Tax is not fun. It’s boring, complicated and painful, but somehow all business owners deal with it. Even if all the receipts are shoved away in a shoebox, they eventually get taken out, tallied up and crossed off the list.
Mental health is a very different story. While most business owners may know a little bookkeeping, they rarely know what to do when it comes to protecting the mental health of their employees. Often the issues are simply shoved away in another shoe box and left untouched in some dark corner.
They really shouldn’t be. When you help your employees thrive, you’ll help your business thrive too. But allow them to suffer and chances are your business will do the same.
Dealing with mental health makes incredibly good business sense. According to a recent report by PWC and Beyond Blue, effective mental health measures deliver a $2.30 return for every dollar spent. With the right intervention employees become more productive, take fewer sick days and are less likely to require compensation.
While many business owners and managers understand the business case, they are still very wary of opening the lid on that old shoe box. Some still cling to the idea of being ‘tough’ and leaving problems at the door. Some have good intentions but simply feel ill-qualified, knowing the human mind is even more complex than the tax system.
In developing Mindarma our aim was to make it simple to make a difference. We wanted to create something affordable, accessible and a whole lot more fun than sitting in front of a spreadsheet. We wanted to get past all those taboos and acknowledge we are not perfectly programmed working robots, but rather normal, imperfect humans. We will all face difficult thoughts. We will all be challenged by tricky emotions. We will all have moments where we are completely stressed out.
Just about everyone could benefit from discovering better ways of dealing with all the stuff that’s going on in their head. Sadly, very few people were taught such core skills at school (but for some reason everyone learnt quadratic equations). Instead most people have been left to cobble together their own make-shift strategies.
Unfortunately many of the strategies people come up with are actually counterproductive. Commonly we interact with uncomfortable thoughts and emotions by fighting them, pushing them away or attempting to avoid them completely. We may rant about things that annoy us, finish the day with a few too many wines or fantasise about taking a baseball bat to that stupid, malfunctioning printer.
Mindarma introduces a number of far healthier coping strategies. It teaches mindfulness and equips learners with a number of very practical skills they can use to become less stressed and more resilient.
Just like taxes are inevitable, so are difficult thoughts and emotions. It’s time we all learnt to deal with them.