Episode 14 - Digital Wellbeing: Interview With Mich Bondesio from Growth Sessions

In this episode, I interview Mich Bondesio. Mich is a business-performance mentor, with a 20-year background in communications and project management. Her Growth Sessions mentoring programmes, workshops and talks support business people to build healthier cultures and develop more mindful approaches to work. Mich's clients include consultants, entrepreneurs and teams working in creative and digital-focused sectors. Today, we discuss digital wellbeing in more detail.

You Can Read the Transcript of Our Interview Below:

Nathan Simmonds:

Welcome to Sticky Interviews, this is Making Business Matter, MBM, the home of Sticky Learning and the trainer of Soft Skills to the UK retail and manufacturing industry, helping them to increase profits and sales. This interview series is all about speaking to great thinkers and sharing ideas to make that happen.

Nathan Simmonds:

Today, we've got Mich Bondesio with us. I hope I pronounced that right, I've never checked the pronunciation of your last name, Mich. I do apologize if that's horrifically wrong. Talking to us today. Thanks very much for being here, Mich. I'm just going to give the guys a quick rundown of who you are, where you come from, and I'm going to get into these questions, okay?

Mich Bondesio:

Okay.

Mich Bondesio: performance mentor

 

Nathan Simmonds:

So the first thing, Mich is a business performance mentor with a background in communications and project management. Her grow sessions, mentoring programs, workshops and talks support businesses, people to build healthier cultures and develop more mindful approaches to work, which we all need in this day and age, before this and after this. Originally from South Africa, Mich is currently based in the northwest UK, her clients are consultants, solopreneurs, and small teams working in creative and digitally focused sectors around the world. Mostly in the creative space, as far as I'm aware at this point in time.

Nathan Simmonds:

Mich, thanks very much for being here.

Mich Bondesio:

Thanks for inviting me.

Nathan Simmonds:

It was huge, we started to have a bit of a get to know you, which had nothing to do with this interview series, and as that conversation developed and sprouts came out of it, I was just like, some of the stuff you're talking about is absolutely vital for people to be hearing, from a mental health point of view, from an isolation point of view, which we're all in right now. I think the majority of people are just starting week three. I know I, we're a week before that because our work's starting to slow down, the face-to-face work started to slow down a little bit. So we've been isolating for, this would be the beginning of week four.

Nathan Simmonds:

And as we were talking about that you were just saying there's going to be some critical crunch points that come up through this that you're kind of aware of. I just thought, you know what? We've got share this. We've got to give this to people in the work space and they need to hear what you've got to say about this, to support those consultants and the culture that's coming up out of this.

Nathan Simmonds:

So first of all, thank you as I just said. Please tell everyone what you do and why you do it.

Mich Bondesio:

So, as you mentioned I'm a communications consultant and business performance mentor, and I want to help people to develop more mindful approaches to work because for the past 20 years I've worked in high pressure deadline driven environments and industries and sectors, which have very unsupportive work cultures, and I've also experienced burnout first hand and my burnout was so epic that I wasn't able to work for more than a year. So I have first hand experience of being socially isolated and very unwell and not having a work environment that was supportive of my recovery during that point.

Mich Bondesio:

So I realized actually that we need to be helping others to build their resilience, develop the skills that they need to work better whilst supporting their wellbeing. Because it's all very closely tied, there's a lot of research out there that shows that better selves are better for business, they're better for your bottom line, and if you were humans first and resources second, essentially. So if you put humans at the center of your business, they're going to be better for your business.

Nathan Simmonds:

I love that because I'm guilty of doing it in the past as well. We are humans first before we are resources. The bit that I'm mindful from as a leadership point of view is making sure that we get a balance of both of those. Like you're saying, like people first, so how that links in for me is actually these are human beings, what are their needs, what are their wants, what are their desires, what support do they need, what training do they need, how can we help them do that?

Nathan Simmonds:

Then helping them to see where they're going. Because we can see what they're capable of and the skills they've got, we can then see how they move across the chessboard of business in the nicest possible way, but they're moving to their strengths. I've often referred to people in business, it's like a game of chess and some people are knights and some people are bishops and some people are kings and queens or whatever. But if you try and move a bishop the same way as you move a knight you're going to get some serious resistance from the people around you.

Mich Bondesio:

Correct.

Nathan Simmonds:

So like you say, it's making sure that they are supported, so that actually they feel like they're working optimally.

Mich Bondesio:

And that leads to more engagement and loyalty totally company as well, so they will bring their whole selves to work and they'll give you 110%, because they feel supported and they feel safe within the environment that they're in to deliver their best.

Nathan Simmonds:

Absolutely. And there's plenty of people around here that band these numbers around. 87% of people are not engaged in the work that they're doing and it's leading to millions and billions of pounds, I think even in the UK it's 84 billion I think of lost productivity due to some of these situations. But if you're not feeling productive and you're not feeling like you're contributing, you won't do your best work, and if you go to somewhere that you just genuinely feel unhappy about and you're unsupported in that, burnout is an absolute given, for sure.

Mich Bondesio:

Yeah.

Nathan Simmonds:

Amazing, but then you also talked about that self-isolation piece. It's a personal event for you, so how much are you happy to share about that in what you do?

Mich Bondesio:

I'm happy to share as much as I need to. Actually sharing was part of the last step of the recovery process for me, so I think it's important for people to know why I'm doing what I'm doing now because it had such a profound effect on my life. So I'm happy to share. Through that process of burnout, I kind of rediscovered myself, I developed the skills I needed to support myself better in both working and living. I discovered the importance of solitude as a form of self-awareness and as a way to actually help you develop all of those ideas that we have inside our head but we never get a chance to actually think about or do something about.

Mich Bondesio:

And I also... I discovered that I had far more resilience than I thought I did. And this is an important thing for all of us to know is that we do have resilience within us, to cope with highly stressful situations. We just need to know how to bring it out, we need to know what to do in certain situations. So I'm finding that in this situation, yes it's scary, yes it can be anxiety inducing, it can create a lot of fearfulness within us, but if we have the skills and toolkit that we can call on to support us when we're feeling that way then we can get through it a lot more easily. We feel a lot less paralyzed, we feel a lot less uncertain because we've got the skills to look inward to find that certainty.

Nathan Simmonds:

Thank you. And I do a lot of work inside workplace stress, anxiety and depression. I've suffered with that horrendously myself, I've worked through it, and talk about that resilience to push through. Yes you can still get through it. It doesn't make it easier and eventually that stuff starts to kind of... it can start to weather you and wear you down and then eventually something happens. The key part, as I talked about, is everyone has that resilience.

Nathan Simmonds:

The bit that I often see with people is, especially from the workplace, what we call the normal workplace anxieties and depressions. I have a problem, I feel like this, everyone else looks like they're okay, therefore I don't say anything in case I look like I am the problem or causing a problem. And we keep quiet.

Nathan Simmonds:

And because of that keeping quiet we start to put a lid on things and the pressure builds up and we've got all these coping mechanisms in place and whatever it is, for me it used to be drinking too much coffee, or overworking. And then something happens and then you fall down. No one copes their way out of a crisis. You don't manage yourself out, you know you have to take the lead on that.

Nathan Simmonds:

But then going back through what you're saying, developing ideas, having the solitude and quiet to develop those ideas and come up with new... with a creativity, that actually helps to improve where you're at.

Mich Bondesio:

Correct. We're all capable of creativity, we're just not aware of it. But creativity needs a little bit... sometimes a bit of a constraint can help but it also needs space and time and very often our modern workplace does not allow for that, because we are constantly on and we're multitasking, even though that's not something that our brain can do,