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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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

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

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

Slowing Down vs Rushing Through Life.

Our lives are guided by natural rhythms that are particular to each of us and cannot be altered by force of will alone. Life itself is a journey made up of processes and events that manifest before us only to be swept away when time marches on. Whether we envision ourselves creating a career, building a family, or developing the self, we instinctively know when the time has come for us to realize our dreams because all that is involved comes together harmoniously. When the time is right, the passage of destiny cannot be blocked. Yet as desperate as we are to touch these beautiful futures we have imagined, we cannot grow if we are not fully present in the evolutionary experience.

The present can be challenging, uncomfortable, and tedious, but life unfolds as it will, and the universe will wait patiently as we make our way into the unknown.

The fate that awaits us is not dependent on our pace, so there is no reason to rush through life to reach those pinnacles of success associated with the paths we have chosen. Enjoying and fully experiencing the journey of life is as important as achieving goals and reaching milestones. There are lessons we can learn during the moments that seem insignificant that we cannot learn at any other time.

However, appreciating these takes patience because human beings tend to focus on the fulfillment of expectations, rather than the simple joys of being. Like many people, you have no doubt longed for the ability to fast forward through certain periods of your life. Yet haste is, by its very nature, vastly more stressful than serene fortitude. When you feel yourself growing impatient because the pace of your development is deceptively slow, remember everything that will occur in your life will occur in its own time.

Quelling your urge to rush will enable you to witness yourself learning, changing, and becoming stronger. There is so much to see and do in between the events that we deem definitive.

If you are patient enough to take pleasure in your life’s unfolding, the journey from one pinnacle to the next will seem to take no time at all.

Text from Daily Om.