At some point, every entrepreneur struggles with filling their program. Obviously, as evidenced by the droves of ads… there are a million ways to go about it. And still, entrepreneurs try one marketing strategy after another, sometimes with little or no results. When lack of sign-ups leads to dwindling revenue and profit… it starts to get really uncomfortable. Most entrepreneurs think that this is time for a solid plan, a marketing plan, however, the solution may have nothing to do with marketing.

 

Marketing plan problem or conversion problem

Linda called me in the middle of the afternoon one day. “Can I get your advice?” she asked. “Of course!” I replied. Linda was a longtime client. I knew her business well and loved helping her out.

“I’m thinking of hiring a marketing person.” Linda said.

“Why?” I asked.

“Because I can’t seem to fill my programs. I was thinking if I hired a marketing person… they might be able to help me get clarity on my message.”

“Is that what you want, Linda? Clarity on your message? I asked. “Or do you want to fill your program?”

The fact was that I knew Linda was concerned about revenue. She wanted sign-ups and was starting to get concerned that the program she loved wasn’t going to bring in profits. She was getting desperate in fact. Linda revealed that it wasn’t that no one was interested… it was that no one was signing up. She was having conversations, but she wasn’t converting.

 

Marketing wasn’t the problem

Linda had a sales problem.

As Linda and I continued to talk I could feel the desperation in her voice. I knew there was more going on for her that was just below the service. So, we started to do some mindset and motivation work to figure out what was really going on.

As it turned out, Linda had a fear of people thinking she didn’t know what she was talking about. That fear was a subtle undercurrent in her messaging and although her clients wouldn’t have been able to identify it themselves, they could probably feel that “something was off” with Linda. Linda thought she just needed more people to talk to so her plan continued to repeat in her head… “get more leads” but with this message that both spoke to her client’s hopes and dreams and her own fear of being rejected for not knowing what she was talking about… no marketing strategy was going to dig her out of this hole she was is. In fact, if Linda had invested in marketing help, she would have been seriously wasting more money.

 

The problem started in her body

The position Linda found herself in many entrepreneurs can relate to. The fact was that Linda tried all of the regular tactics (ideal client exercises, messaging workshops, etc.) She had done all the right stuff but nothing was working because her fear lived in her body, not her head. It wasn’t until she did somatic work that she was able to get to a new level and finally become a person who was closing sales.

Somatic work is body-centered work. The somatic work that we did with Linda was Sensation-Based Motivation coaching. By tapping into the felt quality of Linda’s fear, she was able to acknowledge and experience it in a way that allowed her to let it go. She was also able to tap into a felt quality of her “knowing” which gave her true confidence and true clarity from within.

Marketing a business is important. Marketing plans and strategy are important. But without clarity of messaging, we can’t truly connect to our clients. Building a marketing strategy on top of confusion or desperation will not provide the solutions, profits, and revenue we’re seeking as entrepreneurs. That is like building a house on quicksand. We need to be clear in our messaging before we invest in marketing support. That clarity needs to be felt in the heart and body and understood by the intellect in order to be truly magnetic.

In our most recent Motivation Beyond Measure Forum we met with both forward thinking organizational leaders and outside consultants to talk about Best Practices for Measuring the Stress Levels of Employees. Coming into the forum our assumption was that leaders and consultants would want specific tools for accurately measuring the stress levels of people working in their organizations; however as often happens in our forum discussions, our participants shared some unexpected and very welcome ideas for better understanding what is going on within people’s individual stress experiences.

Alarming Stress Statistics

The awareness of organizational and employee stress has perhaps never been greater than it is right now. As we wrote about in an earlier MBM blog post, the Harvard Business Review’s current series on employee burnout has highlighted continually alarming trends, including that 89% of their survey respondents say that their work lives are getting worse and 85% report that their well-being has declined. According to a recent survey conducted by the Global Leadership Forecast, 86% of high-potential employees feel “used up” at the end of the workday. 66% of Human Resources professionals feel the same and about 44% of those leaders are considering changing companies.

Burnout: A Taboo Topic

While stress awareness seems to be at an all-time high, what may even be more distressing than the levels of reported employee stress is the apparent lack of acknowledgement or support from organizations themselves. A survey from FlexJobs and Mental Health America reports that only 21% of employees are able to have open and productive conversations about burnout with their HR departments and 56% said their HR departments did not encourage discussions on burnout. It would appear that as a whole, even if organizations recognize the ship is sinking very few leaders are willing to listen to the alarm, never mind grab a bucket and start bailing.

How to Measure Stress

When it comes to stress, measuring it can be a curious thing. On one hand, stress is pretty simple, when defined as “the result of a person’s perceived physiological and psychological inability to cope with their current view of reality.” In other words, when a person perceives that they can’t effectively respond either physically or psychologically to their current life demands, their body and brain jump into gear to help. Of course, the problem becomes that if the response isn’t effective in solving the perceived problem then the body and brain try and turn up the response higher and higher until either the problem is solved or the person burns out. Although beyond the intent of this article, there are a some very effective ways to manage stress at this level, namely by addressing a person’s perception and how it relates to their environment and reality.

On the other hand, stress is very complex considering that it is not only physiological and psychological but also emotional, behavioral, environmental, social, relational, and once again, perceptual. Stress is also strange, in that not everyone responds to the same stressful exposures in the same way; and yet work stress can be predicted based on the relationship of perceived effort vs. reward and degrees of demand vs. control. In many ways stress is as elusive as Bigfoot but also as common as the family pet.

The number of surveys, scales, and assessments for measuring stress are quite extensive, each one with a specific nuance which makes it more or less valid for any one particular situation. During our forum discussion, we introduced several scales ranging from non-validated, context specific scale surveys to our personal favorite validated measures, the Perceived Stress Scale and Motivational Mapping. Initially we were most interested in finding out more about which stress metrics leaders really wanted, however based on the discussion with forum participants our focus meaningfully turned to the most effective qualitative, rather than quantitative stress investigation methods.

Best Practices: Measuring Stress in the Workplace

For our group of participants, it was clear that they already knew high levels of people within their organizations were stressed, their question was now, “why”? This can be a tricky place for organizational leaders and managers, on one hand knowing and caring that your people are stressed and on the other hand if you ask “why”, there is a high likelihood that it will have something to do with you! This is where only the most courageous leaders are willing to go, asking the questions that not only may be a bit ego bruising but also initiate your taking actions to respond and address these newly revealed and often painful issues.

We asked our group, “What is one question you would love to ask your people, that you haven’t asked yet”? Here is a sample of a few responses:

• “What is one thing you’ve consistently done this year that has helped you manage your stress better?”
• “From a leadership perspective, do you feel like I have your back?”
• “What is one obstacle that will get in your way from having a great day today?”
• “How clear are your job requirements and responsibilities?” 

Each of these questions not only surveys a person’s own stress experience but also offers an opportunity for empowerment in self-expression and advocacy. It’s also worth suggesting that any one of these questions asked to several people will begin to give a more detailed picture of the cultural threads which connect your teams and organizations together. It would seem that when it comes to measuring stress, gathering quantitative data is a necessary place to start while the qualitative understanding will ultimately drive much needed change.

 

People are burned out in record numbers and 89% of people say their work-life is getting worse according to a recent article by the Harvard Business Review. The impact of stress and employee mental wellness is no longer a luxury; it’s critical to our economy. So where should we start to look for a solution? You might think that the fix is in the amount of work… or the amount of hours a person works… however, burnout is not a logistics issue. Burnout is an emotionally based problem. 

Characteristics of Burnout

When looking into the characteristics of burnout we see clear as day that it’s an emotional issue based deeply on our physiological responses. It affects how we “feel” and the feeler, we often forget, is our body. Symptoms of burnout cited in the Harvard Business Review classic from 1981, When Executives Burn Out, include:

·     Chronic fatigue

·     Anger

·     Self-criticism

·     Cynicism

·     Irritability

·     Feeling besieged

·     Hair-trigger emotional reactions

All of the above experiences exist in our bodies. Yet so often we look outside of the body for solutions. All of the above experiences have an emotional base, but so often we avoid talking about emotions, especially at work.

Yet typical solutions to burnout simply prove ineffective as evidenced by the fact that burnout was an escalating problem before the pandemic. Why would we think that those solutions would work now when they weren’t making a sustainable dent before?

Past Solutions Are Superficial

According to the Mayo Clinic in an article titled Job Burnout: How to Spot it and Take Action, recommended actions for handling burnout include suggestions like “getting some sleep” and “trying a relaxing activity.” For someone who feels like they are drowning or suffocating so badly that they feel they need to leave their job or take a permanent leave of absence these kinds of suggestions must feel like a slap in the face.

Is this the best we can do?

Our employee’s mental health and emotional wellness are on the line let alone people’s livelihood and self-esteem. These issues are real and feel real and require a much deeper level of vulnerability as well as common sense into human physiology to figure out how to sustainably approach a solution.

The Cost of Conversations We’re Not Having

Employees waste an average of an 8-hour workday for every crucial conversation they avoid reports VitalSmarts in The Cost of Conflict, Why silence is killing your bottom line. Burnout at work is a crucial conversation we need to be talking about. In fact, we need to talk about it before people get burned out. We need to have open conversations about stress. We need to have conversations about how people feel.

Most people feel totally unqualified to have conversations about other people’s feelings. The “Pandora’s box” that we imagine opening is scary and potentially messy. However, we need to equip out leaders and managers to have these conversations and have them before they turn into a turnover problem. Before they turn into a presenteeism issue. Even before they turn into a productivity problem. When leaders and managers are measuring employee stress and having potentially challenging conversations about emotions and employees’ emotional well-being before it’s a problem, we will be doing something to make a dent in the burnout issue.

Burnout Is Emotional

Burnout at work isn’t going anywhere without a culture shift around how we deal with emotional wellness. Burnout is an emotional issue that requires knowledge and conversations about emotions and physiology. Just because someone is feeling an emotion doesn’t mean they are bad, wrong, unproductive, or unmotivated… it means they are human. Humans live in bodies. Humans feel feelings. Humans have both primal and evolved parts to their brains. And humans go to work. Accepting the fact that employees are humans and bringing the skills to navigate human physiology in the workplace will correct more than just the issues with stress and burnout. It will create sustainable, thriving work cultures.