Psalm 1 v 3 says ‘when we are planted we are like a tree thats planted by the river and yields its fruit in season’. When your business is small and starting to grow, you are the most important person in it and the driving force behind it. You are the custodian of the vision. And however well you communicate that vision, you still need to be available to give it life, feed it, tend it, and nurture it, to do all the jobs a gardener does to create beauty in a garden, or it will wither and die.
I dislike gardening, but Roger my husband loves it, but after a day in the garden I realise gardening is hard work! He comes in sweating and looking like he has run a marathon because gardening has the ability to keep you fit while you are working on making it beautiful. So to garden, you need to stay fit to keep it up with it if you want to create and maintain a beautiful garden. For your business or your working life to be beautiful you need to be fit and well.
In work and in business the highs and lows of creating products and services, offering them for sale, doing the after sales service and innovating throughout the business to keep up with market trends are all hard work too. But in most businesses the effort you put in doesn’t necessarily keep you fit like gardening will.
You need to sharpen the tools you use…
If I was to ask most CEO’s or business owners where they are at in their business where their business is at, what are the numbers, what sales they had last week, most would be able to respond but if I were to ask the same group what are YOUR personal numbers, would they know? So better still would YOU know? Do you know, your blood pressure, you’re resting heart rate, your weight, your cholesterol level…?’
You are the critical element and component in your business. What would be the cost to your business if you were to go down and unable to work due to the loss of your availability through stress or illness? If you fail to pay attention to your own numbers then this is a real possibility.
Do you at least take time to make certain there is balance in your working life? Do you take time to eat healthily and to exercise regularly and by regularly I mean at least 3 /4 times a week.
Are you overeating and postponing your weightless? Have you checked your BMI lately?
There are times when taking adequate exercise can be difficult – when you’re travelling, when there are deadlines to be met, but most people who have ever exercised know that when they do, they feel better and achieve more. Not just at work but everywhere else in their lives, too.
There are easy ways to exercise that take less time and involve less expense than gym memberships. For most people walking is the easiest and often most neglected.
Get some easy exercise – go walking
Walking is low impact (the lowest) exercise, but if you walk reasonably fast and walk regularly you’ll get toned up, lose weight and even find yourself less willing to put sugar, carbohydrates and excessive amounts of fat into your body.
In the not very distant past we all walked a lot more than we do now. We walked to work, to school, to church, … to see family and friends. Less than 40 years ago in an age before freezers were common in the home, women (especially) walked to the shops almost every day, and therefore also did weight bearing exercise on the way home. So, going about our day to day activities we exercised without having to think too much about it.
Walking for half an hour 4 times a week will make a difference to your body…
How often in the week could you fit a short walk into your day at lunchtime or before you get home to cook dinner?
Take care of your mental health – go walking
The mental health benefits of walking are even more beneficial than the physical ones… Walking for between 20 and 40 minutes every day or even every other day frees the mind and allows you to shift perspective, whatever is going on at work or in the business. After walking for just a few minutes, you’ll feel calmer, your stress levels will begin to drop and you are likely to gain more clarity in your thinking.
Many of us when we have a huge workload start to feel the stress which causes our blood pressure to rise and our concentration to diminish, soon we are no longer creative, by just taking 20 minutes out of our day we find clarity returns we feel grounded and where fresh for the next onslaught of work.
Have you ever been for walk and told someone you felt better afterwards?
Release your creativity – go walking.
There are many well documented accounts of some of our greatest thinkers, leaders, artists and entrepreneurs using walking as a creative aid. A familiar concept in NLP is a pattern interrupt (an instant shift in perspective). There’s a great little story of the evolution of the ideas behind ‘Glasnost’ that brought about the end of the Cold War. The story goes that a difficult conversation between Reagan and Gorbachev was going nowhere when Reagan suggested they go for a walk. The shift in perspective allowed them to find a creative solution to the impasse… and the rest as they say is history.
In his enthralling biography of Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson documents the many meetings Jobs was inclined to walk, where he worked out the business and design problems he was tackling.
The romantic poet William Wordsworth ‘…wrote almost all of his poetry on the hoof’ according to Andrew Motion (former British Poet Laureate) says, the walks he and his sister Dorothy took, as well as those with the poet Coleridge were well documented at the time in his diaries.
A favourite quote of mine from Wordsworth is this: ‘Never trust an idea that wasn’t got while walking’.
So, do you know your numbers and are you taking care? ‘We live inside our bodies, take care of your home’ and make sure that ‘your garden’ is replenished daily, you know the ‘numbers’ in the soil etc, what minerals are missing etc and see it flourish!
Are you taking care of your home and also enabling your garden to thrive?
Leave a comment below and tell us how you make your garden grow and if walking has helped you! If you haven’t started walking yet then are you inspired to start?
Amanda Wells
Amanda is a life coach, author and speaker who has been on platforms in over 63 Nations and the co founder of GEM women with Caroline Marsh.
Please Go to www.wellsministries.com.au for more
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