Episode 57 – 5 Reasons To Support Post-Pandemic Personal Growth
“According to a Public Health Ontario report: “The COVID-19 pandemic has negatively impacted the mental health of the healthcare and public health workforce and adequate supports are essential to protect and improve the public health workforce’s mental health and resilience.” Head over to the shownotes for more details on how we can support your hospital in post-pandemic personal growth.
Supporting post-pandemic personal development for frontline healthcare workers can have significant benefits to improving personal health and wellbeing, as well as retain the staff that remain. During the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, employees and company leaders were largely in agreement about the need to prioritize mental health. Its reasons obvious; the pandemic has placed unprecedented pressures on healthcare systems around the world.
However, as the economy recovers and the pandemic starts to wind down, senior leaders and employees may soon be shifting its priorities back to business as usual. Let’s not let this happen too quickly.
According to a Public Health Ontario report: “The COVID-19 pandemic has negatively impacted the mental health of the healthcare and public health workforce and adequate supports are essential to protect and improve the public health workforce’s mental health and resilience.” Taking that one step further, post-pandemic personal development needs should be implemented across several levels of an organization, taking into account the individual and team’s needs, as well as the organization, management, the entire community and workplace policy.
Here are the Top 5 Reasons To Support Post-Pandemic Personal Growth And Wellbeing.
1. Develops Capacity To Adapt To New Situations, While Building Emotional Intelligence
While adapting to new situations and building emotional intelligence might not seem to go hand in hand, they do. Employees who learn to shift their mindset, inside the flow of their workday, can become more agile and highly adaptable to new situations. In an experiential program like The ProMind Experience, Satori is building a community of Mindful Clinicians. We train our participants to do daily short lessons over 7 weeks, which emotionally immerses employees in the experience of consistent self-care. While they’re implementing strategies, they’re also building that emotional intelligence . This emotional experience engages participants to the point that the learning and experiencing change the participants’ mindset.
A well-constructed experience enhances a learner’s ability to empathize, far into the future. The ProMind Experience recognizes that emotions such as fear, confusion, and distrust cause many people to stall. Although there are a number of ways to overcome fear, it is through these experiential training programs that participants are encouraged to identify and celebrate their emotions. By celebrating their emotions now, the experience of those powerful emotions is identified as the place to pivot, express, ask, and act.
2. Helps Embrace An Organizational Approach
Deliberate organization-level interventions support staff in many areas of their life, not just in mental health. Multiple included reviews recommend the availability of organizational-level interventions aimed at preventing mental health issues and providing supports and/or referral options to staff for mental health concerns that emerge. Unfortunately, in today’s unpredictable world, health care professionals may fear being stigmatized for facing adversity. Therefore, to take a hospital-wide approach and provide training and development options to all frontline staff, you make processes of support normal.
An organizational approach empowers the employee to embrace uncertainty in a supportive learning environment.A rapid review by Magill et al. (2020) suggested that “organization-level activities, even those not directly related to mental health, improved adverse psychological outcomes among providers across outbreaks by increasing confidence and enhancing positive psychological effects”.
Experiential growth programs are essential to have employees learn how to gracefully face uncertainty head-on, and to be present in their jobs and personal lives. When an organization embraces the employee’s growth, they feel valued.
3. Bridges The Gap Between Theory & Practice
Certainly, it’s one thing to read a book about performing open-heart surgery. It’s quite another to actually open a chest cavity and operate. Running a post-pandemic personal growth program offers your teams the option to practice new coping strategies, during times of change. Satori bridges this gap through our Weekly Study Halls when running our 6-Module Digital Workplace Health Program.
4. Provides A Safe Space To Fail
With employee perception of job security at an all-time low, failure can feel like an Armageddon. And yet would you put a pilot with no practice at the helm of a jumbo jet? Probably not. A post-pandemic personal growth program uses simulations to allow employees to fail safely. Their job is not in danger when they put their skills to use – whether in simulations, or through other applicable scenarios. In The ProMind Experience, we offer group coaching along with the 6 digital modules, and weekly Study Halls, to support your staff at getting their minds “right”. Doing so outside the workplace, but supported by organizational structures, provides staff an opportunity for a paradigm shift.
5. Encourages Growth Outside Your Comfort Zone
The pandemic has put us all outside of our comfort zone. While some health practitioners have been deployed, others are experiencing the pressures of low staffing, difficult hospital shifts, and ensuring staff basic needs are met in the workplace. The routine shifts within the pandemic have placed people in a place of perpetual uncertainty. This makes for challenging times in maintaining good daily health habits.
A post pandemic program gives your staff that much needed help at taking control of their personal health and wellbeing, while also encouraging them to grow. In The ProMind Experience, we focus on establishing those powerful daily routines and creating sound daily habits that will help accomplish new skills, goals, and capacities. This helps every member of the team because there’s a culture of overall health and personal growth.
Essentially, we don’t realize that much of the reason we don’t take risks is that we think that the discomfort would not be worth the hustle. Without an attack on those habits and the exposure of how those habits limit one’s results, there can be no learning. Nor would there be any chance of taking different actions. It’s only when a participant gets the opportunity to act outside of their comfort zone, will a new action come to fruition.
The most important actions for working towards your wellness and personal growth are doing whatever is necessary to stay accountable to the vision, mission, and strategic objectives. These actions undertaken are for risk-taking, creativity, holding one another accountable, having fierce conversations, and going above and beyond to make your objectives achievable.
Learn how the ProMind Experience™ improves work-life balance and clinical effectiveness in health by booking a call with me.
Magill E, Siegel Z, Pike KM. The mental health of frontline health care providers during pandemics: a rapid review of the literature. Psychiatr Serv. 2020;71(12):1260-9. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ps.202000274
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