Firm fully accredited in world first

Queenstown business MedRecruit, a recruitment agency for doctors, has become the first company in the world to be accredited as a "Healthy Thinking" organisation by New Zealand's Healthy Thinking Institute.

The world leader in emotional management, stress reduction and attitude improvement accredited MedRecruit after the 11 staff met the required criteria: an "average unhealthy emotional index" below 10%, and widespread use of the principles of "emotional algebra".

The company, led by Dr Sam Hazledine, has experienced 857% growth over the past three years, recently being named the fastest-growing service business and the second-fastest growing business overall in the Deloitte Fast 50 Awards.

An active personal development teacher of his MedRecruit team, Dr Hazledine said healthy thinking was vital for any organisation.

"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 ... 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 said.

Dr Hazledine explained the emotional index and the application of emotional algebra.

Unhealthy emotions included anxiety, stress, anger and frustration, he said.

"You have to rate yourself what percentage of the time you're experiencing these emotions. They calculate all of those out on their Healthy Thinking Index."

The Healthy Thinking programme was "really simple", with the emotional algebra equation described as an event triggering a thought, which led to an emotion.

The correct response was to look at the emotion, remove the event and be left with the thought, he said.

"What you do is say, `Is that thought true, is it worth it, is it helping me to achieve what I want?'."

If the answer was no, you replaced the thought with a happy one, to help you achieve your outcome, he said.

An example might be getting home from work and finding your partner angry.

"You might feel all sorts of things ... perhaps angry yourself.

The thought may be, `My partner's angry and they're just trying to wreck my day'.

Is that true? Probably not.

Is the thought worth it? Definitely not ... it doesn't help me achieve my outcome, which is to feel good ... so you replace that thought with a healthy one, like, `They've probably had a tough day'.

"If I'm thinking they've had a tough day, I'm feeling compassionate."

But the Healthy Thinking programme was not just about positive thoughts, he said.

The same scenario could be used in back-country skiing when a person saw a crack in the snow and realised it could trigger an avalanche.

The feeling would be fear, and justified, because the outcome was to stay alive.

"This is really simple and it can be applied really quickly and easily. I thought it would be great to get the whole team [at MedRecruit] on board - our thing is about delivering a world-class [service].

"We've hired people based on [their attitude]. We don't hire negative, grumpy people. It's been a really good thing for us ... it's going to add to what's already a great culture here."

The Healthy Thinking accreditation was awarded by the Healthy Thinking Institute Ltd, which developed the interventions for workplace stress reduction and attitude enhancement and was established in 2006 by Dr Tom Mulholland.

Dr Hazledine said the programme had been done in departments of other businesses, but MedRecruit was the first "full organisation" to be accredited.