A big part of being a business owner or leader, is be a problem solver. Its what you get paid for, after all. But you know, sometimes what comes along with solving problems, is a whole lot of stress.
Now stress, in an of itself, is not necessarily a bad thing. Each of us handles stress a little bit differently. Some people fall apart, and others literally thrive on being dumped into the fire. There are even people, who literally go looking for opportunities or go about creating stress. (I think we all know someone who likes to create a little stress!)
When it comes to business owners and leaders, you are generally the one who thrives on a little chaos. At the same time, it can become so easy to get consumed in solving a problem, that before long you forget about yourself.
About a week ago, I was talking to a health professional and we had an interesting conversation. It started out by him saying, “the body loves to move”. I know this doesn’t sound profound, but he went on to say that too many times people get into their head, when they should be looking to get into their body. In other words, they do a lot of thinking and they stop moving. We were talking about how when you feel pain, it can become hard to focus on anything else (in your head), but if you were to keep on moving other parts of your body, the pain would lesson because your focus would change.
I got thinking about this in terms of business. How many times have you been working to solve a problem and you run the facts and data, or conditions over and over in your head, looking for a different solution? How many times have you told yourself to, “just push through” when you are trying to figure something out? You won’t take your focus off the problem for even a second, because you believe that to do so, would be to give up.
What if the answer is to do exactly that? If you think about a problem, being like having a headache. The more you tell yourself how painful the headache is, the more focused you are on the headache. You lay down and have a nap, or you watch a little television, or you play with the kids and before long, you realize the headache is gone. What if the change in focus was all you really needed?
Back to the problem. What if you could become even better at problem solving, if you got up from your desk or computer and got moving? What if you took a little walk, did a little stretching, or maybe even did a little dance to your favorite tune? If you stopped focusing on the problem for a moment, I believe likely you would realize the problem was gone and, in its place, would be the answer.
Movement is an amazing thing. As my friend said, “the body loves to move”, but now I think that the brain might like it as well. The stress of pushing yourself to push through, will kill you. You deserve to be fulfilled aaaaand healthy, so maybe you should give what your body loves, a try. All you will lose is, maybe a few problems.
