Well-being as the Foundation of Leadership

In this episode, we revisit a conversation originally recorded in 2019 about wellbeing—and why it remains essential to leadership today. Rather than offering a single definition, we explore wellbeing as something dynamic, personal, and contextual. From physical and relational health to awareness, boundaries, and values, this conversation invites leaders to reflect on how wholeness shapes influence, presence, and culture.

Key Topics Covered:

• Why well-being is foundational to leadership
• Wellbeing as wholeness, not a checklist
• The role of context, values, and personal practices
• Why wellbeing must be practiced—not perfected
• How leaders can start meaningful wellbeing conversations

Reflection Questions:

• What does well-being mean to me in this season?
• When do I experience it most clearly?
• How does my well-being shape my leadership presence?

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Chapters

• 0:00 1_5_26 Well-Being
• 8:57 CLOSING
• 9:46 BrianNathanWellbeing
• 9:52 Personal Practices and Relational Wellbeing

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:53

You're listening to the Leadership Vision Podcast, our show helping you build positive team culture. Our consulting firm has been doing this work for the past 25 years so that leaders are mentally engaged and emotionally healthy. To learn more about what we do, you can click the link in the show notes or visit us on the web at Leadership Vision Consulting.com. Hello everyone, my name is Nathan Freeberg, and as we begin 2026, we wanted to return to a conversation that feels just as relevant today as it did when we first recorded it way back at the end of 2019. And that is the idea of well-being. Now, keep in mind that this episode comes from a very different season. You'll hear names like Carrie, Melissa, and Sarah referenced colleagues who were part of leadership vision during the craziness of 2020. And while they are no longer with the company, they left a meaningful impact. The questions, language, and early experiments around well-being that you'll hear in this conversation were shaped in part by their presence, and that influence still matters. Now, what hasn't changed is our conviction that well-being is foundational to leadership. Over the past six years, Leadership Vision has continued to practice what we're wrestling with in this episode. Those practices have evolved and adapted as our context has changed, but the commitment remains. Brian, Linda, and I have each invested in our own well-being over these past six years in some pretty intentional ways. Working with running and strengths coaches, engaging mindfulness practices, partnering with business and leadership coaches, and building rhythms that support physical, emotional, relational, and cognitive health. Not because that these are just kind of trendy things to do, but because we believe in them and because our leadership demands it. Now, as you'll hear, we don't offer a single definition of well-being, nothing that fits everybody here. Instead, we treat it as something dynamic, contextual, and deeply personal. It looks a little different depending on your season of life, your responsibilities, and the people that you're leading, or living alongside. So as we kick off the new year, our invitation is this let this conversation create some space. Reflect on what well-being means for you right now, and consider how your attention to wholeness, not just performance, might elevate your leadership, your work, and your relationships in 2026. Enjoy.

SPEAKER_01: 3:55

Right. In harmony, in sync. You said something yesterday about homeostasis, that there is a calm, that there is a peace, there's an equilibrium. Well-being involves physical health, well-being involves relational health, emotional health, cognitive health. Right. And it's also a sense of mindfulness and awareness of my sense of well-being, health and wholeness. We have not locked down on one way that we're defining well-being, but I do know that like with Melissa, it's thinking, doing, and feeling. We talk about personal, emotional, and relational, social well-being. Uh yesterday we were exploring things as a team on physical well-being, um, interrelational well-being, and how is it that we can hold each other accountable to well-being? Because well-being could be practices around silence, meditation, physical activity, uh talking with people, reading books, like what do we need to be healthy and whole? Right. So I think that well-being kind of falls into healthy and whole for us right now.

SPEAKER_00: 5:00

And and I appreciate that. Your honesty of saying we haven't quite figured that out, because maybe that's sort of the second part of this journey. Because sometimes, uh maybe almost always, when we're working with a team, the thing that we were brought in to do isn't necessarily the thing that we end up helping them the most with. Because we get in there and realizing, oh, you thought you needed X to make your team better, but you really needed Y or Z or something else. So we think of this idea of well-being, all the stuff that you just mentioned, it's really us figuring out how do how do people, teams, and ultimately the culture, how does it become healthy and whole around a variety of different things?

SPEAKER_01: 5:40

It's one of the things I wanted to say, Nathan, when you were talking is that well-being is also the definition of it is informed by the context within which we're working. Yes. However, there are some elements of well-being that we have begun to introduce no matter what context we're in. It can be ideas like courage, vulnerability, boundaries, integrity, generosity. It can be value-based decisions. It can also be professional best practices of awareness, conversation, mindfulness, focus. And it just depends on the context of which one of those may kind of bubble to the top.

SPEAKER_00: 6:19

Um, but we have found that well-being, wholeness, and health are probably you know some of the as we think about our influence, we think about our capacity for influence, you can't forget about all these other areas of your life if you truly want to have the greatest impact in your in your context.

SPEAKER_01: 6:37

And to show like how much we believe in this, um so we've learned a lot of lessons in the last 18 months as we've begun to explore and expand into this area of our business. We've also committed ourselves to practicing personal and professional well-being as a team. Yes, we have. So, one of the things that Sarah will be leading, and Sarah and Melissa will be partnering together on is to create a content calendar and strategy for all of our staff meetings so that all of our bi-monthly staff meetings involve personal and professional well-being conversations, activities, responsibilities, interactions with other people, so that we know what it means to ask some of the difficult questions, to work through some of the challenges, to understand what some of the unique things others on our team are doing and how to spot those, how to identify those. So we believe that um we aren't just the ones that are to lead the conversation, we're to participate as conversationalists, you know. Um participating members, yes. And and we've committed to that, and we've done some of that uh in the second half of 2019, but it was truly experimental, and now one of our values is to be intentional too. And I feel that this is a time for us to intentionally invest in one another so that we do have that unique inward focus to who we are as professionals wrestling with well-being, so that when we do um express ourselves to the external world that we have the experience and the examples and we've done the hard work ourselves, so we have a much better understanding of what it actually means to pursue well-being. And that's it's it's not static, it's a very dynamic conversation and a very dynamic discipline.

SPEAKER_00: 8:24

And if we think of well-being as wholeness as a very broad definition, what I appreciate about uh one of the conversations from yesterday was just that we're gonna start doing that more internally, even on you know uh how the podcast informs our staff development, how our staff development informs the podcast, informs client meetings and you know, influences proposals, all of these things. I think that's also an example of us practicing some of these ideas that we're uh we're we're teaching and we're helping others figure out. So any final thoughts on this, Brian?

SPEAKER_01: 8:59

Whenever you begin to entertain new ideas like well-being, um, we do have a lot of experience with this. Because when we work with teams, whenever we introduce a topic to the teams that we're working with, we start with a definitional understanding of that topic. We ask them, what does communication mean to you? Because we believe that everyone understands what the the concept is. So with well-being, we would ask, what does well-being mean for you? Let's start with that and remind ourselves that we probably have an an understanding of what well-being is. So, what does it mean to you? And ask someone else, what does well-being mean to them, and just begin to have a conversation around that. And that's actually the beginning of the journey of discovering well-being is having the conversation, what does it mean? When have you and I experienced well-being? Oh man, right now. How so? Well, say more about that. I think that you and I have practices of of well-being where there are things that we do as individuals that contribute to our overall health. And so I think one of the unique things about our relationship is whenever we're together, we run together. And now that's just not about physical well-being, it's about relational well-being and an organizational well-being. So, well-being is an umbrella that encompasses many different aspects, and when we're in relationship, many of us can actually identify what are the elements of well-being in that relationship. And for us, I think it's running, uh, it's friendship, and it's our partnership in the in the company. Because we talk about those three things every time we run. We talk about running, our relationships, and life. And life.

SPEAKER_00: 10:36

Well, and I think we're both the type of people who we love doing things together. So we're not uh the type of people who are necessarily going to go grab to grab a coffee, grab a beer, and sit and talk. It's like, let's go for a run, let's go on a roller coaster, let's like do something together and process. And it's funny, I was uh reflecting on this the other day, too. Is like that's true of all my relationships. That's kind of who I am in all areas of life. So if I think about uh well-being to me, uh relationally means doing something together, having an experience uh with the people I care about to me that strengthens that relationship. And if I'm not doing that, I know there's something wrong.

SPEAKER_01: 11:17

Yep, and part of what we just talked about is what does well-being mean to you? When does that happen? With whom, right, and how.

SPEAKER_00: 11:28

Okay, that's a great starting point for all of us. That's I think that's perfect. As we close out this conversation and begin the year, we wanted to leave you with a few guiding thoughts as you step into the year ahead. First, well-being starts with clarity. Before habits or goals, pause long enough to ask the defining question: what does well-being mean to me in this season? Leadership grows when we name what health and wholeness actually look like, not in theory, but in lived reality. Second, well-being shapes influence. How you care for yourself directly impacts how you show up for others. Leaders who ignore their own well-being, they often pay for it in diminished presence, strained relationships, and reduced capacity over time. Third, well-being is practiced, not perfected. It's not static. It evolves as life evolves. What served you before may need to change, and noticing that is a sign of growth, not failure. So here's our challenge as 2026 begins. Start a conversation. Ask someone you trust what does well-being mean to you right now? Then ask yourself the same question and listen honestly to the answer. Because leadership doesn't begin with action necessarily, it begins with awareness. And when leaders commit to wholeness, they create cultures where people can thrive, not just perform. Thank you for listening to the Leadership Vision Podcast, our show helping you build positive team culture. Here's to a grounded, intentional, and healthy start to the year ahead. We'd appreciate it if you could subscribe wherever you get your podcast or on YouTube. And if you found value in this episode or any of our other material, please send it to someone that you think could benefit from it. My name is Nathan Freeberg, and on behalf of our entire team, thanks for listening.