Moving through anxiety to soul work in a pandemic with Dan Murray-Serter
Daniel Murray-Serter is the co-founder of Heights, a supplement company that prides itself on using science to inform the creation of its products. He is also the host of the #1 business podcast, Secret Leaders.
In this blog, Daniel gives insights on becoming a changemaker through techniques such as working with psychologists to help align the values of co-founders and how values are important not just for your company but also for brain care. He also reveals ways to utilise radical candour to achieve company objectives. (Do you prefer to listen? Then, head on to the podcast!)
The values Dan stands for and how it shows up in his life
Sam: What do you stand for in your life?
Dan: First and foremost, it's spirituality. I believe that spirituality is a journey, not a destination, so I'm building on my sense of spirituality every day by being deliberate and leaning in and listening to it. The best way for me to find calm and access my best positive mental health has been through leaning into spirituality.
The second is mental well-being, then compassion, contribution, and impact.
With spirituality, it shows up in life in a way that I spend less time thinking about myself and more time thinking about others. It's definitely challenging, and I have an ego like everyone else. I get tripped up by myself all the time and spend too much time thinking about myself. The deeper the rabbit hole I go, I always notice, the sadder it makes me, and I feel more frustration in my everyday life.
Tapping into spirituality enables me to ask these questions:
Who was really thinking this thought?
Why am I thinking this?
How is it serving me?
Journey of Building Heights
Dan: My journey started with insomnia. So I had terrible insomnia for five and a half months before. It was a period when I was happy so suddenly that not being able to sleep took me by surprise.
So I go to sleep at about midnight, but I wake up at around 2 AM, and I am always wide awake and full of energy that I'm just unable to sleep. I had insomnia for a couple of months when my anxiety started showing up during the day. So I was waking up with hot sweats and getting cold sweats and panic attacks during meetings that I'd have to leave the room. It wasn't a professional way to be, and it was an exhausting and frustrating period of my life.
I kept going because nothing was working. Finally, after five and a half months, a friend recommended that I go and see a dietitian. She also added that if I've tried everything psychologically, I might have a biological problem.
I went to a dietician, and she diagnosed me in about two minutes and prescribed me supplements with Omega-3, blueberry extract, B Vitamin Complex, etc. At first, I was highly sceptical, but I had already tried everything, so I figured I would just go for it.
So within a week of taking the supplements, I was sleeping like a baby. I called up the dietician to tell her what happened, and she explained to me that no one trusts supplements and diet professionals anymore because the supplement industry has destroyed itself by putting out loads of low-quality products that basically are scams.
Motivated by my experience, I started a newsletter where I research one Science paper every week and rewrite them all into plain English. My mission was for people to build trust in the supplements industry again. At first, I wasn't promoting it heavily on social media as I wanted people to get my newsletters the old-fashioned way.
After starting the newsletter, I thought about what kind of product I could make with my co-founder Joel and then I met Dr. Tara Swart. I definitely didn't want to be the person bringing this product into the world because I'm an entrepreneur, and I know my limitations. I had all these great ideas with Joel about how we would do things differently because we know nothing, which is a huge benefit. Being new to the supplements industry led us to ask different questions rather than just copying what everyone was doing.
Techniques to align founder values
Sam: How are you building out the company culture around your values?
Dan: There is obviously a big impact on your personal values and how they manifest at work. However, the values we have in the company are different.
My co-founder Joel and I started a company before Heights. It was quite a big and successful fast-growth company that then imploded, so we worked with some brilliant psychologists where we went through a fairly intense process of unpacking where we went wrong with the last company. We got it all out on the table so we can start afresh.
Then we worked on our personal values by doing psychometric tests, and then we looked at where our values were misaligned. Some of our values are very far apart, while some have completely crossed over. This process helped to make sense to start the values of the company.
We then wrote interview guides based on the values of the people we wanted to work with. In the beginning, we would have a meeting with the foundation team every Friday to discuss the values. We scheduled that meeting because the founding team might have a different idea about what our values should be and what will make us scale, but the only way that we're all going to buy into that is by being a part of the conversation. At this point, we continued to work with psychologists so we could understand why values are important, what they mean for the job, etc.
We redefined our values recently, and they are trust and be trusted, which I think are really great because we are a science-led organisation.
Another value is "go for it", which sounds odd, but that value basically means to just go for things in general. As a company, we embody a growth mindset, so everything that pushes us to grow, we go for it.
The final values are to keep a sense of humour and humility. At Heights, regardless of your job title and expertise, we all do a couple of hours of customer service work. It definitely keeps the humility.
What do values look like in action?
Dan: We work as a team to embed these values into behaviours. For example, with our value "trust and be trusted", we practise radical candour with each other. We make sure that we are all able to handle direct feedback.
Another great example of demonstrating this is we have professional OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) that we are all striving toward every quarter. Then we have personal development objectives where people constantly give feedback to each other. The list of feedback we have becomes a personal development objective for the next quarter.
How to run a company during a pandemic
Dan: We've only run the Heights company during the pandemic, so the way that we've been working has always been the norm for us.
We are big on health and well-being as we are, after all, a wellness company. So we're very conscious of screen time because we know that people don't have the separation of work and office. So we really try to encourage people to do things that break up the working day for them. It can be simple things like taking a walk, reading a few pages from your book or even taking a nap.
So I think for us it is like the little things about trying to make sure that we're encouraging a healthy and well being related workplace. We are a wellness company, after all. So it's super important.
Conclusion
Building, running and scaling a business during the pandemic is no easy feat. However, combining values, healthy habits, and hiring people that align with your mission and vision makes the journey a bit easier and worthwhile.
Are you ready to build better self awareness , self leadership and well-being at work? Head to the link to learn more about our Be Happy First Well-being Programme.