Vishen Lakhiani argues workplaces should shift from extracting labor to healing people. Five interventions—better food, meditation and therapy access, gyms, sleep prioritization, and flexible mornings—boost both productivity and well-being. Mindvalley implemented all five and saw measurable gains in employee engagement and health.
Questions this video answers
Close to 85%.
70% of our waking lives.
10 kg (average man, first year).
A cognition drop of 30% when 90 minutes of sleep are removed.
Top performers: 8 hours 36 minutes; Average American: 6 hours 51 minutes.
Chapters
Human society is built on a big lie. I call this the lie of work. The idea that we have to spend the bulk of our adult lives trading our well being, trading our passions to earn a paycheck to deliver what we call work. And it's why, if you look at study after study, close to 85% of human beings are disengaged at work. But work is 70% of our waking lives. Something has got to be broken. And so I, along with my team, we are looking at ways to rethink how work works. And the biggest aha is this. What if work is not about extracting from you? Not about making you more tired or making you age faster, or giving you gray hairs, or filling you with stress, or making you want to go home and take a nap? But what if work is actually healing? What if the very act of going to your workplace means that you start losing weight? You start looking and dressing better, you start being more lit up, you develop meaningful connections with the people around you. You become a better individual day after day after day. And when you go home and you see your kids or your friends, you are magnified as an individual. You are more positive, you are more open, you are thinking, filled with energy. What if work fueled you and gave you rocket fuel rather than extracted for you? We call this ideas work as healing. And it's possible. And more and more companies are starting to bring this into their workforce. But I believe that there are five quick things. If CEOs and supervisors and managers do, it will change the way your employees show up. It boosts every single dimension of what we call worker productivity. But it also ensures that your people are becoming their best selves. The first has to do with food and healthy eating. In the office, you need to engineer environment where people eat healthy. So for example, in Mindvalley, we stopped bringing in donuts into the office, we got rid of Coca Cola, and now we fill our office with healthy food. We do not put sugar near our coffee machine. People instantly get off it. As a result, the average man who joins Mindvalley loses 10kg in their first year. By year two, our team is typically men and women combined running spartan races. We are taking people and turning them into athletes. And a big part of it is food. The second part is mindfulness. It's introducing meditation and spiritual practices and allowing this to happen. In the office we have a therapy room. We start the day with yoga or meditation. Occasionally we might bring in an acupuncturist or all of these things help us heal and recover and deliver our best selves. The third is exercise. What if you can get your teammates and you running spartan races? What if you can engineer the office, such as this space here, to allow mobility and exercise? We have everything from kettlebells lying around to pull up bars. People show up here early in the morning to transform our office into a gym. All of these things create healthier humans. Now, the fourth is is acknowledging sleep. So many companies make us show up at a ridiculous hour, 9am but we have kids, we have our personal growth practices. What if you could give people more time to actually get sleep? We know that sleep is one of the best things you can do for your body. It doesn't make you lazy, it makes you smart. If you take away 90 minutes of a person's sleep, that's a cognition drop of 30%. That's 30% less ideas, 30% less functioning. Yet companies push their people to sometimes work late nights, then show up early in the next morning and pop sleeping pills to survive. What if all of us had permission to sleep seven or eight hours a day? Human beings would be healthier, wiser, they would be in a better emotional state when they show up. And the best performers, according to a 1993 Kay Anders Ericsson study, got 8 hours and 36 minutes of sleep. The average American, 6 hours and 51 minutes. We have a sleep gap in our society now. That brings us to the fifth idea, which puts everything together. It's called morning autonomy. It means giving people their mornings back so they can go to the gym, they can meditate, they can catch up on their sleep. Daniel Pink said, if you want to motivate people, give them autonomy. But autonomy doesn't mean you give them 20% time in the office to dabble on whatever they want. You can give people morning autonomy, says Daniel Pink. Morning autonomy to actually own their mornings and dedicate their mornings to themselves. And this makes them show up better at work. At Mindvalley, we start our morning huddle at 11:30am that's relatively late, but it allows people to own their morning, so they can use their mornings to be autonomous and become their best selves. So these five ideas help you transform work into a healing space. But this is only touching the surface. The next thing that you're going to see is work as a way to create superhumans. And if you want to know more, one of the first things you can do is to check out mindvalley Mentoring for business, which brings you some of the world's greatest mentors into a company so you can elevate the mindset, the heart set, the brain set, and the health set of all employees. And this is one of the greatest things we can do to start making work a place of healing for all. SA.
