If Your Body is Tense, Decisions Won’t Make Sense
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Generate better leadership and decision-making via body awareness. Understand how physical tension can reveal a misalignment with your values, guiding you towards smarter, authentic decisions.
It’s imperative for us to raise our awareness of what’s going on within and around us. There’s so much information to take in that most of us are forced to gloss over things. And those of us who are aware that we’re doing that can sometimes have that haunting, look over the shoulder kind of feeling.
The Symbiosis of Body Awareness and Decision-Making
Body awareness can provide rich information that can benefit our decision-making and it can substantially reduce stress.
An important way to attune to wise decision-making is to pay attention to what our bodies are telling us.
This can provide valuable real-time information regarding how aligned or not aligned we are with decisions we’re contemplating.
A reliable way to check how well we’re aligned with a decision is to sense how relaxed our bodies feel. Our bodies can tell us if a choice feels right or not, and it’s a good idea to start paying more attention to how relaxed or tense our bodies are.
If a choice feels right, wise, and in alignment with our heart and values, our bodies can be calm and relaxed. It takes practice to become sufficiently aware of the body, and some of us are more in touch with our bodies than others, but everyone can do this.
Identifying Misalignment through Body Signals
In looking at ways to support ourselves in making wise decisions, noticing what our bodies are telling us can cue us to any misalignment in our decision-making process.
If we consider moving forward with a decision that is out of alignment with our values or our integrity, we will experience an internal conflict that will result in our bodies getting tight.
For example, if we’re planning to execute a decision that will be good for us personally, but we know it will negatively impact others (customers, employees, friends), the inner conflict will drive the mind to strategize how to justify doing what we’re planning to do so we can get what we want.
The discomfort and guilt about our planned behavior could well be enough of a signal from your conscience to reconsider the choice.
But if not, the negative experience we’re setting up will cause the body to contract, generating tension in the body. This is designed as a way for our conscience to get our attention.
It serves as a line of defense to support living in alignment with our values and what we truly care about, rather than getting lost in myopically getting only our own needs met.
Harnessing Body Signals for Conscious Leadership
There’s an old saying, “If it’s tight, it ain’t right.” Certainly, some of us are better listeners when it comes to our bodies, but all of us are capable of sensing that our bodies are experiencing greater tension.
It’s easy to tell when we are dramatically out of alignment.
When there’s a lot of tension rising in our bodies, our breathing becomes faster and shallower. Some of us even briefly stop breathing for a while.
In a sense, this is the body’s way of serving as our bullshit detector. No need to rely on outside support!
Rather than waiting for our bodies to send extreme signals that we’re out of alignment, there is great value in learning to listen for the body’s more subtle signals, like tightness in the shoulders, a sense of pressure in the chest, a slight headache, etc.
Conscious leaders recognize these body signals to be a great gift because if we pay attention to them, we can make the appropriate course corrections to get back into alignment with our values.
You can see this quite easily when letting go of the need to reach perfection. Not only does this cause the body to relax again, but the whole of us ultimately feels better.
When we lead with integrity, and when our words, choices and actions are in harmony with our values, tension drops away and our bodies relax. And the decisions that arise from this way of being are inherently wiser.
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