Mind-body balance

Bringing your inner team into alignment

By: Tom Gegax

Would you sit back and twiddle your thumbs while a competitor poached your customers and employees? Would you blow off network security until a vicious virus crashed your computer system?

Doubt it. When it’s business, some of us are laudably proactive. When it comes to personal issues, however, too many of us have upside-down priorities. We wait until a crisis body slams us before contemplating the possibility of making better choices.

Case in point: The triple trauma that struck me at 42 also flattened my assumptions about health and wellness. Divorce and a business cash-flow crisis crumbled my psychological and spiritual foundations. Then cancer forced me to rethink physical fitness. Those ordeals poked gaping holes in my theory that a shrewd mind was the only arrow I needed in my workplace quiver. Six painful months of self-analysis revealed the barriers I’d erected between life’s four essential elements — body, intellect, psyche and spirit.

Not only were the four players on my “inner team” incommunicado, they had never been formally introduced. My intellect was calling all the shots, my body never looked beyond its next run, and my psyche and spirit were neglected stepchildren.

For years, I had been in constant motion and felt healthy. But a lack of inner harmony had blocked my path toward true wellness and peace of mind. When that realization washed over me, I was embarrassed to realize that I’d sidelined much of my inner team. In business, I would never have wasted half my workforce.

What’s it mean to get all four players on the same page? Imagine if John, Paul, George, and Ringo had all pursued solo careers. Maybe they would’ve each scored a hit now and then. But they never would have defined pop music for generations without combining their talents and transcending the sum of their parts.

As I began developing wellness strategies for each player in my life, here’s what began to happen.
Integration produced clearer thinking, sharper instincts, and more energy.  I started feeling the quantum leap in wellness that occurs when our inner elements align. Not a minute passes when every part of our being isn’t enhancing or sabotaging our decisions and actions.

For instance, I discovered that when coaching a team member on a sensitive issue, my reasoning was influenced by my state of physical, emotional and spiritual well-being. That new business plan that needs analyzing tests more than our intellect — our body, psyche, and spirit are in on the action, too. They’re all affected by how we slept the night before and whether we hit the treadmill or the doughnut shop during lunch hour.