This is going to be the last in a series about wellness.  This week we will look at wellness and sustainability.

Pretend for a moment that I forced you to sprint as hard as you could for 60 minutes.  How long could you do it before it caused damage to your body?  5 minutes? 10?

No one could make it the full 60 minutes.  Sooner or later the fatigue would set in and we’d be injuring ourselves trying to run.  Now imagine for a moment we changed it up.  You sprint as hard as you can for 1 minute and then you walk for 10.  You repeat this until 60 minutes are up.  Which way of doing things is sustainable?  The one that has the higher chance of being sustainable is the sprint/walk combo.  It will still be hard to do this, but it is something that can more than likely be done without causing devastating harm.

You might be wondering where this is going.  This entire series has been about wellness and taking care of ourselves, so we can keep going.  The above example causes us to reflect on what it means for an action to be sustainable.  It’s more than just whether or not you can do the action.  Sustainability is about being able to do the action without causing significant harm to yourself. 

Recently I was talking to a colleague, and they said something along the lines of, “The company is expecting more, stretching people beyond their breaking point, all in the midst of a pandemic.”  My colleague wondered how sustainable that is.  Have you ever wondered that?  While I agreed to an extent, I also challenged the idea of sustainable.  We keep saying, “I don’t know how long it will be sustainable.”  This assumes that what we have demanded of people WAS sustainable at some point.  I’d argue it never was.  Per our analogy, we demanded people sprint constantly by having unrealistic expectations and requirements in the midst of a pandemic.  Those expectations never let up or changed.  Throughout the past couple of years it feels more like individuals have been in varying states of breaking down, at least I’ve felt that way a fair amount.  The unspoken question being asked is, “How long can this go on before people are broken into pieces?”, which is very different from asking about sustainability and how long we can keep this up before doing harm to ourselves.  That unspoken question is a scary one, especially because it’s going to be hard to glue people back together after they are shattered.

The challenge: As a leader, how are you creating an environment that promotes wellness AND sustainability?  What are you doing to help people keep from breaking?

Have a jolly good day,

Andrew Embry