https://www.listennotes.com/e/143813723d4748c5b6174ef90155ed30

Now, there's a movement going on within HR that they use the term, the whole person shows up at work. We're more than just a cog that fits into an organizational machine. We are whole people.

This is your Badass Journey podcast. I am Kareen Walsh, serial entrepreneur, growth strategist, executive leadership coach and bestselling author. Each week, I will bring you a guest or thought that will help you align what you love with what you do in order to build that badass life and business you dream of. Hey there, listeners. Welcome to another episode. I am talking direct to you, but I'm also going to share a dialogue that we had in our most recent clever talk. where we brought leaders as well as health-focused practitioners into the conversation to really talk about integrative health in your business. And because I just shared with you my definition of the five pillars of integrative health in the last episode, I thought I would also share this clip from our last clever talk in that It will bring some highlights to you on the trends that integrative health focused people are seeing across businesses, but also some solutions on how you can think about it for yourself and become a little bit more proactive in dialoguing around this as you move forward building up your career and business so that you can get the support you need. So we had two panelists, Frank Lanyi, who I had shared a one-on-one interview with a few episodes back, and Samantha Fitzsimmons, who is a practitioner up in the healthcare space in Canada, to dialogue on what they're seeing, how they're approaching it, and how we can better support leaders in business today. on thinking more integratively on what health truly means to their teams. So I hope you enjoy this clip from that conversation. I will also put the link in the show notes to our Clevver Talk series so that you can watch the whole video is available to you in order to join us in our next Clevver Talk that we have. It happens monthly. All you have to do is join the network and you'll get access to our monthly free calls and Just start the conversation with us so that we can support you in the way you need as a leader of industry. So without further ado, let's jump into that clip. How do you define what integrative health means to you?

Fundamentally, to me, to me, integrative health means kind of what I'll describe. Well, first my definition in terms of thinking of health broadly outside of not just our physical well-being, but mental, and kind of the social things that affect health. And integrative health or integrative health care really, to me, means kind of leveraging all sorts of different kind of methods and available options for treatment. So that can mean more traditional Western medicine, that can mean Eastern approaches to care. And I think really interesting for me, an eye-opening experience for me in my years in the health care space is we think of Canada as a public health care system and and I think I learned very quickly that our definition of health or health care that's provided within our public system is one important piece of the puzzle, but I think a small piece of the puzzle in terms of overall health. And there's all sorts of interesting areas in terms of the different kinds of types of treatment that are available, as well as the socioeconomic factors that affect our health around housing, food security, and things like that. So basically thinking as broadly as possible about how to optimize health is is what I think of when I think of that word.

Frank?

That was an awesome definition, Sam. I concur 100%. I was actually first exposed to the term integrative health back when I was going through my Qigong certification training. The gentleman that I was trained under and got my 200-hour certification, he actually was a doctor of Oriental medicine who had lived extensively in China. And so as he was teaching us these exercises, Qigong, which I'll talk a little bit more later about what that means, but he was explaining that in, and this is back in 2004 was when I finally completed my certification. He was explaining that in China, if a person gets diagnosed with cancer, they will go to a hospital and they will get in one room, they'll go over, and if it's deemed necessary and they choose to do so, maybe they'll get some chemo, and then they'll go over and then they'll get some herbs from a traditional Chinese doctor to help them deal with the negative side effects of the chemo. And then they'll go to another room and they'll have someone teach them a personalized Qigong form to help their own body's natural immune system to be able to fight the cancer, to fight the effects of the medication that's being used. And how I see it is the best of all worlds. And so, the model that I see us going to on a macro level around healthcare. And we're doing it very slowly here in the United States, Canada and the UK, places basically where they have socialized medicine are far in advance of us because they understand the key importance of prevention versus intervention. Unfortunately, because in the United States we are on a profit model for healthcare. that ends up radically affecting how people access healthcare and what healthcare means. And so in a perfect world, and that's what I'm shooting for personally in my work, is we would be able to blend the best of all worlds. It's kind of like what Sam so eloquently articulated. We can have access to holistic body treatments and, you know, it's just been what, the last 10 years that some medical insurances even allow acupuncture, which has been clinically shown to be beneficial, is still treated like it's some sort of woo-woo voodoo medicine, right? That's how a lot of people view it. So the ideal that I would see is that people would be able to access through a healthcare system all the beneficial techniques that are there to help them deal with an illness, but even more so, I think it's important for us to begin thinking in a proactive preventative model and start having our institutions and organizations in-build ways to be able to have people learn to take care of themselves before they get sick. One of the things that my Qigong teacher explained to me is that there's a saying that in ancient China, you would pay the doctor a monthly fee, and when you got sick, you would stop paying him. And what that meant is that if the doctor gave you good advice to prevent disease, then you paid him. But if you got sick following his advice, you cut back the pay and he would have to recalibrate and give you some sort of dietary tips, or exercise tips or rest tips or whatever it was to get you back on track. And I think that's kind of the paradigm shift we need to think. Prevention, prevention, prevention. That's enough. I'm preaching now.

No, no, no. It's so true. I think that is part of the integrative model is how do you proactively charge forward and combat the reactionary space that care has turned into, especially here in the US. And it sounds like there are some challenges like that too, even in Canada, because those are the two countries represented here today. But I love that you brought that up, Frank, because I do think to me, integrative, just that word has a proactive feeling to it versus just health care. Like there is a more forward energy about it. And I do think that we're seeing more of it too. We're also realizing that our problems don't have a one size fits all answer. And when I see that and when I think about even just my own personal journey through whatever physical health issues I had, financial health issues I've had, the mental health issues I've had, even in relationships, like to me, integration hits all of that. right? Like it in order, because when we know we've all seen it, if we're suffering financially, our health tends to suffer. If we are in a bad relationship, we're not showing up in our work environment the right way. Like there is something about overarching integrative perspective that I love that you both touched upon. And then also as practitioners in the field, as well as assisting other companies and individuals do their best and become their best, how you define integrative? I think I would like to ask a follow-up question to say, well, as you have worked with your clients and have been part of companies, what are the changes or the demands, I guess, you're seeing from that internal space that you are helping find solutions for?

And just to stay frank, Canada is also very much in the reactionary healthcare space. still as well. So, yeah, there's a, there's a lot of work to do, and I totally agree about the, the goal of this all being more proactive. So one thing that I think is an interesting thing to talk about that is an example of one of the areas that we've done a lot of thinking over the years about how we can do things differently is this concept of caregivers in the workplace, which has been a growing kind of area of consideration in recent years and has only been exacerbated by the pandemic. But when I say caregivers in the workplace, caregivers can obviously mean caregivers of children, of parents, of any sort of friends, family, whatever it might look like. And based on the shifting demographics of kind of the current working population, there's more and more people that are the sandwich generation that may have responsibilities to support parents and kids. And this was certainly an emerging area in the company that I most recently worked at. So a good example of a challenge that we needed to start thinking differently about how we supported people. I think in terms of solutions, one of the big ones and a shift that I've seen is an openness to talking about mental health. I think that that's obviously something that's dramatically changed in recent years in terms of an openness to acknowledge mental health and think of different ways to support it. And a lot of our solutions using this caregivers in the workplace example were around opening up conversations around it was surprisingly impactful. Like I think a lot of the solutions that we think of when we think about tackling this problem in the workplace, I think people's minds go to what resources we're providing for employees, which is a super important piece of this. But I think a lot of it is, the environment that we're creating one within the workplace itself and for people to be able to focus on their health and well-being outside of the workplace. So that gets into more like the structure of work environments and the types of conversations that we have and things like that. And to me, that has been the biggest positive change is that piece of things. Like we can think about the resources we can provide as an organization, but our ability to kind of talk about these types of things more openly and create more flexible work environments to allow people to focus on their health has been a really positive shift that I've seen in recent years.

That's great input. I think that one of the key things that the COVID pandemic has pointed out is it exposed the glaring weaknesses that were already there, the fissures that were already there in our system. systemically looking at workplace environments, you know, the medical industry, mental health approaches and attitudes, all that kind of stuff. I mean, going back to the prevention idea, back when I was doing a lot of work with young men in social work and in bonds prevention in Los Angeles, I would always, you know, beat the drum about being proactive about accessing mental health services. And of course, you know, there's a generalized stigma about mental health care, right? I mean, we think, well, you don't need that unless you're crazy. And depending on which particular demographic group or community that you're working in, those things can get even deeper, in many ways connected with some systemic racism that has gone on in particular communities. And the fear that many people have about acknowledging that there may be a problem because that may have implications for whether they're allowed to care for their own children whether social services will step in and take them, right? Or whether, you know, they'll be able to maintain their place in the work environment. So I think the key thing that I've been trying to work with on the organizations that I've been able to consult with is to take a broader picture and view this as something beyond what the HR department is supposed to deal with. And so I'll give you just a concrete example of that. When I was working with the Department of Defense in Hawaii, immediately after the COVID pandemic hit and the stay at home orders started coming, the HR system there would issue these archaic little things about self-care, right? And you'd get, oh, hi. Well, while you're at home, remember, eat the food pyramid, you know? and you get one little email from the HR department encouraging you to look at the food pyramid and actually do something about that when the dietary patterns in Hawaii have nothing to do with the food pyramid. People could care less about the food pyramid. But the idea of the responsibility of the organization was just we're informing them. Oh, here's a breathing tip that we'll send you through the email. or here's the food pyramid. Don't forget to brush your teeth and go to your annual checkup. And that kind of milquetoast approach to dealing with your employee's health is archaic. I mean, that just does not work. Due to the extreme pressures that people are under right now, I was really resonating what you were sharing, Karine, about the fiscal stresses influencing our overall stress and certainly our performance in the workplace. I read a recently that 52% of people in the United States are extremely stressed about their finances. And of course, that bleeds over into their personal relationship, that bleeds over into their work life and their work habits. You know, it's pretty apparent that there needs to be some sort of fundamental change going on. And so I, it sounds like I'm veering from your question in the sense that you're asking me what would I consult within an individual institution, but when I'm sharing within individual institutions, I always need to drive them back to what's the macro picture going on here, you know, to take that big picture viewpoint. And I think when you cut right down to the core of it, the key problem that we're facing is that we are following a model of healthcare, which is based on the industrial model of work of the workplace. So the idea is that, you know, we're gonna, we're like little, robots and we're going to go in and we put our eight to ten hour shift in on the line. And if we do that without hitting the wrong button or doing the thing that we're not supposed to be doing, everything's okay. And all we are from that viewpoint is a cog that fits into an economic machine. Now there's a movement going on within HR that they use the term, the whole person shows up at work. we're more than just a cog that fits into an organizational machine. We are whole people. And so if I'm going through a divorce or my kid just had an overdose on opiates or whatever the thing is going on on the background, my work organization would be foolish to just expect me to go in there, operate as business as normal and not expect something bad to happen, not only to me, but to their bottom line at the end of three, six, eight month cycles of a person attempting to fit this unrealistic expectation of what they should be doing to fit their particular little job description. You know, and I guess also working in the nonprofit world has kind of helped me a little bit to have a different viewpoint because in many of those fields, you're looking at what the chief mission is of the particular nonprofit field that you're looking at. And although there's a lot of problems that the nonprofit industry has, they do tend to view people more from a holistic viewpoint and understanding what is the entire packages of gifts that you bring to the table in addressing this broader issue versus here's your job description, do your eight to five, don't call them sick, you know, you've got, you've got two weeks to, you know, to take off or whatever issues, just do your part, your cog in a machine. You know, and I think that's kind of getting to some of that deeper stuff is what we really need to do, whether it's individual consultation work with organizations or broader advocacy work or prevention work that we're doing.

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