Automated Transcription
Lee Chambers 0:01
They’re also on the bus, as your company drives towards its destination. Its destination will hopefully be something that improves the world that makes a difference that solves a significant problem that prepares. It’s about helping to align that vision, making sure it’s communicated throughout the company because I’m sure you’re aware, Richard words matter, not just to clients and customers from a marketing perspective, but how you speak to your employee, helps them feel that they are appreciated, helps them feel that they have the autonomy to design and create and build things themselves that can benefit the company.
Richard Matthews 0:45
Heroes are an inspiring group of people every one of them from the larger than
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Hello, and welcome back to the HERO Show. My name is Richard Matthews. And today I have the pleasure of having Lee Chambers on the line. Lee, are you there?
Lee Chambers 1:48
I’m here, Richard.
Richard Matthews 1:49
Awesome. And I was just talking before we started the recording. You’re coming to us out of Preston in the UK. Is that right?
Yeah,
Lee Chambers 1:56
Quite away from yourself, but it’s not too far away, small world we live in today.
Richard Matthews 2:02
Yeah,
And for those of you who’ve been following along with our travels, we are still in southern Florida or Central Florida because of the COVID stuff. We haven’t moved much in the last couple of months. So we’re still there enjoying our little piece of paradise. But to get started, I want to go ahead and introduce Lee to you before we get into his story. So you guys who don’t know him, it a little bit of a better idea of who he is. So Lee chambers is a well-being consultant and founder of Essenstialise, Workplace Wellbeing. And you’re a well-being consultant, workshop facilitator and sleep specialist, which I find really fascinating. And you’ve spent the last 10 years discovering and working in a variety of fields, including local government, corporate organization, elite sports, and now you’ve brought your expertise and qualifications with the aim to impact the well being of thousands of individuals and businesses through organizational well-being advancement while looking for conscious and purpose-led leadership internally in those companies. So with that introduction, Lee, why don’t you start off with telling us what it is that you do? What it is that you’re known for today? And you know, what, how do you help people?
Lee Chambers 3:06
So what I’m known for is someone who brings multiple multidisciplinary, visionary ideas to companies. So I work with small to medium-sized enterprises are generally between 50 to 500 employees.
And I go in that, really on the premise of increasing employee well being. With the benefits that come from that, I’ve increased motivation, increased morale, high productivity, and creativity, reduce sickness, reduce conflict in the workplace, reduce mistakes, and better workplace retention and staff turnover rates. So, in many ways, its return on investment is getting more from the stuff that you have that in to nudge the organizational culture to actually consciously see the employees as people who can be developed as people who can grow people who can be looked after and encouraged to become more to become their own little leaders within that business and become someone that aligns with the company’s vision, and drives up forward with the management and the leadership.
So, I create a series of workshops that interlink all these elements. So bringing in that well-being awareness through by talking about healthy eating, sleep, movement, mindset, and habits, but helping embed that to show that really, if you’re going to bring well-being advancement into a company, then it also needs to be bred organically, internally.
So there needs to be a culture of care, a culture where there’s not where blame is less prevalent, a place where people feel they can try and fail, and not be made to feel that they’re inferior, and a place that’s more inclusive of the many different people that work within an organization but also getting clarity on what the organization stands for, what its values are, what its mission statement and purpose-driven, or intention is so that that can be communicated down through the organization to employees so that they can also join in the journey. They’re also on the bus, as your company drives towards its destination, its destination would hopefully be something that improves the world that makes a difference that solves a significant problem that we face. It’s about helping to align that vision, making sure it’s communicated throughout the company. Because as I’m sure you’re aware, Richard words matter, not just to clients and customers from a marketing perspective, but how you speak to your employee, helps them feel that they are appreciated and helps them feel that they have the autonomy to design and create and build things themselves that can benefit the company. So many ways.
That’s what I do for a series of workshops through training, and through organizational development, sit creations of systems and processes that look to measure wellbeing. So, it’s not just the fluffy fruit goals and fancy yoga sessions, but actually looking at how we can build systems that embed within the business so that when I’m gone on to the next business to make a difference, it continues to grow the fruit community through strategy.
Richard Matthews 6:30
That’s really awesome. And it seems like it’s taking that old 20th-century idea that workers are cogs in a machine to realizing that workers are human beings that are helping to drive the human causes that businesses are built for, right.
Lee Chambers 6:42
Exactly.
Richard Matthews 6:44
So that’s a really cool and powerful message you have. So we’ll get into a little bit more of the specifics of that as we get further into the interview. But I want to find out how you got started in this business, your origin story, right? We talk on this show all the time.
Every hero has an origin story. It’s where you started to realize that you were different. Maybe you had superpowers, and maybe you could use them to help other people. So how did you become an entrepreneur? And then more specifically, how did you become an entrepreneur working in the well being space.
Lee Chambers 7:13
So it’s quite an interesting journey. And in a similar way to … I had that initial upbringing where my parents were, they worked very hard. We had the basics, we had food on the table, a roof over our heads. I was always that, disruptive child, who was constantly asking my mom, “Do you need this? Do you need this?” Because then I would cover them up, take a picnic blanket out to the end of the street and put them all on, and try to sell them to passers-by. And lots of little ladies would be like, “Oh, this cute little boy.” And then I tried to manage to convince them to part with some money, or something they probably didn’t even want. And then that was always kind of why I was always looking and thinking quite like business and statistics and what things, and in a similar way again, I then set up an Amiga video game business, male ordering desks around the world. And I was only 12. And I was like, Yeah, I was in my element. It just felt like building something. And I love structures and that kind of thing. So, it really resonated with me. I did that for a few years and then started to use the funds from that to sell how to mobile talk shop at school. So, a mobile sweet shop that used to sit around and sell stuff until school like outlawed me because they said, “You can’t sell that.” So, you can’t sell food on the premises without a license. And also, he seems to be coming in school. I’ve been there. Literally carrying, you’re starting to forget your PE kit because you’re carrying all your stock round and not bringing what you need for school.
So that kind of that was what I was like as a child. And I was I’m not your typical. I’m always a bit out there and a bit on the edge. As the kind of went for education. And I was the first one in my family to go to university. And that was a big thing that my parents had always wanted because no one else in the family has been. And they wanted me to take a more traditional path and try and set a career in place. And I did International Business Psychology University, which in some ways is good because it allowed me to take a lot of different units and a lot of different aspects. So I did geopolitics, organizational psychology, history of business, so a lot of different things. And that stopped me from getting bored because if I did just on business, I’d probably been bored to tears. But what that actually led to me is in the third year, I wanted to set up a business. And I’d written up this business plan and cash flow forecast and a value proposition for the idea of going working and building a business in the video game fulfillment industry. So working again to wholesale games around the country. And I felt that that’s something that I could facilitate, I could organize the logistics. And I could almost in some ways use the very early stages of algorithms to build a process where I could find where I could get the margins, and move them around. And I put this business plan in front of their -… mentor at the time. And he’s a well-known businessman in a walkable city class to me, you know, in his 50s, well respected a number of different organizations, he’d run all the time. And what unfortunately happened was I put it to him and he said, “You know what Lee. This is a great idea. Probably not for you.” He said, “You’re young, you’re diverse, you’ve got a bit of an attitude problem. And this industry is controlled by 50-year-old white man, out in these tall ivory buildings, in your opinion. If you ever get to go and pitch to them, they’re going to look at you and think, hmm, he’s disruptive.” He’s not gonna fan and he says, probably not gonna start.
You’re going to struggle to break through into these industries in the way that you want. So what you should probably do is lock up the card in the developing. That’s much more diverse. That’s much younger, much more dynamic. You probably fit in there. So well that actually did is it put a little bit of water on my fire and everything. Yeah, maybe he’s right because it came from his heart. Didn’t come from a place of trying to put me down. But it came from a place of wanting to give heartfelt advice. But as a young 20-year-old male, you just saw, oh, well, interest rates. It maybe is right. So I then finished my degree and graduated and decided I really have to think what I wanted to do, and decided that I was going to go and be a financial advisor. It worked with my need for statistics and want to help people and if I could achieve, you know, get through, become qualified, and healthy for the financial well being? Well, I thought, you know what, that’d be quite good. So I went into that, and that was 2007. So, as you can imagine, I get onto a graduate scheme with a national bank and start training. And six months in, they say, “Sorry, we can’t pay if you train anymore. The economic crashes caused us to lose lots of money, and we can’t care for you.”
A week later, I got made redundant. So that was pretty much that. And I was like, Okay, well, that’s a challenge, suddenly lost my job and lost my path for what I wanted to do. But then I thought, you know what this is my opportunity, isn’t it? From the south business, then that’s my career, and I can control that myself. And in fact, if I’ve lost my professional qualifications, and I’m going to go and do something that I pick, and I pay for, then no one to tell me that I can’t study. So I then went back into the video game idea, set it up, and all of a sudden after 12 months I was up to six figures. And I was able to actually go out and buy my first house. And I was like, Whoa, that is, this just works. Why don’t I just want it and just do it? But sometimes you need that challenge. And now six months graft … corporate, it taught me quite a lot about resilience about how to navigate corporations. So, I don’t actually look back and … that wasn’t good. I actually look back and forth. That actually hardened me for the reality of being an entrepreneur who actually needed that period. And why actually did is I went back working, so many people do so running a business, largely working a job but I worked within local government, which is always quite easy and relatively easy go in a low bid the ability to start training in farmer’s nutrition, in strength and conditioning coaching. And that all kind of led to me working in the elite sport. So I got to see the cutting edge of Science and Experimentation, Technology that was used and how performances gained a really small level because everyone’s already so far advanced, but also made me think that if that technology was used, and that time and money was spent on ordinary people, it makes a massive difference. And then all of a sudden, over the course of a week, I became unwell. My joints locked in place, and I was unable to walk, unable to look after myself. And that changed my worldview completely.
Richard Matthews 13:33
And you know, so you went from there to learn how to apply those things to yourself and then started this business.
Lee Chambers 14:42
Yes, so I mean, that was really that turning point. Like I’ve gone through and thought the video game business was probably a great vehicle, but not the most fulfilling position. I was fulfilling video games to people who wanted to buy them but wasn’t really making it different in the world. And having become unwell and being stuck in the hospital bed. At first, it was a big shock. My wife was six months pregnant. My son was 18 months old. And suddenly, I’ve gone from being able to do whatever I wanted to have to rely on everyone else to even feed me and show me. And it was scary. I mean, in that initial week, I was in shock. And then I was in grief for my mobility. But in the second week, I started to realize actually, suddenly, I’m still able to run this video game business from a hospital bed with one hand. And if I built it that way, then I wouldn’t have been able to do that. In fact, if I had a physical job, I’d know beyond sick fare and being a financial crisis. And I started to think about 29 years walking around this planet. Never once been grateful for being able to walk and suddenly I’ve got all these people coming showering me. Looking after me, bringing me things. And I’ve not been really that grateful for them either. They’ve been on my journey all this time. And I’ve never really thought that much. And then I was like a grown-up in the Western world by free education, free health care, freedom set for business, numerous different opportunities, through education and work. And all this time. I’ve never been hungry, never not had a roof over my head. And I thought to myself, why should I be sad about losing the ability to walk? In fact, I should be looking to see I’ve got the opportunities to relearn and that’s what I started to do. So after a month in the hospital, I got sent home. I started walking rehab and then went into intensive physio. And my daughter was born not long after. I came out of the hospital, and I was like, by the time she’s walking, I’m going to be walking too. That’s my power of why that’s the reason to get up in those mornings when I’m in agony when my joints are stiff.
To do those exercises, to do long stretches to push on. And I just knew that I had to be resilient and have that proactive mindset, take ownership of this disease and attack it as much as it’s attacking me. And just going through that. And I started to realize, actually, if I can get through this and after 11 months, I was back on my feet. What am I on added? That was a massive moment, because my dad said and once a few weeks after, and I just thought to myself, if I can bring myself from that hospital bed back onto my feet, and I’ve got all this experience through local government, elite spa, all these qualifications, why don’t I use my entrepreneurial spirit to bring something to the world that helps people that helps people who are going through what I’ve gone through and just make workplaces better, a better place to be where people go in and come out as well as they went into the office and that really all started this process of building Essentialise up to deliver coaching for individuals who want to grow as much as the business is growing. And for companies who actually want to start to align with the fact that well employees equal employees who care, employees who work, employees who bring more to the table and actually come into what … and spread that happiness at work. And then when they go home the relationships
Richard Matthews 18:27
Absolutely, and that’s it’s a really fascinating story that covers a lot of ups and downs over the years. So what if you don’t mind my asking what caused the joint lockups that you had to overcome?
Lee Chambers 18:40
So, it was my immune system was attacking the connective tissue inside my joints. So it attacked both my knees, my shoulder, my wrist, and it attacked them so bad, they effectively misplaced the ligaments, the tendons and parts of the joints. They were the size of your American footballs.
Richard Matthews 19:02
And you have all of that sort of I guess cured or fixed at this point in your life?
Lee Chambers 19:08
So, it’s a chronic disease that I live with every day. However, over the past four years, I’ve spent a lot of time optimizing my sleep, my nutrition, my movement, or mindset experimented with all these things to find out exactly what works for me and my condition and what gives me the most energy and the most flexibility with my joints so after years of testing bringing stuff in tech and stuff I experiment in here experiments in there. Finding where the boundaries were finding what energizes me, what I could tolerate, what drains me I’m about to come off medication. And that next week is my last doze and worker my consultant I’ll be controlling it by lifestyle along which is massive, cause I feel if I can go through that journey, and so can other people and if I can do that to come off medication, which is toxic and has been dumping in my immune system all these years, then what can the same a similar process do for someone who’s fit and well. It could propel them like a rocket towards their potential.
Richard Matthews 20:17
That’s an incredible story. And as someone who’s like I’ve just recently got to this point in my business where I have employees and I’ve been thinking through things like how do I make our workplace right and we have a virtual team so they’re all over the country, we don’t come into a central office or anything. And, you know, how do we do things that encourage not just because not just you do good work for me, but that our company and working for our company actually improves your life? Right, improves, helps you achieve your goals and helps you get where you want to go. Because I think we can do both right? We can do good work for our clients and do good work as far as our business and we can improve the lives of our employees.
Improve my life and you know, like, do that together. So it’s definitely something that’s been on top of my mind. And I guess I want to get into a little bit of how you actually do that. And I think the next question will probably be really helpful for that. And that’s, you know, talking about your superpowers, right, we say every superhero has their superpowers is what you do, or what you build, or what you offer this world that really helps solve problems for people. The things you use to slay the world’s villains, so to speak. And the way I’ve been framing this is like if you look at all the things, the skills and stuff that you’ve built over the years, you probably have one skill or one zone of genius, so to speak, that really, you know, energizes the rest, right, your zone of genius, your superpower. What is that for you?
Lee Chambers 21:44
Yeah, so I’d say it’s the superpower of interconnection. So a big thing about my delivery is, I fully appreciate that I could be a master in one area and in isolation know everything there is to know. However, like in life and in business, things are so interconnected, it’s actually more powerful if you step back and look at things across the whole board of levels. So one of the big things that I do is instead of being like Big Pharma and saying, right, we’ve got this one symptom that we want to obliterate, is that’s going to cause 10 side effects. Because the body is such an interconnected system. Is actually a look at business and its processes, and what co well being, and consciousness can be embedded within all those processes. So it then grows organically. So it’s that wide view. And when we’re doing health wellness events, we don’t just go in and say about are they healthy eating this and healthy eating that. We actually say, well, you need to sleep well. And if you sleep well, you’ll eat better. And if you eat better, you’ll move more. And if you move more, you’ll have more clarity of mind. And if you have more clarity of mind, be less anxious. And if you’re less anxious you’ll sleep better. If you sleep better, you’ll feel like exercising more, exercise better, you’ll want to nourish your body with more money. And what you find is just massively interconnected and cyclical. So it’s about actually helping people remove that tunnel vision view of trying to solve one problem, and actually opening a problem up and seeing that has multiple facets in that problem. So, it’s almost like a superhero power would be like a magnifying glass that turns little problems and actually shows a web of solution.
And I think that’s kind of like something that I’ve taken from my own kind of philosophy really, that I’ve done a lot of different qualifications across a lot of different fields. And I’ve decided not to go so deep into one field, that suddenly take the basics for granted. Because as soon as you start taking the basics for granted and look at the really more complex problems. It becomes slightly less actionable for delivery to your everyday person. And as soon as you take those basics for granted you lose that acuity for the fact that the karate master practices basics every day. Every single day is practicing those basics. And it’s the basics and the fundamentals actually drive most of the performance, most of the well being most of the advancement. And when we kind of look at problems becoming more complex, it requires that wider view, the ability to step back in the third person or almost look at it, like you’re an actor and a player. And just realize that nothing, including you, exists in a vacuum, but it’s just one isolated thing that you can look up and solve. Because it’s never the case. everything is interconnected. And in so many ways that is like and it’s my business philosophy to help people realize that the words that use with their employees are met their employees feel a certain way how the values communicate. It will do the same thing. If you don’t act in line with those values, employees will feel that you’re not congruent. And it’s just looking at the so many aspects to as conscious leadership and well being in our organizations. And it’s not as simple as bringing the well being a practitioner in, helps build some awareness goes out again, that’s an isolated approach. It needs to be embedded internally. It needs to be able to grow internally, communities need to be forged. And that helps then if someone comes in externally for the benefits to be amplified. And that really is my superpower. The world’s internet interconnected, we’re interconnected.
Richard Matthews 25:43
Absolutely. So so you’re talking there’s a lot of meat there, but things like you. So if I’m understanding correctly, you’re saying the business like all the things that happen in the business to make profits and to do good things in the world are going to be like On a foundational level, it’s all the basics of like running a good business, right? So having good communication, having good systems and processes, and then you’re saying that to include having employees that are healthy and well and growing, needs to be sort of part of that foundational level of building a solid business.
Lee Chambers 26:18
Yes.
Richard Matthews 26:20
Absolutely.
Lee Chambers 26:23
It’s integrated into all processes. So all the way from marketing, to finance, to human resources, every aspect has to be synergistic. Business is almost like a science. entrepreneurialism in business science. And sometimes it’s a bit like a business dance. We try out so –
Richard Matthews 26:43
Just out of curiosity, then do you have any like a concrete example about how you integrate well being into, for instance, a marketing department.
Lee Chambers 26:55
So again, if you go to the marketing department, and you’re locked in Some of the bigger businesses are quite siloed. So each individual department is quite disconnected from the others. Really, it’s about taking an approach and finding out – Firstly, the top-level managers in that marketing department, because their philosophy is being, you know, press down to the department. So it’s difficult for me to go in and start doing well being with employees. If the managers say for example, quite autocratic, very much telling, the workers what to do, not giving them the capacity and the autonomy, to deliver and be creative themselves, is to just give that blind project, right, get it done. If you need anything, come and speak to me, that doesn’t promote that kind of coaching, developmental style of conscious management that we need to bring for well being to be present because in so many ways in that department The things that bring the initial fundamental level well being our staff feeling, they have the autonomy to make decisions and choices, that they feel that the management inspires a level of half in them for the future, that they can develop and become better themselves, even possibly future leaders. We’ve been wrong, you know, in our own sphere of influence, but also the appreciation for the work that they do. And with those three simple factors, you can then build on top of that. And if you don’t have that, if there’s no trust in the management, if management is almost keeping a hero style approach, where the effectively wants to be the hero that saves the death of the department when things go wrong, are when an employee comes and says, How do you do this? How do you do this? Instead of gradually empowering the plot employees start to work on the wrong solutions. They actually solve it so that they can say look, I said the day and that kind of approach, it suppresses people from being able to regenerate the well being and grow and develop as employees. So, if the management is like that, it really starts with working on the management, on the communication on how they treat their employees, and opening up their eyes to how they can develop the department to work without them having to constantly give out as a march around looking.
Richard Matthews 29:34
So if I’m understanding, right, you’re not talking specifically in that case of like, physical health, you’re talking about like the mental communicative health of the department and learning how to make that have a healthy synergy, right, that’s actually going to lift up the employees.
Lee Chambers 29:53
Because in many ways we can deliver like mental and physical health awareness but the responsibility of the employees if they don’t feel on that best level that they are, have been given the appreciation and autonomy and work while they’re highly unlikely to take the responsibility for their own health and behaviors. Because there’s very little incentive, if they don’t feel valued at work, if they feel valued at work, they start taking responsibility for their own work projects, start taking more responsibility for their own development. And then that bleeds over into when you build in physical and mental health awareness, there starts to take more responsibility for that as well. Because at the end of the day is not an organization’s responsibility to tell people to go to bed at night at a certain time. That’s an employee’s responsibility. And yet the culture of the organization directly impacts and affects how health awareness and health implementation can be input. So, it’s almost like trying to do something with when there’s not the absorbency for it. If people are not in working, in a place that feels congruent. It’s like the leadership saying to the employees, We value your time, we really value you, but then expecting them to work all the time and email in midnight expecting them to with fine. It’s not congruent behavior. It needs to be congruent before you can then build site having dodgy foundations, then trying to build health behaviors on top of those foundations just falls apart. It doesn’t work.
Richard Matthews 31:34
Absolutely. And I really, that’s a fascinating discussion, and I’ve never really heard it discussed that way. Right? Like, the idea that generally it’s that once the employee leaves, they’re not my responsibility anymore. But if I’m hearing you correctly, you’re saying the way that we treat our people at our workplace is going to impact their health outside of the workplace. So we should have a high level of you know care for how what they do at work is going to impact their lives outside of work.
Lee Chambers 32:05
And when you build that kind of culture, employees start caring for each other as well.
Richard Matthews 32:11
Absolutely,
Lee Chambers 32:13
And that amplifies out today, go home happier and care more in their own relationships to driving on the road home. And the more kinds well, the road users, it’s almost like a strange way of spreading happiness across the world.
Richard Matthews 32:28
And it’s a ripple effect. Right? And so, it’s not just the ripple effect of the work that you do as a company but the impact that you have on your employees and that they have on the world. I love it.
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