Three Leadership Lessons Yoga Can Teach Us In A Digital World
When we step into any yoga class, we're likely to hear phrases like "bring your attention to the present moment, "check-in with yourself" or "turn your focus inward." While yoga might be more known today for enhancing flexibility, it also gently cultivates self-awareness. It helps us hone our ability to identify our true thoughts and feelings at any given moment. To reflect. To process. To clarify. This is a reminder that yoga can teach us some valuable leadership lessons in the digital world.
Here’s are the three leadership lessons yoga can teach:
1. Focus
One of the core benefits of yoga is gaining focus. Going through the different yoga postures has a calming influence on the body and the mind. Every pose, from beginner to more advanced, requires your full attention and focus.
Maintaining focus is a valuable skill for leading teams in a fast-changing environment. Clarity of mind enables leaders to focus on what it is important to navigate their teams through industry transformations and future-focused organizational changes. Focus also helps us tap innovation for its business value by focusing on adopting technologies not for their coolness factor but their potential to create new products and business models.
The best yoga pose to practice focus is the headstand. Nothing requires more attention and focus in yoga than balancing your body on your head (at least for me).
2. Determination
Not every yoga posture is easy to learn. It takes determination and steady practice to master both beginner’s poses and more advanced postures. Leaders don’t shy away from challenges. They tackle them every day with determination. By maintaining a clear focus on goals, they find ways to build the right team and skill sets and use the right technologies to overcome hurdles.
For me, one posture that requires determination is the crow, or crane, pose. While it requires some arm strength, the real challenge is convincing your mind that you can balance your body with both feet lifted off the ground on your arms. To master this pose, you need to understand where your center of gravity is and how to distribute your weight to balance your body.
Imagine the opportunities when you take off the blinders at work.
3. Challenge yourself every day
Learning and growing as an individual, a team, and a company requires being comfortable with change and being ready to leave one’s comfort zone. Yoga practice challenges you to overcome your perceived physical and mental boundaries.
Consider the scorpion pose, known to be one of the most challenging yoga poses. It resembles the position of a scorpion ready to strike, with your body resting on both forearms and your legs mimicking the scorpion’s tail. This advanced pose that I have yet to master. It requires enormous core strength, flexibility, and mental readiness.
Practising different styles of yoga over the years has taught me to constantly challenge myself, not only at yoga practice but also at work. Applying yoga techniques at the office helps me to adapt to a fast-paced environment and help others to do the same. It also gives me the mental power to create a quiet space to stay creative and innovative.
Just like the practice of yoga, leadership is an ongoing journey. A constant work in progress. If we take the time to pause and reflect on all the information we’ve absorbed, we may discover surprising new insights that lead to targeted success.
How InBloom Helps Leaders Lead with Wellbeing First
We’ve heard it so many times recently; leaders must first focus on their own wellbeing. At In Bloom, we are helping leaders have a better understanding as to what their wellbeing looks like, holistically. We do this with in partnership with the Global Leadership Wellbeing Survey. This is the first step of our Leadership Wellbeing Coaching journey.
Reference:
https://www.digitalistmag.com/future-of-work/2018/10/22/3-leadership-lessons-yoga-can-teach-us-in-digital-world-06191104/