch of courses to try to learn how to do the thing that can take up a huge amount of hours. It could even be days, weeks, months, or if you have someone that is coaching you on your mindset, you might realize that you actually do have that capability and you can get right back into creating that content and actually delivering it.

So with productivity, we're looking at the number of tasks that's getting done in a certain amount of time. When you have those mental health challenges, either the number of tasks goes down or the amount of time it takes to get the task done is increased.

2. Human Error.

The next metric is human error. Otherwise known as mistakes. I had this magnet one time that said, "stop rushing me. I'm making mistakes as fast as I can." And I love that the thing is mistakes are going to cost a business money. This shows up as rework. Like you have to go back and redo something. So it doesn't have that error.

You might have a lot of scrap. So if you have raw materials and now you've made a product, but there's something wrong with it, there's a defect in it and you can't use it. You're going to have to throw all of that out. Or if you're partway through making something and you realize this isn't coming out the right way, you're going to have to get rid of all of that. Well, all of those raw materials cost you money. And now they don't result in a product, a tangible thing that you can actually sell.

There also can be low quality issues by having these types of defects. When a customer goes and buys a product or a service, and all of a sudden it has defects, they're going to want to return that. There are a lot of reasons why human error gets introduced into a process, but one of them is definitely mental health challenges. So like the magnet said, if I'm feeling any kind of pressure to hurry up, whether that's my internal mindset or someone else saying something that triggers me to have some thoughts that I need to hurry up, then I'm might be making mistakes along the way.

If I have triggers that cause me to have thoughts that, Oh my gosh, I'm going to make mistakes. Guess what? Our mind creates the thing that we're worried about. So if we're worried, we're going to make mistakes. We are going to make mistakes.

When I was in biotech, I had a whole course that I taught on human error prevention. And then when I was out coaching teams, that was one of the things that we'd look at. We'd look at all of the processes that we're doing and how many errors are actually happening. And it was amazing. Once you started counting where the errors were in the process, it was pretty substantial. Like you could see where the waste for the business was, how much it was costing the business to have these errors.

And many of those errors were caused by mental health challenges. They weren't even because the process was wrong.

You just have people that were kind of freaking out that day. And even though the process was there and the process works, if you follow it with a clear mind, if you're there with a mental health challenge going on, you can't see straight, you can't focus. You're not calm. You're not paying attention to all of the things.

3. Flow

The next metric is flow. And this is referring to something flowing through a process from one step to the next. So let's say you're creating something and one person creates one part of it. And then it gets handed off to the next person to create the next part of it. If there's any mental health challenges for any of those individuals or between the individuals, as it pertains to that hand off, your flow is now going to get impacted. It's going to slow down. There's going to be a bottleneck at some place, right?

Like one person might've created a whole lot of widgets. Whatever's going through. But because of a mental health challenge, maybe there was a communication breakdown. We get angry at each other. We're not speaking to each other. And now the next person can't do their part. Or they're not willing to sometimes workplace dynamics cause just a complete breakdown of even being willing to work with each other. This can cause a stoppage in production. That you won't even have your things that you need completed because of that. Or there's going to be some type of a delay in getting it completed. So something that would have been completed within a week might now take two or three weeks. And oftentimes it's because there's some type of team dynamic issue in there and that's caused by a mental health challenge.

4. Absenteeism

There's many times I know employers have questioned whether an employee is calling off from work because they're really sick. Because we only focus on physical illnesses like having a cold or a flu or something or a broken leg. And we don't like to think about the mental health challenges. But it's quite possible that people are taking a mental health day. Although in our countries, we still have a lot of stigma around mental health. So often we won't talk about it.

But we can count how many days that an employee is absent. Now, if we already have a company policy that allows for five days of being absent a year and they've taken all five of their days then, okay, that's fine. But what about the employees that need to take even more than that? If they're having mental health challenges, and now this is different than a mental illness. This is a mental health challenge because most humans have good mental health, but a hundred percent of humans have, and it could be daily challenges. It could be every minute challenges.

How does it affect your business when your employees are taking time off of work? Either things aren't getting done or you're having to run with a minimal staff or you're having to do heroics in order to try to compensate, right? You might have to have one person work a lot of overtime. So now you're paying for overtime. Or you as the business owner or the manager, that's a salaried employee... Now you're skipping your personal time so that you can make up for the employee's time that they would have spent if they weren't absent.

5. Staff turnover rate

Businesses do a lot better if they're able to retain their employees. Happy, healthy employees are good for your business bottom line. If you're having a lot of staff turnover, now you're going to have the added expense of trying to fill that position. So that's going to be time that's spent advertising for the position, Interviewing for the position, and even trying to find someone who's qualified. It's quite possible that for some businesses, those positions will remain open for a long amount of time. And so that's like an extended absence. Now you're having to have other people make up for those lost hours. You're burning out.

Other employees are burning out, yourself, or just not being able to produce everything that you need. Now, why is staff turnover a mental health challenge? Now it's quite possible that some of your staff have left because there's other opportunities out there.

But have you had any staff that have left because of workplace dynamic issues? Or that they don't like how they're being treated by their boss? All of those are mental health challenges. And it could either be for the employee. Like maybe the, when you look at the circumstances around the employee, it doesn't make sense on why it would be a challenge. That might be their own challenge. Like how they're interpreting things. Or it could be that yes, the other people around them or one individual here or there, that they do have actions that are causing a mental health challenge for the other person.

Then you have two people that could use some coaching on workplace dynamics and the whatever is coming up for them. What's creating these actions? And then how can they work together? I've learned of a business where you actually have a business owner and a manager who both have a very difficult time managing their tempers. And different things will trigger them. That the employees may not even know anything about, but the employees are the ones that are experiencing the outcome of that trigger. So the manager and the business owner would get upset at something. And now their actions are to go and blame employees or yell at employees. And then the employees do not appreciate how they're being talked to. How they're being treated. So then they want to quit. And when you have a large amount of the staff that want to quit, that indicates that the problem is not with the staff. The problem is with that manager or that business owner and how they are working with their triggers in the world and how they then are taking it out on other people.

There's lots of ways that you can communicate issues in your business with employees. But when you're coming from a place of anger and frustration, you can do a lot more harm than good. And if you really want to see your business succeed, that might be a time when, as a manager or a business owner, you take a pause, go get some coaching on your own mindset so that you can have the outcome that you actually want. That is healthy for everybody's mental health.

6. Training cost

So when there is staff turnover, now you have new employees that have come in and you're looking at how much does it cost to actually train a new employee? You're going to have to take another employee who was doing their job, take them off the floor, so to speak, so that they can train the new employee. So now you have the cost of two employees, right?

So if you had retained employees, you'd have two employees that were out there actually performing the job. Instead. Now there's two employees off the floor that are still being paid, but now they're doing the job of training and learning. There's also time to competency. So with that one, when you have someone that is fully trained and they're fully capable in their job, they're operating at peak performance. So they're going to have high productivity. They're not going to need to pause and ask questions or, you know, go look at procedures on how to do something. You have someone who's fully up and running.

The time to competency from when they start to, when they're there of being fully up and running, that can be different for each employee. Now, if you have a trainer that doesn't have the right type of patience or your program is not put together in a helpful way, this can cause mental health challenges to the person that you're training. If that person is having those types of mental health challenges, then their time to competency is going to take even longer. And that's not what you want as a business owner. You want that employee to come in, get their training, be ready to go as fast as you can. So in this instance, you might need a little bit of coaching. Mindset coaching for the trainer for how are they showing up so that they have the right kind of patience and also for the new employees so that they're not freaking out having their insecurities, that they can actually focus on just the tasks and learning how to do the tasks.

7. Revenue

Metric number seven is where you're really going to notice this as a business owner. One of the most important things is to have revenue, right? We're in business to make some money. And eventually we're going to have profit too, right? But revenue, if you don't have everybody having good mental health and being productive and having competency, then you're not going to be able to have all of your products and services available for people to purchase. And there's also how we're working with the customers that want to buy the things we need to make sure that our mental health is there so that we can deliver great customer service so that people actually want to buy the products and services. So when you're looking at your revenue numbers, and they're not as high as you want them to be, that might be an indication to look to see how was it that we were showing up?

Were we having any mental health challenges along the way that have contributed to that decrease in revenue?

The next three that I'm going to go over... These are a lot more expensive and they probably don't happen as frequently as the other ones, but these are good ones for you to be aware of because when they happen, they are very expensive to you as a business.

8. Worker's Compensation Claims - Work Stress

The very first one is workers' comp claims. It's quite possible that someone has had enough mental health challenges at their workplace that now they're not able to work anymore. They've gone to the doctors. They've gone to the therapist. And they (doctors/therapists) have taken them (employee) off of work for a work stress claim. And although you may be paying into the insurance for workers' comp, every time that you have a new case that comes against that insurance, your insurance could go up.

So now you are paying a salary, or a partial salary, for an employee who is not even there at work because they've had enough mental health challenges by being there. I bring this one up because this was something that I experienced and one of my coworkers experienced directly. So this was back when we were employees. I had a mini stroke at work. And although I felt that I could come back to work, I was super driven to get back to work, the doctor forcibly took me out of work because they could all of the warning signs of a full blown stroke. So when they took me out, I was put on worker's comp because everything pointed to all of the stress that I was feeling coming directly from work. And that was proven. So I was taken out of work for a whole month. Whereas if I had had some mental health coaching while I was there, just something to help me with my mindset, this wasn't that I needed a therapist, I just needed a few mindset shifts so that I wouldn't have as much of that stress. Then I wouldn't have had to take a whole month off of work. And my company wouldn't have had to worry about paying my salary.

A more extreme example is when my work partner had a major stroke at work and he ended up in hospice care for two years. The employer, I love the employer, kept his job open for him. So we went a whole two years without his position filled. Which meant that all of the extra work that he was supposed to do, fell on the rest of us. So the rest of us already had a full amount of work that we had to do every day. Now we each had a piece of his on top of that.

And then from a humanity perspective, this was a man who ended up having to have part of his skull removed from this major stroke. And all of this was definitely triggered by the work stress. He might've had some underlying conditions too. So I don't think that they went through a workers' comp claim, but there was definitely an impact to the business. Because one, we were missing out on his expertise. He was an amazing man, knew all sorts of stuff. And then the work distribution now stressing out the rest of the employees with extra amount of work. And then of course the humanity part of it, no one wanted to see one of their best employees have his life completely changed and altered and almost lose his life because of what was happening.

9. Lawsuits - Workplace Bullying

So next metric that you can look at is lawsuits. So workplace bullying has become very prominent in the last decade or so. And there are actual lawsuits that are filed against companies because they did not take the necessary steps to make the bullying stop. Now with bullying, having mindset coaching for both the person being bullied and for the person doing the bullying can be incredibly helpful because people usually don't even realize that they're being a bully.

There's usually an underlying pain behind the actions that they're taking. So having someone that has that mindset coaching background, and also to understand defense mechanisms and how people are acting, they might be able to go in and help that person resolve all of those activities and also be able to do some coaching with the employee that has experienced it so that they can find ways of looking at things that feel a lot better for both people and ways of working together that work for both people.

It's completely possible to change that dynamic before it becomes a problem. And definitely before it becomes a lawsuit. Lawsuits can be in the millions of dollars against a company. When all they really needed to do was invest in a little bit of coaching for two people.

10. Workplace Violence

The final is very extreme and hopefully you don't see it. But we do see cases of this on the news, and this is workplace violence. So there's two different types. There's violence against self and violence against others.

So when we start to see suicide rates, some of those suicides are a result of some of the stress that people are experiencing at work. Some of the workplace violence is a result of the stress that people are feeling at work or the workplace dynamics and having a coach that is there in your company that can see these things and recognize it before it gets to this extreme can help you to avoid loss of life. Any losses associated with people getting hurt. And then there's always a business repercussion for anything that happens like that. Like the business might have to shut down for awhile. There's counseling for everybody because that's a traumatic event for multiple people. That's not an area that you want to get into. And it is completely preventable with a small investment upfront where you have someone that has those kinds of skills and can see it and respond to it before it happens. Then you're setting your employees up for success and you're setting your business up for success.

All right. So 10 different metrics that can help you to be aware of mental health challenges:

1.Productivity.

2.Human Error.

3.Flow.

4. Absenteeism.

5.Staff Turnover.

6.Training Cost.

7. Revenue.

8. Workers' compensation.

9. Lawsuits.

10. Workplace violence.

All of those can come back to mental health challenges. And notice, I didn't say mental illness. And there's a reason for that. Mental illness is something that is usually beyond the scope of most people in a workplace. That's something that is for a trained professional, a therapist or a doctor.

Now mental health is different. Every human has mental health. Every human has mental health challenges. It's quite possible that a person can come in and have a good day at work. Everything's working fine. All the people are nice and it's quite possible that someone can have a bad day. They go into work and something's not working, or someone else is not nice to them.

That becomes a mental health challenge. Challenges trigger unhelpful thoughts. Those unhelpful thoughts can create all sorts of feelings that can create those undesirable actions. And as you saw, all of those actions can definitely have an impact on your business.

Current Support Options

So what is the current support that you offer to yourself and also to your employees in business?

A. Medical System.

So our current support that most have is just to rely on our medical system. Go in, go see a doctor or a therapist. The problem we run into is that this is an impacted system. There's not enough of the doctors and therapists to go around for every human on the planet. Yet every human can have mental health challenges. It's difficult to get an appointment.

And then when someone does get an appointment, it might only be 10 minutes to come in, find out something, find out that the general practitioner is not going to be the one that's able to help them. And so then they have to sign up for another appointment, that might be a couple of weeks out, and then they go and they get assessed. And then they're told, okay, yep. Now come back in another couple of weeks for the next thing. This is a long delay at getting the mental health challenge resolved.

And as long as the challenge is there, it's impacting how the person is able to perform at work and also their quality of life. All of the scheduling and rescheduling and trying to research about medication that could be taken. All of these can result in having distraction while at work. Because oftentimes work has the best computer systems to be able to search and do all of the scheduling. It can also result in missed time from work because they have to go to all of these different appointments. They have to leave work and drive all around town to get there.

B. Human Resources

If you work in a larger company, you might have the benefit of having a human resources department or an employee relations department. Oftentimes though, even in the largest corporations, these groups are really small. Now they might have people that have the right skillset for your regular, everyday mental health challenges. And they can be there and available to help coach someone through it.

What you'll find though, is that people are afraid to go and use their human resources representative. What you'll find is that employees get scared to use these services because they're worried this is going to go into their file at work. It's going to be used against them in their employment. Especially if they're looking to get promoted or transferred to a different job. At some point, they're worried that anything that they say is going to come back to haunt them.

There's also the component of being completely honest. Because when someone is having a challenge, they might be talking about other people that work there, and that might bring up repercussions for those other people. And maybe that employee doesn't want other people to have to have consequences. They don't want to jeopardize that. That person might not have a job. Like they might get fired.

They just want help in figuring out how to resolve the challenge that they have. They're trying to learn some skills or learn how they can think about it in a different way so that they can resolve that challenge. Be able to get back to work and be able to work effectively with everybody.

A New Alternative

For the individual

So what's a better alternative? And this is where I want to share with you about the life coaching industry and independent business coaches. The keyword here is independent.

When there is an outside independent company that offers coaching services to your employees, it takes all of that extra pressure off. They can go. This is an independent person that they can talk to about anything. And they never have to worry about it coming back to their own company.

So this is different than executive coaching. So executive coaching is usually something that the company has hired. It usually involves the boss of the employee, talking to the executive coach, saying this is what we want out of this employee. And then the employee enrolls. And then that coach is giving reports back to the boss on the progress of the person that they're coaching. That's not what I'm talking about.

I'm talking about completely independent coaching. So it's something where it never comes back to the employer. That although the employer may sponsor for that employee to go into this coaching program, they don't get report back as to progress. This is completely for the employee themselves or for the business owner. Like they could use that type of coaching.

Also the programs and services that are out there come in a variety of packages. There are some where it's just a course. And I think we've seen this on LinkedIn. There's some LinkedIn courses that you can take. You can get a business membership into that. So all of your employees can go and take the short courses and it's supposed to help them. And it can help them with their mindset, their mental health challenges. And then they come back to work. Now that might be fine for some people that might be enough. It might be enough just to learn a small amount of stuff and then come back to work and be productive.

But for other people, they need that one to one conversation. They need to talk with someone to say, here's exactly what's going on for me. Help me. Like they, they don't necessarily need to learn all of the tools themselves. They don't need to learn all of the theory behind it. They just might need someone to help them with one specific thing so they can resolve it. And then they can get back to work.

There are several coaching companies, including mine, that offer a membership. And so in a membership, they can have courses, but they also have that opportunity to speak with a coach individually. And in these memberships, it's usually a group coaching environment. So that's what helps to keep the cost low. So there's multiple people that would come onto the coaching call. And then people would raise their hands saying, yep, I want coaching. And so a short amount of the call is devoted to each person so that they can get coaching on their one specific thing that they need help with that day. That is a great cost option. If you're limited on funds, because it gives your employees that option to get the support when they need it, calls are usually pretty frequent so that you can get those things resolved closer to real time than having to wait for an appointment somewhere.

Many coaches also offer one-on-one coaching. So this is not an a group environment at all. This is where that person has dedicated time with their coach individually, so that they don't have an audience. They don't have to worry about what other people would think about what it is they have to say. They can just share freely.

For some coaching packages, they still have that setup where it's a membership, but what you get is a different coach each time. So it's kind of like going to an HMO medical facility. Where it doesn't matter which doctor you see, you just need to see a doctor. And so that helps to keep the costs lower.

There's other programs where it's the same coach every time. So when you're looking for programs, you might want to see, will they get the same coach every time that starts to get familiar with them? And they don't have to worry about trying to bring a new coach up to speed on what's going on in their life.

Or is it better to just have someone that can do, you know, a 10 or 20 minute session? And then that's it, it's just really pinpointed on one thing.

For folks that want to have an even more personalized approach, they can go with dedicated long-term one-on-one coaching. And so this might be for a month, a couple of months, a year. There's one-on-one. So they have the same coach. They understand everything that's going on, either at work, or work and as part of their personal life. They figured out what they want to work on together. They might have an idea of even some results that they're looking for. Those are also available and super helpful. All of that is focusing on the one individual and the challenges that they're having to their own mental health.

For Career Development & Individual Support

So the next type of coaching is where not only do you want help for yourself, but you also want to develop your own coaching skills. Where this can be helpful is in your business.

If you have people that have developed their coaching skills and especially mindset coaching skills, then they are available for the other employees at your business. This is going to give you closer to real time problem resolution. This is a great investment to do for yourself and for your company, by developing other people there, to be those real time coaches you can get in front of problems before they get too big.

Once employees are developed, they could either do spot one-on-one coaching. Like if they see someone that is obviously having a mental health challenge, they can pull that person aside and offer to give some assistance right then and there.

Or they might be someone that can develop programs within your organization that can help more people all at one time. They might be able to give workshops or create special talks or any of that. To be able to help your whole staff, how would those employees develop their skills?

So all of those coaching programs that I mentioned before, those can be an excellent opportunity for someone to develop their skills. They could go in, enroll in those types of programs:

1. Learn through experience as a client

as a client to experience what it's like. And once they have their own breakthroughs, they're going to understand how powerful those types of approaches and tools can be.

2. Learn through benchmarking/observation

They can also be in those programs to observe how is it that these coaches are doing their programs? How are they coaching other people? Especially if it's a group program. Then you can sit back as an observer and watch as a coach is coaching someone and see exactly how they're doing it and start to learn and then go out into the workplace and try it out.

3. Learn the tools and theory through courses

There's also many of the programs that have courses that are provided that are developing those skills. Teaching more about the tools, teaching more of the theory behind the tools. So then it really clicks. When they're watching that group coaching going. Ah, this is when that coach was applying this skill or this concept, and then they can go and apply it to themselves. They can go out and experiment and apply it on people in the workplace.

4. Learn by Doing - coaching individuals

It's also possible that some coaches, including myself, offer that coach development as part of the one-on-one. So I've had many clients over the years where, when they work with me, I'm helping them with their stuff, but I'm also helping to develop their skills as a coach. So I would even explain as I'm coaching them, why I'm coaching them in a certain way so that they can understand the theory behind it and, and why it's effective.

And then they might even bring up a scenario of a challenge that they're seeing in their work environment. And then we would go through all of the different tools or concepts that would be applicable for that particular situation. And then they can go out between our one-on-one appointments. They go back out to work, they will do their own experiment with those tools and techniques. And then they come back the next one-on-one session. And we do a debrief, like a little lessons learned on... Okay. So how did it work? What did you learn from that experience? How was it effective for the person that you were helping? What improvements did you see for the business as a result? So if this is specifically for trying to help your business do better, we want to make sure that the business actually is doing better. So I also teach people about business metrics and how everything ties back, how our human performance ties back to our business.

5. Learn by doing - coaching groups

When my clients happen to be in a leadership role, some of the coaching that they do is up in front of large groups of people because they have a whole staff. So same thing...they'd come to me. We would do coaching on anything that was coming up for them to help to resolve any of the triggers that they were feeling. So it was bringing up some kind of emotion that wasn't feeling good. They weren't being able to be calm, cool, and collected as a leader. And then we'd also start to look at what were some of the challenges coming up for their employees, next, and then what types of tools and concepts and approaches would help.

And so then, as they're standing up in front of these groups, between our sessions, they could practice those different things and see, does this have the right effect on the employees to help support their mental health? To help support the productivity at work? And then come back and we'd do a little debrief on what worked, what didn't work or did it bring up new things? And if there was a new challenge, okay, now how do we work through that next challenge?

Having that independent coach is very helpful because as a leader, we know in our businesses that we want to show up looking like we know how to do everything. We want to be capable of helping our employees. But sometimes we don't know how to do all of the stuff. Like we know a lot of the technical stuff. About how to do the job. We might even know about strategy. But we don't necessarily know about human dynamics and how to help our employees when they're having any kind of struggles. So being able to step back, have a person dedicated just for yourself and your own development of you, your own development of other people can be very, very helpful.

Comparison - Working without vs. with Mindset Coaching

When I shared at the beginning about how I had gone through this experience for a couple of weeks of just feeling my emotions, processing any pain or any discomfort that I was having, it reminded me of before I knew about mindset coaching. And before I started applying business tools to my own mental health and what it feels like. And I want to paint this visual for you, because you might be able to recognize this.

I felt like I was drowning. Like I was just flailing around in a pool. That I knew that I had all of this stuff that I needed to do. Yet, I was there. And I knew how to swim. Yet for that moment, I didn't know how to swim. And I'm just flailing around. And like panic starts to set in. I feel this impending sense of doom. And then when I finally decided, okay, this has been going on long enough, like I may just give up and quit my whole business. Like it got that bad. Like, you know, as I was like flailing around in this, that I was actually thinking about quitting my own business.

I decided, okay, enough of sitting and processing this pain because all I was doing was spinning on my own thoughts. And then those thoughts would trigger the next thoughts. And it would cause all of the anxiety to come back. So I reached out, I got mindset coaching on the thoughts that were coming up frequently.

And what it felt like was going from drowning in a pool to standing up and realizing that I was just standing in six inches of water and that I was fully capable.

The whole time that six inches of water is like no big deal at all. And then I was able to get back on with my day. All of that was able to happen in one hour of mindset coaching. Now I had spent two weeks plus, I think almost three weeks, of the feeling like I was drowning and flailing and stuff. I was doing it on purpose though. It was part of experiencing this certification course that I was going through.

But that's what it was like for me before I knew about mindset coaching. And before I experienced it, and I saw that a lot. When I was working in the corporate environment, I would see people that look like they were flailing and drowning in some kind of emotional turmoil. I could just go and grab that person. Luckily, because I had the skills, I go and grab them and go, come on, come over here. And we'd go into a conference room. And it was just the two of us and a whiteboard. And all of a sudden in like half an hour or less, everything would be calm. They'd be like standing up in six inches of water again. It's like, Oh, okay, this is no big deal.

But when you're caught in it, it definitely feels like you're drowning. And that there's no possible way out.

So having an independent person who can see that and help you out of it quickly. Could you imagine that resolving something in 30 minutes instead of spending three weeks ruminating on it? That in itself is so incredibly powerful for you and your own mental health. Just that alone makes it worth it.

But when you have business and you have a job and you want to keep your job, or you want to do well at your job or keep your business up and running, this becomes like gold.

If you can keep your head completely clear and moving forward, what would your business or your personal work performance look like? If you could resolve your mental health challenges in just a few minutes.

Two Ways to Support Mental Health at Work

1. Sponsor employees in an independent program

My program, and other programs out there, allow employers to sponsor their employees. You can purchase a certain number of seats in a coach membership program so that your employees can go in there. And again, independent third-party. It's not something you're going to hear reports back on. It's just a service that has been provided for you and for your employees. So that's one way by providing these coaching programs to your employees at all levels, you're going to be able to support mental health challenges from every aspect of your business.

Try not to fall into the trap that only leaders need this service. Every employee's performance can get impacted by mental health challenges. The more that you can support everybody, the better. So these coaching membership programs are a great low cost option that helps all of your employees be able to function at their highest peak performance.

2. Develop employees to provide Mindset Coaching for your business

That way you're investing in just one or two employees, or maybe a handful, and now they can be there to support real time. Any of your employees that need the help.

My Unshakable group coaching programs, and my one-on-one coaching can help you with both of those. To learn more about how you can sponsor your employees or yourself, reach out to me for a consultation. Just go to my website at www.myfreedomgrove.com/contactme and you'll be able to contact me so we can start talking about the possibilities and what is right for you and your employees.

All right my strong friends, I hope you have a great week and I will talk to you soon. Bye bye.

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Thank you for listening to My Freedom Grove podcast. I can't wait to work with you directly. I'll help you to be your authentic self, to have amazing relationships and to live your purpose. I invite you to check out unshakable men and unshakable women. The unshakable programs will give you all of the tools, the coaching and the community to help you rise in life, relationships, and business. To learn more, go to myfreedomgrove.com/work with me. I can't wait to see you there.