How does connection contribute to your health and wellbeing? Exercise and medical scientist Pete Williams champions the functional medicine approach to making individuals more healthy. Listen in as he shares how wellbeing, network medicine, and connection relate to inspirational leadership.
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Topics Discussed in this Episode:


What is network medicine


The infectious nature of obesity


Social genomics


What happens when the brain is wired for more and more stressful environments


Why we’re in the Catch-22 of how we’re trying to change humans


What the future looks like for organisations in terms of how they look after employees’ health and wellbeing


What it means to say that humans are holobians


Why connection is so important



Key Takeaways:


Obesity is a disease and a disorder that has an infectious nature to it. From a network medicine perspective, humans can become “infected” in the sense that if you have a friend who is overweight, by the simple nature of that relationship, you’re 152% more likely to become overweight over time.


We all have these multiple networks that influence our health either positively or negatively.


Social genomics is the field of research that looks at how our friends, family, colleagues, and organisations have a huge influence on how we exist, including whether or not we’re going to be healthy.


The human body’s number one job every day is to look around the environment using its senses and say, “Am I safe in this situation?” This is driven by the stress hormone, so this is why we always have a problem with stress.


Studies have shown that empathy from someone else has huge implications not only in a person’s stress response but also on their biochemistry.


It has been proven that if you opt into a well-designed strategy from a wellness perspective, the ROI returns are huge.


The human DNA is wired for connection, and this is why connection matters on a fundamental biological basis. What connection does is it takes you from a stress response into a relaxation response.


The more you can connect with your employees, the more work they will choose to do for you. If you can build the right tribe, they will pay you back in buckets.


The more tech you’re exposed to, the more touch you need to engage in your life.


You must have the ability to have sanctuary daily. If you’re in a stressful environment at work, you need to have that connection outside of work.



Action Steps:


Organisations ought to make work less stressful and more empathetic.


Organisations should understand that health encompasses a lot of different strata and a lot of different networks that are all interconnected.


Organisations should bring in people who can give them the bigger picture a little bit more.


Have a look at the level of connection and the depth of connection that you have in your life. Do you have a good network of friends and family, and people who motivate and inspire you? Are you connected to nature and your passions and hobbies?



Pete said:
“With corporate organisations, they need to be moving into the understanding of how we’re influencing our colleagues and our workers… we’re starting to find these more and more intricate networks that humans exist for, and we need to understand those in a little bit more detail.”
“System networks of how humans exist is not dissimilar to how companies exist. I see companies as living, breathing entities from the point of view of they have a life span and a life cycle."

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