Tag: optimal me

my innovation mindset

Ten years ago, I decided to focus my career on helping organizations innovate by developing new products and services. Because of that, I did my best to embrace what I considered an “Innovation Mindset.”  I thought to myself: I need to become an innovator and adopt this mindset in my life. For me, this meant not being afraid to try new things, takings risks, and doing my best to be creative. However, as a result, I became someone who struggled with routines because I thought an innovative person should not be static.
As I started to grow personally and professionally, more complex problems appeared in my life. The idea to optimize, or improve, some aspects of my life did not resonate with my “innovation mindset.” I didn’t have a problem with the idea of improving and trying new things. The conflict I had was that for me, optimizing meant finding a routine and sticking to it.
 

The breaking point

 
my innovation mindsetThen, eventually, there was a point when I realized that the pain of not doing anything was larger than the pain of change. So, I started my Optimal Me journey. I decided to start with my nutrition. I reduced sugar, carbs, and read some books on the topic. I have to be honest, I could not become a keto person, but I became conscious about how I eat and how my body feels when I eat garbage (aka “junk food”).
Then, I continued my journey and started tracking how many hours I was sleeping. I downloaded an app and noticed how bad the quality of my sleep was. I kept going and explored new ways of exercising, measuring my HRV to understand my nervous system. In other words, I got quite nerdy about it. I started to read about meditation and practiced it 3 to 5 times per week. I tried specific ways of breathing to deal with stress, and so on. My point here is not to talk about all of my experiments in the Optimal Me program, but to reflect on the fact that what started as a small step became a deep dive on improving several aspects of my life.
 

Readjusting my innovation mindset

 
As a result of implementing these improvements, I was able to cope with some personal and professional problems and found the balance I wanted to achieve (for now). You might wonder if I currently have a fixed routine that includes all of these tools or techniques? Not quite. I do have some routines, but there are a lot of things that I stopped practicing. I thought I had failed because I had explored so many things during the last two years that I was not applying regularly. For example, I remember thinking: “Why am I not tracking my sleep anymore?”
The answer is simple. I am aware that now I sleep fine. Then I realized that some of those experiments helped me to deal with moments of stress, anxiety, and more. I was not using those techniques, apps, or routines simply because I did not have those problems anymore. However, now I have a set of tools that I can use when I feel I need them again. And this is the whole point of optimizing my life. Develop awareness, learn, test, and repeat if it makes sense. Otherwise, save it for later.
I realized I had a framed optimizing my life in the wrong way. It’s not a journey that you start and finish. It’s a life-long learning process of self-awareness and trying new things to deal with all the life-changing challenges that appear along the way. The cherry on top is that this is how innovation in organizations works. Having a successful business is not possible with a fixed optimization formula. The things that worked in the past may not be useful in the future. This is how I optimized my innovation mindset.
 

What happens when procrastination gets the best of us?

According to Susan Krauss Whitbourne, Ph.D., procrastination is a common human tendency. About 20 percent of adults have regular bouts of procrastination. She claims it is so common that no one can ever completely avoid it. Psychology researchers say that procrastination is characterized by the “irrational delay of tasks despite potentially negative consequences.” How can we overcome this paradoxical challenge that so many of us are facing?
Recently, I committed to writing an article for our website and, at the time that I did, I was energized and enthusiastic. Time passed, other work piled up, and… ahem… I admit I was tempted to renegotiate the deadline. The challenge is that at Axialent, our culture frowns upon the behavior of making excuses – one is expected to be a player, own up, and honor commitments, or renegotiate the terms of the agreement.
Bummer.
The victim in me was agonizing, wanting to say, ‘I don’t have enough time.’ A more culturally acceptable version of this at Axialent is, ‘I prioritized other commitments.’ But what about my commitment to write the article? What happened to my willpower in this situation? In any case, that was not the best version of myself.
Instead of letting this angst go to waste, I decided to use it to jumpstart this article. I wondered whether others who may read this could be beating themselves up for similar situations. And I thought that those readers might find it helpful to know that, 1) they’re not alone, and 2) there’s a science-based method out there that allowed me to put this article together and get-it-done.
 

So, what can we do when procrastination gets the best of us?

 
What happens when procrastination gets the best of us?
If you think that I listened to a pep talk that made my fingers glide across my computer keyboard, think again. The fuel that got me going was something I learned in one of Axialent’s newer programs called Optimal Me. There was no motivational speech, just scientific facts on how the brain works, how our mind works, how our body is this smart machine that I had neglected. Among many other provocations, this one nugget of wisdom stuck with me: better than having the motivation to do something is having a motive. Why? Because motivation depends on my emotional state, while a motive will always be around when I need it.
So, as all my anguish poured in at the thought of submitting this article, I turned to my motive. I just had to remember that the ultimate reason I had for writing this is not to produce a perfect literary piece, comply with a deadline, or respond to a colleague’s request. My motive is to share less-than-extraordinary experiences that could make ordinary people’s lives a little better. It’s to be of service and maybe help others out.
Once I connected with that, my energy reset. My mood was out of the question. I put in the work. A less than perfect first draft came out. I trusted my colleagues to edit it with due professionalism. And got-it-done.
 

The Optimal Me method

 
Optimal Me is not a recipe book from where I took this advice, plugged and played. It’s a journey that exposed me to thought triggers from a carefully curated stack of knowledge about our well-being. More importantly, it enticed me to experiment my way to better-being (yes, I just made that word up). How? The course’s experimental nature made it attractive because it became a game that I was happy to play – albeit without gamification.
I’ve participated in development programs before where learning outcomes were based on knowledge consumption. Others, the transformational ones, relied on double-loop learning. This program is different in that the main goal is to learn to experiment for the sake of experimentation. Knowledge was not there to be consumed but to shape my experiment. I was free to pick the topic that I was more drawn to among all the curiosity triggers I received. I felt empowered to shift mindsets and learn!
This comes with a bonus: I, the participant, reaped the benefits of this program in full. I did not learn something that I was expected to ‘pay forward’ to my team (like leadership skills) or ‘pay back’ to my company (like technical skills applied to my job). What I learned by experimenting with productivity directly affected my well-being at work. What I learned after experimenting with nutrition, sleep, and exercise affected my body.
Given the constant uncertainty we’re living in these days, more and more companies we engage with are earnestly concerned about and caring for their people’s well-being. If you work at one of those companies and want to explore a non-threatening, enjoyable, and science-based method to address this pain point now, I recommend you give Optimal Me a try. Experiment. It will be worth it.
 

If you would like to see the recording of our live Optimal Me webinar with Oseas Ramirez, click here.

After a year of a pandemic that has taken a physical and emotional toll on hundreds of millions of people, the elusive idea of “well-being” is more relevant than ever. Even before the pandemic, it was already a hot topic with an established multi-billion dollar industry. The need for organizations to prioritize their employees’ well-being is more present than it has ever been. Does this mean we have the right tools and resources at our disposal? Not exactly.
 

The Road to “Well-Being”

why organizations need to prioritize their employees’ well-beingOne of my qualms about the idea of “well-being” is that it often follows a prescriptive approach. This is how one “should” eat, workout, rest, work, etc… oh, and here is the evidence for it. As well-intentioned as this might be and as well-substantiated as the proposal may be, I have noticed that many of us find it difficult to fully connect with it beyond just accepting what is proposed.
In many cases, we fall into a loop of feeling we “should” do something or be a certain way. We feel bad when we fail to follow the recommendation or achieve the state we believe we should pursue. We sometimes even reach the conclusion that doing or being a certain way is out of our reach because of __________ (fill in the blank with your favorite response – the one I found most people reference is the lack of willpower or discipline). In many cases, we are either left with the option to “try again” and see if this time we will have the willpower, or try the next new workout class, diet, or meditation app in hopes that this time it will be different. Many of us are familiar with the new “hope-try-drop it-feel disappointed” cycle.
 

Why is it so difficult to adopt changes that are good for us… that we know are good for us?

I have been passionate about exploring this question for years now. I did so silently as I focused on consulting Fortune 500 companies on topics related to innovation, agility, and digital transformation. A couple of years ago, I realized that there were a series of overarching themes in the space of innovation that actually shed some light on helping us adopt those changes. Coupled with some of the core aspects of behavioral science popularized by many habits books and publications, I found an interesting intersection: behavioral innovation through personal experimentation. This was the starting point for Optimal Me, a program we launched at Axialent in 2019.
Ever since, we have worked with seasoned leaders from over 10 countries, spanning Europe, the Americas, Asia, and Africa. We have asked them to run experiments on a wide range of topics – whether it’s intermittent fasting to increase focus and energy, new workout routines to help with stress reduction, breathing practices, personal productivity methodologies, or team productivity approaches. The most gratifying aspect of this work has not been the direct results of the experiments, but when people reestablish the confidence to playfully experiment with learning something new. Trying out a workout regimen for a couple of weeks, measuring how I feel about it, and trying to learn what works best for me is very different than powering through two weeks of doing something that may not even be the right fit for me, but I have a sense of obligation that I should do it.
 

Conclusion

We have learned that people are much more likely to stick with well-being initiatives if they actually enjoy doing them. Working on discovering this joy through a non-threatening (yet rigorous) personal experimentation process, supported by basic tenets of behavioral science is the core experience we are trying to instill in our Optimal Me participants.
Research has shown the incredible benefit of workplaces that provide well-being initiatives. Eighty-nine percent of employees at companies that support well-being initiatives were more likely to recommend their organization as a good place to work. Organizations with supervisors that supported their well-being plans reported a higher number of workers motivated to do their best, higher job satisfaction, and better relationships with their superiors.
If you are interested in innovation or growth mindset, Optimal Me will offer you a concrete way to embody it in your life. If you are just interested in learning how to be better in key aspects of your life, Optimal Me can offer you tools and approaches for you to test your way into it.
 

If you would like to see the recording of our live Optimal Me webinar with Oseas Ramirez, click here.