Hardeep Matharu 
Hello everyone and welcome to A Better World of Work podcast. You are joined today by your hosts, Hardeep and Eoin. 

Eoin Higgins 
Hey everyone.

Hardeep Matharu 
Today's topic is happiness and wellness at work, and we are very fortunate to be joined by our interviewee, Sha-En Yeo, a TEDx speaker and graduate of the prestigious Master of Applied Positive Psychology programme at the University of Pennsylvania. She is very much recognised in this space of happiness and wellness. In 2021, she was identified as one of LinkedIn Asia's top mental health advocates to follow. She is the founder of the Happiness Scientists and has trained more than 20,000 people in Singapore and beyond. So we are very, very happy to have her on today.  I think we can go right into it and get Sha En to tell us a little bit about herself and what it is that she does as a happiness scientist. 

Sha-En Yeo 
Yeah, thanks Hardeep for the introduction. I’m so happy to be here. Well, I think people are always very curious what a happiness scientist does and really, I just use signs of positive psychology, the evidence base and the research to inform practices that would help individuals and companies or organisations increase their levels of well-being. In doing so, I think people find that happiness, which seems so intangible, can actually be very scientifically applied and implemented in very tangible ways.

Hardeep Matharu 
Which is actually something I wanted to touch on and maybe as a scientist – I’m sure this is an important point that you think about - what would you define or what would you use to define happiness and wellness in the workplace? 

Sha-En Yeo 
I guess you know, there are frameworks surrounding what contributes to well-being in general and I would say in the workplace context, we are looking at factors like how do people feel when they come to work? Is it more on the positive side or do they experience a lot of challenging emotions that they have to deal with on a day to day basis? Is there a sense of connectedness to the mission or purpose of what the company is doing as opposed to just coming in and just seeing it as a job?  

One part as well is contribution. People come into work to contribute to the workplace, but also to grow as individuals. You will often see people who are engaged at work and feel that work is a good place to be when they can feel that sense  of hey, I am not just a piece of the organisation that's moving. I can actually have a personal contribution, whether it's using my strengths or my ideas on intelligence. 

Hardeep Matharu 
I'm actually curious now that we are speaking, what it is that drew you to this field? What was it that drew you to becoming a happiness scientist? Maybe you can let us know a little bit about your journey? 

Sha-En Yeo 
Yeah, for sure. I used to be a teacher, and many people say I still talk like one. I guess when I was a teacher, I saw many students who were very academically brilliant and strong, but when it came to the psychological skills, the social emotional skills, I found it as a teacher, very challenging to share with them how to do it. That’s number one. 

Number two, when they encountered failure, it was always, like, I’m going to die. It's like a blanket statement and I always wondered how do we help students like that build up their resilience, their optimism. How can the school culture and the teachers support the student to thrive? I guess that journey and those questions led me to the University of Pennsylvania to try to answer those questions for myself. I was and I am still very passionate about education. I guess so much of my work parallels between what happens at a cultural level in an entire school and how that also translates over into workplaces. 

Hardeep Matharu 
Great and of course, the parallel as you have said in education is very fundamental. For those of us who work in our own environments or our corporate environments, there is obviously a difference to how it would be in an educational type of space, but a lot of the hierarchy and the structure is not really all that different. 

As you have said here, of course that being part of your background, one of the things that I have been curious about as you were talking about happiness and wellness is what it means to you. If you think about it from a corporate prospective, metrics and performance indicators are super crucial from running a business perspective. What would you say to somebody who might be thinking about metrics that a company can use to measure happiness and wellness. What would you say to that?

Sha-En Yeo 
There would be a variety of things that we will be looking at. For example, I know a lot of companies run pulse insights which are surveys, whether it is quantitative or qualitative to try to understand what is going on with the staff. There are also, of course, preset surveys. There are well-being workplace surveys and there is a multitude of them. I think every company chooses different ones. 

Aside from that, you can think of informal check-ins when teams are having meetings. You can check-in with them and see how they are doing. Especially now, when people are kind of transiting back into the workplace, I think that level of frequency has to increase because we do not know how people are taking this so called re-entry into work after two and a half years of being remote. There are informal and formal measures, and also looking at other proxy data like absenteeism rates or sick leave rates. 

You've got to look at it as a holistic picture and not just use one data point and say it's good or bad because of this one data point. If we look at it as a composite and holistic picture, then we can get a sense roughly of how things are going. Then, if you need to, have more specific surveys to drill down perhaps into Asia Pacific regions or teams in order to really pull out what may be the main challenges that each segment is facing. 

Eoin Higgins 
Sha-En, I want to jump in just on that. This is sort of a two prong question around measuring the KPIs but also what we're measuring. I guess with a little bit of context, I was just reading today, a major report by Gallup, one of these major global reporting on the latest in terms of trends that we are seeing. I noticed that they had a section about people experiencing negative emotions mentioned. Sadness was one in particular. It mentioned how people are experiencing sadness in what frequency in general in workplaces. I thought to myself about the way in which we sometimes think about negative and positive emotions. 

Emotions like sadness, frustration or dissatisfaction might be negative. From my perspective, sometimes sadness or definitely frustration, or maybe some level of dissatisfaction can be the engine of innovation, right? Usually, when we try to change something, it’s because we are not satisfied about something in our workplace or the way in which we offer a service or our customers are not satisfied, so we are looking to find ways to innovate. What is your perspective on that? Obviously, we don’t want people to be experiencing negative emotions all the time but a little bit is a natural human experience. Where does that fit from your perspective and then how do we measure it? 

Sha-En Yeo  

We must understand what emotions are. Emotions are just information that lets us know what we are experiencing so every emotional state comes with physical state as well. That is how you can bring the two pieces together. When you feel sad, when you feel angry, you may feel a tightness in your chest, or you maybe start to tear. You feel overall, generally. Even your body language is downward facing as opposed to when you are happy, where it's always like bright and open. Once we understand that, then we understand that every emotion has a function. 

A positive emotion has what Barbara Fredrickson calls a broaden and build effect. It makes us more open to possibility, makes us see things with new perspectives, and we perhaps end up taking novel ways to go around our problems or challenges. But the emotions that you recall as negative, or what I prefer to call that we experience as challenging to us - I prefer to look at it that way - actually also teach us things, right. When we feel sad, it is about loss and instead of dismissing the loss, it’s okay to honour the loss and allow the loss. If we experienced frustration, like you said, and perhaps instead of dismissing it, saying that, 'Oh, I don't want this', we ask ourselves, what is this teaching us? If I allow this, what can I learn about myself and also about the emotion. If we look at emotions as teaching us things and ways in which we understand ourselves, then it becomes a richer experience rather than that dichotomy of 'oh, I must always be positive all the time,' which then generates another problem of toxic positivity which is actually quite harmful. 

Eoin Higgins 
Could you talk a little bit about that, toxic positivity? I have never heard of that before, that expression. 

Sha-En Yeo 
Toxic positivity is when you only allow people to have that feeling of good vibes only, meaning that you don't tell me anything that's wrong, don't come to me with your frustrations, or don't not get angry in front of me. If you are grieving, don't show it to me or you are not allowed to grieve, so to speak. We may not say it so directly but it comes across in our words, the words that we use. For example, if someone shares that I am going through a really hard time, toxic positivity might sound like 'oh, it will pass, don't worry, cheer up, tomorrow will be a better day'. I think the intention is always positive, like we probably do not know what to say and we want the person to feel better so we use these terms but what the person hears is my emotions are not valid. How I'm feeling is not important and I’m expected to have a timeline to get over things. That's why it's toxic because there is no space for the allowance of this difficult or challenging emotions.

Hardeep Matharu 
It is a very good point that you mentioned there and Eoin, thanks for bringing in this topic to understand being able to articulate emotions and connect with them in a way. I'm curious, in your experience, Sha-En, have you noticed organisations becoming more open to having these conversations, to encourage these conversations? If I think back to when I first started working 15 or so years ago or now, it is certainly that when you say toxic positivity. I've never thought of a such word but I feel like that was more commonplace, at least when I first started working in the UK. It was because we didn't know any better? I'm not too sure. How have you seen that evolved now? Is there more openness to those types of conversations, perhaps than they used to be?

Sha-En Yeo 
I think as a result of the pandemic, people have begun to realise that mental health and well-being is not a bonus or the cherry on the cake. It is the cake and to me, it's fundamental. If people are not well mentally, then they also don't have health. You know, similarly, if our physical health is impacted, we also don't have health. We can't look at it as something extra, it should be something that is front and centre for workplaces especially. With the pandemic, it has allowed this to come to the surface and normalised these kinds of conversations. I do see that workplaces are more open to at least beginning some discussions and going beyond just ticking the box initiatives to really engage their staff, and listen and find out really what they could do to support them. Of course, I can't say that it is the same everywhere across the world but where we are in Singapore at least, what I am seeing is that there is definitely an upward trend in terms of openness. Now, whether it can be done in a way that’sreally going to be sustainable and all that, that's a different story but are they willing to have that conversation? I would say yes, at least they are taking steps in that direction.

Hardeep Matharu
I think one thing that viewers or listeners might be curious about is should they want to engage that conversation, what are some of the steps that could be done either at employee level, or even at the organisational level? What maybe could be done? But we will come on to that in a short while because I would love to know what kind of work you do and how you put that into practice. A question that comes to mind more in line with where we are now is maybe the consequences of not engaging those conversations, or the consequences of not having guiding principles around wellness and it not being part of the organisational agenda. 

What have you seen out there when you are working with clients?

Sha-En Yeo 
What I have seen is things like miscommunication does happen. Person A assumes something,  person B assumes something else and when they come for a conversation, all this myriad of assumptions and maybe even biases come into play in the conversation. That gets in the way of actually moving things along. Meetings are less productive because people come in with different guidelines and different ideas of what the meeting is actually for. 

For example, a lack of clarity as to what this meeting is supposed to accomplish and if there are no guidelines on that as well, then it makes it like a meeting that goes on and on.  Then, of course burnout and increase in stress are things that we can actually look out for if well-being is not really taken into consideration or the unclear structures that are put in place to look out  for such situations that might be cropping up. So there are many consequences. Of course, I think companies mostly would be looking at maybe tangible measures like productivity and things like that. You may not see it immediately that people are not productive because they might be responding to your texts, they might reply to emails, they might show up, but I think we are not looking just in terms of how much time they are putting in but the quality of what they are doing, the quality of the conversations they are having, the quality of work they are producing, the quality of connection they are having with stakeholders, clients, or even just co-workers. All of that adds up to productivity which sometimes goes. It's hidden and it's hard to see.

Hardeep Matharu 
This point that you mentioned there about stress and how that can kind of really build up with people. Again, I would love to hear your perspective on this but given the fact that the home environment and the work environment have become so blurred now, you can be online and working at all hours of the day because most of the time, for some people, your home environment is their office environment. Have you noticed that the pandemic and maybe our shifts to new ways of working has put an additional strain on that and just generally increased our level of stress? Is it something you've seen with the clients that you work with? 

Sha-En Yeo 
I think I see like a mix. There are some people who enjoy being at home more even though they may work a little bit later but it means that in the day, they have a bit more flexibility to attend to family. For example, we have couples with young children, or maybe they are sandwiched between taking care of the elderly and young children, and they really appreciate having that time at home to nip here and nip there but then continue working at night. So, there is one group that actually does appreciate having that but of course, the flip side to that is that the boundaries become a little unclear. Does work officially stop at 6:30pm, for example, and if I were to draw that clear boundary, is someone at a workplace going to think I'm slacking? 

Again, it comes back to conversations and communications about what the new way of working looks like and to be free of those assumptions. Then, we need to equip people with the ability to bring up these kinds of conversations as employees and also as managers to create that space where we can ask people and feel safe to share what is really going on for them, what works for me, what kind of flexibility do I need or not need?  Even for some people coming back to the office two times a week seems like a complete change because they have been used to having five days at homes. There is a lot of new things to navigate in this current environment.

Hardeep Matharu 
I mean, one observation that really comes to mind when I think about it with colleagues that I have worked with or even actually, to be honest, more often than that clients because clients really tell us about their pain points, and you really notice it, We keep them quite close to heart when we are working with them. One thing that has become really common for people to say is that they are frequently in situations where they are being interrupted all the time now, more so than they used to be. Perhaps this is because of the fact that if you are working from home, you've got your Teams open, and you've got all forms of communication platform, you've got WhatsApp on, and you've got email going so people can get you in ways they couldn’t before. I think that is one thing I have noticed people have mentioned can be a stress point for them. Again, I don't think there a solution to this type of thing. 

From your perspective, is this something that organisations should think about and should there be thoughts and processes put in place to allow people to reduce this? What's your perspective on that?

Sha-En Yeo 
Absolutely and I think sometimes, it really depends on the organisation. Some leave it to the team leaders or the supervisors to navigate such guidelines. But I think if you have it as standardised across, it will be easier than for the individual or the employee to enforce it themselves. For example, WhatsApp. I work with a media and comms teams who need to really be on their phone a lot because they get responses all the time and to say that by 6pm, they cannot communicate or respond to media inquiries, that is going to be like they cannot do their job properly. 

Within a team, there can be flexibility but perhaps there can be clear guidelines that are written company-wide that says beyond a certain time, to the discretion of the team leader, to agree on a set time where there could be no communications until the next working day. If there is something urgent, there can be caveats written for that so that everybody is clear and of course, it must be somewhat enforced but I suppose it does not have to be punitive. It is like everybody comes together and discuss it and when they come to an agreement that's collective, it will be much easier for everyone to follow through with it. 

Eoin Higgins 
So I was thinking of this conversation a marriage that we are having now, Sha-En, when I heard you talking about people coming together as teams and understanding what they need from each other in terms of flexibility, it all speaks to me of connection. It's about how are we connected to each other within our teams, within our organisation, how are we seeing each other and how are we being seen by our colleagues? I guess it’s a great irony as Hardeep mentioned. There are so many ways for us to be connected via technology, Hardeep has mentioned Teams or WhatsApp group. There's all these ways to be connected and yet one feels like there is an absence of some different type of connection. I’m curious about what you think is the relationship between connection and wellness? What is authentic or what is good connection in an organisational sense?

Sha-En Yeo 
One of the frameworks that we look at when we talk about well-being frameworks is PERMA. I'm not sure if you are familiar with it, but it's Martin Seligman's framework which stands for positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning and accomplishment. The pillar that most significantly contributes to well-being is the 'R' which is the relationships, which is about connection. It's no wonder that so many of us felt isolated during the midst of the pandemic. 

To your point, we are connecting with people but again, it comes back to what kind of connection are we having. Is it high quality connection or is it just quantity connection which is very task focused but not human focused. If we only come into a meeting, and we start the meeting by saying what is there on the task to do now and let's get it done in 45 minutes because everybody needs to head off, then it feels very transactional and cold. Perhaps we could just tweak that by saying, hey, let's do a check in with everyone when we get started, where is everyone's mind space is at right now?. You will at least get a sense that maybe one person is feeling good, one person is kind of like, oh, my god, I'm overwhelmed. That allows you to have that kind of human connection first, before you proceed into the task. We want to define high quality connections. It is looking at neutrality, whether people are both putting in as much as they are taking, whether there is trust between two parties and whether that connection can actually survive both high moments and challenging moments.

Relationship needs to be able to be stretched and moved around sometimes whenever we come into tension with each other.

Aside from checking in, we could also celebrate small wins. That is one way to get to know each other and it could be small wins professionally, but it also could be small wins personally like I managed to take my dog for grooming today. It just brings that side of a person out and people are multi-dimensional. It's not just their work self they are bringing to work, we're bring our whole self to work. I think the sooner we realise that, the sooner we can bring that connection into the workplace.

Hardeep Matharu 
Yeah, that really resonates with me, Sha-En. We practice something in our small team which we call the ground of health, which is from a matrix leadership practice. Essentially, it is about what you have said, bringing your whole self to work and doing a check-in on our weekly team meeting where we ask any question, where we all share our perspective on. More often than not, you find out things about your colleagues, which in our case, sometimes you find out things that you had no idea about and lots of common points that you can really connect with. 

I definitely resonate a lot with what you’ve just mentioned there as well. In fact, it leads me to a question I wanted to move on to. Hypothetically, you have a client who comes in and says, Sha-En and we want to look at wellness, and have a closer look at this and think about where we can go from here as an organisation. How do you do that with a client? How would you walk through the process? 

Sha-En Yeo 
I think it would begin with gathering some data. As positive psychology is research and evidence base, it is hard to just say oh, you should do this and do this without understanding the context at all. So if they have a recent pulse survey, or insight, or any kind of feedback, as much as possible, we gather all the data, then we take a look at what people are saying or what could be some patterns or trends we are seeing. It could be region specific, department specific sometimes and of course, there is some industry specific issues that could be going on. We also look at the strength of the organisation. What's already going well? What do people say they like about the workplace? It isn't just finding gaps but also leveraging and building upon strengths that are already there as the foundation. 

The next piece is really understanding what do they want to achieve in what amount of time. Sometimes, it could be a very large objective, and if it is large, my take is always to try and scope it down to what do we want to see in the next three months or six months as opposed to a five year plan. That’s good for the vision, but then we’ve got to scale it back down because that informs what kind of practices we can implement, who do we need to speak to, what kind of resources we need to put in place and what is possible to achieve within this amount of time. That requires a pretty long and maybe repeated conversations before we can get that level of clarity. The next stage is about speaking to the relevant parties, working with the teams to try to make that happen. Of course, the one thing you talked about metrics earlier is to identify when we think this project has been successful. How would we know that it has been successful? Is it through the tangible data that we can spot which is of course one thing. The other part is what we see in terms of behaviours? For example, if one of the goals is to encourage people to speak up more, then do we see that more after implementing the practices? If we see that behaviorally, then hopefully that comes into alignment with the actual data we are collecting quantitatively or qualitatively.

Hardeep Matharu 
What would you say are the key aspects of being able to build a successful programme or a successful policy around what you would recommend.  What would you say are the essentials that are needed to make that work?

Sha-En Yeo 
I would say start small. I always recommend that companies start with a pilot first. Of course, not everyone likes to hear that because they want something like a big grand gesture to show that they are doing something. It could be big as in like it is companywide but it can be something small scale because it makes it accessible and doable. When employees look at it or key manager has to implement it, they would be like okay, I can do this. At least, it galvanises people to take action and feel motivated that it can be doable, achievable and see results. Otherwise, it feels like this huge elephant that they are trying to shift and then everybody feels daunted because in their mind, they would be like how do you move an elephant. If you say okay, let's just do this small thing, let's start with this region or with this team, let's see their good results, then we can cascade it and that’s how it can actually work well. Along the way, you get the feedback, you can tweak, make it better and adjust it if you need to and that also invite collaboration from employees because you hear their voices as well. It's like an all-around win-win approach if you ask me. 

Hardeep Matharu 
I would be curious to hear a little bit about what the variety of the kind of solutioning might look like because when I think of the classical, I shouldn't say classical because it sounds really grand and it's not. The typical one is like let's have a yoga class for people, or mindfulness sessions which are usually quite off the shelf type of approaches. In your experience, what kinds of things do you find corporations will experiment with or trial which might not be the typical? Don't get me wrong, it could be those things can be pretty effective, but what do you typically find corporations might start with as kind of approaches themselves?  

Sha-En Yeo 
The umbrella of positive psychology is so broad but I have seen some in work with some clients who just really want to start with being good listeners. Have everybody equipped with the ability to listen to each other and that is so hard. Because everybody wants to have their say and so it begins with equipping people with the skill to understand what it means to listen and what could be some obstacles and distractions and mental model that could get in the way. Then, you have to upskill the managers to listen in a way, and what do you actually listen to for. So that's one example. 

Another example is more on the relational pieces like tapping on the five languages of appreciation by Gary Chapman. It's really noticing what each employee's different language appreciation is, and not wait till it's Staff Appreciation Day by doing those gestures but it’s something you do more sustainably over time. If someone is word of affirmation person, you could just write a note or it could be a WhatsApp so in that way, you are using the tech to really connect as opposed to just using the tech just to communicate for work. Even little practices like this can result in really big shifts for people.

Hardeep Matharu 
Correct me if I am wrong but by doing that and if people engage in their practice, not only are the people who are receiving the appreciation appreciating that, the act of sending appreciation helps people to attune themselves to what is it that they appreciate around them. It makes people more actively look for what do I appreciate around me and then how do I let people know. 

Sha-En Yeo 
Yeah, I think it brings on different kinds of conversations. Your attentional focus is now looking elsewhere as opposed to oh, what's wrong, what can I complain about or why did he say that to me?

Hardeep Matharu 
I'm also put myself in your shoes about kicking off a programme and seeing it through. What comes to mind for me is a question, based on putting myself in your shoes and thinking about projects I have run, what would you say are the general obstacles that you face when running a project? Essentially, I suppose it’s very much like driving change, so what are the typical obstacles that you find when you are running your projects?

Sha-En Yeo 
I think a lot of it comes from buy-in. If it's something that you have not spoken to the staff about and suddenly you are like oh, let's do this, just because you know, it’s good for you. How do you actually know whether it is good? Of course, if it comes from data, then we can at least begin by saying, look, we've looked through the data, we really want to support and therefore, we are trying this out. Along the way, please let us know whether this is something that actually works for you. If you take that approach, I think that's okay if you start off that way. But if you just pluck and pull something that you think everyone else is doing and then you think it is going work in your context, then you will probably face issues with buy-in because people are going to say, I didn't ask for that and why are you making me do that. So that's one potential thing that you might encounter when implementing such initiatives.  

Number two, I think this general area of psychology and well-being is probably not everybody's strength. In fact, most people find this area very hard to understand and grasp and so it might be a competency issue. In a sense, they are scared because it is unknown and if they had not been well-equipped yet and they are expected to do it, then they might feel some procrastination or inertia or anxiety around it. Therefore it doesn't get implemented. It may not mean that they do not see the value, they probably do but it's like, am I the best person? I may not be confident about this. If I'm not confident, then why do I shoot myself in the foot by getting started on it. That is something I have also seen which then comes back to how are we supporting and equipping people in leadership roles to take care of the mental health of their staff. So that's one issue as well.

Hardeep Matharu 
So it's very much a role modelling type of an approach and the buy-in part. I think the reason why I asked that question is because I think I can relate a lot as many projects or clients that we work with, we face similar challenges. Of course, you are making people change, or I should say that you are encouraging people to change. People generally don't like change and get quite used to their own groove and do things the way that they’re used to. There was also a general level of resistance there. You also started talking there about a couple of the solutions to some of these aspects for you, but what would you say are your kind of guiding principles in terms of running an assignment or running a project? What are the things that you always come back to as being kind of your ways of running your projects essentially?

Sha-En Yeo 
I think my guiding principles - one, is it going to be sustainable and by sustainable, I mean it is something that you have resources to sustain it. Number one, you have the manpower or the right people in the roles who understand why this needs to be done. If you have an initiative that nobody understands why they have to do it, they will do it but it is just a tick in the box and then you will encounter not just buy-in issues, you will get people hiding stuff under the carpet. You might even start to feel a bit of resentment, because it's like, why am I doing this? I don't even want to do it, which I’ve said earlier. 

Then, the other thing is pervasiveness. Is it across the board? We start small and make sure it is working and then, we want to ensure that is pervasive and around so it becomes a common practice for everyone. Thus, normalising the practice till it becomes common and if people talk about it, it becomes part of the language, it becomes a way I greet you. If it is there, you don't have to keep thinking about it. Then, it becomes habitual and built, embedded within the culture. I think that's where we want to get to. 

There’s also consistency. Like having yoga days and meditation days, there's nothing wrong with that and I think sometimes it is good to spotlight and highlight certain practices which can appeal to a different variety of people who feel that physical wellness is the way that they get mental health, and that's great. But we also want to make sure that it is consistent and not just have Mental Health Awareness Day on the 10th of October, and then for the rest of the year, I’m going to treat you however we like, and not bother about you until next year, because that will defeat the purpose. You are sending a message that is telling people the opposite of what you want them to, and that misalignment can cause a lot of frustration. 

Hardeep Matharu 
Thanks. I think they are very good reminders of things that we should think about when we are driving through any project or implementation. The point about normalising is super relevant. With the pandemic coming along, as you've said, people's vocabulary around the topic has become much wider. People have it more as an agenda topic in some ways, or a thought process because we have been so much more exposed to it as well. So in some ways that has helped. But of course, like you said, to really make it part of the practice is another level from an organisational perspective. 

I think just to kind of move us on a little bit,  there is a question that comes to mind for you. While it’s great for us to talk about it from a corporate perspective. For those listeners, or viewers out there who might be thinking what can I do for myself, not even from an organisational perspective, what are some things that you would recommend for people if they want to do a check-in for themselves, What can people can do to make those small efforts to improve their own wellness and their well-being? What do you recommend to people from that perspective? 

Sha-En Yeo 
For example, if I was feeling like -  and this is what I hear from a lot of people that they feel like - oh, there's so many changes all at once and feeling overwhelmed, I see all these deadlines piling up and I’m rushing from meeting to meeting, maybe the listeners will find this very familiar. They always say Sha-En,  I've tried everything. I always say let's start with focusing on just that one thing at one time. It sounds like something that we have all heard, but how do you actually do it. In this moment and in your mind, we have to pause and create a little bit of mental space and ask ourselves what are the five or seven things that,  maybe it is more than that for some people, that are in my mind space at the moment and how does it make me feel? 

 It’s a lot of awareness and mindfulness practice to recognise what is going on with you because you can't take steps if you don't really know what's going on. From there, with that space created, you can say, okay well, today, this is the one thing I am going to do from nine to 10 and at 10 o'clock, we can do another check-in. Otherwise, it feels like this long staircase that we have to climb. We are at the bottom of it and we are trying to take one big leap to staircase number 20 when actually we should just be focusing on the first level. Let's get to the first level, and so it breaks it down to something that is more manageable. 

Even for me, I practice this a lot. I go through very peak periods in my business cycle and when I am going through that, always every hour, I will stop and ask myself okay, what is the one thing I'm going to focus on for the next hour? Of course, it is not always easy but it is a practice that we can start. I think people sometimes get daunted, oh, this is something I'm not used to, it's very awkward. Every new practice is awkward because we are growing brain cells and trying to make new connections, forge new pathways but I think that one thing is very helpful. 

Hardeep Matharu 
I like that, by doing the smaller check-ins like you said, just to take it more bite size a little bit but at an individual level.

The question that we always like to ask our guests, of course it's very related to the topic of our podcasts as a whole. The question I have for you is what does a better world of work means to you, Sha-En?

 Sha-En Yeo 
Oh, I love that question. I think a better world of work is where people come in, like we said earlier,  and they are bringing their whole self. They can feel free to be their authentic self. They don't have to hide parts of themselves. I know that’s always challenging. People who may have experienced a mental health condition, or even diversity and inclusion, might feel like if I show myself, people are going to judge me, they are going to put me down and dismiss me. But we don't have to do it that way as what we have said earlier. We are not jumping from step one to step 20. It's about just bringing little bits of yourself to work so that is on the individual side. 

I think as a workplace, on the employer side, we can create conditions where people can explore who they are, not just what work they can do, but who they are as people and how they can continue to contribute, using the diversity of their strengths and talents into the workplace. If we create spaces that allow people to do that, then we are building a better workplace. It is wholeness in the workplace as well.

Hardeep Matharu 
I love that. Thank you and I appreciate the really nice, human-centric or people-centric approach to how you do your work and. It is very clearly what drives you. so it's really nice to hear that. 

Sha-En Yeo 
Yes.  

Hardeep Matharu 
Thank you so much for joining us today for the session. It was really enlightening and nice to hear your perspectives about wellness and happiness and we very much appreciate you taking the time for us, Sha-En.

Sha-En Yeo 
Thank you so much and thank you for having me. I really had fun on the conversation. 

Hardeep Matharu 
Wonderful and I will also say thank you to Eoin, of course, my able co-host for today. 

Sha-En Yeo 
Thank you, Eoin.

Hardeep Matharu 
Yeah, it was wonderful for also being on the call with you, Eoin.

Eoin Higgins 
Yes, great. It was a great conversation. Thank you, Sha-En.