You already have a “healing” business

If you look around LA, it seems everyone is on a healing journey.

With the rise of breathwork, meditation, psychedelic therapies, and wellness retreats, it’s becoming a huge marketplace. ($5.6 trillion if you count the entire global wellness industry).

And many entrepreneurs look to these outlets for ventures to start.

But here’s the thing: you don’t need to start a wellness company to have a healing business. 

The companies focused on wellness tend to get the biggest “impact” spotlight in the media. 

But actually, operating a healing business can be as simple as caring more about the well-being of your team.

People often forget that you can bring wellness practices into your company, even if your business model is something completely unrelated. 

Raj Sisodia, the co-founder of Conscious Capitalism, gave a TED Talk on this a few years ago (and despite having under 20K views, it’s quite powerful).

Imagine you’re an employee, just about to join a meeting, and you get a phone call.

Some sort of minor family emergency. Maybe conflict with your spouse or partner. Maybe your kid is in trouble at school. Maybe some potential financial crisis.

You of course want to do your job, but there’s no opportunity to process what’s going on. 

And because you’re holding that in, you feel worse and worse throughout the day…

All you need is 15, 20 minutes to collect yourself, maybe make a couple of phone calls, and you know you’ll be good to go after that. 

But what if you don’t have that kind of relationship with your boss – where you feel comfortable asking for the space? It won’t only be you suffering… your performance and your work will suffer as well.

Your team members and employees will go through difficult things in their lives, as we all do.

And it’s easy to get so wrapped up in work that we don’t create the space for them to navigate their lives along with their work.

In his TED talk, Raj points out that this sort of thing happens all the time. In most cases, internal suffering in businesses happens out of ignorance, not spite.

He says this happens because there are too many managers, bosses, and supervisors, and not enough leaders.

So how can you, as a conscious founder, cultivate a culture of healing and support within your team?

Sometimes it’s just letting your team know “...I’m here to help if you’re ever going through anything,” etc.

Creating a culture where employees feel respected and supported is crucial.

Your business itself doesn’t have to save the world. 

You can have a “healing business” just by operating a little differently–in particular, by caring more about your team members. 

As Raj says in his TED talk, “Take care of the people, and the people will take care of the business.”

Have you implemented any of these strategies for a more caring and supportive workplace? 

What were the results?

Feel free to reply here and let me know. It’s been awesome to see the replies coming in each week.

Chat soon,

Oliver