Harnessing athletics is a key way to elevate your professional success and personal well-being.
As an athlete, I've seen, lived, and created business impact using the principles drawn from my athletic training. I've been a runner, triathlete, and ultra-distance endurance cyclist, and each time I've tested the frontiers of myself, and found how malleable our perceived limits and edges really are.
So as you engage with outstanding personal and professional development, if you don't already have an athletic practice that's your passion and exploration -- find one! The importance of a truly enjoyable athletic frontier in which you can test yourself again and again can't be stated enough. Athletic training is not merely begrudgingly walking that extra block to the car just so you don’t absolutely turn into a couch potato while you're binge-watching your favorite videos. Engaging with the drive, intention, competition and purposefulness of a depthful, consistent regiment of athletic pursuit is an essential element of cultivating your potential for high performance. Training in this way grows the discipline, determination, and focus that have a direct impact in achieving personal and professional mastery.
Obviously, There's A Physiological Advantage
Do I even need to point this out? Athletes are healthier human beings. But they're also gifting themselves with the preconditions for higher-performance as well. Dedicated physical activity delivers enduring cognitive benefits, including cerebral blood flow, deeper breathing, the relaxation and flow state that lead to better mental acuity, and the delights of physical strength.
Meanwhile, the body's natural response to positive physical stress is an essential release and refreshment mechanism in today's sedentary and convenience-laden world. This type of positive stress is called eustress, using "eu-", a prefix of Greek origin that means "well," "good," or "true." Eustress is a term used to describe positive or beneficial stress that gives the body the natural, healthful level of daily activity and stress it adapted to handle over the past tens of thousands of years.
Healthy eustress in a day improves performance, focus, and motivation. The definition of eustress is generally that it is short-term and perceived as being within our control, and athletics is the much-needed delivery method. The human body is built for distance -- many sources maintain it is designed to travel 10-20 miles a day, as well as engaging naturally throughout the day with periodic lifting, running, and effort. When we re-create this natural environment in the modern day, we contribute physically to our personal mental development, skill enhancement, and our ability to achieve a desired goal.
Sun, Moon, Stars - The Energetic Perspective
From an energetic perspective, heading outdoors gets you out of the magnetic fields created by electrical wiring and wifi, and out into the natural magnetic field of the earth. The sun's natural light and the magnetic resonances of the earth's bioelectric field have powerful abilities to help rebalance and recaliberate your own natural energies. The views of sky, spaciousness and trees, if you've got a park near you, can refresh and reset your mind in ways no other activity can provide.
From a shamanic perspective, we are, as shamanic teacher Sandra Ingerman says, "gardeners of energy". Getting out into the world of sun and clouds, friendly trees and favorite rivers, brings us back to the realization that we have a place within the entire spectrum of earthly beings, not merely the limitations of indoor environments, man-made structures, and business. It is part of a cycle of connectivity, helping restore our wildness, also a natural need and element of our human beingness as evolving over tens of thousands of years. I have many tree-friends I greet when I run through my local park, who always send good energy back through all seasons of the year.
From Field to Boardroom
The skills honed in athletic pursuits can be seamlessly translated to a professional context. The drive to master riding the 100 (century ride in cycling parlance), which was one of my absolute favorite training and achievement experiences (I rode the 100 each weekend, and was cycling about 300 miles a week total at the time), and the strategies you use to train and ride, easily teach you periodic training, persistence, consistency, and how to evaluate whether you should push on farther, or call it a night and refresh yourself with relaxation.
One of the most significant and important aspects of athletic performance is how easily it demonstrates the flexibility of that which we call LIMITS. Before I rode the 100, I rode shorter distances (obvious, right?). When I was riding 20 miles a ride, 40 seemed far. By the time I'd broken 40, 60 seemed far, 20 was inconsequential. When I cracked 80, 60 was no longer far. And when I hit the 100, I knew I'd never consider any of those distances unreachable again. Limits are what we accept as limits, nothing more. I have that lesson graven into my body and bones from riding the 100, and I'll never forget it.
But, it doesn't take epic efforts to reap the benefits athletic pursuits give you in exploring the edges of high performance. Even the applicability of metrics and data analytics in both athletics and professional settings further solidifies this link. Athletics are famous for being data consumers, with devices such as Garmin smartwatches, heart rate monitors, TrainingPeaks software, and other tools that track, capture, and analyze performance over time, have direct parallels in the best data-driven efforts in business, even in your own personal day-tracking, energy, or observation of which habits build your highest performance. In each arena, a detailed understanding of the metrics can guide you toward more focused, effective, and productive effort.
How Will You Leverage Athletics?
Athletic discipline directly impacts professional growth. Your excellent physical health isn’t just a vehicle for living longer; it’s also a vehicle for achieving more in your career with greater vitality, wisdom, and rejuvenation.
If you're not already an athlete, find a sport you feel drawn to. It can be solo or a team sport. It can be running, cycling, triathlon, rock climbing, paddling, or ...? It can be whatever you most enjoy that gets you into the environment you most enjoy.
Get yourself set up with a proper gear investment, including fitness and heart rate trackers and the software that goes with them. YES, spend the money that it takes, and YES, DO get the data-driven tracking gear for your sport. Please, don't just go to the gym, run a bit on the treadmill, eyeball your stats on the console and think you're there. Dive into it all the way. Bring your stats home with you. Pore over them in TrainingPeaks. You'll get ROI on your gear investment, trust me, and you can't train properly without it.
Then set a strong goal, and begin to pursue it. Reach for peak performance. Learn the wisdom of good training. When you conquer that goal, set another. And another. Find your center of joy in athletics, and realize it is an essential vehicle in your high-performance life.
What athletics and what insights will you engage with today as you #healworklife?
Be well,
Katherine
Katherine Lieber is a high-performing founder, CEO, and Director, developing the frontier of business transformation through better use of analytics. Also a seasoned coach-consultant, her body of work Healing the Wounded Professional is based on transformative modalities that integrate wisdom, energy, and alternative techniques to solve high-performing professionals' problems that block them from moving forward.
