Fit to Lead: Transforming Your Leadership with the 5 Pillars of Performance by Marcus Marsden & Sari Marsden

Author:Marcus Marsden & Sari Marsden [Marsden, Marcus & Marsden, Sari]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

BREAKING HABITS

Closely linked to the importance of discomfort is the importance of breaking habits. One of the reasons human beings form habits is to reduce the irritation and discomfort of doing new things.

As such, we create patterns everywhere in our lives. Habits show up in all three Internal Pillars: they exist in the Physical, Mental and Emotional State Pillars; patterns exist in the domains of movement, thinking and feeling. As we get older, our beliefs harden into facts, our emotions become moods and our once-flexible joints become stiff. All of these can be mitigated by the willingness to notice and break habits.

While these patterns provide convenience and comfort, they also keep us trapped, for just as surely as our input remains the same, so will our output, in the form of our results. This is one reason why children learn, develop and grow so much faster than adults: they have no patterns and habits to hold them back.

Certainly there is nothing wrong with habits and patterns, but unless you are willing to break them, your future will look very much like your past. In fact, one of the most important habits to cultivate is that of breaking habits! The capacity to break habits is a capacity that can be developed just like any other, and just like any other habit, you create it by doing it, not by thinking about it.

Habits can also be something that I never do. Today, the habit of not exercising is one such very popular habit. Why? Because as we have seen, exercise involves discomfort, and many people in the 21 st century like to avoid discomfort like our forebears liked to avoid the plague!

WALKING AND BREATHING

Some of the simplest and yet most impactful habits on which to intervene lie in the domain of the Physical State Pillar. One powerful example: walking and breathing. Our good friend and colleague at NFA, Beatriz Garcia, introduced us to a very simple way to practice intervening in both of these areas simultaneously via an easy practice.

To do this, all you need do is walk around the room, breathing in when you move your left leg until your left foot hits the ground, then breathing out when you move your right leg until your right foot hits the floor. As you do this exercise, you can vary the

speed at which you move, which changes the speed at which you breathe. Doing this, you will notice the impact that varying the speeds of breathing and walking have on you, in all three domains. The Physical, Emotional and Mental State Pillars are all simultaneously impacted.

The more often you do something, the more transparent it becomes to you. The more transparent it becomes to you, the more “normal”

it appears to you, and ultimately, the more power it has over you. You cannot change a habit that you do not know you have.

This is why shifting patterns in such “routine” areas as walking and breathing can make such a powerful difference.

The world today

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