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How to sustain high performance and avoid founder burnout
118 Plays1 year ago
Steve Peralta is Co-founder and Chief Wellbeing Officer of Unmind, a leading workplace mental health SaaS platform that helps organisations create better workplace cultures, so that employees and businesses can flourish. They support over 2 million employees in hundreds of organisations globally.
Steve came to entrepreneurship in an unconventional way, from jazz singer and songwriter, to actor, to coach, to startup co-founder. In this episode of the First-time Founders Podcast, Steve talks about how his unusual background has helped him inspire leaders to bring more heart and soul into workplaces, the ‘four pillars of self care’ and much more.
Interested listeners can reach Steve via https://www.linkedin.com/in/peraltasteve/ and Rob (https://www.linkedin.com/in/robertliddiard/) at Rob@mission-group.co.uk (or to book some free time with Rob, visit https://www.eosworldwide.com/rob-liddiard).
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Transcript
Introduction and Guest Introduction
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello and welcome to another episode of the First Time Founders Podcast, the show where we talk about how to start a business from nothing and grow it into something meaningful. I'm Rob Lydiard. I'm a professional implementer of the Entrepreneurial Operating System, or EOS, which means I work with entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial leadership teams to help them get more of what they want from their businesses.
00:00:20
Speaker
That's what I do as a day job, but in my spare time, I love talking to entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial people about the first time we found a journey, what those of us have done it, learned upon the way, so that hopefully we can share some of those experiences, our war stories, and maybe save those coming behind us from making the very same mistakes that we did. So you can make your own mistakes if you're listening to this content.
00:00:41
Speaker
Today, I'm speaking to Steve Peralta, who's a co-founder and chief wellbeing officer at Unmind, which is a VC-backed, high-growth SaaS platform that delivers corporate wellbeing initiatives to individuals and teams. He's an amazing guy, a fascinating background, started his career as a performer, then ended up a kind of wellbeing mental health coach.
00:01:03
Speaker
before pairing up with an industry leading mental health professional and scientist from the NHS, Dr. Nick Taylor, to create Unmind. In this episode, Steve shares what he's learned about sustaining high performance through personal care, mental health practices, and also what he's learned about configuring and coaching great teams to create environments that are conducive to high performance.
00:01:29
Speaker
So you can listen and get a lot from this as a founder on multiple levels. So without further ado, I give you Steve Peralta of Unmind.
00:01:42
Speaker
Steve, welcome to the First Time Founders podcast.
Steve Peralta's Journey to Wellbeing
00:01:44
Speaker
Thank you so much for doing this. Yeah, of course. Thanks, Rob. Good to be here. So, Steve, we're going to dive deep into mental health, drivers of mental wellbeing to make startups, the first time founder journey, more sustainable. So I'm really excited about this. Before we get into it, would you mind giving folks a sense of who you are, where you come from, what you do at Unmind? Yeah, sure. So I am Steve Peralta. My role at Unmind is co-founder and chief wellbeing officer.
00:02:11
Speaker
And we can chat a bit more about that in a bit. Prior to Unmind, I was working as a wellbeing consultant and coach. I did that for a few years. I coached executives before that around stress management and performance. And then prior to that, for about seven years, I was a singer and an actor and a musician and a performer. So I've had quite a non-traditional journey towards what I'm doing today.
00:02:34
Speaker
That's amazing. So what drove that transition from performing to being interested in the art and science of mental health and wellbeing? Sure. So I had about a seven year career in the entertainment industry.
00:02:50
Speaker
I loved the elements of it. It also brought with it, I guess, a dark side and it reignited old habits from my youth. So it wasn't necessarily good for me, the industry, but also where 2008, 2009 with the crash and then entertainment became like a luxury that people didn't want to pay as much money for anymore. And so I decided to sort of
00:03:14
Speaker
because of both hitting rock bottom and not necessarily feeling like a viable way forward. I didn't quite leave the industry. I got a role as a singer on a cruise ship for a year and a half. So I had time to reflect and think. And while I was there, I realized that as much as I love music, I wanted to
00:03:30
Speaker
Well, during that time, I became really interested in spirituality, philosophy, psychology, well-being, et cetera, et cetera. And I sort of transformed my own well-being. And so I became interested in the idea of me potentially helping people to do the same. And that ignited, I guess, a pivot to my career path. And that took me down the well-being route. And there's more to it, but that's effectively it.
Founding and Mission of Unmind
00:03:51
Speaker
And you've built a pretty sizable business in this space, haven't you? You want to tell people a little bit about your mind? Yeah, for sure.
00:04:01
Speaker
I was in my corporate wellbeing journey. I had a conversation with my step-brother, not my step-brother, my brother-in-law at one point about how I can reach more people doing what I was doing because I was doing a lot of face-to-face stuff. He had mentioned the digital tech avenue. I'm not a techie at all.
00:04:24
Speaker
At the time, it was intriguing. I had a business partner who was an ex-oil trader, and he decided, let's go 50-50 in an idea to see what we can do with it. We hired a few developers, and I worked on an idea called Illuminate Wellness, which was an idea of mine. It was a financial well-being, emotional well-being, and physical well-being platform. The idea was that you could
00:04:48
Speaker
to evolve over time and get stages of wellbeing across these different areas of your life and it was integrated, et cetera. It was more in hindsight, it was a testing ground for ideas. I didn't really know what I was doing. It was cool to figure out some ideas and put them to, sort of bring them to life.
00:05:10
Speaker
Anyway, during that time, my business partner connected me with a guy called Dr. Nick Taylor, who at the time was in the NHS as a lead clinical psychologist. And we had a chat and I remember telling him about what I was doing.
00:05:27
Speaker
what was important to me. So he was still in the NHS, but he was speaking about the opportunity within mental health and people weren't getting the right sport at the right time. And we came at the problem from different perspectives, him from a clinical problems focused perspective, mine from like a coaching, flourishing, expressing potential in life kind of perspective, which today sort of makes up our company. But anyway, we hit it off.
00:05:51
Speaker
and decided there was something there to worth working on, right? And that was late 2015 or early 2016. Many Skype calls back in 4000 living in Cape Town at the time. And we got to the point where we decided to do something with this and hence unmind. And we brought on two other co-founders at the time because Nick and I had not come from a
00:06:17
Speaker
entrepreneurial background and we didn't have tech experience, so we brought in a CTO and a CPO. And then it's been a pretty interesting journey since then, the past eight years. But yeah, today we are about 180 employees, global organization, an office in our headquarters in London, we've got one in New York and one in Sydney. And it's been a massive just learning journey for me, but it's one I've been very inspired by.
00:06:43
Speaker
Yeah, it's amazing. It's a great story. And what exactly does the product do? I mean, I know you're not selling the product, just so that people can picture as we now go on to talk about founder wellbeing. Yeah, sure. I mean, at its heart, it is a product and offering that helps employees to become healthier at work, mentally healthy at work. It helps organizations to become sustainably high performing, right? And it's a win-win for both. But it's a platform and an app.
00:07:09
Speaker
In the beginning, it was very employee-centric, so we helped the employees to understand the mental health and then take proactive care of the mental health through learning development programs and bite-sized tools, all that kind of thing. We acquired a coaching and therapy company about a year and a bit ago, so we have online therapy and coaching for employees as well, Mood Tracker,
00:07:32
Speaker
assessment, so that's covered. But then about a few years ago, we just recognized that look, supporting employees is important, but that's not enough. You could support your employees as much as you want in a toxic culture and you're still going to have problems. And so we moved from like just focusing on the person to the whole organization as well. And so we help organizations understand their culture.
00:07:57
Speaker
The degree to which their culture and ways of leading and managing etc are supportive of mental health and well-being or not. Then we help them with their well-being strategy around that. We do manager training and we work with their execs, integrate AI coaching into that as well. It's become a very comprehensive holistic offering now, but at its heart it's creating
00:08:17
Speaker
more mentally healthy, sustainably high performing organizations and employees. That's amazing.
Stress and Wellbeing in Entrepreneurship
00:08:24
Speaker
Okay. So my interest in this topic, there's a few different bases. So one, I founded my software company, Yapster in 2015. Prior to that, I was a corporate lawyer for a few years and then like a biz dev guy. So I did stressful roles, but the stress never went to the core of who I am, right?
00:08:44
Speaker
didn't make me think neither of those jobs made me feel bad about myself. Anyone that listens to this will know that yaps had a happy outcome in the end but at the very like lowest points of it I mean at one point actually Steve I haven't told you this when we were speaking before the call but like the skin pigment in my forehead when like I ended up I ended up with like it was it has to be stress induced right because it
00:09:07
Speaker
Because it sort of came, it came at the lowest point, which lasted a year or two, and has kind of faded as my life has gone through that, and better over time. But it was really, at the darkest points of the yapster journey, that sort of stubborn first time founder journey when you're plowing on. It was the first time in my life where I'd ever experienced that my physical and mental health might break down.
00:09:33
Speaker
before my willpower or cash ran out. Does that make sense? Like I was kind of still able to go. Like bits were falling off the boat. How often do you see that in and around the founder community? And like, are there any kind of like, are there any high level principles of wellbeing that you typically would suggest that a new founder look into first as they're going on the journey and starting to experience some of the symptoms of stress?
00:10:02
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I think it's, thanks for sharing that. I mean, stress manifests in such strange ways and in different ways across all of us, but definitely sounds related to that. And I think it's common, not necessarily the head rash, but it's stresses and strain is, and burnout is common amongst founders. We know the research supports that hypothesis. And it is so important that as a founder, you stay healthy.
00:10:32
Speaker
and well as, as much as you're able to, you know, like I've learned over the years that feeling inspired, feeling energized as a founder is critical. Critical for your capacity to be high performing in a sustainable way, right? Is that, but also critical in terms of the role that you play within your company and the, and the ripple effect that has outwards on the people around you. Like if you are.
00:11:01
Speaker
feeling burnt out and super stressed out, you become that match that then lights all the other matches around you. You have such an outsized influence, right? So it's just so important and it's difficult. I guess I was lucky in that I came from a background of wellbeing. And so I understood what it took for me to stay healthy and well. However, there've been periods in my journey where
00:11:29
Speaker
that was difficult because of various circumstances as we might all encounter as a founder. But I've always most of the time been able to course correct
00:11:42
Speaker
relatively quickly by just, you know, listening to my body, listening to my mind. And I can tell you what I would do, but, you know, that was what I was going to say. Like I, um, what are those sort of fundamentals that you keep coming back to or that you knew coming into the journey that you think is, it hasn't clearly hasn't saved you from some of the strains and stresses that being a founder naturally brings, but it sounds like it equipped you better to deal with
Essential Elements of Personal Wellbeing
00:12:04
Speaker
it. What are some of those fundamentals? For sure. For sure. I would break them down to four groups. So.
00:12:12
Speaker
fulfillment slash happiness. And I can chat what that means and what I do to ensure that that is addressed and maintained. Let's call it recovery restoration group two. And this is an order of priority. Then movement.
00:12:34
Speaker
and then nutrition, hydration, et cetera. So, and I think if you're going to prioritize an order, that's the order you go. So the first like fulfillment and wellbeing, this is about, to me, it's central being clear on what your core values are as a human being, as a leader, et cetera, what your North star is in life. What is your calling? What is your purpose? Why are you here? What impact are you wanting to have? And to get really clear on that,
00:13:00
Speaker
because it'll be there anyway. But if you're not articulating it, then you're going to have less to work with in terms of knowing when you're in alignment and not out of alignment. But the symptoms of not being in alignment with your true values and your calling and your purpose, et cetera,
00:13:16
Speaker
almost like spiritual ill-being in a way which can manifest as stress and anxiety and burnout and physical symptoms, et cetera. So getting very clear on that and then taking in with that often, like I do it through journaling and staying self-aware and self-reflective and self-critical and then sort of realigning, making your behaviors, how you're showing up, the decisions you're making, are they all in line with us? And if they are being great, then you can like, that's core, that's not there, then it's going to be this general sense of dis-ease.
00:13:46
Speaker
So that's like the first bucket. Do you mind if I dive in there because I've written down so we'll definitely go through all four. That speaks to me so loudly like when you say that because I remember people trying to tell me that early in my journey. Yeah.
00:14:04
Speaker
I could hear them, but I wasn't listening or the other way around. For some reason, it wasn't getting through. I don't know if it's because I'd over-intellectualized this stuff. I thought I was some highfalutin lawyer. I don't know what it is. I didn't understand what it means to be living in line with my purpose and values. I couldn't take the advice. Are you able to give some examples, at least for you?
00:14:27
Speaker
what it means when you're in line and out of line, at least in your example. So that first time founders that are hearing our words but not hearing the meaning. We're still not going to get through to them, but let's try it. Yeah, I can. I mean, there was a period during Unmined where I started to
00:14:50
Speaker
I feel like I've lost my mojo, become very, I was riddled with imposter syndrome, which can be a healthy thing, but a lot of it's like degrading you and your capacity to show up well. And I realized that it is because day-to-day I was not living my values, I wasn't playing to my strengths, I wasn't connected to my, let's call it my North Star, and I recognized that. And so what I did was,
00:15:17
Speaker
We may not be able to do this, but I went to a cabin in the woods for about three days. Really? Yeah, I did.
00:15:30
Speaker
in New Forest and I took my journal with me and I didn't use any technology and I journaled and wrote and so on over those few days and I did like an exercise where it's as if you're writing your eunogy, what someone would be saying about you if you'd lived your life as well as you possibly could. I then wrote down what each of the most important people in my life would have said about me at my funeral and I did a whole bunch of that kind of work and out of that drew up my core values again and what my North Star was
00:15:59
Speaker
And then I recommitted to making sure that I would stay connected to this and live in alignment with it. So what it looked like in practice for me was that then became just like a one pager and literally as a daily check and I could just give myself a score out of 10 in terms of the way I showed up today, the decisions I've made, et cetera, are they in service of this in alignment with this? And if they were, you know, 10, nine, and if not, you know, I'd deal with journeying around that. And I would just, um,
00:16:27
Speaker
that would help me to course correct. That led to me changing my role, that I'd mind. It led to me no longer trying to focus on my weaknesses and fix my weaknesses and just play to my strengths. It led to some tangible things, which we can chat about as well, but it helped me to reconnect with my spark and my mojo. So from a practical sense, that's what it looked like for me. That is amazing.
00:16:50
Speaker
I wish I'd done that rather than push myself right to the brink of sanity. And then stubbornly start looking for some of these techniques. That's something you could recommend to anyone, right? All a founder needs to do is to be humble enough and growth oriented enough to give it a go. They can spare a couple of days to go somewhere and disconnect and really peer inwards. It's just that you just have to be willing to do it.
00:17:16
Speaker
But also, I mean, if you can't do that, and we all have varying circumstances, right? I mean, I do highly recommend just committing to a journaling practice. And that can be 10 minutes in the morning. Just, you need to spend some time with yourself and almost like, because you're able to then engage with your higher self in a way. And I don't want to sound too flaky here, but... No, I love it. But you are able to do that and you become self-reflective, self-aware. And I think that's so important. You can get wrapped up in the day-to-day minutia
00:17:44
Speaker
if you don't take a bit of space and time to become self-aware, right? So I would recommend journaling and self-reflection practice for sure. That's amazing, Steve. So then the next one, I think you used the word restoration. Talk to me about that. Yeah, it's like restoration, recovery, rest, et cetera. Like we live pretty full on lives and as a founder, as a leader, you're going to be having a demanding day-to-day kind of life, right? And so rest and recovery is essential.
00:18:12
Speaker
Holy Grail is sleep, right?
00:18:15
Speaker
getting enough good quality sleep. Now I say that as someone who spent a decade getting about two to three hours of sleep a night. So I had insomnia for 10 years of my life and I struggled immensely because of it. I managed to overcome it and I'm now pretty well versed in all things sleep and I've had the good, you know, I've been able to chat with professors of sleep and so I can know quite a bit about sleep now and I've transformed my own sleep.
00:18:42
Speaker
But really, sleep needs to be a priority in your life. It has to be seen as that foundational thing in your life. If you don't have that, you can't build all the other good things on top of it, right? We all know what it feels like when we haven't got enough sleep. We're more irritable, we're able to think well, to be creative, et cetera, et cetera. So sleep primary focus for me. I've started to hear people talk more about that in recent years, but I have to say for I'm 41, for most of my life,
00:19:12
Speaker
particularly the career I grew up in first corporate law, kind of not having sleep was almost like a badge of honour or a path that you walk in order to earn
00:19:25
Speaker
The promotion, it's interesting to hear you talk about it more the way an athlete would talk about sleep. You don't hear any professional sports people showing off about not sleeping. Of course. Business people, at least in prior generations, it was like a badge of honor, wasn't it? 100%. And that had shifted, but you used athlete there. I think it's a nice analogy. You need to think of yourself as an athlete for your mind to be able to perform well. It needs sleep. It needs to not be stressed and burnt out all the time.
00:19:51
Speaker
And then there's a lot of good science to back that up. But yeah, I think of yourself as an athlete. Rest recovery is so important. Don't obsess about sleep, but prioritize sleep. Obsessing can lead to the opposite effect, right? But I'm just relatively consistent sleep times and avoiding bright lights in the evening.
00:20:09
Speaker
and general healthy lifestyle wind on paper for bed all those things you've heard like oh yeah yeah same old same old but it works it works right and but i would say prioritize sleep is essential and then during the day just giving yourself some moments for active recovery really important otherwise with the same
00:20:27
Speaker
energy of an athlete in mind, your performance will just go down and down and down as the day progresses. If you have little periods of active recovery, you can have high performance rest and high performance rest. You can have constant capacity to think well, to focus, to get into deep work and flow. If not, you're just going to become less capable as the day goes on.
00:20:47
Speaker
Rest and recovery is super important. That's like the second priority, I'd say, underneath fulfillment. And the next one, I think you said, is movement, right? Yeah, movement. I mean, I have to remind myself, you know, we're in front of our laptops a lot. But when we sit in front of, we're sitting down all day, we stagnate quite literally, like our blood doesn't pump as much, like our blood pumps around the body through leg movement, right?
00:21:09
Speaker
So even if you've got it from your desk every hour and just attend squats in your office or whatever it might be like, that is going to help you to start thinking better again, to feel more energized, to get rid of excess cortisol in the body, whatever movement looks like for you. For me, it's walks in the woods with my dog. It's gym a few times during the week. Yeah, essential that we move as often as we can, really. Yeah, makes sense. And I feel like that's the one people
00:21:36
Speaker
know about, but maybe just are disciplined about ensuring that they get it into their regime. And we'll talk about some of the things that blow us off course of these. And I think you said, do you say hydration? I was going to say nutrition, hydration. I'll tell you about that. Now, before I get there, the movement one, one thing that it's worth noting is that if you're super stressed out and you're feeling burnt out,
00:22:00
Speaker
etc. Doing hardcore exercise is probably not the right thing to be doing. Because you're just going to be adding further stress to an already stressed out body to put you into a catabolic state, break down muscle tissue, aches and pains. So that's what you're experiencing stuff like yoga, Tai Chi stretching, that's probably a better thing. Then get your sleep back on track and then have energy to expel energy. Otherwise, you just like
00:22:29
Speaker
pouring your fuel out the tank kind of thing. So I thought I'd mentioned that as well. Yeah, actually. And now I think about it. I played rugby growing up. I enjoyed functional fitness. And I was doing a lot of functional fitness in some of the more high stress periods. I think it was a net benefit, but you're right. I didn't spend a lot of time doing kind of active recovery type
00:22:51
Speaker
type exercise because I just wasn't considered about how all of these things go together really. I was always like, let's just muscle through this quarter and then I'll fix all the burning pile of dung that is the rest of my life once I've fixed the business.
00:23:11
Speaker
But it's so important that if we approach this in a more consistent way, the stuff we've spoken about doesn't need to be huge amounts of time dedicated. It can require relatively short amounts of time, but it's keeping you, it helps you to sustain performance rather than just smash it out, break down and have to build up slowly over time. It's counterproductive, right? So the sooner we can embed these kinds of habits into our lives, the better.
00:23:38
Speaker
Makes sense. I'm assuming the same sort of philosophy continues for the nutrition side of things, right? Yeah. I mean, I won't go into too much detail there. I mean, I think a nice heuristic is just eat real food. We can get wrapped up in, should it be keto? Should it be this? Should it be that? We're all different. It's something called biochemical individuality. We all have a different gut. We have food impacts us in different ways.
00:24:01
Speaker
But one thing is for sure, like the less processed food you eat, the better. So just focus on if you're a meat eater, like, you know, healthy, grass fed meat, ideally, but no meat and lots of fruit and vegetables and nuts and just real food, really. That's what I could say. Steve, do you get pissed off with people that can't, won't listen or just can't discipline themselves to do these things?
00:24:26
Speaker
in their own best interests. Like my confession is since I learned the entrepreneurial operating system and the kind of like the the how to run a small business in an effective way. I've got like a lot of colleagues that teach us as well. And the ones that I think are better than me are the ones that are like natural coaches, they don't get annoyed. Like I still have an operator spirit. The organizations I connect best with, I think actually quite like my impatience. But when I'm being reflective, I admire
00:24:55
Speaker
people that are more like, have like a God given talent for coaching where they never get annoyed with and never give up on.
00:25:02
Speaker
Anyway, does that make sense? But like what? Yeah, of course. Once I've kind of seen the light as to what I think the right way to do something is, I find it very difficult to be endlessly patient with somebody that I care about, right? I want these founders to have fulfilling lives, run successful businesses, not end up with stress induced lack of skin pigmentation, you know? And then they don't fucking listen. I hear you. So I hear you.
00:25:30
Speaker
I am also a coach, so I typically take a more coaching approach and how I might engage with people. Now I'm sharing information because I know the information, but how I might work with a person, I think it's better for someone to come up with something for themselves. They're far more likely to commit to it, and I understand why it's difficult.
00:25:50
Speaker
overflowing with information, information, it can become overwhelming. So it's why I listed those things in order, like focus on one thing first, once you've got it down, it's like a habit that's easy in your life, move on to the next thing. So no, I don't get frustrated necessarily. It's a tough world that we just, it's pretty overwhelming. But I think it's important for
00:26:12
Speaker
whatever those ideas are to come from you, it needs to be your own personal agency involved. Why do you think so few founders, like let's start with the first one.
Aligning Work with Personal Values
00:26:23
Speaker
Why do you think it is that so few founders, at least in my experience, yours might be different, are able to or take the time to make sure that what they're doing with their days, make sure they're doing in their company is configured in a way that's consistent with who they are at the core.
00:26:39
Speaker
Is it just ignorance? I mean, I didn't know. Yeah, sure. I learned this after I started.
00:26:45
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, who knows? I mean, I don't want to use the word ignorance in a derogatory term. It might literally be literal, not knowing some of the information or let's say the links between doing it and not doing it. And the impact that might have on your health and well-being and capacity performance. It might be ignorance to that degree, right? But it's also, I think, well, I mean, if we're going to get deeper here, I think it's at the root, it's a flawed
00:27:13
Speaker
paradigm that we use to look at ourselves and our work and our organizations. We use a mechanistic lens to look at ourselves, like machine inputs and outputs. But we're not, we're living, breathing.
00:27:28
Speaker
human beings that are part of living, breathing organizations. We can't just push, push, push. It's not input, output. It's not just about efficiency. We have certain intrinsic needs as human beings that must be met for us to be healthy, well-performable, et cetera. I think it comes down to a flawed way of seeing it. That's because the machine mindset is pervasive, right? Yes. It was born in the Industrial Revolution. It's hung around for a long time. It's just because it's the way that people do things.
00:27:58
Speaker
Just get stuck in it again so this again would require a bit of stepping back still for when a self-reflection seeing things for as they are. I do think a bit of that.
00:28:08
Speaker
understanding the science behind high performance that won't, won't harm you. I think understanding and then recognizing, ah, so when I'm stressed and burnt out, I literally am like operating at like 30% of the potential that I could be operating. Like when you start to understand that, then you've got some motivation to change as well. But I do think it's the wrong paradigm that might be driving these kinds of behaviors forgetting that we're human. Yeah, I think that's right. It's interesting. I think if, if I think about what's spoken to me, um,
00:28:38
Speaker
I would love it if, I would love to, I like the idea of being the type of person that just kind of receives these things because I've just got this kind of innate wisdom. If I'm honest, I think some of it's sort of my competitive spirit that has led me in this way. I've got this weird thing where I've become more and more Zen and Yogi-like, as I've got more and more serious about having a successful life, like broadly defined. And now I truly believe in this as a vehicle to
00:29:07
Speaker
success that broadly defined, including economically. And so I think I liked the way you defined ignorance. It may well be actually that those folks that have grown up trying to be, get into the best school, then get into the best company and then start the best company backed by the best investors and to get the best traction. Actually, I think as they start, you know, because of missions like the one that you've been on with our mind, as they start to learn more about these things and realize that actually,
00:29:34
Speaker
A lot of this stuff that would have felt a bit hippy dippy 20 years ago, maybe, is actually entirely consistent with trying to behave like an athlete, which whilst recognizing our bodies are not machines, there is a slightly kind of, the way athletes think about their bodies and the inputs and outputs almost is trying to control what they can control, right? Recognizing there's a lot they can't control. For sure. 100%, I think I like that way of thinking about it. But to your point of hippy dippy, et cetera,
00:30:02
Speaker
I'm embedded in a very science-driven space, science-driven organization, like science is important. And there is a whole bunch of stuff out there that cannot be reduced down to just like, again, like I said, inputs and outputs and science alone. And whether you call that stall, whether you call that spirit, like, I think seeing a lot of what we're talking about through that lens is important. Like you can't divorce
00:30:30
Speaker
your role as a founder from your life. You can't divorce your work from your life. It is all just your life. It's almost like these bigger questions should be the ones that help trickle down into the rest of this. What type of life do you want to live? What type of person do you want to be? What impact do you want to have? Et cetera, et cetera. When you really get clear and you connect with that, then I cannot think that
00:30:56
Speaker
the behaviors were like naturally stiffed. And to me, I call that soul and spirit, but you don't have to call it that, you can call it purpose, you can call it mission, whatever. But I think if we come to myopic and just think of our roles as like this, these little things unto themselves, or our organizations think unto themselves and forget that they're part of this only life we have, then I think we get stuck in like habitual, unhelpful behaviors. So taking like a bigger perspective, I think is helpful.
00:31:26
Speaker
Yeah, it's super inspiring. Have you got a couple of minutes to talk about the organizational culture stuff?
Organizational Culture and Mental Health
00:31:31
Speaker
Because I just said something a little earlier. I think it's really interesting. I don't want to put words in your mouth, but did you find then that as you focused on individuals and helping them find balance, success, sustainable, high performance, it was hitting a ceiling of the organizational environments that they found themselves in, which almost forced you to broaden the mission and your contribution. I would love to understand what you've learned about
00:31:56
Speaker
organizational environments and i mean people listening to this might be found as i think about creating environments but we also have people that listen to entrepreneurial minded but are currently employees somewhere is the reason they might be wanting to pursue entrepreneurship is because i may actually be in an unhealthy place.
00:32:15
Speaker
internally or externally currently. So I think your observations on organizational culture and how it goes to some of these things would be really interesting. For sure. Yeah, I could speak about this from different perspectives, but the first one would be just within Unmind Itself and how we've approached what we do. We focused on employees initially, on supporting employees, which is really important. But we recognize, and I think
00:32:41
Speaker
I'm trying to think what this arose out of. I don't know if it arose out of necessarily thinking they'd hit a ceiling or anything like that. It was more just like a light bulb kind of moment, I guess, and actually driven by something called the biopsychosocial model. But I don't need to go into that necessarily. But we realized that you could give your employee all the support that you could give them, an EAP therapist, whatever it might be. But if they are within
00:33:08
Speaker
an organizational culture that is this incivility and toxicity and poor leadership and management practices, you can only do so much for that employee to be healthy and well, because the environment that you're in is so important. A lot of the problems we experience arise out of our environment. And so we shifted from just focusing on the individual to also focusing on the organization as a whole.
00:33:31
Speaker
and helping organizations understand how to create cultures that better support mental health and well-being. So very briefly, we look at stuff like trust and leadership, management support, psychological safety, and so on and so on, right? And we help organizations improve across those. But what's also the other perspective I can come from it is actually just within our mind itself, like culture is
00:33:55
Speaker
really important. To me, if you're a founder and you've got a startup, you should be thinking about culture from day one and be very intentional about the culture you're wanting to help allow flourish.
00:34:11
Speaker
I guess our culture started somewhat organically, but because we were hiring for passion, fit and purpose, fit and all the rest initially, we were able to have a lot of a line between our commission and our culture. We wanted a culture that was good for people's mental health and wellbeing, right? Now, as we've grown over the years and venture capital backed, growing, growing expectations, short term results, expectations and so on, it becomes very difficult to hold that tension between
00:34:39
Speaker
the expectations from being a venture capital backed company in a tough market that's growing fast and one of the fastest growing tech scholars and all the rest with being a company that's mission driven and wanting work to be good for well being. It's a tough tension to hold. However,
00:34:57
Speaker
For us to achieve our mission, we need to be as high performing as possible. And so for us, it was a journey of recognizing, fine, this is not about doing away with the need to achieve short-term results, but it has to be a both and thing. And the and is we need a culture where people can flourish in because that becomes good for the individual, good for business. And so we've been very intentional about holding this tension, acknowledging this tension,
00:35:27
Speaker
and making sure that how we were showing up with each other across all the levels of the organization, across teams, was conducive to flourishing, right? And so our values align with that. Our values are be human. That's one of our core values. We've got a few others.
00:35:44
Speaker
I ended up running a cultural assessment across the whole organization so we can bring awareness to this. We take it very seriously. You don't need to do it how I've done it, but the point of trying to get across is that you need to take this seriously. Because if you don't, then your culture can just degrade in the direction of whatever stress takes it. It's important, is my point.
00:36:05
Speaker
Totally. Steve, I'm sure a lot of people listening to this will have been as inspired as
Unmind's Clientele and Resources for Companies
00:36:10
Speaker
I am. What's the smallest type of company that's realistic, like a good fit client for an Unmind? No one will be offended if your average customer is a lot bigger than the average listener here. But if folks are interested, what's usually a good fit to actually come and consider working with Unmind?
00:36:29
Speaker
Yeah, so we typically work with larger organizations, a minimum of like 1,000 employees, but most organizations are a fair bit larger. So it's normally sort of enterprise organizations. So where would you recommend that somebody that's running an organization, you know, tend to the very biggest ones, a couple of hundred people. Are there any particular resources that you typically recommend a founder going to try and get themselves into best in class across some of the things that you've mentioned here?
00:37:00
Speaker
In terms of culture, there's something called the OCHI, which is Organizational Cultural Assessment and Inventory, but there's a book written about it. It helps you understand different cultural types and the degree to which your organization might be manifesting each of them, and then it really can walk you through how to understand that and embed cultural change in organization. I think that's really important.
00:37:24
Speaker
Oh, there's lots. As from an individual perspective, this is maybe getting a little bit philosophical, but I love it. Martin Buber's Iron Vow in terms of, I think that can be a good resource for how you show up as a founder in your startup. Iron Vow is all about either looking at people through the lens of utility or looking at them through the lens of, of Vow, right? Of a fellow human being. And it's quite easy to shift towards the
00:37:53
Speaker
the former when you're under stress and so on, but really important that we stay in this Ivar relationship. There are many. I mean, I've got loads of books all over my house, but those come to mind from a culture, big organizational thing, and then individual. Amazing. And are you happy for me to put a link to your LinkedIn? And I know you can't answer everybody that's pinging you every random question, but you're happy for people to sort of follow you if they're interested.
00:38:15
Speaker
in this space. Maybe they aspire to have a thousand employees one day and they might be able to get on the online customer roster. No, of course. Of course. Brilliant. Thank you so much. This has been amazing. Of course, Rob. Thanks, man. It's been a pleasure.