Brio Leadership

The sports world recently thrilled to the amazing performance of Phil Mickelson winning the Masters Golf Tournament in Augusta, Georgia. Beside the fact that Mickelson presents a family-friendly contrast to his fallen-from-grace chief competitor, Tiger Woods, Mickelson’s victory offers a lesson in the power of the mind in both sports competition and in business. As recently as last summer, Mickelson was coming back after a six-week golf hiatus to care for his cancer-stricken wife and he was surprisingly confident about his ability to re-enter the game in tip-top condition.

“I think that mental rehearsal is every bit as important as physical rehearsal,” he said. He explained that as he was in the hospital at his wife’s side, he would take time during quiet moments to rehearse his shots – to visualize perfect shots in his mind’s eye. Not only did he come back strongly, but only nine months later, he won the Masters.

It is well-known that many top sports competitors use the power of visualization and mental rehearsal to master their game. How can you use that technique in business?

Mental rehearsal is a wonderful technique to enhance your emotional intelligence or EQ. Visualizing an appropriate response to a common business situation helps you practice a new skill in the safest possible setting – your mind.

Here’s why a mental rehearsal works so well. The human brain cannot differentiate between what it imagines and what is actually happening. That explains why you get a lump in your throat when you remember a tragic situation in your past, or how you can increase your blood pressure by just thinking about a colleague who has cheated or lied to you. It is your memory of an incident – or perhaps your anticipation of an incident – that elicits the physical and emotional response in your body. Your mind and body react the same, whether the situation is remembered, imagined or real.

So how can you harness the power of your brain to help you learn new ways to react to situations that in the past would evoke an ineffective response?

As an executive coach, I suggest the following steps to my clients to mentally rehearse a new emotional skill:

1. Think of a recent event in which your response to a situation wasn’t appropriate or optimal. For example, your boss may have criticized your work last week and your response was an angry remark. Or in a meeting you got defensive when a colleague criticized your idea. List as many trigger situations you can think of. Then identify how your body registered a warning signal. It might have been your heart pounding, or sweaty palms. These physical feelings can help you recognize when you are similarly triggered in the future. You might complete a grid that looks like this:

2. Next, visualize pulling down a blank white movie screen in front of your mind’s eye, and playing a movie in which you are the star. The movie is of one scenario from the list you just made – perhaps of the boss criticizing your work. Unlike a movie, you have the power to invoke all your senses:

What does the situation look like, feel like, smell like, taste like and sound like? Imagine, in the greatest detail, what you can do in the future to select a more effective response.

What do you do with your body, say with your words, inflect with your tone of voice?

• Note: A good rule of thumb is to imagine taking a deep breath and smiling before responding. The deep breath oxygenates the brain and gives you a momentary relief of the flight or fight response that you experience. Smiling interrupts your involuntary emotional reaction by tricking the body into thinking it is happy.
• If you are in a private place, you can add to your mental rehearsal by physically taking a deep breath, smiling, and saying the words that you select as a better response.

3. It’s like washing your hair: Lather. Rinse. Repeat. Repeat this exercise at your next opportunity: in the car commuting, in the shower or during a quiet moment. The more you rehearse in your mind, the better the outcome.

Will this technique guarantee immediate perfection in your responses and behavior? Of course not, but combined with experience and feedback from a trusted friend or colleague, this approach will help you become adept over time in responding more maturely to situations that, in the past, would have given you trouble. Did Phil Mickelson expect miracles from just mental rehearsal? No, he said that mental rehearsal is “every bit as important as physical rehearsal.”

In other words, mental rehearsal is not a substitute for actual training and playing the game of golf. The same can be observed in business – there is no substitute for experience and the school of hard knocks when it comes to improving your emotional response to situations. However, over time, you can improve your emotional responses just like Mickelson did his golf game. You, too, can win the equivalent of a Masters Tournament in your career with the help of mental rehearsals.

I did a "three hill walk" tonight at sundown.  I live in a neighborhood that’s unusual for these parts – it has hills.  There are three streets that go up that hill, and I walked all three of them tonight. Fast. I got up a bit of a sweat. Despite the glow I achieved, it was an Everyday Mystic walk. Even though I’ve walked that route countless times, tonight I walked those hills like I’ve never walked them before – with beginner’s mind and new eyes.

This afternoon, a summer thunderstorm blew in, dumped lots of rain but blew out the humidity and dropped the temperature significantly. Tonight was a magic night – unusually cool for June, but warm enough to envelope a sundown walker in a wrap of summer evening-ness.  As I walked, my senses were alert.  I noticed that I couldn’t hear any traffic noise – which can’t be said for the mornings, when I usually walk those hills.  What I heard were two airplanes flying overhead, one dog barking and the constant sound of my feet walking – per-thum, per-thum, in 2/4 time, accented by an occasional skreek when my shoe scraped the pavement. And then – oh my! – there were the cicadas in the trees, with their rhythmic drone.  I noticed the music of one band of cicadas fade out as I walked away from their trees; then I would hear another band grow louder as I walked toward them.  It reminded me of going to a parade and hearing five bands march by, spaced out over the length of the parade.  Every now and then I heard a tree frog’s quiet squeak-squeak.  I stopped to put my hand in a stream of water coming from an irrigation sprinkler. I was surprised at how warm the water felt.  I nearly swooned as my nose caught an intoxicating waft of perfume from a nearby honeysuckle bush.

Exercise is a great way to get in touch with our bodies and our connection to something greater than ourselves, if we pay attention to the moment. I enjoy going to the gym to get my exercise, but sometimes it feels like a microwave experience – quick, efficient but devoid of true flavor or aroma.  That’s why I enjoy walking so much. If I remember to 1) go alone and 2) be aware as I walk, I can be present to the sites and sounds around me and to the wonder of my body as it propels me through space.

I recommend an Everyday Mystic walk to you, especially after a busy or stressful day. Open your senses – see, hear, feel and touch what is around you. Feel the stress drain from your body. Appreciate your feet as they carry you on your journey. Be in the moment. Be grateful. Feel alive.

Have you ever been with a person whose negative attitude, perspective or energy seems to suck the very life out of your body?  Or, have you ever become aware of your own negative reaction to a person or situation and noticed how it seems to settle in your body? If you are aware enough to notice these situations, congratulate yourself because awareness is the first step in spiritual maturity.  What I’d like to share today is a technique to literally brush off negative energy and clear the way for your heart to embrace more loving thoughts and feelings.

When we are exposed to negative thoughts or emotions – whether they originate from others or ourselves – our heart space is most affected. It is our heart, more than our brain, that detects and radiates energy.  Researchers have shown that the heart’s energy radiates further from the body than the energy generated from the brain. The heart space is also an antenna for picking up energy that comes at us from others.  Therefore, we need to clear the heart space when we feel that we’ve been emotionally or energetically attacked or when we react negatively to outside stimulus.

The body is the best indicator of our emotions and reactions – the body will hold negative energy and feelings. If I sense a tightness in my stomach muscles, I know that I am either tense or feeling attacked. You may feel tension in your shoulders, your head or some other part of your body. Whenever you feel tension, it is a good practice to examine what is causing it and try to eliminate it. If it is negative energy or thoughts that you are holding (which it often is), give the following technique a try.

The Brush-off

It’s easy: With your hand held palm open, you simply brush your heart space with a downward and outward sweeping motion. Start by touching your heart, and then start the sweep. Do this several times and visualize feelings and vibrations being swept away from your body, your heart and your consciousness. You could hold the image of a broom sweeping out your heart as you do the motion. Flick your fingers a few times at the end of the sweep to clear the energy off your hands.

For extra credit, you can then do an aura self-sweep. Hold your hand about 6 inches above your heart space, palm open and facing your body. Slowly draw your hand up and down the front of your torso and head, hovering about 6 inches above your body. See if you can feel any differences in energy in any part of your torso.  If you do sense some difference, pause at that spot and perform the sweeping motion described above, but without touching your body. Flick your fingers and shake your hands out to completely disburse the vibrations.

When done, be sure to take several deep breaths to re-energize. Don’t forget to congratulate yourself for being aware and taking action to protect yourself!

You can do this exercise discretely at work or any other place.  At work, you can go to the restroom for maximum privacy, or simply turn your body toward a wall in your cubicle so you can discretely do the sweeping motion. I am writing this post in an airport, where I just performed the brush-off in the ladies’ room. Hmm, I feel so much better.

Do the brush-off and feel better!

Our bodies tell us a lot if we only listen to them. An Everyday Mystic listens to his/her body, respecting it as the temple of the soul during this earth-bound life, attending to the lessons it provides.  When the body gets sick or experiences any type of disease, we need to listen to what message it might be sending us.

Louise L. Hay, author of You Can Heal Your Life, was a pioneer in showing the connection between emotional or thought patterns and disease.  Recent scientific research likewise shows that emotional issues such as repressed anger can lead to heart disease and other serious illnesses.

We easily recognize that when we are embarrassed, our cheeks get red.  When we are nervous, our palms sweat.  When we are very sad, we cry. Likewise, long-term, repeated emotional or thought patterns can affect our physical body. That’s why Louise Hay has a dictionary of physical illnesses, their causes and affirmations to counter-act them.

What is the message in the illnesses we have?  Last week, I caught a cold. What a funny phrase – to "catch" a cold, like I was on the hunt for it. Maybe I was!  I started getting a scratchy throat as I was finishing a report for a short consulting gig that I accepted because I needed the cash flow.  I had "resigned" from doing that type of work late last fall, but reneged on my resolve last month when I assessed my lack of income.  I needn’t be too worried, because I saved a generous amount of money to get me through this transition period. As I write this, I realize that it was ego that motivated me to accept the consulting gig.  Ego was telling me to worry about income, to not draw on my savings even though they were set aside for just this situation. I have a lot of ego wrapped around the success of my business and the amount of income I create. I recognize now that my ego needs to step aside.

I got sick last week. Just a cold with a runny nose and one night of fever. A message from my body to my higher self that I’m not making good choices.  A warning that I must listen to my body as it tells me what to do. As if to remind me of the importance of this message, I am now experiencing a cough and nasal congestion – post-cold annoyances for certain, but reminders non the less that I need to pay attention.

Ignoring the wisdom of the body is perilous.  Sometimes we get sick just because we need the down time, the time to stay at home and rest.  Sometimes it is more than that – sometimes it is a wake-up call that we dare not sleep through. I am told that our spirit guides often use our body as a means to communicate with us, which underscores the importance of paying attention to the body’s message.

Eleven years ago I got a bad case of shingles. Usually a disease of the elderly (I was in my early 40’s at the time), shingles is a stress-related illness in which the chicken pox virus, which lies latent in our spinal chords since childhood, resurfaces to work great mischief. In my case, it was the symptom of an exhausted body and stressed out lifestyle. The ultimate outcome of that illness was I resigned from my corporate job and sought a different lifestyle.  That was when I started my consulting and training business, KR Consulting.  I am certain that if I hadn’t re-structured my life to allow more time for my family, rest for my body and attention to my spiritual life, shingles would have been only the start of a long road of disease that would not have had a pretty ending.

So as I write this, I commit again to following my conviction that I am on a new path and that I needn’t accept work that no longer fulfills me.  I know that my body – and my spirit guides – will thank me for listening to its wisdom by staying healthy.

How can you listen to your body?  What spiritual wisdom does it send you?  Please don’t ignore the messages your physical health sends you.  Remember, the body does not lie.

Blessings to you on this journey.