Dozens of speakers shared a wealth of knowledge during MDRT’s three day virtual conference last week.
Among the guest speakers included three from Australia who delivered presentations to thousands of the organisation’s members working across the financial services sector worldwide.
Peak performance researcher Dr Adam Fraser spoke about the benefit of advisers taking time out between the end of the working day and joining the family at home.
He calls it The Third Space and during his presentation explained how placing a gap between work and home life can help prevent bringing workplace stresses into the home. According to Dr Fraser, 65% of people find it difficult to separate work and home.
He tells the story of a colleague who arrived home every evening after work feeling grumpy “…his children disappeared into the back garden when their dad came home”.
“Seeing his children run off one afternoon, the man took stock and changed his routine,” says Fraser. “He decided to go straight to his bedroom when arriving home where he’d shower and take time out before joining the family.”
Fraser says taking time out can include listening to music, a podcast or reading – “…anything to place a gap between work and home”.
“Then when you emerge to see the family you are in the moment, calmer, and more clear-headed.”
Addressing business owners and team leaders, debt management specialist Amanda T Lee explained how putting people before profit can enhance a company’s bottom line. She invited MDRT’s global audience to think about how what they say and do impacts others.
“Ask yourself ‘what is my impact on people’ and therefore my profit,” she said. “Communication and connection, people and profit, must be considered to remain a successful and profitable business.
“The communication and connection of a team is a determining factor in our emotional and mental health and happiness, as well as our performance and output. We are responsible and accountable for creating the environment within our business and the impact on our team – and that ripples out to the community and the world we live in.”
Lee says that when a team witnesses good communication and connection among other team members, the bottom line will improve.
“There are gains to be made by anyone who understands the vital impact of people on profit,” she says. “If you want more profit, you need a business that has an inclusive connected culture, a supportive healthy environment, higher productivity, and an adaptable innovative team delivering optimum customer service.”
She says work-related stress has an annual cost to businesses of $300 billion and causes 120,000 deaths a year.
“This is not an acceptable or sustainable situation,” she says. “Existing paradigms must change. Conventional wisdom has to be challenged, because the bottom line is people first, not profit.”
Performance coach Andrew May looked at the impact of living and working in a world of ever-increasing change and offered tips to help viewers react positively to disruption to their routines. The key to this, says May, is being matchfit “…it’s not a luxury, it is a necessity”.
“If you look after your body, if you look after your brain, look after your relationships, and your immune system…if you look after your physical and psychological wellbeing, you will be in a much better spot,” he said. “It benefits everyone if we take proactive care of what we can focus on.
“There has been lots of change, but I want to focus on what we can control,” says May. “Many of us are now working from home, there are expanding technologies and possibilities, the 9-5 workday is gone, and we need to redefine what productivity means. Productivity is not hours in the office, it is time spent doing what you do to make a difference.”
He says business structures have been turned upside down as staff obtain more autonomy working from home, away from top-down management systems.
May says there are six key fundamentals to being matchfit:
- Always have a beginners mind – not an expert mind
- Move, move, move – every day do 10,000 steps
- Have 2 to 3 alcohol-free days each week to improve your brain
- Have some fun and laughter
- Turn off the news and watch a movie
- Play-on – keep driving forward in your career and personal life because we are all living longer
