Along with reading and putting into practice all the positive advice we can find on business success, we also continually look for out of the box solutions to some problems that impact our business success.
Definition of Terms
In this article, we consider business success to be in a business we own or in a business we work for. We might see business success as continually expanding the business or in working our way up the corporate ladder. The key here is to define clearly what we want from our careers or our business. An often overlooked aspect of what we want from our businesses or careers is the importance of achieving and maintaining excellent health toward achieving those goals.
Health and Success
Everyone knows that we have to “take care of ourselves.” This is true for everything we want to get out of life, and it is also vital for business success. However, many people underestimate the importance of good health in business and how to go about achieving it. In short, the kind of good health we seek for success in our chosen professions is far more than an hour a week in the gym and cutting down on fried food.
Mental and Physical Health
In the West, we used to talk about the dichotomy of the physical and the mental. This concept has always been foreign to people from the East. In the last fifty years, many people in the West are looking at health as a synergistic relationship between the mental and the physical and, in typical Western style, we have developed a word to express this approach: holistic.
So, the modern approach to optimal health is to see it as a holistic combination between things that are primarily but not entirely physical and things that are primarily but not entirely mental.
Games
One of the most important new ideas is the importance of games in producing both good mental health and good physical health. Gameplay can be anything from playing online casino games to working out complex logic problems. Games have been shown to be a form of both mental and physical exercise. Where we once thought of someone who played mere games in the afternoon as wasting his or her time, we now know that playing games contributes directly to good health. Games combat the natural deterioration of brain cells that often results in such conditions as dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.
Listening to Music
Most people who spend an hour on the treadmill say that they couldn’t possibly get through time without music. What they don’t usually realize is that music is as important to the success of the workout as the sweat and strain. Relaxing with music that uplifts our mood and our mind is a vital part of staying fit. It doesn’t matter if the music is “essentially” happy or sad; what matters is that you as an individual find it uplifting. So, some people will groove on rap music while others will listen to more mellow, folksy music. The key element is to recognize that music is important to our overall health and our overall health is important to our professional success.
Singing along to the most uplifting music also relieves a lot of stress. We can sing even when we aren’t listening to music and we can sing in our heads when singing out loud would be inappropriate. Singing has long been a staple of many church and synagogue services and the people who regularly attend such services say that the singing is often more important than the words sung.
Combating Stress
Games and music are important to relieve stress as are many other activities that we once saw as purely physical. Stress is a killer. It contributes to heart attacks and strokes and many other ailments. Getting enough sleep and getting good sleep we now know are important for our mental well-being as well as our physical.
Stress feeds on itself; it isn’t a static aspect of our makeup but rather an evolving aspect of our makeup. So, when we don’t deal with stress, we contribute to its advancement, and when we do deal with it, we enhance our own advancement.
Merge Your Right and Your Left Brain
We once thought that the left brain controlled logic and reasoning and the right brain controlled emotion and creativity. That’s why women so often complained about their unemotional husbands and men complained about their overly emotional wives. The reality is that every thought comes from both sides of the brain at the same time. Logical reasoning works only when we are emotionally satisfied that the conclusion we have reached is a correct one. In this context, it doesn’t matter if the conclusion actually is correct; what matters is that we understand that our brains work as a united force combining logic with emotionality.
To advance in business or in our profession, we need to actively utilize both our most rational self and our most emotional self.
Rejection Hurts
We all know that we are hurt deeply when we are rejected, but few people realize that we are also hurt when we reject someone else. There are times when we have to say “no.” We can do this is a very negative way or in as positive away as we can. The latter way is far better for our own well-being.
Even if we get poor service in a restaurant, we hurt ourselves in subtle ways when we don’t leave a tip. It would be far better to leave a smaller than normal tip or even a short note but to not leave a tip at all may intrude on our sleep later that night. It surprises many people to discover that emotional and physical pain release the same chemicals in our bodies and the same chemicals are released when we cause others both emotional and physical pain.
In the End
In the end, we need to invest at least as much time on the synergistic side of mental and physical health. Our professional and business success depends on it.
