Mumbai: It’s an hour after start time before the last senior executive drifts into the room. Once they’re in, very few speak to others; most are glued to cellphones or laptops. No one steps out to the terrace to take in the cloudy, breezy afternoon at Bandra-Kurla Complex.
Ironic. Because the event is a ‘masterclass’ with ambitious goals, from “understanding your life purpose and tapping into your inner wisdom” to sleep and meditation as self-improvement. The host is Thrive Global, founded in 2016 by Arianna Huffington, co-founder and editor-in-chief of Huffington Post ; it began India operations in January this year, and this is its first masterclass here.
Thrive’s mission is to “end the global stress and burnout epidemic by offering businesses and individuals sustainable, science-based solutions to enhance well-being and performance.” Some of the concepts they teach originate in India, says Dr. Marcus Ranney, General Manager, India. “Ours is the longest working-hour culture. Mumbai clocks 64 hours a week, the longest on earth.” And these hours are increasing burnouts, not productivity, he says.
Joey Hubbard, Thrive’s Global Director of Training, asks the room, “How many meditators?” Four hands rise. He scolds the others: “It started here: one of the most powerful techniques you can use to be focused, to be present, reduce stress, and four people raise their hands. You’ve forgotten your heritage!”
Then Mr. Hubbard asks, ‘Are there areas of your life where you are experiencing imbalance?’ He shifts focus to the ‘whys’, like why people don’t exercise more or eat right despite wanting to.
He divides the room into ‘Thrive 101 pathways’ according to their greatest challenges: well-being, to do with the body (sleep, nutrition, movement and exercise); wisdom, to do with the mind (mindfulness, meditation, focus and reframing), connection, to do with the heart (gratitude, mindful communication and empathy), and purpose, to do with soul (meaning, giving, vision and values). The foundation, he said, is, ‘my whole self is better.” (The additional pathways are innovation and productivity, resilience and recharge.)
The four groups quickly go about discussing their challenges in getting poor quality sleep, not getting enough exercise or even, as one participant tells his other group members, “trying to get in touch with my fears.” Another says, “Why does everyone have a problem with nights? I love the night, it’s quiet. I’ve spent 25 years thinking about this.”
Mr. Hubbard then asks them to discuss their strengths in each area. He explains to them how most challenges are born out of a reverse in personal values: humans driven by what they have, what they want to do and who they are. “If what you have goes away, for instance, your value goes away. People who created a positive impact in the planet, like Gandhi or Mother Teresa, didn’t have anything.” Instead, he says, be who you are, then create what you want (what you do) and what you want to have. “Stress and burnout is because people are chasing the wrong thing.” He shows them how their beliefs about themselves — that they are not lovable, or deserving of success — drive behaviour, and how neuroscience shows that these patterns and beliefs could be changed.
The executives are shown exercises they can do at their desks. There is also an exercise to demonstrate how multitasking is unproductive, backed by research: According to the American Psychological Association, there is a 40% drop in productivity when switching from one task to another, and intelligence quotient levels drop temporarily when multitasking. The participants are given simple strategies: “Let others know when you need to focus, create a device-free time zone, and keep a ‘thinking time’ in the morning.”
A video on the importance of sleep is shown. There is also a product on display: the ‘phone bed’, where people could ‘switch off’ and charge their devices on it while they were asleep. In India, the product is made from recyclable material, and could be priced at less than $20.
Siddharth Banerjee, EVP, Marketing at Vodafone, attended the session to understand the link between research on well being and how we can apply it to our daily lives. And he was not disappointed. “While we might know this stuff intuitively or theoretically, we all need a definite action plan with Thrive calls ‘Microsteps.’” His two big takeaways: “The importance of being on the move, not just in terms of exercise but how much movement I can pack into my day, related to my physical well-being. On the purpose front, I was struck by the Be-Do-Have model, which I will reflect on.”
Suraja Kishore, Head, Planning, McCann, was candid about why he was there: “I came just to take a break from my work, see what was said here that was beyond the idea of wellness. I would never do this on a regular day; I don’t have the luxury of attending a session like this for two hours.”
Sunita Wazir, Wellbeing and Inclusion Lead at Hindustan Unilever, said she picked up small but lasting changes one can make. Her colleague, Priyanka Mandal, said she learnt the need to keep her phone aside, as she was sleep-deprived. She stayed wide awake through the afternoon, though, making copious notes.
The Hindu also spoke in more detail with Dr. Ranney and Mr. Hubbard. Brief excerpts follow :
‘We’re reminding people here of their roots’
Thrive Global was born of Arianna Huffington’s personal experience: she collapsed at her desk out of exhaustion in 2007. She now calls herself a “sleep evangelist” and advocates, among other things, that executives switch off their devices for at least seven hours every night.
The core elements of the Thrive programme include corporate training, a media platform for a conversation about well-being and productivity, and technology products that help people make sustainable behaviour changes.
Making the case for such workshops in India, Dr. Ranney says, “In a decade, we’re going to have 700 million people in our workforce, the largest anywhere on earth. And we’ve already got so many challenges around finding them then right types of jobs, irrespective of whether you are an optimist or pessimist around artificial intelligence. Then you layer on challenges such as ours being the longest working-hour culture: Mumbai clocks 64 hours per week, the longest anywhere on earth. The working hours are not translating to productivity, performance or profit and are leading to stress and burnout.”
There is more alarming data, they say: 80% of working professionals in India feel stressed at work, and 56 million Indians suffer from depression, more than in China and the US. “It’s a problem that needs to be solved now because the numbers are astronomical,” says Dr. Ranney. “By the end of 2025, over half our population in India is going to be at the risk of or will suffer from diabetes. Already we have the third highest number of cancer cases among women. We’re winning medals we shouldn’t be, in chronic diseases and lifestyle disorders.”
Thrive is creating products specifically for Indian entrepreneurs who, Mr. Hubbard says, “in their desire to have and to do, lose track of who they are and their personal values.” When he was growing up in the USA, he says, everyone was into making money and achieving ‘success’; all the venture capitalists came into play and “we watched this epidemic grow where people started burning out with physical and stress-related issues, and slowly starting to realise that’s not necessarily the way to go. You in India are in that process. You have all these entrepreneurs running after success, but no one’s on their deathbed saying, ‘I wish I’d started two more companies.’”
Through the Thrive 101 process, Dr. Ranney says they have “married the conversation between individuals and their importance around well-being to an organisation’s success.” Says Mr. Hubbard, “The more you take care of yourself, the better you will perform. Ultimately, it’s a win-win: the employee, the individual, the organisation, the team wins, and then society wins.”
Mr. Hubbard goes back into history to drive home the point. “[Mahatma] Gandhi was able to work 17-hour days and when [Rabindranath] Tagore asked him how he could do that, he said ‘it’s because I’m always at rest’. There is a consciousness behind how he did what he did that we’re trying to capture in our work. We tell people it’s fine to be a high-flier; go for it, succeed, do those things, but also understand your limits, yourself, your values, and when you need rest.”
The irony of having such a workshop in India, where these concepts have originated, is not lost on them though. “We were laughing about it as a group earlier,” says Mr. Hubbard. “The ancient wisdom from Krishna, the Vedas, the Gita and Buddha have been grounded in this society but what’s interesting is how much this society has forgotten. So we’re really just reminding people of their roots.”
