CEOs "first, put on your own oxygen mask"

– You’re the leader. How do you keep yourself best fit to Lead?

With every day bringing new hurdles, stresses and pressures, a crucial part of your leadership is navigating each day’s hurdles, deflecting the distractions, forging on to the goals, while managing to stay in One Piece. This is not a normal workload. Many CEOs are struggling with too many requirements from stakeholders, clients, team members, and personal life circumstances. 

Leaders are finding that intelligent attention to physical and mental health improves well-being, resilience, and effectiveness. We’ve heard these steps as often as we’ve heard “first put on your own oxygen mask,” but they work! And they maintain your ability to lead your team to success.

1. Add more physical activity - park further away, take the stairs, take the meeting outside for a ‘walking meeting.’ Walking stimulates blood flow to the brain and leads to more innovative solutions. In addition to releasing endorphins that trigger positive feelings regular walking, strengthens bones and muscles, improves heart and lung health, and improves balance and endurance. 

2. Nutrition matters. Protein and leafy greens will make you feel and perform better, while processed, fatty foods, sugar, and alcohol will do the opposite.

3. Hydrate.   Water carries nutrients and oxygen to your cells, flushes bacteria from your bladder, aids digestion, prevents constipation, and normalizes blood pressure and heartbeat. Drink 4-6 cups of water a day no need to get waterlogged. Choosing water at 4pm instead of a caffeinated drink helps you sleep better.

4. Sleep – essential to our productivity, clarity, and memory. Lack of sleep weakens our immune system and negatively affects stress hormones, appetite, breathing, blood pressure and cardiovascular health.

5. Visualization - See your day plan as you exercise, walk or take the stairs. See the outcome you are planning. The combination of visualization and activity is synergistic.

6. Gratitude – Expressing appreciation to those who mean something to you actually reduces stress. Research shows that showing gratitude improves your well-being, increases resilience, and reduces depression. Relationships are invaluable.

7. Writing – is a Release. One of the best tips to prevent insomnia is a notepad to quickly jot the tasks running through your head at 3 am. Writing your thoughts helps you process challenges and releases the weight. Externalizing helps put things into perspective. 

Even when the benefits are clear and significant, changing habits is never easy. 

Positive Self-talk is important : Research, and every sports-psychologist, confirms that positive self-talk is essential to powering through the toughest part of the game. It’s ironic that the encouraging words “You can do this!” that we extend to friends and colleagues often turn to self-critical recriminations when we ourselves tackle difficult challenges. '

But replacing negative psychological messages with positive ones can have very real positive effects. 

The inner voice throughout the day and into the night can be supportive, or self-defeating. People are prone to self-criticism, and this negativity can be unrealistic and detrimental. This inner voice combines conscious thoughts with unconscious beliefs and biases. When it is positive, the inner voice brings calm and confidence. 

The experts at the Mayo Clinic suggest: Don't say anything to yourself that you wouldn’t say to someone else. You will see and feel real benefits from using the same positive can-do encouragement toward your own efforts that you would use to encourage others. Instead of “It’s far too complicated,” try “I’ll tackle it from another angle.”

Instead of “no one informed me,” try “I’ll see if I can open the channels of communication.”

Instead of “I’m not going to get any better at this,” try “I’m going to give it another try.”

Whether it’s a golf swing, a speech or a presentation, encouraging, calming self-talk is essentially is the mother of invention.