(or how to push through tough times together with a bunch of mood boosting tips, activities and lots of puppies)
Oh my… almost March ALREADY?! It’s funny how we keep getting surprised at how fast time flies and the amount of things that can happen in “just” a couple of months. Wait a minute… Months? Let’s say years. These past years have been one hell of a ride and we can’t ignore how they have affected our ways of thinking, behaving, perceiving and feeling it all.
At a retrospective last week, a few colleagues brought up how crazy it was to even think of life before the pandemic, how little and how much had happened from different points of view. One person mentioned having read that “2020, the year of the rat, was all about survival: our attention was on keeping body and soul together. Then 2021, the year of the ox, made us look for ways to anchor into a new reality. And so, 2022, the year of the tiger, is about making big changes.” Surviving, new reality, changes, changes and more changes. Whether we are into the Chinese calendar or not, we cannot deny that this speaks to what we’ve all been experiencing, right?
All of these new experiences and challenges have definitively shifted our approach to ourselves, others and the world we live in. We’ve recognized our desires to 1) free ourselves and release all of the b******t, and 2) give and receive more tender loving care on the whole. We need to feel good, to be both understanding and understood. More and more, we are seeking both a sense of belonging and togetherness, and the space to let go and be ourselves. In other words, health & well-being has rocketed to the top of our priority stack.
At Boomerang we believe that we are only as good a community as our people are themselves healthy — in mind, body, spirit & heart. And for this holistic approach to thrive, we must first ensure that we’re responding to our community’s health in all its facets: physical, emotional, and mental; personal and professional. Our new Boomerang for Better impact strategy is working to implement a long-term health & well-being plan that puts our community’s well-being at the workplace first. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and there will be lots of trial and error involved. But doing better by our people is a priority, and we hope more and more of us can benefit – day by day, month by month, year by year.
This year’s first theme is energy. So we decided to launch a fresh initiative around “Blue Monday” – considered the most depressing day of the year. Under the motto of ‘to hell with blue being a sad color’, we flipped the story on its head and tried our damndest to make it an overly positive week. We gathered and shared our colleagues’ tips and resources on how to make the best of work-from-home, like this beautiful read from our colleague Anneke Schapelhouman on the effect of ‘uitwaaien’ or ‘getting some fresh air’. We spammed everyone’s inboxes with rewarding content (click here to discover your ‘brain on puppies’).
Finally, to pump up our sense of connectedness, we organized a mood-boosting activity hosted by our partners at Sanctum – a cathartic workout experience that uses holistic practices to empower the body and expand the mind. Of course, we did it both IRL and digitally so everyone could join… wherever, whenever!
Full disclosure: anything can happen and the unexpected is now part of our schedules. But… we are fired up and ready to keep the health & well-being agenda rolling. Here’s to leaning into 2022 as a year of big changes – ones that support us on our journey, and make us feel and live ‘better’.
Teresa Santos – Health & Well-being Strategist, Boomerang for Better
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Pictures by Hamzah Kashash
