Yoga was conceived thousands of years ago as a practice designed to clear the mind of distracting thoughts through completion of a series of demanding physical postures held for a few seconds or even minutes. While Yoga by origin is a spiritual practice a by-product of it is better health and fitness. For many people this is the reason they do it. Yet the benefits of Yoga extend to the mental and emotional as well as the physical.
With the increasingly rapid advancement of technology machines and devices are doing increasingly more of the tasks that humans previously had to – many of them better than we could – but for the time being people run businesses and the performance of individuals and teams remains the ultimate determinant of results. Therefore, anything that helps us perform better in all aspects of our lives, not just work, is a good thing. It’s a simple fact that healthier, happier, more relaxed people, able to think clearly and make good decisions are good for business. Not to mention the reduction in lost productivity and associated medical costs caused through poor health and sickness.
In this two-part blog series I’ll share nine ways Yoga will help you perform better individually and in your career and correspondingly benefit your employer. The first four ways which we’ll cover in part I are:
- Balance
- Flexibility
- Integrity and
- Discipline
1. Balance
Balance is an integral part of yoga poses. If you are off balance emotionally then how you respond to what life throws your way is much harder. It’s a bit like trying to reach for a glass from a cabinet while standing on a three-legged stool.
Analogously, for organizations the Balanced Scorecard was developed in recognition that organizations need to focus on more than financial (for profit) or customer (non-profit) goals in order to prevail. Any company that is purely financially focused will not survive in the long term. Sacrificing product quality to maintain margins will eventually lead customers to look elsewhere and competitors to emerge. Pushing employees to deliver more without addressing their job satisfaction is only successful in a down economy. When conditions improve and jobs abound they will surely hop ship.
2. Flexibility
A flexible body leads to a flexible mind as the saying goes. In business we often see the term, agility, described as a desirable characteristic of top-performers. Agility refers to the ability of shift course on a dime and refocus resources rapidly in response to new opportunities or changing conditions. Accordingly, business processes need to be flexible. There needs to be a readiness of available resources that can be diverted. There needs to be a willingness of management to act and there should not be bureaucratic processes that allow individuals to delay changes because the rules permit or require them to do so . So agility depends on process and people but the willingness to be flexible has to be there. As individuals we need to be flexible in the face of inevitable change – to bend with the prevailing winds, adapt to new environments, and accept and embrace change. Without an openness (or flexibility) to change it will not happen easily. We need to follow a path of least resistance and adapt. As Charles Darwin wrote “It is not the strongest of species that survives, nor the most intelligent … it is the one that is the most adaptable to change”.
3. Integrity (honest conduct)
You know (hopefully) whether you possess this quality or not. When you are bent over in Dandayaman-Bibhaktapada-Janushirasana (you can look it up) halfway through a rigorous hot yoga class you can rest up and not put your head on your knee. Assuming you have some moral compass you know whether you are being honest or not.
As individuals or organizations we will eventually pay a price for any lack of integrity. It may not be immediate but sometime, somewhere down the road we will meet the piper. The great tech meltdown of the past decade saw the eventual demise of companies (and their leaders) that lacked integrity.
4. Discipline
It is hard to practice (yoga) day in day out. In the same way it is hard to mediate, exercise, eat well, abstain from temptations and the list goes on. We understand the rewards of a disciplined life but it takes immense effort sometimes, perhaps often. Sometimes you don’t feel like it and the mental effort to drag your body into the studio can seem overwhelming. Yet, you would never regret doing it. If we can make the commitment to follow through and remain dedicated to a task in one area of our lives then we can apply the same discipline in other (work) activities – and see them through.
From: CFO Knowledge