BCBusiness

(TOP) COURTESY OF LiFE dELiCiOUS FEBRUARY 2016 BCBusiness 15 Clogged Arteries N u m e r o l o g y by Melissa Edwards wellneSS anD The BoTTom line and has included mindfulness as part of her executive retreats. In her opinion, the increasing connection to well-being beyond exercise and diet is helping to epitomize a new style of leader. "It's now a key pillar of success," she says. " CEOs are seeing the link between physical and men- tal education and being more present and eŽective as a leader." Catherine Roscoe Barr, who runs the wellness education group Life Delicious (and contributes to BCBusiness), agrees. She calls on her back- ground in neuroscience to teach why a healthy mind and body boost work productivity. Her urban wellness retreats in Chinatown cite academic studies showing how "happy employees" have on average 31 per cent higher productivity, 37 per cent higher sales and triple the creativity. "Executives often veer away from wellness information that's too 'woo-woo' or hippie-ish but appreciate the ben- e„ts of evidence-based science," says Roscoe Barr, who has lectured at Hootsuite. "They want to understand how their thoughts and actions aŽect brain chemistry, like the release of neu- rotransmitters serotonin, which boosts mood, and dopamine, which helps motivation—and how that translates to reduced stress and improved productivity." She advocates walking meetings or doing a few squats during a phone call. And being time-crunched is no excuse. Taking a deep breath will "elicit the relaxation response" by activating the parasympathetic nervous system, she says. "The body whispers to us about what it needs. We just have to listen before the screaming stage." +38,000 Mind the Work Catherine Roscoe Barr teaching her wellness education group Life Delicious Number of times each year a person is left standing by full buses on the Broadway corridor Estimated daily ridership of a proposed underground Broadway transit line by 2041 increase in Metro Vancouver's transit ridership between 2004 and 2014 500,000 320,000 In 2010, 3.7‚million adults—one in four Canadian work- ers—described most days as "quite a bit" or "extremely" stressful Lost productivity accounts for about a third of the $51-billion yearly cost of mental illness in Canada Canadian companies lose 14% of their net annual prots and up to $16 billion every year through mental health disorders 1/3 14% That's the Lower Mainland's approximate population increase—more people shop- ping, working and trying to get around—since the mayors released their plan one year ago for relieving an already-choked transit system. With that funding killed in 2015's referendum, many hope the resulting "no Plan B" deadlock will be shifted by PM Trudeau's promised $5-billion infrastructure spend in the upcoming federal budget. But even that only echoes the previous government's Building Canada funding, and with an authority chain that prevents the feds from dealing directly with cities, Trudeau is unlikely to "ride in on a white horse and solve all Vancouver's transit problems," says David Moscrop, a political science researcher at UBC. "The cities belong to the province, and the province gets testy if they think the federal government is overstepping constitutional boundaries." But, says Moscrop, Trudeau's early reputation as an honest broker may at least bring city and province back to the table. "Tone matters, and political capital matters. It's a huge opportunity to get stuŽ done." 50%

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