Human society is built on a big lie.
I call this the lie of work.
The idea that we have to spend the bulk of our adult lives trading our well-being,
trading our passions to earn a paycheck to deliver what we call work.
And it's why, if you look at the study after study, close to 85% of human beings
are disengaged at work.
Work is 70% of our waking lives.
Something has got to be broken.
And so I, along with my team, we are looking at ways to rethink
how work works.
And the biggest aha is this: What if work is not about extracting
from you, not about making you more tired or making you age faster or giving you
gray hairs or filling you with stress or making you want to go home and take a nap,
but what if work is actually healing?
What if the very act of going to your workplace means that you start
losing weight, you start looking and dressing better, you start being more
lit up, you develop meaningful connections with the people around you,
you become a better individual day after day after day, and when you go home and
you see your kids or your friends, you are magnified as an individual,
you are more positive, you are more open, you are filled with energy?
What if work fueled you and gave you rocket fuel rather than
extract it for you?
We call this idea 'Work As Healing' and it's possible, and more and more companies
are starting to bring this into their workforce.
But I believe that there are five quick things if CEOs and supervisors and
managers do, it will change the way your employees show up.
It boosts every single dimension of what we call worker productivity but it also
ensures that your people are becoming their best selves.
The first has to do with food and healthy eating in the office.
You need to engineer an environment where people eat healthy.
So for example, in Mindvalley, we stopped bringing in donuts
into the office.
We got rid of Coca-Cola.
And now, we fill our office with healthy food.
We do not put sugar near our coffee machine.
People instantly get off it.
As a result, the average man who joins Mindvalley loses 10 kilograms
in their first year.
By year two, our team is typically men and women combined running Spartan Races.
We are taking people and turning them into athletes.
And a big part of it is food.
The second part is mindfulness.
It's introducing meditation and spiritual practices and allowing this to happen
in the office.
We have a therapy room.
We start the day with yoga or meditation occasionally.
We might bring in an acupuncturist.
All of these things help us heal and recover and deliver our best selves.
The third is exercise.
What if you can get your teammates and you running Spartan Races?
What if you can engineer the office, such as this space here,
to allow mobility and exercise?
We have everything from kettlebells lying around to pull-up bars.
People show up here early in the morning to transform our office into a gym.
All of these things create healthier humans.
Now the fourth is acknowledging sleep.
So many companies make us show up at a ridiculous hour, 9:00 a.m.,
but we have kids, we have our personal growth practices.
What if you could give people more time to actually get sleep?
We know that sleep is one of the best things you can do for your body.
It doesn't make you lazy.
It makes you smart.
If you take away 90 minutes of a person's sleep, that's a cognition drop of 30%.
That's 30% less ideas, 30% less functioning.
Yet companies push their people to sometimes work late nights then show up
early in the next morning and pop sleeping pills to survive.
What if all of us had permission to sleep seven or eight hours a day?
Human beings would be healthier, wiser.
They would be in a better emotional states when they show up.
And the best performers, according to a 1993 K. Anders Ericsson study,
got 8 hours and 36 minutes of sleep.
The average American, 6 hours and 51 minutes.
We have a sleep gap in our society.
Now that brings us to the fifth idea which puts everything together.
It's called morning autonomy.
It means giving people their mornings back, so they can go to the gym,
they can meditate, they can catch up on their sleep.
Daniel Pink said, "If you want to motivate people, give them autonomy."
But autonomy doesn't mean you give them 20% time in the office to dabble
on whatever they want.
"You can give people morning autonomy," says Daniel Pink.
Morning autonomy to actually own their mornings and dedicate their mornings
to themselves and this makes them show up better at work.
At Mindvalley, we start our morning huddle at 11:30 a.m.
That's relatively late, but it allows people to own their morning
so they can use their mornings to be autonomous and become their best selves.
So these five ideas help you transform work into a healing space.
But this is only touching the surface.
The next thing that you're going to see is work as a way to create superhumans.
And if you want to know more, one of the first things you can do is
to check out Mindvalley Mentoring for Business, which brings you some of the
world's greatest mentors into a company so you can elevate the mindset,
the heart set, the brain set, and the health set of all employees.
This is one of the greatest things we can do to start making work a place
of healing for all.