We spend so much time working that we often forget to take care of ourselves while we work. It makes sense that wellness can often be the last thing on our minds when we’re focusing on paying bills and getting a better job.
However, one of the most important keys to developing workplace wellness is recognizing the joy we can experience right now if we are exposed to the right inspirational quotes.
These 20 workplace wellness quotes will remind you why you need to take care of yourself and inspire you to take action.
This post is all about workplace wellness quotes.
WORKPLACE WELLNESS QUOTES:
1. “Take care of your body. It’s the only place you have to live.” – Jim Rohn
You may get to move to a different house or switch jobs. But, how you care for your body, now, will impact how you can do your job in the future. So, adopt a healthy lifestyle and define what that means for you.
Whether you start journaling for your mental health, working on your physical fitness, or getting better sleep, take care of yourself.
Prioritize your health because no one else will do it for you. Remember that the only way for you to continue doing your job twenty years from now is if you take care of yourself in the moment.
2. “May your choices reflect your hopes, not your fears.” – Nelson Mandela
It’s easy to make decisions based on your fears. In this world, there are a lot of reasons to be terrified. Whether you’re worrying about an existential threat like climate change, or you’re worrying about the source of your next paycheck, you have reason to be afraid.
Unfortunately, when we make decisions based on our fears, we’re creating a world in which those fears are still realistic and valid.
We can’t change our circumstances, cool down the planet, or come into a vast inheritance by changing our decisions. But, we can make decisions to create the world we hope to live in one day.
3. “The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.” – Alice Walker
When we decide we have no power, we’re right. Someone else will take the power we think we don’t have and use it to their advantage. This is especially true when we think of ourselves in the workplace.
Ideally, we’d all work in happy workplace environments where we feel valued and are adequately compensated for the work that we do. Of course, that’s not always the case and this can leave us feeling powerless.
But, remember, that we are never powerless. Even if the only power we believe we possess is the power to get a different job, make friends with our coworkers, or choose to keep coming in and doing high-quality work, that’s still power.
4. “Remember that sometimes not getting what you want is a wonderful stroke of luck.” – Dalai Lama
We often limit ourselves by what we’ve done in the past and what we think we can do in the future. Instead of recognizing that employee wellbeing is based on hope, we forget common sense.
We create our own limits of ourselves and, sometimes, we need an external force to change that. It’s easy to get stuck in our limiting beliefs without realizing it.
So, when an external force, whether that’s a job loss, an abusive supervisor, or a new job opportunity randomly appears, we can see that as a stroke of luck. Luck disrupts our beliefs about ourselves, so we notice how much more we’re capable of than we realize.
5. “Don’t be afraid of hard work. Nothing worthwhile comes easily. Don’t let others discourage you or tell you that you can’t do it.” – Gertrude B. Elion
Remember that no one else knows you as well as you do. They don’t know what you’re capable of and some people in your life may make you believe you’re less capable than you are. Others should never get the chance to define your limits.
They don’t get to define you, especially if they’re discouraging you. If your source of stress in the workplace comes from someone telling you you’re incapable, remind yourself that they don’t get to make that decision for you. Whether you fail or not, let it be your decision.
6. “A healthy attitude is contagious, but don’t wait to catch it from others. Be a carrier.” – Tom Stoppard
One secret of health is a positive outlook. It takes time and effort to develop a positive mindset, especially when you are a “carrier.” You must train your brain to think more positively by focusing on the positive thoughts and emotions you experience daily.
It’s important to develop this mindset to help you handle work-related stress. If everything else in the world appears to suck and you feel like you’ve been experiencing difficult times for a while now, it’s going to be hard to manage that extra bit of stress from work.
7. “Let me fall if I must fall. The one I become will catch me.” – Sheryl Sandberg
Define who you want to be and give yourself the time to get there. There’s this wild idea out there that you have to know who you are and stick to that person for life. You’ll never know who you will be in five years, but you can make decisions that influence that person.
The bravest action anyone can take is to choose who they want to be and fail until they get there. Most people will go their entire lives letting their circumstances change them instead of acting deliberately to change themselves.
8. “The most difficult thing is the decision to act, the rest is merely tenacity.” – Amelia Earhart
Sometimes, the hardest step is the first one. You can talk about doing your best work and how you plan on creating this life-changing business that will enable you to work for yourself.
Or maybe you want to run a marathon, in the spirit of a healthy body and therefore a healthy, sound mind.
The easy way of accomplishing these tasks is to talk about them forever and never actually take steps to do them. The harder way is to do the work, get uncomfortable, and stick to your passion until you get somewhere with it.
9. “Continuous effort – not strength or intelligence – is the key to unlocking our potential.” – Winston Churchill
If you’ve ever been told you’re not smart enough or talented enough to achieve something, that may be true. Maybe you didn’t ace your computer science final exam, so your professor told you you’d never amount to anything.
This is not true. It’s entirely possible to not be enough because there’s no way to be everything to everyone. So, first of all, ignore how other people think of you and stop putting energy into trying to control that.
Second of all, you are capable of anything that you are dedicated to. Put the work in and come back time and time again no matter what, and that effort will probably be enough to make it possible.
10. “Good health is a duty to yourself, to your contemporaries, to your inheritors, to the progress of the world.” – Gwendolyn Brooks
You deserve to take yourself and value your health. This means you value your physical health as well as your mental wellbeing because it all plays a role in your ability to join a healthy workforce and put in the work day after day.
It’s easy to burn out and lose track of your healthy habits. So, prioritize those healthy habits now to get health benefits later.
Take care of yourself and make it a goal to value yourself as much as value your work and productivity. As Brooks said, you’re not just doing this for you. You’re doing this for everyone else in your life too.
11. “I learned how to be a learner. When you get in a job, the tendency is to say, ‘I’ve got to know it. I’ve got to give direction to others. I’m in this job because I’m better and smarter.’ I always took a different view, that the key was to identify the people who really knew and learn from them.” – Anne M. Mulcahy
One of the most important skills you can develop is learning how to learn. It doesn’t take humility so much as it takes curiosity to learn. This means entering a workplace to improve despite the amount of failure that comes with that.
When you think of working from this perspective, you start to realize how much joy you can get from learning something new.
You can start from scratch, using your natural strengths, and end up with a skill set you could never have attained on your own. This is possible only if you accept help and recognize that you can achieve so much more by working with others instead of competing against them.
12. “Things don’t have to change the world to be important.” – Steve Jobs
Small stuff matters too. Sometimes, it’s the small stuff that matters more than the big stuff because the small steps build up. You can’t start with the internet from scratch.
Instead, you start with the need to connect people who live in different places, develop mail as a technology, and work from there.
When you think about ways to innovate in the workplace and outside of the workplace, you can’t start from a place of beating yourself up. You can be your own main obstacle when it comes to entertaining new ideas and trying something new.
13. “In every job that must be done, there is an element of fun. You find the fun, and snap, the job’s a game!” – Mary Poppins
Look for the fun in your job. Some days, you will think there is absolutely zero fun present. Maybe you’re giving a presentation and you hate to talk in front of people. Or you have to deal with more customers than you usually do and you hate that.
These are fair issues that you have to acknowledge to do your job. You can’t fake your way to liking something and you shouldn’t have to. This is why the best thing to do in this scenario is look for the fun. Identify the part of your job or project that you enjoy and lean into that.
14. “Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or the present are certain to miss the future.” – John F. Kennedy
Expect change because it’s going to happen whether you want it to or not. While this is not the most fun step in centering workplace wellness, it’s one of the most important. Prepare yourself mentally for the fact that your job will change.
Your coworkers will leave, get fired, and be replaced. No matter how happy you are in your safe environment, you have to expect change to happen.
The more comfortable you are, the more you need to recognize that change is okay. It may hurt for a little while, but, in reality, it’s a good thing that will help you in ways you don’t expect.
15. “The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.” – Ernest Hemingway
Get to know the people at work. You can’t think about workplace wellbeing without thinking about your team members and the relationships you have with them. Sometimes, the only thing that makes a job worth keeping is the people around you.
Maybe your supervisor is mean or absent and the only connection you get is your coworkers. Take the plunge and befriend the people at work so that you have allies. When you’re having a bad day, the best way to get through it is to experience human connection, so give it a try.
16. “If a cluttered desk signs a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk a sign?” – Albert Einstein
Whether you’re on team empty desk or team cluttered desk, there’s a takeaway for everyone behind this quote from Einstein. You might be a creative person who often forgets to clean up your desk and can’t remember where just about anything is in your office.
Or maybe you’re a business owner who needs everything to be organized and for you to stay comfortable and in control.
Both of these workers can contribute to a culture of wellness within the workplace, but neither of them can do that if they don’t recognize what type of person they are. Notice what safety and good business mean to you so that you can develop the type of workplace that works for you.
17. “We are all born ignorant, but one must work hard to remain stupid.” – Benjamin Franklin
We can debate whether we’re born ignorant all day long. But, we can likely agree that it takes work to remain stupid. In this case, stupid means that you aren’t aware of the world around you.
You don’t make any effort to learn or enrich yourself, which is virtually impossible. In the age of social media, it’s almost impossible to avoid learning something new daily.
Whether you are gleaning new information or learning a new skill, you are taking in new information constantly. It’s okay to set boundaries for your health, but it’s not okay to shut it out entirely.
18. “The ability to be in the present moment is a major component of mental wellness.” – Abraham Maslow
Be present. You won’t succeed at being present all the time because it’s harder now than ever to make that happen. It’s difficult to stay present when we’re taught to plan for the future or obsess or past mistakes.
So, it’s fair to say that you can’t be present constantly though that should be a goal of yours. Mental health, as pertains to both the workplace and your personal life, is characterized by how much time we spend in our thoughts as opposed to reality.
Sometimes, reality is the cause of our desire to escape, but it never benefits us to focus so much on our past or future that we forget to be present now.
19. “It is health that is real wealth and not pieces of gold and silver.” – Mahatma Gandhi
At a certain point, we’ve lost our health. If we push ourselves to burnout constantly and refuse to care for our minds and bodies, we’re setting ourselves up for failure. When it’s all said and done, we need to protect our health because it’s the only thing we can’t afford to lose.
If we lose money, prestige, or our careers, it’s possible to get that stuff back in time. But, when we lose our health, whether we lose a healthy mind or body, we can’t always work to get it back. So, we need to nourish our minds and bodies and appreciate them for what they are.
20. “The best way to predict the future is to create it.” – Peter Drucker
Rather than spending time debating what your future will look like, create it. Identify your goals and formulate steps to get you there. It may not always work out and you may not reach your goals every time.
But, you’re a lot more likely to get where you’re going if you know where you’re going. You may not have a good job that you like and pays you well.
Or you may want a boss that trusts you and challenges you. Whatever it is that you want and don’t have, remember that you have power over your future more than most people let you believe.
