How fast is your Recovery Time?

Do you know the #1 difference between star athletes and the runners up?

It’s not strength, speed or agility. It’s not training. It’s not even motivation or how badly they want to win.

What about a Fortune 100 CEO? Do you know their secret to competing in the global marketplace? Hint: it’s not knowledge.

And how about elite sales teams? How do they continually make critical sales while others can’t even get their foot in the door?

The answer?

Their recovery time. The speed in which they rebound from setbacks and mistakes.

If you don’t recover fast enough, your small mistakes or setbacks can spiral into bigger ones. Champions know this.

How fast is your recovery time?

When you experience a setback – a rejection from a prospective client, getting admonished by your boss, losing your cool when talking to your teenager – how long does it take you to recenter yourself, mentally and emotionally?

The answer depends on the strength of your internal saboteurs. They waste a ton of your mental and emotional energy which in turn prolongs your recovery.

How do you train your mind to respond reliably, even in the toughest circumstances? How do you develop the ability to handle adversity with a clear, calm, and laser-focused mindset?

This takes mental fitness.

Mental fitness is the greatest predictor of how happy you are and how well you perform.

People with high mental fitness take fewer sick days than their co-workers and are less likely to become burned-out. Salespeople with high mental fitness sell 37% more than teams with lower relative mental fitness. CEOs with high mental fitness lead teams that are more likely to praise their workplace as a high-performance environment.

Mental fitness leads to lower levels of stress hormones, better immune system function, better sleep and smaller risk of hypertension, diabetes or stroke.

Mental fitness can actually help you live longer!

It is worth exploring, it is worth spending time strengthening the muscles to build yourself up and live mentally fit.

Excerpts from Shirzad Chamine

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New Situations & New Habits

In unfamiliar, high-stakes situations, you’re hard-wired to default to the solutions you’ve relied on in the past. But challenging times are when you need to learn, change, and adapt the most.

Overcoming this “adaptability paradox” is all about acting with intention, creativity, and objectivity. Start by practicing learning agility: learning from experience, experimenting with new tactics, approaching new situations with a growth mindset, seeking feedback, and applying these lessons to new situations in real time. Next, practice emotional regulation: the ability to recognize, understand, and manage your emotions—and to channel them into productive behaviors.

To develop this emotional intelligence, you might keep a diary of moments when you feel emotionally triggered and describe the thoughts and bodily sensations you experienced and actions you took in those situations. Finally, practice dual awareness: consider both the internal circumstances (experiences, thoughts, emotions, and responses) and the external ones (an objective reading of the situation and what it calls for) simultaneously.

By pausing to take stock of both yourself and the situation, you will better understand not only your true feelings, motivations, and intentions, but also what the situation demands—and how your habits and tendencies can serve you in the moment.

Adapted from “How to Become More Adaptable in Challenging Situations,” by Jacqueline Brassey and Aaron De Smet

The Beauty of Imperfection

Below, four simple ways to introduce wabi-sabi at work, at home, in your relationships and in your personal life.

1. Be intentional with self-care

These days, self-care has almost become synonymous with bubble baths, scented candles and face masks. But to do it the wabi-sabi way, set aside time for quiet introspection and immersion in natural environments. A daily meditation practice is a good counter-balance for our busy modern lives. Being out in nature also helps remind ourselves of the impermanence of existence.

2. Create a living space that is in harmony with who you are

With many of us spending a lot more time at home, it’s important to carve out a comfortable living space where we feel happy and are at ease. Whether that’s inviting the outside in with the use of natural light and fresh greenery or ensuring that all electronic devices are kept out of the bedroom, you’ll want your living space to be your sanctuary. One simple way that homeowners make a house feel like a home is by having objects that are meaningful to them and tell a story of who they are.

3. Show up with authenticity

While we are often our truest, most relaxed selves around friends and family, it can be hard to let our guard down at work. Because most workplaces are geared towards optimum performance and productivity, many of us think that we have to hide or at least edit who we are in a professional setting. But that’s not true. To practice wabi-sabi in the workplace is to be able to embrace the messiness of the creative process: to allow yourself (and others) to be imperfect, and to see setbacks not as failures, but as opportunities for growth.

4. Appreciate the mundane

Just as the wabi-sabi aesthetic places value on the rustic and the imperfect, it is also a reminder to cherish the seemingly prosaic moments in our interpersonal relationships. Whether that’s sharing a laugh with your best friend or taking time each day to re-connect with your partner over dinner, there is value in the plain or unremarkable. After all, life is not always about the big “Instagram-worthy” moments, but the many tiny, beautiful moments in between.

Text from Silverkris Magazine

Brain Matters!

Stepping back, evaluating, and reflecting become our only chance of rewiring new neural pathways and reforming patterns. A pause can happen when we reflect on feedback we’ve received, observe someone we admire, or even when we rest and reflect.

It doesn’t just happen automatically. It starts with becoming more self-aware. Only then can we be intentional about where and how we expand our thinking—mastering the balancing act between what appear to be polar opposites, but actually complete us. The good news is we can change our minds—literally. Here are some thoughts:

• Rewiring our reality. When we get good at something, our brains literally become hard-wired. In fact, if someone were to use brain imaging, they’d see the neural pathways that reflect the well-worn habits of how we think and act. Rather than get stuck in a rut, we need to expand our thinking. In fact, the more open our minds become, the more we can develop and tap the capabilities that allow us to make a positive impact. But it takes more than just will and skill. To get to the other side of paralyzing paradoxes we need to shift our mindsets so we can expand and reframe our reality. Then our possibilities become probabilities.
• Compare, contrast—always connect. When we compare and contrast between two opposites—spreadsheet vs. stories, profit vs. people—we’re using a skill set known as critical thinking. From elementary school onward, it became engrained in us—or so our teachers hoped. While critical thinking is important, there’s another way of processing ideas that can open more possibilities: integrative thinking. It’s the opposing muscle that allows us to build integration and congruencies. In other words, it’s not enough to only see the dots, we also have to connect them. It’s a little like playing 3D chess—and, to be honest, it doesn’t come naturally to most people.
• Our tale of two brains. We live largely in a left-brain world—overly focused on our technical skills and caught up in the details. Instead, we need to tap Google Earth and zoom out—and that takes our right brain. Looking at things from 30,000 feet helps us contextualize information. And the bigger the picture we see, the more we can connect and collaborate with others, instead of getting stuck in our own silos. Make no mistake—it’s not that our left brains don’t matter. We need both brains—left and right. By connecting them, we can see farther, wider, and deeper. That’s how we can look up, look out, and leap forward, becoming the best “us”—and bringing others with us.

With all due respect to what we learned in high school, the dreaded compare-and-contrast no longer serves us in these times. The new world is not one or the other—or one versus another—neither for people nor ideas. There’s room for both—and more. Indeed, that’s the real brain game-changer.

Based on a text by Gary Burnison

Comfortable with Incompletion

Excerpts from an interview with Ariana Huffington.

Burnout is one of today’s hottest topics. But for Arianna Huffington, the syndrome that was first officially recognized by the World Health Organization in 2019, has been top-of-mind since she collapsed from burnout 15 years ago. “I literally collapsed, hit my head on my desk, and broke my cheekbone.” The incident inspired nearly a decade of reporting around stress and mental health as founder and CEO of The Huffington Post, before she decided to shift her focus from awareness to action. In 2016, the bestselling author launched Thrive, a behavior-change tech company on a mission to dispel the notion that burnout is an inevitable cost of success.

On Why Downtime Is a Feature, Not a Bug

EAn interview with Ariana Huffingtonor centuries, we have really believed that downtime is a problem… It really goes back to the first Industrial Revolution, when we began revering machines; we began revering software. The goal with both machines and software is to minimize downtime but, for the human operating system, downtime is not a bug, it’s a feature. “Every leader now needs to be able to navigate turbulent, uncertain waters and be able to look around corners and see the icebergs before they hit the Titanic. Be innovative. Be creative. And these are the first qualities that are depleted when you’re exhausted. So, taking care of yourself and taking care of your employees’ well-being is not a nice-to-have. We need to say it as a business imperative.”

On Debunking the Delusion to Always Be On

“I had really bought into the collective delusion that so many of us buy into, or used to, that, in order to succeed, we have to always be on, 24/7 — that we don’t have the luxury of taking care of ourselves.

“We can’t sit here and promise anybody a stress-free existence, unless they want to go chill out under a mango tree. So stress is unavoidable, but cumulative stress is avoidable, and it is cumulative stress that is the problem… The good news is that it takes 60 to 90 seconds to course-correct from stress. Which is kind of amazing, isn’t it? So, we’ve built an entire feature in our platform that addresses that, and it can apply to Chiefs and it can apply to frontline workers.”

On Getting Comfortable With Incompletions

“I’ve learned to delegate, which I think is essential if you are going to be a leader who doesn’t burn out. It requires accepting that maybe it’s not going to be done as 100% as you think you’re doing it, but that’s fine, because it leaves you room to actually zoom out and look at the bigger picture. It’s also been very important for me to get comfortable with incompletions at the end of the day. I’m sure there’s nobody listening who has an end to their working day. I think all of us could stay up all night answering emails, texts, handling things. We need to declare an end to the working day. “The phone is not really a phone, it’s a nuclear weapon — repository of every problem and every project, and we need to separate ourselves from it. And yet 72% of people sleep with their phone on their nightstand or cuddled up with them.”

On Changing Corporate Infrastructure From Within

“Right now, the corporate infrastructure that made it so challenging for women is crumbling, and we see a lot more openness to reinventing the infrastructure, because we see that it hasn’t been working. There’s no question that in the past burnout has disproportionately affected women. Women in highly stressful jobs have higher instances of diabetes, of heart disease, because we are all impacted by stress even more deeply. But that world is changing. It’s not changing as fast as we would like it, but women who choose to stay within the current infrastructure and change it are really doing a tremendous service, not just for themselves, but for so many other women and men coming behind them.”

On Redefining Success

“I love the phase of reinvention. When I decided to leave The Huffington Post to launch Thrive, it was a tough decision because I was leaving a very successful company to follow my passion, to start again. There are no guarantees when you launch a new company, but I felt that this was going to be what was really going to fulfill me.

“So much of our career has to do with climbing the career ladder, getting a higher title, and if these things are no longer fulfilling us and no longer speaking to our soul, then we are really betraying what is true to us, and I think that’s happening a lot… There are many examples where people are no longer seeing their lives in terms of the next step on the career ladder, unless that’s what fulfills them.”

Interview by Claire Oliver

Spotting the Hidden Gems.

Life is full of buried treasures. Chances are, you’re sitting on some right now. Sometimes we have an experience that we don’t understand, but if we look deeply, or wait long enough, a reason for that experience will usually reveal itself. All the events in our lives lead to other events, and all that we have manifested in this present moment is the result of past events and experiences. We cannot easily tease apart the many threads that have been woven together to create our current reality. Experiences that don’t make sense, as well as any that we regret, are just as responsible for the good things in our lives as the experiences we do understand or label as “good.”This is especially important to remember at times when we feel directionless or unsure of what to do. It is often at times like these that we take a job or move to a place without really knowing if it’s the right thing to do. We may ultimately end up leaving the job or the place, but often during that time we will have met someone who becomes an important friend, or we may have an experience that changes us in a profound way. When all the pieces of our life don’t quite make sense, we can remember that there may be some hidden gem of a reason that we are where we are having the experiences we are having. It’s fun to look back on past experiences with an eye to uncovering those gems—the dreadful temporary job in a bland office building that introduced you to the love of your life; the roommate you couldn’t tolerate who gave you a book that changed your life; the time spent living in a city you didn’t like that led you into a deeper relationship with yourself. Remembering these past experiences can restore our faith in the present. Life is full of buried treasures. Chances are, you’re sitting on some right now.   Text from Madisyn Taylor

How well are you managing your Energy?

It’s not how many hours you put in that determines how productive you are, it’s how much energy you’re able to invest during the hours you work. Master this one simple concept, and you’ll not only be more effective, you’ll also be much happier. The challenge is not to get better at managing your time, which is finite, but rather about managing your energy, which you can systematically increase and regularly renew. As human beings, we need four very different sources of energy to operate at our best: physical, emotional, mental and spiritual. None is sufficient by itself, and they all influence one another. Too often, we take our energy for granted. We assume that if there’s more demand, our capacity to meet it will just naturally expand. But if you often find yourself feeling tired or overwhelmed or stressed out, you know that’s not true. The fact is that if we’re not intentionally finding ways to increase and renew our energy, we’re depleting ourselves. If we’re not getting stronger, we’re getting weaker.

At the physical level—the foundation—too many of us treat our bodies as if our health is our birthright. We work too long and too continuously, which takes a toll even if your job is sedentary. And we rest and sleep and work out too little. A new study released several weeks suggested that people who work more than 10 hours a day have a 60 percent higher chance of a heart attack. A different recent study found that people who get up and move frequently during the day have more protection against a range of illnesses. Overwhelming evidence suggests that nearly all of us need at least seven to eight hours of sleep to be fully rested and able to function cognitively at our best. Yet the average American gets less than six and a half hours, and that number continues to diminish. At the emotional level, all our urgent busyness fuels a state of heightened impatience, anxiety and frustration. In physiological terms, it’s called the fight-or-flight response, which serves us well when the threat is life or death. The problem, in fight-or-flight, is that our brains don’t operate as well. We become more reactive and far less capable of thinking logically, imaginatively and long term. Worse yet, the adrenalin-induced rush we get from elevated stress hormones can literally be addictive. At the mental level, the primary form of overload we’re all fighting is information. Technology makes it possible to be connected all the time, but also difficult to ever disconnect. Many of us cope by trying to multitask. We end up splitting our attention between multiple activities, and almost never full engaging in any of them. By practicing fractured focus, we progressively lose the ability to absorb our attention in one thing at a time. Ironically, we’re also less productive when we try to multitask. The researcher David Meyer has shown that when we switch attention midtask to take on another, the time required to finish the first one increases by an average of 25 percent. At the spiritual level, we undervalue the fuel we derive from deeply held values and a clear sense of purpose. When something really matters to us, it becomes a powerful source of energy and direction. Rather than responding reactively to every new demand, purpose serves as a road map for setting our priorities. The good news, we’ve discovered in our work at The Energy Project, is that small, intentional changes can make a very big difference in our lives.

Just for starters, consider these four strategies, one for each of the four energy dimensions: Physical It makes sense that the bigger the demands in our lives, the greater the need for renewal. We do just the opposite. Start taking a break at least every 90 minutes. You can get a lot of renewal by completely disengaging from work even for very short periods of time. Emotional Start paying attention to how you’re feeling, moment to moment. How you feel profoundly influences how you perform. When you notice yourself moving into negative emotions, apply this principle: Whatever you feel compelled to do, don’t. Instead, smile, take a deep breath and wait to act until you’re capable of thinking clearly. Mental Stop trying to multitask. You can’t, efficiently or effectively. Instead, work as much as possible in short, uninterrupted sprints. Focus intensely for no more than 90 minutes, and then take a break. At a minimum, do the most important thing first every day, for at least 60 minutes. Spiritual It’s very easy, under pressure, to do whatever will solve the problem in the moment, without regard for the long-term consequences. Instead, ask yourself this simple question when you have a difficult decision to make: “What’s the right thing to do here?” The more intentionally you make decisions, the better they’ll be. Take just one behavior from the Energy Audit that you’re not currently doing but know you should, and start doing it at a specific time every day for a week. You’ll notice a difference in your life. Is there an area of your life you feel more challenged than others when it comes to personal energy? What are your struggles?

Excerpts from Tony Schwartz

How fast is your Recovery Time?

Do you know the #1 difference between star athletes and the runners up?

It’s not strength, speed or agility. It’s not training. It’s not even motivation or how badly they want to win.

What about a Fortune 100 CEO? Do you know their secret to competing in the global marketplace? Hint: it’s not knowledge.

And how about elite sales teams? How do they continually make critical sales while others can’t even get their foot in the door?

The answer?

Their recovery time. The speed in which they rebound from setbacks and mistakes.

If you don’t recover fast enough, your small mistakes or setbacks can spiral into bigger ones. Champions know this.

How fast is your recovery time?

When you experience a setback – a rejection from a prospective client, getting admonished by your boss, losing your cool when talking to your teenager – how long does it take you to recenter yourself, mentally and emotionally?

The answer depends on the strength of your internal saboteurs. They waste a ton of your mental and emotional energy which in turn prolongs your recovery.

How do you train your mind to respond reliably, even in the toughest circumstances? How do you develop the ability to handle adversity with a clear, calm, and laser-focused mindset?

This takes mental fitness.

Mental fitness is the greatest predictor of how happy you are and how well you perform.

People with high mental fitness take fewer sick days than their co-workers and are less likely to become burned-out. Salespeople with high mental fitness sell 37% more than teams with lower relative mental fitness. CEOs with high mental fitness lead teams that are more likely to praise their workplace as a high-performance environment.

Mental fitness leads to lower levels of stress hormones, better immune system function, better sleep and smaller risk of hypertension, diabetes or stroke.

Mental fitness can actually help you live longer!

It is worth exploring, it is worth spending time strengthening the muscles to build yourself up and live mentally fit.

Excerpts from Shirzad Chamine

Getting Comfortable With Incompletion

An interview with Ariana Huffington

Burnout is one of today’s hottest topics. But for Arianna Huffington, the syndrome that was first officially recognized by the World Health Organization in 2019, has been top-of-mind since she collapsed from burnout 15 years ago. “I literally collapsed, hit my head on my desk, and broke my cheekbone.” The incident inspired nearly a decade of reporting around stress and mental health as founder and CEO of The Huffington Post, before she decided to shift her focus from awareness to action. In 2016, the bestselling author launched Thrive, a behavior-change tech company on a mission to dispel the notion that burnout is an inevitable cost of success.

On Why Downtime Is a Feature, Not a Bug

“If you think of it for decades, for centuries, we have really believed that downtime is a problem… It really goes back to the first Industrial Revolution, when we began revering machines; we began revering software. The goal with both machines and software is to minimize downtime but, for the human operating system, downtime is not a bug, it’s a feature. “Every leader now needs to be able to navigate turbulent, uncertain waters and be able to look around corners and see the icebergs before they hit the Titanic. Be innovative. Be creative. And these are the first qualities that are depleted when you’re exhausted. So, taking care of yourself and taking care of your employees’ well-being is not a nice-to-have. We need to say it as a business imperative.”

On Debunking the Delusion to Always Be On

“I had really bought into the collective delusion that so many of us buy into, or used to, that, in order to succeed, we have to always be on, 24/7 — that we don’t have the luxury of taking care of ourselves.

“We can’t sit here and promise anybody a stress-free existence, unless they want to go chill out under a mango tree. So stress is unavoidable, but cumulative stress is avoidable, and it is cumulative stress that is the problem… The good news is that it takes 60 to 90 seconds to course-correct from stress. Which is kind of amazing, isn’t it? So, we’ve built an entire feature in our platform that addresses that, and it can apply to Chiefs and it can apply to frontline workers.”

On Getting Comfortable With Incompletions

“I’ve learned to delegate, which I think is essential if you are going to be a leader who doesn’t burn out. It requires accepting that maybe it’s not going to be done as 100% as you think you’re doing it, but that’s fine, because it leaves you room to actually zoom out and look at the bigger picture. It’s also been very important for me to get comfortable with incompletions at the end of the day. I’m sure there’s nobody listening who has an end to their working day. I think all of us could stay up all night answering emails, texts, handling things. We need to declare an end to the working day. “The phone is not really a phone, it’s a nuclear weapon — repository of every problem and every project, and we need to separate ourselves from it. And yet 72% of people sleep with their phone on their nightstand or cuddled up with them.”

On Changing Corporate Infrastructure From Within

“Right now, the corporate infrastructure that made it so challenging for women is crumbling, and we see a lot more openness to reinventing the infrastructure, because we see that it hasn’t been working. There’s no question that in the past burnout has disproportionately affected women. Women in highly stressful jobs have higher instances of diabetes, of heart disease, because we are all impacted by stress even more deeply. But that world is changing. It’s not changing as fast as we would like it, but women who choose to stay within the current infrastructure and change it are really doing a tremendous service, not just for themselves, but for so many other women and men coming behind them.”

On Redefining Success

“I love the phase of reinvention. When I decided to leave The Huffington Post to launch Thrive, it was a tough decision because I was leaving a very successful company to follow my passion, to start again. There are no guarantees when you launch a new company, but I felt that this was going to be what was really going to fulfill me.

“So much of our career has to do with climbing the career ladder, getting a higher title, and if these things are no longer fulfilling us and no longer speaking to our soul, then we are really betraying what is true to us, and I think that’s happening a lot… There are many examples where people are no longer seeing their lives in terms of the next step on the career ladder, unless that’s what fulfills them.”

Interview by Claire Oliver

Womanhood.

When a woman honors herself, all women collectively move closer to becoming what they’re truly capable of being.

There are many ways and myriad reasons for women to honor and embrace all that they are. And when any individual woman chooses to do so, all women collectively move closer to becoming what they are truly capable of being. By honoring her experience and being willing to share it with others — both male and female — she teaches as she learns. When she can trust herself and her inner voice, she teaches those around her to trust her as well. Clasping hands with family members and friends, coworkers and strangers in a shared walk through the journey of life, she allows all to see the self-respect she possesses and accepts their respect, too, that is offered through look, word, and deed.

When a woman can look back into her past, doing so without regret and instead seeing only lessons that brought her to her current strength and wisdom, she embraces the fullness of her experience. She helps those around her to build upon the past as she does. And when she chooses to create her desires, she places her power in the present and moves forward with life into the future.

Seeing her own divinity, a woman learns to recognize the divinity in all women. She then can see her body as a temple, appreciating its feminine form and function, regardless of what age or stage of life she finds herself. She can enjoy all that it brings to her experience and appreciate other women and their experiences as well. Rather than seeing other women as competition, she can look around her to see the cycle of life reflected in the beauty of her sisters, reminding her of her own radiance should she ever forget.

She can then celebrate all the many aspects that make her a being worthy of praise, dancing to express the physical, speaking proudly to express her intellect, sharing her emotions, and leading the way with her spiritual guidance. Embracing her womanhood, she reveals the facets that allow her to shine with the beauty and strength of a diamond to illuminate her world.

Text by Daily Om