Stress and unhealthy attitudes are major challenges for businesses, but are virtually a thing of the past for New Zealand’s fastest growing service business.
MedRecruit is a recruitment agency for doctors, led by Dr Sam Hazledine. With 857% growth over the past three years MedRecruit was recently named the fastest growing service business and the second fastest growing business overall in the Deloitte Fast 50 awards. And MedRecruit is now the first company in the world to be accredited as a Healthy Thinking organisation by New Zealand’s Healthy Thinking Institute, a world leader in emotional management, stress reduction and attitude improvement.
“Healthy Thinking is really important to any organisation,” says Dr Hazledine, an enthusiast for the teachings of Tony Robbins, and an active personal development teacher of his MedRecruit team. “I loved Healthy Thinking from the time I was first introduced to it. It’s so simple to understand yet effective, and easy to apply across an organisation with a range of different people. “We also want to make Healthy Thinking available to the doctors we place, to add value to them before they take up their new positions,” he says.
To become an Accredited Healthy Thinking Organisation, the 11 staff of MedRecruit had to exhibit an average unhealthy emotional index below 10%, and to show widespread use of the principles of emotional algebra.
“It’s easy to get buy-in to Healthy Thinking training from staff,” says Dr Sam Hazledine, an Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year finalist, “because Healthy Thinking works in their personal lives and in the workplace maximising their ability to enjoy their lives and to provide a world-class service to our clients.”
The Healthy Thinking accreditation was awarded by Dr Tom Mulholland, founder of The Healthy Thinking Institute, which developed the interventions for workplace stress reduction and attitude enhancement.
After 8 years of hard work The Healthy Thinking Institute’s research and development is paying off and many clients such as Organisational Psychologists and Workplace wellness providers in New Zealand and overseas are now endorsing and distributing the Healthy Thinking program. The latest addition to the group is acclaimed wellness provider Synergy Health which provides wellness training for Southern Cross.
Chaired by Bryan Mogridge, chairman of Rakon and Vice Chairman of UBS, with advisors in Psychology, Psychiatry, Medicine and Education, and conducting research under the eye of the Auckland University Medical School Department of Psychology, The Healthy Thinking Institute is currently servicing clients throughout New Zealand, Australia, Asia and Europe.
Dr Tom Mulholland has given over 500 presentations to companies in New Zealand and globally, working with companies such as Google, Microsoft, HP, Audi, Hilton and Sovereign, and has gathered data on well over 6000 people in terms of their emotions, attitudes and the behavioural consequences that arise from these. For example, we know that 48% of the time people are influenced by other people’s negativity, so it is clear that unhealthy attitudes can be infectious.
Independent evaluation of the Healthy Thinking program by Organisational Psychologists OPRA found that 92% of people found Healthy Thinking very effective or effective at home, no one thought it was not effective. In addition, 75% of people said that Healthy Thinking had created long term behavioural change at work. Of those 100% of them said that they thought the changes would be permanent. This research took place one year after the training had taken place.
“Staff are given the tools to manage their own Emotions. Its like ‘brain surgery without the blood.’ It is so much easier for people to cope with problems if they learn this process before they face life and business stressors,” Dr Mulholland says. “We run an ‘immunisation’ program for the mind which is taking off globally.”
In addition to its face to face and on-line courses, and its Attitude Psychometric test with individualised remediation targets, The Healthy Thinking Institute also works in the government, education and consumer sector.