WALK: A lesson learned in life
I recently spent a day walking the five peaks above Boulder, Colorado - 20 miles of up/down that started before dawn and ended as the sun dipped amidst brilliant yellows of late autumn mountain foliage. The event, hosted by Bart Foster and his BusinessOutside team, brought together 50 founders, builders, and adventurers to share time and headspace beyond their everyday.
Why walk? Why outside? - put simply, there’s a deep seated harmony between our mental and physical states that is often suppressed or disconnected in modern workplaces — knowledge work in particular, which is striking.
THREE INSIGHTS:
?? Presence: You can’t help but be attuned to what is immediately in front of you when walking. The learned habits of the body bring you back into a zone of attention that is close, real, and vivid as you conciously and sub-conciously navigate a broken trail or busy city park path. That crowds out the immaterial and inconsequential while magically making space for your mind and dialogue to go to the critical few things.
?? Connection: Walking alone is great, but walking in dialogue with others is even more powerful. The physical orientation of moving forward together sets a tone that automatically biases people toward productive collaboration and a felt sense of shared toil (a couple thousand vertical feet accelerates that). Contrast that to the odd arrangement of most meeting rooms with a gaggle of chairs blocking people and tables meant for another purpose sitting between them.
?? Creativity: Everyone can be creative but often people are blocked through training or environmental conditioning to constrain their thinking to executing a pre-designed process. Sometimes you want to be in execution mode, but the best work is iterative - reflect, create, execute in cycles. Physical movement unblocks the mind. Walking
WHY THIS MATTERS NOW: We are transitioning into a world where concious management of our own mental state is even more important. We are stepping from a world where humans worked on machines to a world where humans work with machines (human-machine teaming). For any of us to be effective in that pairing, we need to bring the highest human intellience (sub-concious and emotional) alongside the artificial intelligence (strongly analytical and reference based).
Bart and his team run an excellent facilitated process for leaders who would like to apply some of this with their teams, and you can also start yourself. I frequently do walk/talks in place of coffee or even longer meet ups — most people are quick to say yes to escape a screen or conference room. Here’s a low stakes prototype — try it with family/friends as your means of catch up next week for Thanksgiving. See where the journey takes you. ??♂?
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