How Founders Can Build New Habits with Breath Practice
Make an effort to watch how your body responds to the mental olympics that we tend to put it through every day - working on our laptops, working on our devices, as we Zoom into the world to connect and do the business that we need to do. We challenge you to find those moments of tension and watch to see what kind of activities cause us to take on a little bit of extra tension in the body.
A lot of us feel this in terms of maybe a stiff jaw or tensing our jaw. A lot of us feel it in terms of tension in our arms or in our hands. Or some of us might find that we’re doing something with nervous energy, like bouncing one of our feet up and down on the floor while we’re sitting in our desk chair. It can also manifest itself in other ways - tension in the back, tension in the neck, the eyelid twitch that so many of us have as intense, focused people that are working on our computers.
So, watch those behaviors as they come up. Watch for them, just over your next work day from morning through the end of the day. Watch to see where you start to feel a little bit of tension come up. Then find a visual cue related to that event or or that space.
Here are a couple of examples:
It can be as simple as entering your physical workspace. Let’s say you’re working out of your home office and there’s a door that you open to walk into your office and you close it to keep the noises of the rest of the house out of your office as you’re working. Then that door can become the physical object that we’re going to attach a new habit to.
Or maybe it’s those serious conversations you have where you reach behind your laptop and turn on the circle light so that you can be illuminated as you you jump on the serious sales call or the business call or the pitch call or the speech or the conversation or the workshop, whatever it may be. If that’s the moment where you’re finding tension, then I want you to attach the habit we’re going to build to that light. Think about the moment you reach over and turn on that light, and that’s where we’re going to build a new habit.
Your challenge is:
We recommend building a habit using the Ten Clearing Breaths tool in the Founders First app. This is a simple breathing process that helps us breathe in a specific process with a little bit of tension and movement to it. The goal is to calm our mind by bringing our mind and our focus to our breath and then allow our body to have intentional introspection into how we’re feeling in the moment, how we’re holding ourselves, where our tension is, and a practice where we just let that tension go on the out-breath.
The two parts of the process are:
Find that object that we want to attach this new habit to.
And the new habit is the Ten Clearing Breaths practice.
If sitting for two to three minutes at these points of turning on the light or walking into the office doesn’t work for your schedule or your attention span, that’s totally fine. But for this practice, it’s really easy to modify. You can reduce it to 30 seconds and do three or four clearing breaths, or take a full minute and do five or six instead of ten. Whatever works for you.
To start, observe your tension through the next day, where you feel it in your body, then find the object that is associated with that situation, and then sit for just one minute to start out with, and the next time you either walk through that door or turn on that light or whatever that object is for you, do the Ten Clearing Breaths tool. It’s going to help bring your mind and your body back to calm.
What’s so incredible about this tool, and we all know this, is that it only works if you do it. So, that one minute is absolutely critical because it can transform the next 15 minutes of your life - how you perform, how you think, how you feel, how much energy you have in the moment, how much energy you bring to the conversation or the situation or the work that you’re doing, and even the amount of energy you have through the rest of the day. If you can serve it and put it into the right activities, that one minute can be absolutely transformational for the next hour or the next couple of hours.
So, find what your object is, attach this new habit to it, do the Ten Clearing Breaths practice and see how your focus, your creativity, your tension, and your performance change in result.
The Ten Clearing Breaths tool is one of many tools available in the Founders First mindstate tracking app for entrepreneurs. See all the tools and get personalized recommendations on how to best invest your time each day based on your current mindstate by trying the app free for 7 days.
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