When did you last disconnect from technology?

We spend so much of our time working purely with our cognitive capabilities, and we forget we have a whole body below the neck!!

I have just come back from a few days on the south coast of NSW on a yoga retreat (with my fabulous teacher Beth Borowsky) and I want to share some learnings from the mat:

• Everything starts with the breath: if in doubt, take a breath
• When we are struggling, we tie ourselves in knots and our head starts telling us what we can’t do
• When we focus on slowing down the breath and breathing more deeply, we can soften into a pose with less resistance
• When we focus on what we can do we allow ourselves to celebrate our achievements and be grateful for the body we have
• Activating our feet enables us to ground ourselves and through them we create a much more stable structure from which to build everything else
• Connecting within to our body with wonder rather than judgement opens us to possibility
• Acute listening starts with listening to our own bodies, rather than external voices

?All of these lessons apply to our lives more broadly and especially to our roles as leaders:

• Everything starts with the breath: if in doubt, take a breath
• When we face a hard challenge our inner critic can get very loud and we need to respectfully thank it for trying to keep us safe and also tell it gently to back off because we have achieved many hard things in our lives
• Sometimes the best thing we can do with a tricky challenge is to walk away for a while and then return with a fresh perspective
• When we celebrate all the smaller achievements rather than only the big end goals we begin to recognise everything we can do and have done
• When we savour those wins and feel them in our bodies we build our resilience and energy for the next hard thing
• Grounding our leadership practice in our values provides the firm foundation for making tough decisions and having hard conversations
• Shifting from only listening to our thoughts and actually tapping into our bodies provides us with a wealth of new information about what is important to us
• Reconnecting our mind and body is critical to our health and wellbeing, and the energy and mindset we bring to leadership is everything!

In yoga class Beth invites us to take a sacred pause, in corporate life I invite you to take a strategic pause.

When you create time and space, on a regular basis, for this strategic pause to connect your mind and body and reflect on your leadership you allow yourself to express yourself more authentically as a leader and discover greater fulfilment.?

As a suggestion for how to create the strategic pause I offer my practices:

Daily: meditation, even if it is only two minutes of focusing on my breath

Weekly: yoga and / or mindful walking in nature

Monthly: coaching supervision with intentional reflective practices

Annual: a yoga retreat and a holiday immersed in nature?

What are you doing to create these strategic pauses in your life?

How are you supporting yourself as a leader? (and did you notice that coaching is in there as a means to cultivate reflection?!!)

With love

Sue