MaryBeth Hyland: “The values that helped me overcome my work addiction”
The Fortune Greece Network platform premiered with MaryBeth Hyland, Founder and Chief Visionary of SparkVision, and author of the book Permission to Be Human: The Conscious Leader’s Guide to Creating a Values-Driven Culture.
As a certified facilitator, mindfulness trainer and values expert, MaryBeth engages audiences and groups around the world with her authentic style of facilitation, coaching and empowerment. Her recent awards include ‘Circle of Excellence’, ‘Innovator of the Year’, ‘Top 100 Women’, ‘Civic Engagement Leader’ and ‘Leading Women’. She has also been recognized as a leading expert by newspapers and magazines such as The Washington Post, The Huffington Post, Forbes, The Wall Street Journal and others.
MaryBeth Hyland was welcomed by Tasos Zachos, Editor-in-Chief of Fortune Greece, who spoke about the purpose and objectives of the new platform.
“Fortune Greece Network is a new platform aimed at executive-bound professionals and entrepreneurs, who are the next generation of leaders. We are creating a membership community that provides members with networking, interaction with influential leaders, targeted knowledge, filtered information and the tools necessary to evolve in their career path. For December we have prepared for you many activities that include presentations by internationally renowned speakers – content with which we aspire to generate new discussions and thoughts, and workshops that will bring us closer to “self-improvement”.
The ‘baton’ was passed to the leading values expert, who addressed the members of the platform in a 30-minute interactive session, answering their questions at the end.
Here are some key points from her presentation:
“You always have to start with yourself first”.
I’m so excited to be here because what was extremely apparent to me, especially after we connected, was how much our values are in alignment with each other. At Fortune Greece Network you all talk about how you need to start with yourself first and then you move into your organizations and then how that goes out into the world. And that’s everything that I believe in. It’s the way that my book is written. It’s the way that I teach leaders and entrepreneurs on how to do this work. You always have to start with yourself first.
Work addiction
When I was 25, I was clinically diagnosed with work addiction. I didn’t even know there was such a thing as work addiction. I just thought that was what it took to be successful. And so my routine for years was that I would go into work at 08:00 in the morning. I would work all day long and then usually have some kind of event at night. I would come home around 21:00 or 21:30, eat a little bit of food and then get back on my computer and keep working. I would fall asleep with the computer on my lap on the couch, and then I would wake up maybe around 02:00 or 03:00 in the morning and start working again. And I would repeat that over and over and over again because I had racing thoughts in my mind that were telling me that I had to do this in order to be successful. I had to do this in order to get ahead. I had to do this in order to be a leader that other people saw as a change-maker. And I realized that after going in to get professional help, that I was really hurting myself. It all came to a head when one morning I rolled over in bed and my husband said to me, ‘It’s so good to see you’. And I didn’t know what he meant because I was like, ‘you see me all the time. What are you talking about? I see you all the time’. And he said, ‘Well, yeah, I see you. But you’re actually never here. When I wake up in the morning, you’re already working or you fall asleep downstairs with your laptop on your chest’.
“During the pandemic, people are experiencing significantly higher stress than ever before”
I started working with somebody one-on-one to understand: how could I slow down those racing thoughts? How could I be more successful in having a sense of personal alignment and wellbeing? And how could I do it in a way that I would still feel like I was a powerful leader in the community. And the truth is, I know that I’m not alone in these feelings. Over the last year, research has shown that globally we are in the most stressful time in our history. Obviously, the pandemic has created conditions in which we really have never had to move through, and we’re understanding what that means for us as unique individuals. The same research showed that nearly 190,000,000 people are experiencing significantly higher stress than ever before. And that very report said that in the world, overall, people are sadder. They’re angrier, they’re more worried, and they’re stressed out in a way that they’ve never seen in the last 15 years. And I share all that to simply say that, if you’re one of those people, you’re not alone. And if you’re one of those people, there is a new way. There is a possibility, there is another way of doing this life and work and entrepreneurship and leadership, so that you are not feeling drained every day, but rather feeling a sense of alignment and aliveness.
“Our values are a compass for how we’re going to go about our lives”
When we understand what our core values are, our intrinsic motivators, the things inside of us that say, ‘yes, this is good’ or ‘no, I don’t like that’, that’s when we can be really intentional about naming it and then claiming it as our compass and our guardrails for how we’re going to go about our lives at work, at home and within ourselves. And so I often tell the people I’m working with that ‘you’re not drained because you’re doing too much. You’re drained because you’re doing too little of what reflects your values’. And that is what my book is all about and has a step by step guide on how to really go deeper into that process.
Your values live with you. They are inside you all the time. Everywhere you go. It’s just a matter of choosing them and being able to say, ‘I am going to make choices. I’m going to behave, and I’m going to move forward in alignment with these core values’. In a nutshell, the overall thinking of values is that if you feel like you’re coming alive, it’s because your values are in action.
And if you feel like you’re being sucked dry, it’s because you’re being drained of those values. And so this experience that we’re going to do, a very short little experience together, is going to give you an opportunity to start to think about ‘what is one of my core values that I would like to be more intentional about activating so that I can have a better sense of wellbeing’
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*Check also: Monthly Mindful Leadership Series της MaryBeth Hyland.
