Two things are foundational to achieving a discipline: a healthy mind and surrounding ourselves with a healthy tribe. In last week’s blog, we talked about healthy people. Today, we’ll discuss healthy minds.
Healthy Minds come only from proper rest, exercise, and nutrition. I’m not going to convince you today about the need for rest and nutrition. If you don’t understand that, I can’t help you. But my point with exercise is mindfulness and mind exercises.
We need to understand that our mental, emotional, and physical bodies are all connected and that we can only be fully present when all are working together.
I’ll often ask leaders, “What triggers you?” You can imagine all the responses I get. Then I’ll ask, “Do you make good decisions in that moment?” Do you first pause to think through what comes out of your mouth in that moment? Or is it more like a loose water hose on full pressure, flapping and spewing everywhere and making a mess? While we cannot prevent the occasional hot spike up our back trigger, we can be prepared for many of the moments that agitate us and become much more aware of our responses in the daily battle.
One way to prepare is meditation. Meditation comes in many forms. For some, it’s prayer. For others, it’s visualization. For some, it’s quieting the mind and becoming aware of thinking before reacting. Whatever works for you, the key here is exercising the mind to think rather than react by using our frontal cortex rather than the ancient reptilian brain of fight, flight, freeze. (Personally, I like the teachings of Dr. Shirzad Chamine and Positive Intelligence). So Step 2 to discipline: A Healthy Mind.