What two decades across the wellness and leadership development industries have taught me about human performance.
I have had a unique vantage point on the question of what makes people perform at their best.
Nearly two decades ago, I took a major leap of faith and shifted gears in my career, starting work in - what was at that time - the corporate fitness industry. Teaching classes, training executives and starting the conversation around why physical performance was essential to business performance.
Fast forward to 2019, and we were on the cusp of what we would now call corporate wellness. We were starting to realize that taking care of the physical was not enough. Then 2020 and the COVID-19 era in the workplace blew open the doors to corporate wellness and opened the door to conversations with executive leaders on the importance of holistic health and its impact on performance and productivity.
Now, we continue to be in the era of increasing stress, employee burnout, mounting pressure to perform and extreme performance and productivity.
So how can we navigate this in a way that is not overwhelming? How can we address the way that leaders and high performers are being impacted by their wellness and their ability – or inability – to deal with stress and the pressures of everyday life in a productive way?
Enter Arevita 360.
The Pattern
Over the two decades, I have coached individuals on movement and trained leaders in the gym. I have written extensively about nutrition, sleep, stress and brain health for national publications. And I have coached executives and their teams on communication, executive presence and leading through change.
These conversations happen in different rooms using different words. But I eventually realized that they are all part of the same conversation.
Whether the topic was a fitness habit, a difficult conversation or a quarterly goal, the underlying question was always: what allows a person to show up with full capacity — physically, mentally and emotionally — and what allows them to sustain?
The answer never lived in one silo.
The executive who could not focus was burned out. The team that could not collaborate did not have self and social awareness. The leader who avoided hard conversations was running on empty. Wellness and performance are not adjacent topics. They are the same topic, measured at different points.
The Business Case Is Not Subtle
The data on this is overwhelming:
- According to the CDC, 90 percent of the United States' annual health care expenditure goes to caring for people with chronic and mental health conditions – most of which are significantly influenced by lifestyle, through simple daily habits.
- The WHO estimates employers lose about $1 trillion in productivity each year due to unmanaged or poorly managed mental health conditions.
- Research compiled by the Cleveland Clinic, JAMA, and others suggests that lifestyle adjustments could prevent the large majority of heart disease and type 2 diabetes and meaningful percentages of cancer and dementia.
- Study after study connects employee wellbeing to the outcomes every business tracks: productivity, engagement, absenteeism, retention, and healthcare costs.
Yet many organizations still treat wellness as a perk – a gym discount, an app subscription, a wellness week. Perks get used by the already-healthy and ignored by everyone else.
What actually moves outcomes is different. What actually moves outcomes is the intersection of wellness and leadership and performance.
Wellness works when it is customized to the individual and to the organization, practiced as performance infrastructure, integrated into how leaders lead, embedded into how teams work and considered when people explore how to manage their energy, stress and growth every day.
Why Arevita 360
The intersection of wellness, leadership and performance is what Arevita 360 delivers.
The name is deliberate: a 360 degree view of the whole person to achieve excellence in all aspects of life – both personal and professional.
Not fitness in one corner, leadership development in another and stress management in a third; but one system that connects how you move, eat, recover and think, with how you lead, communicate and perform.
Everything in the Arevita 360 approach is grounded in evidence-based sources that are cited throughout these pages: published research, evidence-based practice and my personal experience that I’ve observed working with real leaders and real teams over many years.
No trends, no shortcuts. Only habits and frameworks that are proven, and that hold up when practiced in the real-world.
After all these years, my conviction is simple: taking care of yourself is not selfish. It is not something that comes only after you complete everything else on your to-do list. It is not a reward for high performance. It is the foundation of high performance. And organizations that understand this will out-perform, out-retain and out-last the ones that do not.
