Several weeks ago, I sat down for a coaching session with a very senior executive at a Fortune 50 company. Let's call him Richard. He'd invited my company in to help his team better manage the overwhelming demand he believed was taking a toll on their productivity and their satisfaction.

I began by asking Richard to describe his own workday. He told me that he arrived at the office about 7:30 a.m. and worked virtually straight through until 9 p.m. He consumed his lunch in less than 5 minutes at his desk. If he went out to dinner, it was for a business meeting.

"That's pretty typical of people at my level, isn't it?" he asked me.

Sadly, it just may be.

What set this executive apart from most I meet is that he recognized this way of working wasn't serving him well. In recent years, he'd stopped exercising and put on considerable weight. He loved his work, and felt energized by it, but he worried that pushing himself so hard was taking a long term toll.

I suggested he begin with a couple of very simple changes. The first was to schedule a time at least three times a week to work out. He did that almost immediately, and successfully — at 6 pm, as a break before returning to work.

The second change I suggested was to get outside for lunch at midday, for at least 30 minutes. He agreed, and we actually scheduled the time in his calendar, with his assistant, but I could tell he wasn't confident he'd make it happen.

I wasn't entirely surprised. The Energy Project, the organization I run, recently conducted a poll on the Huffington Post about people's experience in the workplace. Sixty per cent of 1200 respondents told us they took less than 20 minutes a day for lunch. Twenty per cent took less than 10 minutes. One quarter said they never left their desks at all.

That's consistent with a study by the American Dietetic Association, which found that 75 per cent of office workers eat lunch at their desk at least two to three days a week.

Those poll findings were the inspiration for a movement The Energy Project is about to launch. The concept couldn't be more straightforward. We're calling it Take Back Your Lunch. It begins this Wednesday, between noon and 2 p.m., in locations around the country, and continues every Wednesday this summer. Find out where people will be gathering — or organize a Take Back Your Lunch Meetup in your city or town.

Far too many of us — managers and employees alike — have bought into the belief that the best way to keep up with demand is to be working all the time.

What if you set an example for the people you manage by taking back your own lunch - and by encouraging them to do the same?

At the most practical level, leaving the office for lunch is an opportunity to relax, let go of whatever stresses you've accumulated during the morning, and return to work feeling more energized, more focused and more engaged in the afternoon.

Taking back your lunch is the first step in taking back your life.

It's been three weeks since Richard made his own commitment to take back his lunch. Last week he got out twice. Can you commit to at least once? Invite your whole office starting Wednesday.

Tony Schwartz is president and CEO of The Energy Project. Tony is the author of the June, 2010 HBR article, "The Productivity Paradox: How Sony Pictures Gets More Out of People by Demanding Less," and coauthor, with Catherine McCarthy, of the 2007 HBR article, "Manage Your Energy, Not Your Time." His new book is"The Way We're Working Isn't Working: The Four Forgotten Needs that Energize Great Performance" (Free Press, 2010).

Taken from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/annie-toro/a-flexible-workplace-is-a_b_342260.html

As National Work and Family Month and Mental Health Awareness Month draw to a close, it's a good time to reflect on the impact of flexible work arrangements on the health and well-being of employees and their families.

Years of psychological research provide a strong foundation for flexible work arrangements, demonstrating the benefit to employees' physical and mental health, as well as their family life. To promote this knowledge, the American Psychological Association created an Office on Work, Stress and Health that promotes research, training, practice and policy addressing these matters, including:

a) Promoting understanding of work stress and its impact on the well-being and productivity of workers;

b) Exploring organizational and behavioral interventions to reduce stress, illness and injury in the workplace;

c) Studying the impact of changing work force demographics (e.g., aging workers, increasing proportions of ethnic and racial minorities and women) on health and safety in the workplace; and

d) Building collaborative partnerships among psychology, industry, labor and federal agencies to reduce stress and health and safety risks in the workplace.

For APA, issues impacting work, stress and health are of utmost priority. Our dedication to furthering initiatives that lead to a healthy workplace environment stems from our association's mission to advance the creation, communication and application of psychological knowledge to benefit society and improve people's lives.

These issues are particularly important under the sustained pressures of global competition on the U.S. work force. Psychologists are uniquely trained to address the behavioral aspects of change faced by our work force.

Research provides us with essential information regarding changes in our society that speak to the critical need to prioritize workplace flexibility. However, public policy has not kept up with the realities of working families. Today's families are more likely to include single parents, unmarried couples, same-sex couples -- sometimes with children, and stepchildren.

One of the most striking changes in U.S. families in the past 30 years is the increasing number of working women and the rate of mothers who work, especially mothers of infants and young children. Recently, California first lady Maria Shriver and the Center for American Progress released a provocative report entitled "The Shriver Report: A Woman's Nation Changes Everything" on the status of women in the United States and the drastic changes that have taken place in our country as a result of women's entrance into the work force. The study is aimed at inciting what it calls "a national conversation about what women's economic power means for our way of life."

Research tells us there is a positive connection between workplace flexibility and an individual's work-life balance. For instance, employees who work in environments that provide flexible work hours also tend to experience fewer conflicts within their work, family and personal lives. However, when a workplace does not provide adequate flexibility, women are more likely than men to experience work-family conflicts and health-related distress, some studies show.

Another key factor is employee perception of workplace culture. Many employees do not use such policies, even when they are available, because they are concerned that taking advantage of parental leave or flexible work schedules, for example, may be perceived as a lack of job commitment and could negatively affect their career advancement. Thus, it is imperative that employers not only support the employees by promoting their company's flexible schedule options, but also create and maintain a culture that encourages use of these policies.

Research shows that employers benefit from offering greater workplace flexibility. When employees receive the flexibility they need, there is less absenteeism and greater job satisfaction. Employees are more motivated to adopt healthier behaviors, sleep better and be involved in employer-promoted health education programs. Additionally, employers have lower health care utilization costs.

Given the interest in issues affecting working families demonstrated by the Obama administration through the development of initiatives such as the White House Middle Class Task Force and the first lady's efforts to bring much-needed attention to issues involving work-family balance, we hope to see the development of sound federal policies and initiatives that will lead to positive outcomes for employees, employers, families and our country as a whole.

to find out more about culture and engagement go to http://www.dradamfraser.com/CustomContentRetrieve.aspx?ID=216930

Taken From
http://www.consultant-news.com/article_display.aspx?p=adp&id=6258

Due to greater pressures from work 40% of women who earn in excess of £40,000 don’t feel equipped with the skills to achieve a work/life balance, according to new findings.

40% of women won’t achieve a work/life balance due to stress at work

The research by Morgan Redwood, a leading expert in talent development, is based on 237 detailed online interviews with women from a range of backgrounds across the UK.

With National Stress Awareness Day taking place next week (4th November) these recent findings just underline even further how stress at work is affecting women in achieving a work life balance.

The study was designed to determine to what extent women of working age in the UK agree or disagree with a range of attitude statements and determine their levels of contentment towards life, work, relationships and future prospects. Throughout the study women frequently experienced negative and stress related feelings, with 39% highlighting this fact further, by saying they are constantly feeling anxious.

Janice Haddon, Managing Director of Morgan Redwood says: “With the economic climate as it is many companies are looking to save money, one way of doing this is obviously to add to the workload of their staff. However by doing this, it is having a major knock-on effect. Pressure from work is increasing, meaning stress levels are getting higher. And when this is happening, particularly with women, as this survey shows, a work life balance is not being achieved.” This obviously also affects their work place performance and work place productivity.

The research also identified another interesting fact. For those women who have had children, they had experienced a loss of confidence when returning back to the workplace. Two fifths of women with children who were surveyed said they had lost confidence as a result of having a family.

Haddon comments: “Having children is life changing. With the pressures of returning back to work, and the worry of performing well after time off, it’s not surprising that women lose confidence after having a family. This can add to stress levels, making it harder to achieve that work life balance, as more time is needed in the office to prove their worth and build their confidence up.”

Haddon continues: “We’ve just launched a new series of workshops to help women and men achieve a work life balance and help them deal with stress. Our one-day workshops, self-titled ‘Creating My Future,’ will help individuals find the confidence and sense of purpose to get their lives back on track, stress free.”

For more info on getting control back visit: http://www.dradamfraser.com/CustomContentRetrieve.aspx?ID=187950

The following was taken from a Harvard Business Review article!

Do you have trouble concentrating? Find yourself easily distracted? Before getting in a tizzy that you have attention deficit disorder or something worse, check your stress level. New research shows that stress interferes with attention. The good news is that easing stress reverses these changes.

In a report in the January 20, 2009 edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Dr. Conor Liston and his colleagues at Cornell's Weill Medical College and The Rockefeller University show that stress blunts the growth and connections of nerve cells in part of the brain that helps keep you focused. The researchers recruited 20 medical students. Each had his or her brain scanned using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while taking a test that gauges the ability to shift attention from one task to another. Think of it as a multitasking test. The students underwent the scan just before taking their licensing exams--a stressful event--and a month later, after a vacation.

Those who were most stressed out by the prospect of taking the licensing exam were the least efficient at shifting their attention back and forth between tasks, the researchers reported. The greater the perception of stress, the poorer the attention to the task. On the fMRI scans, the attention-shifting task lit up several brain regions involved in attention and focus, including the prefrontal cortex. Stress dimmed the connections between these regions. Interestingly, a month of post-exam vacation reversed the disconnects.

Attention is like a Ming vase--highly prized, yet fragile and easily broken.

In a New York Times op-ed piece, columnist David Brooks wrote this gem about attention:

Control of attention is the ultimate individual power. People who can do that are not prisoners of the stimuli around them. They can choose from the patterns in the world and lengthen their time horizons. This individual power leads to others. It leads to self-control, the ability to formulate strategies in order to resist impulses. If forced to choose, we would all rather our children be poor with self-control than rich without it.

Some people are born with this power. Some learn to cultivate it. Others struggle constantly to focus. For many of us, attention is continually shattered by the small hammers of email, IM, a BlackBerry, blogs, YouTube, the Drudge Report, and countless others. Chronic stress helps them knock harder.

Although reducing stress seems to be an obvious solution to improving attention, there's no evidence that popular techniques like meditation, the relaxation response, and others will help you concentrate better. They may, but few studies have tackled this connection.

A proactive approach is unplugging yourself from distractions. A study by Microsoft's Eric Horvitz and Shamsi T. Iqbal of the University of Illinois showed that it took office workers 10-15 minutes to return to an interrupted task after responding to a distraction like an instant message. Their attention wandered to previous unreturned emails, IMs, blog browsing, Web site surfing, checking RSS feeds, and social networking before returning to the task at hand.

After having spent one too many long days at work with little to show for it, I started my own small distraction-reduction plan. Instead of keeping Outlook and my RSS feeds open all day, I now fire them up every couple hours, do what needs to be done, and close them again. It feels like it's working, and I feel a bit less stressed. If Dr. Liston and his gang are right, it could be the start of a feedback loop that will help me harness "the ultimate individual power."

What are you doing to keep office distractions to a minimum?

Ninety five percent of new years resolutions are never achieved, why are we so terrible at sticking to goals?
In a way achieving goals goes against our natural biological drivers. Our natural program is to avoid and move away from things that cause us stress and discomfort. Unfortunately most types of change and the majority of goals require a certain level of stress and discomfort. Studies have shown that the most common emotions people feel during the goal achievement process are frustration, anxiety, fear, boredom and apathy.
Therefore we have to realise that altering any habit or achieving any goal flies in the face of our normal biological desires and behaviour. Put another way its not going to be easy!! This statement is supported by research, which indicates that 85% of all goals set are never achieved.
The following research is taken from the PhD work of Dr Stephanie Burns an absolute guru in the area of goal achievement. It’s broken up into theory and strategies.
Theory is the background to goal achievement and will help you have a greater understanding of how change comes about.
Action items are things you can practically do to increase your chances of sticking to a goal.

Theory
•    The amount of time you have to dedicate to a goal has nothing to do with your chance of achieving it. You can wipe someone’s day completely so they are free and this will not improve their chance of achieving that goal.
•    Having a high level of self-esteem does not improve your chance of sticking to a goal. A lot of people who have high self esteem often talk about all the grand things they will do, but don’t do them. The only thing self esteem affected was the size of the goal, the greater your self worth the grander the goal you set.
•    The main determinant of goal achievement was frequent and consistent action.
•    When people stopped taking action towards their goal they rationalised it by making up a story around why they couldn’t do it. Most of the time they said it was not their fault. They said things like, “I am just not an exercise type person”, “the family is more important and I really need to be there for them”, When analysed their stories were inaccurate and delusional. Also often people who stopped taking action towards their goal, said that they were merely putting it off and would get back to it later, which they never did.
•    When they compared themselves to other people who kept working towards their goal, those that quit perceived those that kept going as having a much easier time of it. They saw the other person’s goal as being easier, or their life as being better than theirs, or that the other person liked their goal more than them. None of these things were true. In fact those that stuck to their goals were as challenged, bored, frustrated with their goals as those that quit. They just didn’t see those things as a reason to quit.
 
Actions:
•    Just start! Research shows that once we start the activity, momentum tends to make us keep going. For example to get people to exercise researchers got them just to walk for 10 minutes a day, however once they were out and exercising they continued to walk much longer than 10 minutes.
•    Don’t think too much! People that didn’t achieve their goals tended to think about it a lot. For example say their goal was to go to the gym, those that didn’t get there would sit on the lounge and debate over and over again in their heads if they should go or not. Finally they ran out of time and couldn’t go. Those people that did achieve their goal didn’t analyse it too much, when it came time to do their chosen activity, they just did it rather than thinking about doing it. In a way their heads were quieter.
•    Most goals are abandoned after 3 weeks. One key to achieving goals is to sustain the action long enough to see a result.
•    Consider the little stuff. When people set a goal they only thought about the outcome they will get at the end of it. For example if it was to lose weight they fantasised about how good they will look when they achieve their goal. Unfortunately they have not thought about all the little steps they needed to take along the way and all the little challenges they will have in order to get their goal. For example many people who had the goal to get fit stopped that goal because it was a pain to drive to the gym or they couldn’t get parking near by. It was the little things that they did not even consider that derailed their goal.
•    Create tension in your environment. Often children stick to new hobbies or sports because they have a lot of tension in their environment to make them keep going. Tension from parents, coaches, fellow students and teachers. All these sources of tension keep them accountable. Announce your goals to people and set up tension in your environment to keep you accountable to your goals.

Video Links
Teenage affluenza – gives you a huge dose of reality
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I46z0WY1ukU

TED video – this is a great example of having passion for what you do.
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/benjamin_zander_on_music_and_passion.html

What makes a high performer? Why do some people achieve greatness and others get left floundering behind. Psychologists have determined that the ability to get into FLOW is one of the most important aspects of high performance. FLOW is also know as being “In the Zone”, it is a state where everything seems easy, you are very efficient, there is zero stress and you feel invigorated after it.

When I was working with elite athletes at the AIS and in America, special forces soldiers, some high profile people in the entertainment industry and more recently with high performers in corporate organizations, I noticed that these high performers regularly go into this FLOW state.

So how do we get more of it? The good news is that it is not all about talent, ability and potential, it’s more to do with how people execute on a daily basis. One of the most important principles that help you get into FLOW is the ability to focus deeply on the tasks that you perform. When you are deeply focused you have a greater chance of slipping into FLOW.

However as a society we are losing our ability to focus. It seems like the whole world has ADHD. There are three main reasons for this.

1. Attention deficit habit (ADH). ADH is a condition where the habits in our day are sapping our ability to focus. For example most people leave their email open and every time it alerts us to a new email we stop what we are doing and we go off and check it. Also we leave our phone on constantly during the day even when we are writing a report or meeting with someone. These habits actually set ourselves up to be distracted and train us to have poor focus.

2. Information Obesity – This is the result of shifting from a physical economy to a digital economy. We are overloaded with information and we have so much information coming at us we don’t have to focus on one thing for too long before something else will come and take our attention away. A recent report released by Proud Foot consulting said that information overload was responsible for a 10% decrease in productivity.

3. Multi-tasking - The greatest enemy of focus is this idea of multitasking, multitasking suggests that you can focus on many things at once. Reality is multi tasking is a very inefficient process and in reality all you are doing is focusing poorly on a number of tasks rather than focusing well on one thing. So what is the solution how do we improve our focus? Well there are three simple techniques we can use to have the focus of a high performer.

1. Control Your Environment. Set up your external world to support focus, turn off the email, turn the phone off, and educate your staff on when you are not to be interrupted. Push back on the environment, don’t be a slave to your environment.

2. Formal Practice. An example of a formal practice is meditation. Years ago I thought that meditation was tree hugging, hippie stuff, however a huge amount of evidence shows that meditation has a beneficial impact on our cognitive ability. In its purest form meditation is about calming the mind and focusing on one task, this ability will translate into work.

3. Be Present. During the day practice focusing your attention on what ever is in front of you. Lose yourself in what ever you are doing. If you are writing a report focus entirely on that report without thinking of the other things you need to do later in the day. Likewise if you are having a conversation with someone totally immerse yourself in that conversation don’t let your mind drift. So often we have conversations and we are not really present. Business is built on relationships, the greatest complement you can give another person is your undivided attention. However we all have a highly tuned BS detector, and we know when people are not truly engaged with us. Some people believe that being present is the key to team building. Companies spend millions of dollars a year getting people to build better relationships within an organization. They usually spend this money on personality profiling, isn’t the first step getting them to engage and be present with each other? In addition some psychologist are now talking about the concept that people are creating fewer and fewer memories. The reason for this is that memories are created in the present and the fact that most people are either obsessing about the past or worrying about the future means that they are not laying down current memories. How sad!

This is the first step towards high performance. Go forth and focus!!!