Brain, Body and Buess

As you go about your day, how grounded do you feel? If there are times when you meet with negative opinions you may feel a little 'off balance' when responding.

Our bodies hold our truth in many ways. All our thoughts are encompassed in our nervous system and reciprocally feed our body. Our neural pathways activate not only our brain but also the automatic and conscious aspects of our body functions and composure. When you are uncomfortable dealing with negative thoughts from others, your body tells your truth.

Your posture, stance, breath and flexibility are all affected. Gaining an awareness of this is key to making adjustments and clearing your thoughts.

Imagine yourself 'reeling' from an altercation in your office. You may feel on the back foot, off balance, defeated or confused. Your posture is likely to be slumped, round shouldered and you sense being less grounded. Take a mental check of where your body is from your head to your feet, notice your heart beat and where your breath sits.

Being aware of your body sensations will help you realise these times of stress or challenge. Notice your breath, your shoulders and how you stand.

By taking a full deep breath, your shoulders will become less rounded and your neck and body lengthen. Use your knees, hips and feet to become more grounded. Ask yourself the question of how this new posture makes you feel and what you now believe to be possible.

This new stance will support clearer and more level thinking and provide renewed confidence. At first, the changes may feel a little strange. In time, they will begin to feel normal and you will notice a lessening of tension in your shoulders.

Changing the way you think is never easy.

Being aware of your body balance and it's sensation is the first step in making a change. As you become more aware, you will begin to remind yourself to do a self check as you notice body discomfort. Your adjustments will change your thinking and support your respond ability. These simple action steps the pathway to enabling you to take morel control over your thoughts.

Much like an athlete stretches and gets their head in the game before they compete, you too can benefit from doing a physical body check before your next big meeting and make some adjustments.

How often do you catch yourself saying or doing things that you don't like? Maybe you continually get a response from others that result in a communication breakdown. On the pathway to change, the first thing is to notice what you can change!

If there is an area of your life that doesn't sit well, then just take notice.

Getting too busy in life stops us from taking notice because we rely on our habits to help us function at a higher speed. We can often think of habits as a bad thing because of their association with gambling, smoking or eating. Habits help us in many ways.

Habits create highways in our brain maps that enable us to do many things automatically over time, relieving mental effort. Our habits stem from a need or desire to do something - our cue. The next step is to establish a routine for doing it and the final step is the reward. During this phase of learning we build a skill or action and can make choices that enables us to form the habit. The aim is to get the reward.

Typically we may not put a lot of planning into creating many habits, it simply becomes what we do. In fact, it becomes more to the point where we are no longer conscious of our choices.

In our day, many habits have been created from rewards. Checking messages, food choices and procrastination to name a few. If these habits are not serving you well, slow down and take a short detour off your highway. This will help your brain to begin a new map. Over time, new maps form new highways. With all major road networks, they take time and energy to build.

So next time you find a habit that no longer serves you well, it is time to take notice.

I earned my Master of Business Adversity on the job, like many business owners.

In your business, you may think that if your people worked like a team, maybe things would be better. Do you see or hear about things your people are doing and don't like? Do you have problems addressing it? Often when you are caught up in the day to day running of the business it can be hard to address these situations and dealing with the emotion of the situation.

One of the nuggets I used to help remove some emotion from my thinking was to ask "what is best for the business?" When too much emotion is at play, the brain finds it harder to think logically. Also constant stress on the nervous system can have a significant impact on your health.

This thinking helped me remove a large part of the emotions that were at stake and made me able to consider each situation with a much higher level of clarity and logic. It also enabled me to address any individuals on a behavior based approach and be much more objective. Whilst it is difficult to remove all risk of emotional heartbreak when delivering feedback, creating an open and growth minded environment is key. Self leadership is the pathway.

If you are in a cycle of frustration around different things in your business, consider what you are ignoring and what is at stake. The stress is likely affecting other people on your team who may feel even more powerless to change things.

'It takes one bad apple to spoil the bunch'.... If you have a team member that is a poor performer, has lack lustre performance or is constantly late, what are the signals that you are sending to the rest of your team?

Being clear in the values of yourself and your business and what is best for the long term vision will help you gain some of the clarity about how you deal with these situations.

Most people fall into small business with little or no formal training on how to manage people and finances. After many years 'on the job' I still don't always get it right, earning a Master of Business Adversity has been the biggest challenge of my life.

Get clear on what you want from life, your business and your team. Some initial hurdles will be well worth jumping over for the long term gains. Learning to lead yourself more effectively, will naturally have a flow on effect with your business and your life

As with any destination we seek, we require a map or plan as to how to get us there. Simplistically speaking, we may want to travel to the next neighboring town. Whilst there are a few variables, you will already have a pretty good plan of how to get there. Your variables could include how much time it will take, your mode of transport, stops you may want to make on the way and if you prefer the direct or the scenic route.

When you are considering this, you probably think that you made little or no decisions because you know automatically how you would do that.

As we move through life, our personal road map can become unclear due to pressures of convenience or performance that lend us to seek the path of least resistance and slowly, our once clear map becomes a little muddy. As our road map gets muddy, our decision making ability can become less clear leading to procrastination, avoidance or making hasty decisions.

Symptoms of a muddy map include:

• internal struggle around being stuck at work when you know your family is expecting you home

• rushing to meet a deadline and sending in a report that you feel is substandard

• running late but you couldn't resist doing one more thing before you ran out the door.

Repeated over and over these become uncomfortable habits. All these things create mental garbage and a muddy map.

Day to day, you could be operating on auto pilot with little thought about different choices. Habits become ingrained and harder to change. These seeming short cuts can lead you to lose clarity on your guiding principles and leave you feeling unsatisfied and restless.

So if you are looking to get a clearer map and experience less inner turmoil , get in tune with your values.

What are values and why are they important?

Values are the things you deem to be important to you in your work and your life. They help determine your priorities and give your life direction. When considering your values, you will want to be 100% honest with yourself and there are no right or wrong answers. It is best to think are these the principles you want to continue to live by? Deep down they will help you measure if your life is working the way you want it to.

If you would like guidance in cleaning your muddy map, Vivien Hudson can help you regain direction in your life.

Next time you stop at a restaurant, cafe, wait in line or are on public transport, do some people watching and see what their bodies are saying. 

Notice people who seem older than their years. People who are in their 40s, 50s and older. Their bodies have had many years of 'holding' themselves in a certain way. Maybe their shoulders are high and hunched over slightly, perhaps their chest is puffed out.

If your body has endured years of dealing with your fight and flight response otherwise known as stress, chances are your body will show it. When your body is in this mode, your shoulders raise up and hold tension. This response was to make you look bigger in case of attack to frighten your threat away. This instinctive response was necessary years ago when there were woolly mammoths to hunt. 

Nowadays this same response can come from just thinking about deadlines, stress of daily life and time pressures. Not from becoming prey to a sabre tooth tiger.

The end result is shoulder and neck tension and a stiffening of movement in the head and shoulders. This can affect your posture and breath. It becomes difficult to breathe deeply as the air catches in your upper chest.

So whilst you are people watching, notice what your body is saying. Where are your shoulders? Take a deep breath down into your belly and let your shoulders drop down. Think of a string in the top of your head, like a puppet, pulling you up and let your body 'fall' this way.

When you experience tension in your shoulders and find them raised up around your ears, reflect on what 'threats' are occurring and consider if it is that sabre tooth tiger. Do a body check now, become that puppet on a string and sense how you feel your tension ease, how much smoother your breath is and how much straighter you stand. Now what is your body saying?

 If you would like to learn more about how you can use your body to change your life, contact Brain, Body and Business to find out more.

Before we can begin to master change, we need to look into what the current benefits of not changing are. If you are stuck in a rut of running your business a certain way you may be avoiding a bigger issue that you see as too difficult to overcome. Issues may include confrontation, lack of resources or fears around success or failure. This could be known as the elephant in the room.

The short term comforts of not changing can lay foundation to long term pains. When you have a team, changing the status quo can be fraught with uncertainty. Your organisational culture is key to how this can all roll.

Often thinking through the aspects and impacts of change can help us take a closer look at ourselves, if you are willing to take a hard look at the reality. If the benefit of not changing in your business is building a short term wall of comfort it might be time to take the bull by the horns and face change.

The most defining moments I have had in my business life were when I confronted the reality, acknowledged the impact of the current situation long term and took action. These are also the moments I reflect back on where I challenged my comfort zone and created new possibility.

If you feel stuck or uncertain about how to change then contact Vivien Hudson on how to begin.

As a business owner or manager you could well be excused for feeling like you were stuck on a treadmill that wasn't looking like it was going to stop anytime soon. Applying change in business or in your life is challenging when you can't see how to slow down.

Change is rapidly becoming a constant in business today. Additional layers of compliance, technology, changing markets, staffing and profitability all require attention for change.

Delaying attention to these areas can lead to hasty decisions, poor implementation, confusion and increased costs. The personal costs can be increased stress, burnout, poor health, nutrition and disconnect.

It can be easy to discount personal costs by kidding ourselves into thinking there is time to get fit, eat better, connect with family later and take things for granted. These costs can be hard to measure.

What would it take to slow down? How would you and your business benefit?

Don't wait till the pain of change is worse than the pain of not changing to do something.

Look out for the next post .. Short term pain for long term gain.

If you are feeling overwhelmed or stuck, contact Vivien Hudson to see how you can change.