How Ayurvedic Doshas Help to Identify Energy & Stress Levers

Let's continue our series on using personality assessments to navigate change by exploring how Ayurvedic Doshas fit into the mix.

Ayurveda is a system of holistic health and wellness that focuses on balance, drawing its roots from India a few millennia ago. One of its concepts is doshas, which describe the three primary energy types:

• Vata: creative, fast thinking, adaptable, and prone to restlessness or overextension
• Pitta: focused, goal oriented, analytical, and can experience burnout or frustration under pressure
• Kapha: calm, supportive, reliable, and may resist change or struggle to maintain inertia

Each dosha has a set of attributes, characteristics, and preferences that describe the individual. There's also the notion of being out of balance with respect to one or more of the doshas, which can elevate stress.

Similar to the Enneagram discussed in yesterday's newsletter, my intent is not to make you an expert on Ayurveda and doshas, rather to create the link between how a person's energy and stress levers impact change management.

So, if you're curious to learn more about doshas, check out either Kripalu or Banyan, both of which discuss each dosha, how it broadly impacts an individual, and have a free assessment so you can find out what yours are.

By understanding an individual's dosha (including oneself), we're able to better balance how to expend energy on an initiative and deal with stress that results from periods of change.

Let's see how each dosha can express energy and the potential downside:

• Vata has peaks of energy that are often spontaneous and creative, but can lose focus over time
• Pitta can have periods of high energy that thrives in structured or deadline based work, although can easily burn out
• Kapha has steady and reliable energy, but needs help getting started to build momentum

And now, let's see how each dosha can be stressed and how to mitigate it:

• Vata is stressed by overcommitment or chaos, and needs clear boundaries and priorities
• Pitta is stressed by inefficiency or missing deadlines, and needs to see tangible progress throughout change
• Kapha is stressed by being pushed too quickly or being overwhelmed, and needs reassurance and to see a tangible path to achieve change

Both energy and stress are related to motivation and conflict, all of which are necessary and occur as changes are rolled out in an organization.

TLDR: Ayurvedic Doshas offer insights into how an individual experiences energy and stress during times of change change, and understanding them helps for smoother transitions.

As for what comes next in this series:

• Tomorrow, we'll see how the Enneagram and Doshas complement one another to create a composite profile
• On Friday, we're injecting AI to see how it can help improve how you and your team interact using the details from these assessments