INsight/ Growing Into Small
Manila, 14 June 2017 — Does size matter to you? Discover how releasing weight will produce three powerful benefits for your leadership.
Six months ago I asked if you were ready to empower your leadership in 2017 by starting a Body Dialogue. Several friends have taken up my challenge and started their Body Dialogue by paying more attention to their food and exercise. It did not take long before they started noticing results.
Over the past months, more people have seen the difference I made through my Body Dialogue and asked me how they could also release weight. This is a good thing for them, and for me. Let me explain.
By keeping up with my Body Dialogue for more than half a year, something extraordinary happened to me last month. For the first time since more than 25 years, I grew into size Small!
As my commitment and effort grew bigger, the size of my clothes grew smaller. With that achievement came an even stronger enthusiasm for taking on more challenges in my leadership journey. It is the kind of positive energy that I wish for the leaders I coach and train to experience in their life.
Working with your body to boost your well-being has a huge effect on how you show up for life. As I hinted last year, the way you conduct your Body Dialogue has a lot to do with your leadership!
How are you doing now? Are you carrying around too much weight? Have you tried several diets to lose weight, only to 'find' that weight again after a while?
You might be repeating that unproductive cycle time several times until you realize that you need a more fundamental transformation in how you live your life, for yourself, and for others. Starting your Body Dialogue can be a powerful start of that transformation.
Three actions to take
How to get started? Here are the three actions you can take.
1. Measure—learn to listen to your body by measuring its changes. This is most easily done by standing on the scale daily. Getting a body checkup also helps.
2. Research—find out more about making healthy food choices. Use the Glycemic Index table as a good starting point for foods to favor and foods to avoid.
3. Partner—team up with one or more partners in the Body Dialogue journey, to work together on empowering your health, energy, and leadership this year.
As you get going, what normally happens is that you start out very well with your personal commitment. And then, after a little while, you discover that it is difficult to keep up your enthusiasm for a longer time. That is why the third action is so important.
Let me share the powerful words of Harvard's Prof Rosabeth Moss Kanter, who said that "nearly anything worth doing is very difficult to do alone." Her advice for leading a positive change is that "everything goes better with partners."
So, when you start your Body Dialogue, team up right away with a partner, who can also be your accountability buddy on the journey!
Three benefits for your leadership
As you persevere in your Body Dialogue and release a significant amount of weight, you will discover three important benefits that will fuel your leadership growth:
First, you can celebrate your achievement. Research shows that making progress is your biggest motivator to keep growing your leadership. Celebrating achievements is hugely important.
Second, you can lead with more confidence. This applies to continuing your Body Dialogue, and also to any other leadership challenge you set for yourself, in your business and your life.
Third, you can inspire others by example. You will soon find out how powerful the transformational leadership behavior of Modeling the Way really is when people start coming to you with questions how you released weight, saying that they want to do the same.
Summing up, your Body Dialogue is a powerful way to flex your leadership muscles, level up, and gain benefits far beyond your improved physical well-being.
When will you start?