Premise:
In the past couple of days, I have come across two women, two doctors who have in their own ways shared the importance and impact that our thoughts have on our body.
First, Meet Dr. Gladys McGarey. She is 103 years old and considered the mother of Holistic Medicine.
In this captivating and powerful interview, she shares the secrets to a longer, healthier, happier life. – LOVE & LIFE, together. At 103, she confesses to have a 10 year plan and also that she found her true voice when she was 93. Inspiring to say the least. And she has just published a book that I highly recommend – The Well-Lived Life.
Second, meet Dr. Ellen Langer. She is a Professor in the Psychology Department at Harvard University. I have started reading her latest book – “The Mindful Body” and have already started to like what she has to say.
You can watch her share her key insights from the book in this interview.
The key learning from both the conversations is the importance of Mind and our thoughts (Love & Loving Compassion) have over our physical health.
One shares the importance of Love (Dr. McGarey) and the impact it has on our lives and the other talks about how labelling and the associated emotions and thoughts can impact our physical health (Dr. Langer).
I believe that they are talking about the same thing – two sides of the same coin kind of thing.
Whatever said, I think that the wisdom that both of these women share is worth considering and implementing whatever feels right to us.
As leaders, it is our responsibility to continuously take good care of ourselves and those in our care. If I were to believe the work of Dr. Langer, labelling, priming and the culture in which we exist has much more impact on our psyche than we have ever considered.
We can use it to our advantage. We can start to expect good things from our people. We have known that people perform to the extent that we expect them to perform provided we give them the structure and the support they need.
We can create a culture which is uplifting and positive. We can prime ourselves to peak performance.
But before we can do all of that, we need to learn more about all of these things, which brings back to the key tenet of leadership – ongoing, continuous learning and self improvement.
And last but not the least, happy and healthy leaders tend to be able to make better decisions and create a culture that encourages happiness as well. So, it is not just in our benefit to heed to some of the advice shared by both the women but also our teams benefits.
In conclusion:
As a follow-up, you could share these videos with your teams and have a conversation about what they learnt from this. Discuss what could we all do as a team to build a culture that encourages these behaviours. Explore where you don’t agree. Go deeper in those. Create an environment where people are open and feel invited to openly share their opinions.
