Vertical growth

Preventing workplace burnout is a complex issue that requires a multifaceted approach. By promoting self-awareness and vertical growth, organisations can create a healthier, more productive work environment. To get started on a personal journey of vertical growth, there are five key steps:

Self-awareness

Self-awareness is the essential foundation for vertical growth, without which all the other steps are not possible. Selfawareness gives us the ability to consciously regulate our behaviour. We cannot deliberately live a values-based life, nor can we learn to take accountability for without first properly developing self-awareness.

Fast brain, slow brain

The fast brain engages the parts of the brain that act impulsively, habitually and with short-term comfort in mind. The slow brain, on the other hand, engages parts of the brain that enable us to act with intention and awareness before our fast-brain reflex response takes over. To shift from our fast to our slow brain, we need to have clear intentions and deliberately choose our values and responses, rather than being held hostage by habitual responses formed in our past.

Be values-driven

Values are far more than yawn-worthy statements on a website. They represent an invitation to grow in our lives and organisations. When applied with selfregulation and internal honesty, they are real forces that direct our behaviour for our own happiness and that of others.

Are your values a living practice? What practices do you use and what actions do you take daily to align with what you stand for? If you need to think about it, then it’s probably not operational in your life.

Find your vertical growth edge

Between our comfort zone and our terror zone is what we call the growth edge. We can become comfortable in patterns that don’t serve us and eventually lead to burnout. So, in order to grow again, we first must disrupt our sense of order and move outside of our comfort zone to build a new, healthier order.

Commit to daily action

It’s pointless to choose values without a daily commitment to deliberately cultivating that value in action. It’s the daily commitment that gives you the opportunity to notice your habitual fast brain patterns, then to engage the slow brain by consciously regulating out of those patterns into a more values-based, selfaware state.

For more, visit themindfulleader.com