Risky business: What does mental health in the Olympics have to do with my workplace?
This is part of WERKIN’s series, “Leaps x Bounds”, profiling change and change-makers. WERKIN Ambassador Shalini Chudasama considers what we have to learn from role models prioritizing mental health and how to change structures to better support our mental health.
Olympians are just like us
Good athletes win. Great athletes set records. Exceptional athletes change the game. Simone Biles changes the Olympics altogether. After the “2020” (2021?), Tokyo Olympics when Biles pulled out of her gymnastics events due to mental health concerns, it was a widely publicized decision. Regardless of whether people agreed, they know what she did and why she did it. She used her platform to speak about mental health, and how in gymnastics, not being 100% could mean the difference between life or death (or paralysis). Now, at the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, there has been an avalanche (pun intended) of athletes opening up about their mental health. Many of these events involve similarly death-defying stunts, and it’s as if Biles and other trailblazers, like Naomi Osaka, have cleared the way for other athletes to follow suit. It’s easy as a spectator to expect someone to bring home the gold – after all, if they’ve done it before. However, athletes are still human and pressure and stress impacts their performance, just like us.
Mental health impacts workers too
In the same way Biles created an opportunity for a larger conversation on mental health in sports, the pandemic created that opportunity at work. If larger corporations offered meditation classes or services 5 years ago, they would have been ridiculed or their employees considered ‘soft’. Yet now, companies are organizing roundtables, consortiums, and building out their mental health and wellbeing offerings. While for many of us, stress doesn’t mean the difference between life or death, it takes a toll on the body. We might not be in a competitive arena, but our body ‘keeps score’, and stress is shown to shorten our lifespan. Taking proactive measures to invest in and grow our own capacity when it comes to mental health allows for happier and healthier minds, bodies, and relationships in and outside the workplace.
Companies need to walk the talk
Simone Biles and Naomi Osaka specifically took huge risks by pulling out of competition – not just for themselves and their reputation, but their careers, lucrative sponsorship deals, and more. So much of the onus of mental health is on the individual to take a risk – asking for help, inquiring about employee assistance programs, or requesting time off. The risk feels quite unbalanced between the individual and what organizations or institutions are doing. While companies might parade around with their suite of mental heath and wellbeing ‘perks’, few are fundamentally rethinking how they do business to avoid these issues of burnout and stress in the first place.
Not to mention, the people disproportionately impacted by mental health concerns tend to be the underrepresented groups – women, racial and ethnic minorities. This is for a variety of reasons, such as all the extra effort that members of these groups have to expend in the workplace to ‘cover’ or hide parts of themselves. It’s no coincidence that two of the most vocal women on this issue, at least in athletics, have been Black women. As if they don’t have enough on their plate, society can’t expect them to sound the alarm on this topic too.
What next?
Taking risks is a form of making a tradeoff. As you think about how you can create larger change on this topic – such as changing systems and structures in your organization – weigh that against the types of privilege you hold, be it your level of seniority, your identity, or your ability to influence. If you can’t be the role model who speaks out, you can be the person who celebrates and thanks people who do for paving the way. In whatever way you can and are willing, push your organization to redefine what success looks like and help chart a path to get there.
Organizations won’t just wake up one day and decide to do things differently – the good and the bad news is that organizations are made up of people. People can choose to treat and approach these challenges of mental health differently, but that requires everyone, not just athletes, to step up to the plate.
