POSITIVE EVOLUTION

YOU ARE ENOUGH. EVOLVE BUSINESS! CREATE YOUR FIT WELLNESS

BY NICOLE HEROUX WILLIAMS I PHOTOS BY NSP STUDIO BY DR PAM DENTON I PHOTO BY KL STORYOGRAPHY

as a Priority for a Successful 2023

Imagine your work environment becomes a culture of fitness and wellbeing on all levels, mental, emotional, and physical - your main goal in 2023. A space where your leadership team and employees inspire and uplift each other, every day is filled with positive motivation and is like a powerful workout at the gym. Where people go to work and feel motivated - no matter if you are in person, at home, or hybrid.

Imagine your office as a wellness culture, a space for clear communication, positive relationships, healthy body, teamwork and much more. This is the FIT in BreatheFIT - Focused Intentional Training. Our form of FIT is designed for on the job and shifting business into the wellness culture paradigm.

Creating a FIT Wellness Culture in 2023 requires these three things:

Focus: You must make your wellness culture a priority, real focus with real results. Create a team task force. Think about creating a Wellness Coach position for your company. Focus on this task for 365 days and then review where you are in 2024.

Intention: Your intentions to create a FIT Culture could be game changing. Keep your intentions consistent and commit to a 365 day implementation of solid yet simple strategies. Intend to make your business a space where people feel valued and honored through health and well-being and watch the positive energy uplevel!

Training: Wellness Culture is an entrainment of new habits and beliefs and requires dedication and

determination. Train a wellness coach, hold regular FIT training, and make health a part of everyday work life. There are rock solid ways to respect and honor everyBODY. For example, regular training for creating a positive mindset could fulfill your 2023 FIT intentions.

To be an effective leader in these rapidly changing and challenging times, you must choose to be mentally, emotionally, and physically FIT and aware of your wellness culture, especially mental health. There are so many sneaky toxic business challenges and when you are unfit you are potentially perpetuating an unfocused and unaware work environment that can leak toxicity into everything you do in business including, cash flow, team work, hiring, communication, sales and more.

With a FIT culture you are Focused on health, Intentional about health, and Training health into daily work life. You are perpetuating a culture that is sustainable and lifegiving and you are creating energy and life force into your operations. You are also creating the culture that attracts the right employees, a FIT culture will attract healthy, dedicated, and dynamic workers.

A FIT culture is a space where staff can process through daily work stressors with psychological safety. A psychologically safe communication space where you can stop and breathe deeply before answering a question and you are respected for your calmness. A psychologically safe culture where employees have the ability to show up fully transparent without fear of consequences that would affect self-image, status, or career and team members feel seen, heard, accepted, and respected.

“Let’s get up and move for a moment before we make this big decision.”

People are used to and trained to accept: anger and aggression as a form of communication, coffee breaks and sugar loaded foods as a means to uplift energy, long seated meetings that stagnate and drain energy, alcoholic drinks that are a form of social connection, and late dinners that never digest well.

We need the FIT business culture now! Environments where people feel like they are getting stronger in the work environment, rather than beaten down by stress. A space where emotions are processed rather than stored. And a space where communication is fluid and healthy.

Commit to your FIT wellness culture in 2023 and watch the positive changes unfold, this could be the success you are looking for in the midst of your stress and challenges. Health and fitness can be integrative and it does not need to be left out of your work life. workplace a constant and consistent application.

Statements such as the following could become a norm:

“Let’s go for a walk and talk about it.” back to this tomorrow.”

“Let’s get up and move for a moment before we make this big decision.”

“Shake it off! And then let’s talk!”

These statements are productive and empowering and they produce revenue generating focus. They are part of everyday upleveling culture and communication and they instill core values.

Are you in?

Positive Evolution Consulting helps businesses become stronger than stress by creating the FIT Wellness Culture. We help you decide a starting point for making wellness a priority. Whether it is our BreatheFIT program or another wellness strategy our company has over 30 years of experience in health and fitness and we can help guide your process. w w w . positiveevolutionconsulting. com

Consider this cultural change:

What if your business made it a priority to bring movement into daily work life as an integral part of work-life? Make movement of lifeforce and positive energy within the “How about we breathe through it?” “Want to process this first with some deep breathing?”

“Have you felt into that decision with breathing, what does your gut say?”

YOU ARE ENOUGH. HAPPY & ANGRY AND ONLY HAPPY & ANGRY

BY NICOLE HEROUX WILLIAMS I PHOTOS BY NSP STUDIO BY AMY BLISS

I spend A LOT of time talking to men about the things they are allowed to be, do or feel as a man and those things they are not. When the topic of emotions comes up, there are only 2 that consistently fall into the “allowed” or “supposed to” category: happy and angry. Sad is a distant third. Though that one is only in very specific circumstances (death of a loved one, a tough break-up, his team losing the championship game…) and only for a prescribed, often very short period of time, after which he needs to get over it and “man up.”

If emotions are like the 88 keys of a keyboard, most women are playing concertos and men are playing chopsticks, on an out of tune piano, with many broken keys. This isn’t because men don’t feel. Rather, the vast majority of men have spent a lifetime being told, shown or scorned into what they are supposed to and not supposed to feel. And as you see that list is VERY short.

So what happens to the other 86 keys? Men feel. They absolutely do. Even if they can’t identify or give language to WHAT they are feeling. It’s there. However, what they have been told their whole lives is that they shouldn’t EXPRESS it. Be stoic. Shove it down. Be a rock. Man up. Don’t be a sissy.

Here’s the problem, ignoring emotions, shoving them all down, doesn’t make them go away. They have to go somewhere, eventually. And where do they go? Into one of the emotions they are allowed to express. And it isn’t happy. Grief, frustration, anxiety, hurt, fear, helplessness, resentment, embarrassment, loneliness, guilt…it all gets channeled into anger.

It is no accident that we live in the violent society that we do. When we tell men to shove everything down and keep it all bottled up, when it all comes back up, it often does so in an explosive way,

harming himself or those around him.

While we will often say anger is not the answer and solves very little, we tend to accept it in men and sadly, have come to expect it. And fear it. There is a saying, “Men fear women will laugh at them. Women fear men will kill them.” Let that sink in. What a VAST difference. And yet, it is confirmed over and over again. You might even be thinking, “yeah, I have that fear.” And if you don’t, ask the other women in your life. I’d hazard to guess the majority will tell you they fear men’s anger and violence. That a man will hurt or kill her. And the violence against women statistics give that fear a strong basis in fact.

On the flip side, if it doesn’t come back up as violence, rage and anger, it gets turned inward.

Here are some scary statistics:

Men are 30% more likely to suffer a stroke and 2 times more likely to have a heart attack. Men are 1.6 times more likely to struggle with addiction. And 3.8 times more likely to commit suicide.

Now, I’m not saying that these are all simply because we don’t give men language for emotion or permission to express, but there is so much stress that results from not being allowed either of these. And stress levels play a huge part in all of these statistics. Add to this that there is an exorbitant amount of stigma attached to men seeking help from a mental health professional, exponentially so in the Black and Latino communities.

We are putting men in a no-win situation: let it come back up in an explosive way or keep it shoved down so far it results in disease and/or self-harm. And it doesn’t have to be this way. If there is a man or boy in your life that struggles with anger, it is safe to talk about it and he wants to work on it, there are things you can do to help. However, do not do this

“If emotions are like the 88 keys of a keyboard, most women are playing concertos and men are playing chopsticks, on an out of tune piano, with many broken keys.”

in the moment! Let the situation cool down to where he can have a rational conversation without further fueling his anger or him feeling like he’s being attacked or criticized.

If you’ve been following me, you’ve heard me talk about this idea that we haven’t given men language for emotions. I’m fairly certain that if you think about the situations in which the men or boys in your life get angry, for a good majority of them, anger is really not the appropriate response. But if you ask him what he is feeling in the moment, he will likely say “I’m angry!” This is because he doesn’t have language for many of the other emotions. The stricter his upbringing, the less language he will have.

First ask, “what happened immediately before you felt angry?” When he tells you, without judgment, condescension or cynicism, ask him, intellectually what does he think the appropriate or reasonable response would be to that event. (This is the main reason why it’s important to wait until the situation has cooled or that question will not go over well!)

If someone cut him off on the highway? Anger is probably the appropriate response. If your child brought home a less than stellar report card? That’s more likely disappointment. If friendly ribbing hit too close to home or someone outs him in some way? Maybe that’s embarrassment.

Having these more intellectual conversations, when he is calm, will allow him to start to unwind anger. To see what the underlying true emotion was that was masked as anger. You can take it a step further and ask where in his body he felt sensation while he was “angry.” If his hands clenched, that’s likely anger. If it’s a heaviness in his chest, feeling like he was kicked in the gut, or a sinking feeling, these are more likely hurt, disappointment, embarrassment, sadness… This begins the process of giving him language for emotions. The next step is the be a safe space for him to express these newly realized emotions in the appropriate way. Remember, while this is all second nature to you, it is largely new to him. Give him grace and patience. He’s gonna fuck it up. Until he doesn’t. And your relationship will be all the better for it!

IMPORTANT: PLEASE DO NOT attempt this if his anger is largely directed towards you and/or if he is physically, psychologically, verbally or emotionally abusive. If the former, he should seek outside help. If the latter, please get the help you need to be safe. There are so many amazing resources available.

~~~~~~~~~~~ Amy Bliss, JD, MBA, is the founder of The Warrior cOre, which offers coaching, workshops, men’s groups and retreats to help men identify and shed the conditioning from family, society, religion, educational systems and culture, of what a man is “supposed to be” and learn to live as the humans they are, independent of these constraints. Please visit our website (thewarriorcore.com) or schedule a Discovery Call (https:// amybliss.as.me/). and other articles are written from a binary and usually heterosexual perspective, not to be exclusionary, but rather because our conditioning is binary. It starts with the proclamation “It’s a girl!” or “It’s a boy!” Other ways of being generally show up well after these statements and long into the conditioning. The other reason is that non-binary, non-hetero identifying people tend to be much further along in the process of undoing conditioning than those who identify as binary and/or hetero.