“I’m fine.” is an insidious sentence.
Often, digging into feelings of malaise and languish can feel personal and difficult. So perhaps many of us just say, “I’m fine.” and move on with the everyday.
Even after two years plus of living through the pandemic perhaps your team members don’t actively display the signs of stress. Organizational psychologist Adam Grant wrote a viral article for The New York Times on a feeling many of us struggled with throughout the pandemic. ‘It’s somewhere between burnout and depression: languishing. This neglected middle child of mental health can dull your motivation and focus’. It stifles our creativity and impacts our problem solving skills.
Languishing may well be the dominant emotion for the last two years.
The sentence, ‘I’m fine.’ may well be the tag-line of a languishing employee.
Grant says that one way to combat a sense of languishing is to carve out time to pursue small, meaningful actions. What might this look like for you and your team?
If meditation, yoga, or building an outdoor activity feels forbidding as a team, perhaps something tactile and easy might help. 😊
Try doodling with your team.
Doodling will give you and your team a break to relieve stress, refocus, be creative and swap out languishing for creative problem solving. If you want to experience a mindful habit of doodling, register for our 5 day habit-building tool. It will take you less than 15 minutes a day and we promise it will make you and your team feel better than just “fine”.