This is the weekly Careers newsletter. If you’re reading this on the web or someone forwarded this e-mail newsletter to you, you can sign up for Globe Careers and all Globe newsletters here.
Kimiya Shokoohi is a writer and filmmaker based in Greater Vancouver.
For elite athletes, ensuring your mind is focused and your mental health is in check is so integral to success that those representing Canada at the Olympic Games in Tokyo this year have access to experts to help them reach peak performance. Turns out that the skills they learn are just as applicable to the workplace.
“We all have necessities and anxieties and fears and get overwhelmed by demands and pressures. In order to mitigate that, we need to develop resilience skills so that we can tolerate the stress,” says Karen MacNeill, lead mental-performance consultant and mental-health counsellor for the Canadian Olympic Committee.
A former field hockey player and 1999 Pan American bronze medallist, MacNeill has been working with Canada’s Olympians through the last five Games and is scheduled to be at hand for Canadian athletes in Tokyo.
“It’s not the stress and the demand, but the lack of recovery strategies that can [pose] a real challenge,” she said, which is why she advises strategies that draw on the “eat, sleep, play” routine from many of our childhoods.
Some of her mental-health strategies include:
- Movement – remembering to exercise and keep your body engaged regularly. Finding sports and activities that you are passionate about and that are fun for you help make this step significantly easier.
- Eating for energy – tailoring optimal food plans that fuel you.
- Getting in a good amount of sleep – at least seven hours is the amount of sleep recommended by the Mayo Clinic. Equally important is developing daily mental fitness tools such as journaling and deep-breathing exercises.
In a year where the Olympic Games were pushed back, with many athletes finding themselves isolated and their dreams deferred, ensuring proper mental-health training has come to the fore. Increasingly, athletes such as Naomi Osaka, Clara Hughes and Michael Phelps, among many others, have spoken publicly about their own mental-health struggles.
In 2019, the International Olympic Committee found that more than 33 per cent of elite athletes experienced anxiety and depression – a significant number, considering 13 per cent of the population worldwide experiences some form of mental disorder.
The organization’s response was a mental-health tool kit for elite athletes, which outlines the core components of a well-rounded mental-health strategy, including prioritizing athletes’ mental health, education and prevention, and even post-career transition. Each responsibility is then assigned to sporting organizations, the athlete’s entourage, or health professionals. In a typical corporate setting, you could just as easily imagine the sports organization being swapped out for a company, and athlete’s entourage replaced by an employee’s support circle.
The World Health Organization estimates that depression and anxiety are costing the global economy US$1-trillion annually. They suggest that with every dollar that is put up in treating common mental disorders, there is a return of four dollars. While the responsibility has long been on individuals to treat and tend to their mental health as a private matter, there is sufficient evidence to suggest that it is no longer just a personal issue to be resolved alone.
“That sense of stoicism – when I’m supposed to endure difficulty without issue or complaint – with education, that’s changing,” MacNeill said.
What I’m reading around the web
- Tennis star Naomi Osaka wrote a thoughtful personal essay on why it’s okay not to be okay for a TIME magazine cover story as the importance of mental health in even highly competitive environments such as professional sports begin to take heed.
- The hard work and long hours often experienced by first-generation immigrants is giving way to a more rounded approach, writes Christine Ro for BBC Worklife. In short, you shouldn’t have to work twice as hard as everyone else to earn success.
- The brain has hard limits and the culture of “just do it” is making it so that we are pushing ourselves past what is feasible for a healthy and happy brain. Annie Murphy Paul gets into the science of our brains in The New York Times.
More opinion from Globe Careers
Coming back to the office this fall should be liberating, not restricting For every system aimed at helping or supporting people, there will be a few who abuse it, but companies should learn from the pandemic in terms of setting out a more flexible work culture, writes columnist Eileen Dooley.
Investing in employees’ mental health benefits both companies and their workers Every business is distinct, but most would probably agree that their disability claims related to mental health now exceed those based on traditional physical impairments. It’s more important than ever that employers actively work to support their employees’ well-being, writes Purolator CEO John Ferguson in the Globe’s Leadership Lab series.
More from the section
If you’re looking for a six-figure salary, there are now more remote openings than in any individual city According to a recent study conducted by Ladders Inc., a New York-based online job search platform that only lists jobs with annual salaries of $100,000 or more, there are now more than 80,000 open remote job opportunities that offer six-figure salaries.
How to bounce back after losing a job Often, the person terminating you will stress it’s not personal – it’s business. But anyone who’s been through job loss knows that it is indeed deeply personal in many ways.
This marketing professional wants to land a brand manager position in consumer goods A job-seeker asks Resume Review how he can veer away from his current project-management role and into something more research-based.
What are the guidelines around working with freelancers long-term without employing them? In this week’s NinetoFive advice column, a reader asks whether it’s ever appropriate to rely only on contractors rather than hire employees.
Leadership Lab is a series where executives, experts and writers share their views and advice about the world of work. You can find all Leadership Lab stories at tgam.ca/leadershiplab and guidelines for how to contribute to the column here.
Have feedback for this newsletter? You can send us a note here.