I have been having some fascinating conversations with Louise Wextra who works with leaders and individual contributors to enhance their performance through helping them better understand themselves through Nutrigenomics.
Louise helped me personally understand my reaction to pressure using Nutrigenomics.
So why Nutrigenomics?
Nutrigenomics is uniquely positioned to enhance leadership development by helping leaders understand how their genetic makeup may affect their physical and mental well-being, and how certain dietary and lifestyle choices can positively or negatively impact their health and performance.
These insights offer opportunities to use personalised nutritional choices (via food and appropriate evidence-based supplementation) and lifestyle modification to enhance and elevate performance and can serve as a fundamental part of a conscious and effective leadership strategy.
The global pandemic and the rise of virtual work, along with the Great Resignation that continues to cause workers to rethink their jobs and careers, has created more workplace change faster than at any time in our history.
Meaning leaders today need to be more adaptive to address all of these changes in order to keep their teams and organizations moving forward.
In addition workplace stress and burnout are at an all-time high as we emerge from the pandemic, deal with a battered economy with rising inflation, and experience societal upheaval.
It is critical that leaders demonstrate care and concern for their employees’ welfare and remain emotionally and mentally agile across a diverse and inclusive culture.
Understanding your unique genetic expression can support your leadership in a variety of ways:
Self-awareness:
Knowing how your genetics may affect your physical and mental well-being can help increase levels of self-awareness.
Allowing you to make more informed decisions about your own self-care needs, your responses under pressure and plan accordingly.
Decision-making:
Understanding how your genetics impact your stress response can help you make more informed decisions in high-pressure situations, such as knowing when to take a break, dialing in to your eating habit and lifestyle choices, and seeking support or delegating tasks.
Empathy:
Expanding yourself at a biological level can help to expand your sense of self-compassion.
In addition it will foster increased compassion for your colleagues and team members and allow you to be more understanding of the range of responses to stress and pressure and the potential for impact on performance.
Adaptability:
By seeing how certain genetic variations may affect your ability to handle stress and pressure.
You can adapt your leadership style or approach to better support yourself when needed and in doing so, benefit yourself and your team.
Thus demonstrating your consistent emotional and cognitive agility.
Innovation:
With the knowledge of nutrigenomics, leaders can also innovate new ways of promoting high performance, healthy lifestyles, create employee benefits and incentives.
Specifically targeting genetic needs and thus cultivating a more productive and engaged workforce and retain talent for longer.
Performance:
Knowing your genetic response to stress can help you optimize your own work performance by identifying potential areas of vulnerability.
By taking steps to mitigate the negative effects of stress on your cognitive, emotional and physical abilities you will be able to sustain higher performance for longer.
You will also be able to recognize more subtle cues informing you of your bandwidth on an ongoing basis.
Communication:
Understanding how your genetics may affect your stress response can also help you to communicate more effectively with others.
Such as explaining to colleagues why you may respond in certain ways to certain challenging situations.
Here’s how this approach has helped my performance:
The remaining pieces of the jigsaw fell into place.
I know that my default setting can be work horse.
The feelings I’m having. These are not just beliefs and behaviours.
They are also biological.
They are my DNA.
If I neglect parts of the nervous system which Louise helped me understand, it causes me more mental and physical stimulation which in turn impacts how I feel and how I operate both personally and professionally.“
If you want to do the same for your business and in leadership, please reach out to me and I will put you in contact with Louise.
