Best Ways to Relax Successfully

Is a stress-free and meaningful life possible today?

We are daily bombarded by requests, actions, interrupts. The media pressure us with what we should possess or buy, how we should look, what to eat ... We are pressed by our surroundings, neighbors, friends to ‘comply’ with standard of living they value. Our bosses tell us when and what to do no matter the hour of a day or day of the week. We are (always) connected – if not, right now we are looking for wifi!

Is this the life we want?

Some adhere to it others aim to different lifestyle. Nevertheless, for many of us the relaxation represents zoning out in front of a TV at the end of a stressful day. Does/could this reduce the accumulated stress?

No.

Known from ancient times to effectively combat stress is that we need to activate the whole body's natural relaxation response.

How we do it?

There are numerous marketing campaigns telling us to try three, seven, eight … ways of relaxing techniques that are readily (commercially) available?

Do those techniques work? Likely not!

What then?

Stress is necessary ‘part’ of life. One needs it for creativity, learning and, mostly in ancient times, to survive. Why, then, such a fuss about it?

Tai ChiWe are all probably aware that stress is harmful when it becomes overwhelming and interrupts the healthy state of equilibrium of our body chemicals through nervous system. Our body and our nervous system are flooded with chemicals which prepare us for ‘fight or flight’. While stress response in emergency situations when quick action is necessary could be lifesaving, it wears our body down when constantly (daily) activated. Sadly, overwhelming stress has become an increasingly ‘common occurrence’ in our lives.

We should aim to control the impact of stress or to reduce it. And here the relaxation techniques come in. They are kind of brakes on our over heightened state of readiness and bring our body and mind back into a state of equilibrium.

Now, let’s move from ‘what’ to ‘how’.

Do we still / again need Leaders?

Current economic and political situation in the world with all perturbations is a big puzzle for me whether we are having or not the leaders.

Networking-treeManuel Lima in his TED talk A visual history of human knowledge explains that “for a long period of time, we believed in a natural ranking order in the world around us, also known as the great chain of being, or "Scala naturae" in Latin, a top-down structure that normally starts with God at the very top, followed by angels, noblemen, common people, animals, and so on. This idea was actually based on Aristotle's ontology, which classified all things known to man in a set of opposing categories.”

Consequentially we accepted some kind of leadership whether of a real person or imaginative / invented super being. Normal people were part of a branching scheme of the tree depending on their power or wealth or importance. This concept is in fact such a powerful metaphor for organizing big communities, organizations, countries or super national entities or conveying information to map a variety of systems of knowledge that still persists in our understanding of organizational order.

At the end of the Cold war things somehow started to fall apart. World became globally connected via air transport and mostly due to evolution of Internet. To be precise I think the Internet is actually changing the tree paradigm we lived thousands of years, quite a lot and pretty fast.

Information is not any more spread via top down approach which gave top people the power of it. Organizational schemes are flattening. Even such organizations as armies follow the new principle when teaching combats units how to behave in the battle. It is dealing with decentralized, independent cells, where there's no top leader leading the whole combat process. Rather, any soldier should or could take command if necessity of circumstances requires so.

NetworkWhat we experiences today is the shift from trees structures into networks. Networks really embody notions of decentralization. Bring in interconnectedness. And the most important people, knowledge, information, organizations, countries and more become interdependent. A fact so well embodied in Nature that we keep forgetting all the times. For a moment think of your body. How many cells you have, organs, extremities. Do you feel each finger all the times? No, all these work in unity. But your body is not alone in the Universe …. Therefore, interconnectivity or better entanglement is a natural order.

Even more, this new way of networked thinking is critical to solve many of nowadays’ complex problems we face. From decoding the human genome or brain up to understanding the vast Universe we live in.

Back to the topic in question – is there a space for a leader in such network notions?

The Difference between Helping and Fixing

Leaders are there to help, managers to fix.

Agree?

Probably hard to claim this could be the final truth.

When helping someone then (obviously) you have to know better or more than the person you are helping. So, helping in ‘the wrong way’ demonstrates non-equality of the people involved thus becoming a relationship between non-equals.

HelpThere are times when we help a friend or co-worker during tough times. Does this kind of help require (owe) a favor in return? Or, is this help a sincere one with no expectation of returned favor?

Trying hard to help someone has it happened to you that you have inadvertently ‘helped’ in a way that it actually took away from people more than you could ever “give” them?

I remember my first weeks arranging my life in Seville. I was so many times lost and had to ask for help. And most of the times I got it only to discover that people, in their desire to help, sent me in the wrong direction.

There’s another way to help: we could help in a way that the receiver will eventually develop new abilities or knowledge and not just receive your help and your past knowledge.

And what would a help with a sincere and open approach be like?

Picture a small kid playing with toys: trying all over again to build a tower with bricks and it keeps collapsing all the times. After a while you step in and demonstrate how to do it. What exactly have you thought the child by your action? That depends on the way you have helped: you may have as well diminished kid’s self-esteem, sense of worth, integrity and/or wholeness. But, the help could be given with the right stimuli, motivation and by asking what goes where … it is a proactive way of helping that ultimately builds trust and knowledge.

With a sincere help you simply share your knowledge or you figure out what’s your help’s value to other person or when you give a transparent feedback. You do not expect anything in return. You just help the other to grow and learn. Help is also when (good) leaders take the time out of their busy day to help a follower or co-worker in need but unable to solve a problem. They’ll sure remember your help.

What about ‘fixing’?

What do People Want from Leaders?

We mostly talk about leaders and what constitutes to be a leader. What about followers – do they have any role?

GentlenessHearing Lao Tzu one can figure out what was found important long ago: "I have three precious things which I hold fast and prize. The first is gentleness; the second is frugality; the third is humility, which keeps me from putting myself before others. Be gentle and you can be bold; be frugal and you can be liberal; avoid putting yourself before others and you can become a leader among men."

How about today?

The Gallup informs us that the ‘vision thing’ pales in comparison to instilling trust, compassion, stability, and hope when debating what followers expect from their leaders.

Is it any different from the past?

CompassionI do not think so, just the wording is kind of more puzzled when reading ancient texts. What I understand is that followers expect a lot from their leaders. When they don’t get what they expect the first thing they begin to lose is trust and respect for their leader.

What I would expect from the followers is their hope for leaders to have greater emotional intelligence – what Daniel Goleman has already introduced in the previous century. With it a leader connects more intuitively with his followers. But this connection is never one way. Followers anticipate to be heard, understood and given enough attention to feel that their contributions and opinions matter. They envisage a leader to become opportunity enabler and an exceptional coach for them to help improve their performance.

Best Practices That Drive Adaptability

Wushu“Better to spend three years looking for a good master than ten years training with a bad one.” Wushu wisdom.

We live in a fast changing world where “being stable” means being adjustable. Only people who lost their adaptability naturally resist change (see: How to Guide Your Change). They become rigid which is the opposite of stable.

In Martial Arts adaptability is the principle of the Bruce Lee’s idea of giving with adversity, to bend slightly and spring back stronger than before and finally to adapt oneself harmoniously to the opponent’s movements without striving or resisting. During a competition or fight you have to adjust to the environment, your opponent, and to the mistakes you and your opponent make. This you can only do by being stable, flexible and adaptive.

Nature
Nature is a prime example of adaptability. Even big trees should be flexible and adaptive to grow stable. They adjust to the surrounding environment, to the winds and become even more stable. If not, they are uprooted. They don’t consume extra energy to rise straight up. For them it is natural to adapt to the soil declination when growing.

Water is the next good example mostly used in martial arts as a material to ‘replicate’. In China they used to say: water purifies and refreshes all living creatures, water without restraint and fear trickles through the surface of most things, water is fluid and adaptive, water which is in harmony with the laws of Nature. Water is soft but can cut through the hills and hard rock. Water “makes” it by adapting.

In everyday life there is an abundance of events and issues that require our adaptation.

Are we able to adapt or not quickly enough?

How to Guide Your Change

“Change is the only constant in life” Heraclitus.
Change
Then why are we so afraid of it?

In the post Organizational change I have written that employees, others as well, perceive stability as security and therefore normally oppose changes. Such perceptions present difficulties or even block a change.

Where, then, is the exit door to ‘changing’ that?

Let’s start with a simple question: what do I want to be?

The answer does not lay within New Year’s resolutions where we write down our wishes and intentions on a piece of paper, store it in a bottle and launch it to sea, hoping it will manifest by itself! No. The Universe isn’t going to make this happen. You are the only one to do it!

New Year’s
So, how then?

Fajin Power that radically changes your Leadership

Fajin or fa chin is a term used in some Chinese Martial Arts

MomentumWhen I first heard the term I didn’t know what to think of it. If your background is natural science you know that MOMENTUM is the product of the mass and velocity of an object and that the net FORCE acting upon an object is equal to the rate at which its momentum changes with time. You’ve also learned that POWER is equivalent to an amount of energy consumed per time unit.

If everything is already explained by physics, what now with this Fajin?

Let’s see what Fajin is and then how a person could practice and achieve this skill in Tai Chi practice.
 
In Chinese, the character ‘Fa’ literally means ‘to issue’, ‘to discharge’, ‘to send out’, whereas ‘Jin’ is a little more difficult to translate. Dictionary term is ‘strength / force’ but does not fully express the correct difference between ‘strength’ in Chinese ‘Li’ and ‘Jin’ in Tai Chi. The best description between ‘Li’ and ‘Jin’ is that the latter is generated by the whole body and is able to permeate the four limbs while the first is bogged down in the shoulder and the back.

Difficult to understand?

For me it was. So let me give you some hints.

In Tai Chi classic The song of Thirteen Postures it is said: “To store the Jin is like pulling open a bow, to issue the Jin (with Fajin) is like letting the arrow fly”. The root of Fajin lies in the feet and is issued from the feet, controlled by the waist and transmitted to finger tips.

Still having trouble understanding?

Ideas to Spark Positive Motivation

We recently got a puppy Xia. She entered our hearts immediately although Biba left us not long time ago (see: Lesson of Leadership by Biba).

Xia
We rescued Biba from the shelter when she was about one year old. Xia came to us eight weeks old from a breeder. This time we did not hesitate to start educating Xia right away. In the first weeks we tried “old” school techniques according to our previous experiences but they were not working well. So we decided to get an instructor to teach much more us than her. The instructor was very confident in telling us that his principle is a positive motivation that is easy for dogs and hard for owners. And it proved so all over again!

XiaWe were awarding Xia (with briquettes) whenever she was doing something that we actually wanted her to do in the way the instructor taught us. Xia was not receiving her food at home but was fed out throughout a day and practically for every single briquette had to do something. In two weeks’ time she was completely clean. As dogs are more inclined to “understand” gesticulation and not words we had to learn right gestures. When she understood them we gradually added words to them. All this time whenever she behaved “properly” she was rewarded with food from our hand. Wrong doings were overlooked but not punished. Until something was done rights, she did not get food. Xia almost immediately learned what brings her food.

The instructor told us that normally the repetition of 10.000 times makes the command stored to dog’s musculature “memory”. How equal to us! (See: How To unify Body, Mind and Spirit). Practically the same goes in practicing martial arts: “If you want to really learn something you have to repeat it 10.000 times!”

How To Unify Body, Mind and Spirit

In the philosophy of all Martial Arts ‘body, mind and spirit’ have to be and work united in order to be successful in any combat situation. In my previous posts you can easily figure out I claim that the same is valid in exceptional leadership.
body, mind and spirit
Here I’d like to go deeper into the subject by using the knowledge that has been steadily compiling. In the post Wing Chun basics 4Leadership I explained this topic through Wing Chun perception of ‘central line, economy of movement and simultaneous attack and defense’. The first can be used as a reference for body as on the ‘central line’ reside most of the vital points of a human. The mind is the most energy lavishing organ in our body. Therefore, a martial art teaches to store “the muscle knowledge” of all your hits, kicks etc. in your ‘muscle memory’ (will be discussed further below) allowing us to be faster and more explosive than we are within the conscious (mind) way of moving our extremities. In the fight there’s simply no enough time to deliver hits and protect oneself. Therefore ‘a simultaneous attack and defense’ is called for. It is “a spiritual way” to be confident that your whole body and not just your hands will protect you. But, at the same time a person has to have high spirit to combat with the opponent.

Looking at those two different options and issues through the same lens give us the opportunity to appreciate the similarities in them. So I tend to see most of the Asian Martial Arts as trains heading for the same destination – the unification of body, mind and spirit - but on different tracks.

Tai Chi’s (Taiji) main aspect is the yielding: when attacked Tai Chi “turns into water” and yield. The main emphasis of Tai Chi is working internally utilizing the Qi (see: Qi–energy–leadership). The Great Masters of Karate, Judo, Kendo, Aikido, Jiu-Jitsu, Sistema etc. all taught and tried to inculcate different principles to unify the three.

Reasons why Leadership is not about manipulation

by JBerceAfter recently a puppy joint our household once again it proved that from the moment we are born we have been predestined and taught how to manipulate. All small kids (the same goes for puppies) use basically 24 hours per day to watch, observe and consequently ‘calculate’ what is good for them and how to achieve it.

Well, assuming that is so and also knowing that manipulation has a bad reputation, how could we distinguish manipulation from a persuasion (does not have a bad reputation) that we use as well?

In my view a manipulation is, by definition, a form of persuasion and vice versa. Might be that manipulation is more of a short-term strategy, but consequently, manipulation and persuasion are all about getting someone to do something that you want them to do. Isn’t it?
Manipulation
From persuasion point of view I would say that it distinguishes from manipulation in a small detail: influencing someone because of something that is ‘good’ for the person or, better said that the person may be persuaded to perceive such doing as beneficial or good. Therefore, in this relation the trust in the persuader is the fundamental element for the effective persuasion. And trust is mostly missing or abused in manipulation.

Steps to: People are energetic when …

… interested and motivated - a well-known approach!

In the posts Can Obedience nurture Trust? and Disciplines of execution the question was whether command/control could bring results and if obedience could bring the trust. My opinion remains the same as explained in How to (not) energize the team: a positive energy energizes a person or a team.

So that’s it! Well, not exactly. My life lessons from bringing up my sons teach me that I have to use different approach to energize one or another.

Energy drainEnergyTo further it, I believe we mostly come across two types of personality: one gives us strength and energy while the other drains it. Within the first group are people (or even places and things) that make us feel like we are building up our own energy stores, rejuvenate us and help to do our best. The latter group leaves us exhausted, makes us feel as though we have wasted our time and energy without getting anything useful done. They do this to fuel their relentless hunger for negativity, leaving us drained and unhappy.

So how should we help people to function in their zone?

How leader decide

I have read that there are many people who think and plan in organizations, but very few who have the ability to move cognitive processes into executable phases (Marino).

Decision
We all have experience in making some thoughtful decisions. Making a good (right?) decision in different, sometimes difficult, situations is no small coup.

But why is it still in a lot of normal situations so difficult to make the right and good decision?

Probably the main problem lays in variables and outcomes that are often so uncertain and we are discomforted and paralyzed by analysis. I’ve read that all our decisions are made with a help of our emotions. And when we get into the emotional part of our brain, our inborn reaction is to protect ourselves. More hard it is to decide more adrenaline rushes in and we get flight-or-fight response. Our short-term survival is the (only) immediate goal.

Therefore, in such circumstances it is important to figure out when what you don’t know is actually important to know. So the first and most important component of decision-making is self- confidence. It helps us to go about gathering the necessary information to resolve the uncertainty and seize a decision.

Employee Engagement

I’ve read a lot of articles stating and arguing that the engaged workforce can create competitive advantage. The prime question here is how to engage people?

An engaged employee is ‘a person who is fully involved in, and enthusiastic about, his or her work’.

Now, try to find out from a truthful top executive how many engaged people work in his company and you would probably get an answer ‘about half of them or less’.

Should top executives be concerned about that?

disengaged employeeIn my post Leadership and “happy” organization I wrote: there is a Gallup-poll of a 1.5 million sampling, and the result is: 30% of employees are happy with their managers, 20% are not, and 50% have disengaged themselves in having any feelings at all. This is when employees show up for work, did what they are told to do, and, at the end of their shift, go home; the same routine would be repeated the next day.

Competition or Collaboration?

There is always a dilemma how to get better results: by fostering competition or collaboration between employees for the executions of organizational tasks.

The humanity from the dawn had to collaborate in order to have bigger chance for survival, so I would (always) vote for collaboration. Our basic communication tool (language) provided two main issues for the success: learning and passing the knowledge and the second is explaining or danger warning to other members of the pack.

CompetitionOn the other hand competition was, throughout our history, a driving force that continued moving humanity forward. It is most evident from the conflicts between tribes or societies. Imperialism, known from ancient times, is about economic expansion by grabbing defenseless countries (like Alexander the Great or/and Genghis Khan). Looting the countries for raw materials by forcing the labor to later force them to buy expensive manufactured goods is also accompanying humanity from dawns. But this competing attitude helped in driving developments that improved many aspects of life, and is continuing to do so. What else is globalization?

Definitely, conflicts were and are still part of our environment. And for them you need collaboration (again): to start or to solve them. But, on the smaller scale, could scientists in e.g. CERN compete with each other and still produce the same results as they do – or do they collaborate?

CollaborationContinuing the struggle of thinking which one – collaboration or competition – yields better results, I would again like to say that it is collaboration: compare teamwork against solo or egocentric behavior of a player on the football terrain. Unfortunately, today we are often forgetting team play and are only competing with each other, against countries, environment… and not really understanding that there is no win for us while doing so. I think that for the progress towards a better world we should principally collaborate with one another and not compete against one another. Could this then be the ultimate goal?

No way!

Practicing “Tai Chun”

There is no martial art with the name Tai Chun. I just melted names of two arts to form a new expression:  the first word from Tai Chi (Tai chi in the leadership world -1) and the other from Wing Chun (Wing chun in Leadership; Wing Chun basics 4 Leadership). So, why did I combine those two arts?

For several decades now I have been practicing different martial arts and came to conclusion that at the top level of any martial art there is a very similar if not the same knowledge and performance.

Why is it so?

PersonPeople like to think we are different. But, what I like to point out is that as people we are all the same. We have almost identical “hardware” (two legs and hands, one body, head …) that moves in the same way. Well, one is taller and the other is heavier etc. but there is no big difference when it comes to how we sit down, walk, eat or fight. We use the same musculatures, joints or/and bones. Our “software” is pretty similar as well (we have fears, we are happy, we are angry …). Our brains work through the ‘same’ neurons and have same regions for processing vision, thoughts, and emotions. Therefore, our thoughts are produced, stored and retrieved in the same manner. And the same goes for our  cerebellum system where our reactions are ‘memorized’ and fired from.
Shifu