This is no laughing matter since heart disease is the leading cause of death in the developed western world and—I was genuinely surprised to learn—has now become the leading killer in India, causing three million fatalities a year (The Lancet, Vol 372 August 16, 2008).

The good news…workers who believe they are treated fairly showed a 30% lower risk of heart disease than those who believe otherwise.

Lesson One: If you’re a boss, then for goodness sake be a decent boss. Be fair. Be kind. Be as tenderhearted as you are tough minded. Don’t make people lose heart. Treat employees the way you want to be treated.

Lesson Two. If your boss is a jerk, find ways to protect your emotional, physical and spiritual well-being. The experts agree: You can’t control your boss but you can learn to control your blood pressure.

If you’re the boss…

• Do you believe your employees think you’re fair?
• Whether you believe they think you’re fair or not, how would you know? How can you find out for sure?
• If you suspect you may be a bad boss, who will help you do better?
• If you find out you really are a bad boss and do nothing, what will it cost you and your company?

If you suspect you report to the boss from hell…

• How can you find out (without a headlong descent into gossip) if you’re right about your boss or if it’s “just you?”
• If it’s not “just you” and if you’re not in a position to fire your boss and find a new one, what can you do to create a happy place where you can go to recover periodically through the day?
• How can you protect yourself from the temptation to slack off or “punish” your boss with poor work?
• Get a confidential partner—someone who will talk straight with you, offer fair critique and sober encouragement; someone who will pray for you and with you.

Whoever you are…

• Take a few minutes to read the FastCompany article and Dan Wooldridge’s Boss from Hell post.
• Take a little time to reflect on, and maybe discuss, the standards outlined in Ephesians 4:29 -32

Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs, that it may benefit those who listen.  ³⁰ And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, with whom you were sealed for the day of redemption.  ³¹ Get rid of all bitterness, rage and anger, brawling and slander, along with every form of malice.  ³² Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you.

Thanks to our friend, Jim Hancock, for producing these videos.

Links

Then consider that 80% of the illnesses and disease in the U.S. are preventable.

The costs to individuals and companies are staggering. One of my clients decided to move from “sick-care” to wellness in their corporate culture. Now after several years, they've begun to measure the results. Team members who continued with high-risk behaviors to their health cost 150% more than those at low risk. This unhealthy high-risk behavior drives worker's compensation costs up almost 30%. Absenteeism goes up 30%. Disability costs is over 40% higher and productivity loss doubled.

Healthier workers have better morale, improved work performance, less absenteeism, and increased loyalty

The flip side is that healthier workers have better morale, improved work performance, less absenteeism, and increased loyalty to the company. The financial benefits to workers and companies are also dramatic. Many companies report $200-$500 of savings per employee. Some reported returns of over $5.00 for every dollar spent.

My conclusion? The health and fitness of employees is a business issue. And it's also a spiritual issue as we have a responsibility personally and toward others to promote fitness and health holistically.

To promote some thinking and discussion around this topic, InsideWork interviewed Coach Don Nava, author of Fit After 40, and founder of The Prevail Team. Coach Nava is a fitness coach who has worked with renowned professional athletes and major corporations. If you or your company need inspiration, instruction, and the practical accountability and action that a coach can bring, contact Coach Nava.

In this first video, Coach Don Nava explains the concept of Total Fitness.

Thanks to our friend, Jim Hancock, for producing these videos.

Links

Don has been a wellness and fitness expert for twenty – eight years. He has conducted fitness programs for organizations in US, Europe and Australia.

He has coached professional athletes, executives, homemakers and children in ways to set and achieve personal fitness goals.

As the founder of The Totally Fit Life, he manages the development of innovative vitality and performance improvement programs for organizations such as Cisco Systems, NIKE, Silicon Graphics, and AT&T.

Don’s mission is to help people from all walks of life look better, feel better and gain more energy. Years of experience led him to his breakthrough concept of The Totally Fit Life, which integrates six essential fitness elements to transform people’s lives. They are physical, nutritional, mental, directional, emotional and spiritual. He details his discoveries in his new book, FIT AFTER 40, published by Thomas Nelson.

Don believes that “fitness as usual” just doesn’t work for most people. He has spent a career helping people shift their thinking from “what you do” to “how you do it” – from individual willpower to team encouragement.

Combining these elements with accountability to a team of two other people who share similar fitness goals became a successful formula for enabling most people to achieve sustainable vitality.

“Something’s wrong here when one of the richest countries in the world, the one that spends the most on health care, is not able to keep up with other countries,” the best way truly to reduce health care cost is to improve its qualityDr. Christopher Murray, head of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, told the Associated Press in 2007. Murray calls for increased attention to reducing cancer, heart disease, lung disease and diabetes and he points specifically at tobacco use, high blood pressure, elevated cholesterol and poor diet: “Even if we focused only on those four things, we would go along way toward improving health care in the United States.” For the record, about two-thirds of adults 20 and older are overweight in the U.S. — nearly a third are clinically obese.

Dr. Murray wants to take the argument beyond the “We’re Number One” chants that sometimes drown out reasonable conversation: “The starting point is the recognition that the U.S. does not have the best health care system,” Murray says. “There are still an awful lot of people who think it does.”

That’s partly a function of availability. About 46 million U.S. citizens are without health insurance and another 25 million are under-insured (a 60 percent increase in the under-insured from 2003-2007).

But according to What Should Employers Do about Health Care? — a report by Michael E. Porter, Elizabeth O. Teisberg, and Scott Wallace in Harvard Business School’s Working Knowledge — the problem goes much deeper. “Many U.S. employers are dropping health benefits or hoping for reforms that will transfer responsibility for health insurance to individuals or to the government,” they write.

Think again. Employers cannot get out of health care, no matter what kind of health insurance system is put in place. They bear the cost of poor health in the form of sick days, absenteeism, reduced productivity at work, and early retirements of skilled contributors. Recent internal company studies in the United States estimate that employers spend 200 to 300 percent more on the indirect costs of poor health than they do on health benefits. The costs of poor health are especially high for chronic conditions such as diabetes, migraines, heart disease, and respiratory problems. These costs remain even if employers get out of health insurance obligations. But by disengaging, employers lose much of their ability to influence the costs of poor health.

They maintain that attempts to deliver health care at the lowest possible cost is fuzzy thinking that only makes the problem worse: “In every other aspect of their business, employers are attuned to quality and value. But health care has been treated as a commodity and cost reduction has been the dominant approach.

Most employers do not even measure the costs of poor health among their employees. If they did, however, they would discover that many of the steps they have taken to reduce benefit costs have actually made the costs of poor health even greater. For example, studies have shown that co-pays and deductibles on essential medications for chronic conditions can reduce adherence to therapy, leading to expensive hospitalizations, complications, and the like. Here, so-called consumer-driven health plans not only failed to benefit the consumer, but they hurt employers as well.

The report concludes that employers must begin thinking about health care in terms of value instead of cost, claiming, “New research on value-based health care delivery reveals some powerful, and ultimately optimistic, principles.”

First, the best way truly to reduce health care cost is to improve its quality—better diagnoses, more timely treatment, less invasive methods, getting the right treatment to the right patient, fewer complications, and so on. Quality, defined in terms of outcomes, is the secret to success in health care.

We won’t solve the larger issues around health care here and now, but Porter and friends raise a significant question: If what gets measured is what gets done, are you measuring the value of employee health?

• What do sick days, absenteeism and early medical retirement (or death) cost you at the bottom line?
• What is the value in measurable productivity from your healthiest employees?
• What can you do in the next 60 days to encourage and enhance employee health? And in the six months after that…
• Based on the difference in your answers to the first two questions, what can you reasonably spend to help your employees stay healthy?

Coach Don Nava is passionate about helping people achieve total fitness in all dimensions of life, and happens to be a friend of InsideWork®. For over 25 years Coach Nava has trained individuals and work teams toward high performance through wellness and fitness programs. He’s trained notable players such as Joe Montana, Ronnie Lott, and Jerry Rice and has designed programs for companies such as Nike, Cisco Systems, and ATT.

Does he practice what he preaches? On his 40th birthday he worked out for 40 consecutive hours to demonstrate the importance of fitness and healthy living. On his 50th birthday, he ran up and down 5000 bleachers at the Stanford University football stadium. He’s also the author of Fit After 40, which we recommend.

All this to say, when we received Coach Nava’s email this afternoon, we immediately asked him for permission to reprint it. (Thanks, Coach.) Take to heart what he says.

Hey Champion,

Across the country, Dr. Jerry Falwell was one of the most highly visible figures in both evangelical and political circles. He was a man with followers and foes alike. There is a wide spectrum of opinions about his work and legacy. But as a fitness coach, something in his death burdened me and gives us all cause to pause.

Dr. Falwell did not take very good care of his body. He had a history of heart problems and likely had died from cardiac arrhythmia, a heart rhythm abnormality that occurs without warning.

I believe his lack of self-care was the main reason why he passed away at 73 of heart failure. I feel he may have had many more years on Earth.

In light of his passing, Christians should stop and evaluate their personal health and lifestyle and make necessary behavior modifications so that they can live on earth as long as the Lord has intended. (Psalms 90:12 Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom)

We subtract from the days the Lord has given us if we make negative lifestyle choices.
— Coach Don Nava

We are unable to add to the days the Lord has for us on earth. However, we can surely subtract from them if we make negative lifestyle choices.

My motivation and intent in writing this is to encourage and not condemn. I pray that we would rely on God's grace and stop leaning on our willpower to create lasting change.

May you prayerfully consider necessary changes you need to make so that you can be an effective member of God's team on Earth — for all the days He has given you.
Psalms 39:4

Show me, O LORD, my life's end and the number of my days; let me know how fleeting is my life.

You Are A Champion.
Coach

So true. I can't add any more days to my life than what God has apportioned, but I can surely subtract from them. Sobering. Challenging.

A sourcebook on the hard facts shaping our future. 44 concise analyses. The critical social and environmental challenges as well as the positive trends that if accelerated could put the world on new, sustainable paths. Food. Agriculture. Energy. Climate. Economics. Transportation. Communication. Health. Social. War and Peace.