The three primary functions of an Executive Leader are to think, decide, and relate.
✔️ Strategic Thinking: Executive leaders are responsible for setting an organization’s direction and goals. You develop strategies to achieve these goals and create long-term plans to guide the organization’s growth and success.
✔️ Decision Making: Executives make critical decisions that impact the organization. You gather, analyze, and consider various factors before making informed choices. You may consult other leaders, stakeholders, or experts to ensure sound decision-making.
✔️ Relationship Building: Executives cultivate relationships with key stakeholders such as clients, customers, investors, partners, vendors, and community leaders. You represent the organization and negotiate partnerships, contracts, and collaborations to advance its interests and establish a positive reputation.
As the Executive Leader of Office Yoga and ZaaS, Harvard Business Review asked me to share well-being strategies that support people in leadership positions. Click below for the full Masterclass I led at the “Leaders Who Make a Difference” Conference
Desk Yoga for Executive Leaders, hosted by Harvard Business Review.
How Desk Yoga Can Help With Thinking
When thinking ahead or problem-solving, it’s beneficial to change environments. For example, if we’re stuck on a problem, the solution often comes when doing something else, like washing the dishes or driving a car. Solutions come when we take regular breaks and switch focus to new environments. However, you can change your internal environment without doing the dishes.
Desk Yoga is an efficient way to change our environment and clear the mind. This allows you to disrupt your current routine and thought patterns and allow for a new perspective.
How Desk Yoga Can Help With Decision Making
Practices like yoga and meditation help protect our energy. The practice conserves our pre-frontal cortex (PFC) energy and creates fertile grounds to make significant decisions. Meditation fine-tunes our thoughts to be laser-focused, direct, and powerful. Without meditation, our thoughts become fragmented and scattered, like the light that reflects from a disco ball. Yoga prevents scattered energy, so you don’t waste your precious brainpower.
How Desk Yoga Can Help with Relationship Building
Desk Yoga helps thread an unspoken bond in building relationships. This connection goes beyond the average working relationship typically based on intellect. Instead, think of a basketball team that practices together. They don’t say a single word on the court yet anticipate their teammate’s next move. This is the unspoken bond that comes from moving together.
How to Practice Desk Yoga
As you’re reading this, release your shoulders from your ears, unclench your jaw, and remove your tongue from the roof of your mouth. We physically tend to hold onto stress in the least noticeable ways.
For more, watch this Masterclass from Harvard Business Review’s “Leaders Who Make a Difference” Conference. The term “shouldering responsibility” or “carrying the weight of the world on your shoulders” refers to the tension created in the shoulders when you’re responsible for something. Releasing tension in the temples, neck, and throat helps us find our voice for clear communication and building relationships. The three poses I share here help open the chest and shoulders, relieve the lower back and hips, and remove tension around the temples, neck, and throat.
This Desk Yoga Masterclass is a solo starting point to optimize thinking, decision-making, and relationship-building. When we enhance these three functions, we become better leaders.
ZaaS is the leading expert in corporate well-being. For more information, contact us directly.
