Winning Strategies to be a Healthy, Energized, and Well-Rounded Executive or Employee
“Champions aren’t made in gyms, champions are made from something they have deep inside them—a desire, a dream, a vision ... They have to have the skill and the will. But the will must be stronger than the skill.”
—Muhammad Ali
If you follow the principles in this book from beginning to end, you’ll have the opportunity to succeed and a tremendous edge over those with whom you’ll be competing. There’s one other element that will affect your chances, and that’s your inner landscape: character, spirituality, drive, balance, and health—both physical and mental.
You may think these things are set in stone, but in fact they’re malleable as gold. Throughout our lives we’re constantly changing in response to changes around us. Usually, those changes are unconscious. I’m simply suggesting you take an honest look at that landscape and make conscious changes, trusting to your innate human attraction to the positive.
Develop a sense of urgency. Don’t have one? Get one. One of my top early mentors at Oracle used to stress a sense of urgency in defining and driving the beginnings and actualizations of success. If you don’t have it, people will leave you behind and none of your results will get recognized. Just so you know that I practice what I preach, I’m writing this at 4:30 in the morning. Why? I felt the need to get out of my normal comfort zone.
Practice stress reduction. Many top executives practice stress reduction, and I don’t mean through partying or even exercise. Exercise can be wonderful, but today many top executives are practicing things like meditation, visualization, or prayer as a way of grounding themselves and calming down. I can’t overstate the effectiveness of practices like these. There’s a kind of energy available to everyone who goes beyond synthetic knowledge to find inner peace. This energy can help guide you in your daily choices and provide clarity. I meditate and pray every morning. It gives me clarity and peace for my day.
Insider Secret #15:
The powers and energy that lie outside our synthetic knowledge are groundbreaking vehicles for change.
“Ah, but I’m not a religious person,” you say. You don’t have to be religious to pray. You don’t have to pray to anyone or anything specific. Just say, “Hey, if there’s something out there, I need some calming today. Please bring some energy in to help me.” Developing a daily meditation practice is another great stress reducer. Meditation is believed to lower blood pressure and heart rate, as well as boost the immune system. Information about many of the most popular and effective meditation practices is readily available online. These practices include Insight Meditation (InsightMeditation.org), Ananda Sangha (Ananda.org), and Self-Realization Fellowship (Yogananda-SRF.org). If you want to learn about the most highly regarded, deeply effective airplane route in mediation and yoga, refer to chapter 26 in The Spiritual Science of Kriya Yoga by Goswami Kriyananda.
Read these great books to help you relax personally and grow professionally:
Invite all of these sources into your process. If you want to be the best version of yourself, listen to great speakers in all areas of professional and personal growth, and also read great writers. This is all part of making you a well-rounded person and job candidate.
Give yourself a fitness and nutrition check-up. If you don’t have a fitness program and eat healthy foods, you’re missing out on a way to increase both your energy and your mental acuity. Not to mention that employers like fit people. They’re less of a risk and a liability, so being fit increases your chances of being hired and being promoted. Create quiet time to recharge and be creative. This time when you can sit and relax is important, but you have to create it for yourself. Make it a priority because it won’t happen on its own. Carve out at least ten minutes during your workday to unplug and unwind, whether it’s reading the sports page with a cup of tea or taking a walk around the block. On weekends, indulge in activities that stimulate the creative centers of your brain. If you paint, draw, sew, write, or play music, great! If not, consider taking up a creative pastime or sign up for a class that will nurture that side of you. Such activities can create a state known as “flow,” where time seems to stand still, resulting in a deep sense of calm and well-being.
Learn to visualize the results you want. All the best books written about success have a common factor: people often become what they think about. Ever think about someone you haven’t seen in a while, and that person suddenly appears? Dreams and goals that seem out of reach can become real through your continuous manifestation of the invisible mind and soul.
Starting five days before your interview, take five minutes a day of quiet time, alone, and picture positive things happening. Picture the outcome you want. Visualize what you want to accomplish. Visualize people saying, “Wow, that was great!” Visualize yourself winning. It’s amazing what a powerful vehicle the mind is.
When people fail, I often ask them if they visualized that outcome. They say, “Yes, with a lot of fear wrapped around it.” Dr. Wayne Dyer, one of the world’s most successful and inspirational motivational speakers, said, “We become what we think about all day long.” So if you focus on negative things—on failing at a job, on your fears about why you can’t do something, that you’ll never win—guess what? That fear, negativity, and worry will show up in the physical world. To work successfully, your visualizations should be around good intentions. By the way, Dyer’s Real Magic is a must-read book. I also love his audio series, The Awakened Life. I listened to it many years ago during a time of major change and personal upheaval and it was life-changing.
Conquer your fear. To be great in an interview, you need to overcome fear. That doesn’t mean you never experience fear; quite the contrary. We all feel fear. Conquering it means standing in the middle of fear, allowing yourself to experience feeling it and not being paralyzed by it. Meditation and breathing exercises along with prayer and taking care of yourself through exercise and nutrition are very important.
Here’s an exercise to help you get the upper hand on your fear. First, write it down. Be specific. Don’t just say, “I’m afraid of having a bad interview.” Dig a little deeper to find out what it is you’re really scared of. “I’m afraid I’ll freeze up and forget to say something important.” Or, “I’m afraid the interviewer will judge me for not finishing college.” Then answer the following questions about your fear, in writing:
When you’ve finished, read your answers to another person you trust. If you there’s no one available, read them alone. Either way, read them aloud, and allow yourself to release the fear with your words. This is an important step because fear thrives in darkness. Once you’ve let in the light by speaking your fears aloud, you’ll feel them diminish.
Motivate yourself to follow through. People tend to think of motivation as something outside themselves, something that either comes or doesn’t, but in fact motivation is most often a matter of commitment. Hesitating to make commitments can become habitual, and that can be dangerous. It means you’ve got a good chance of staying stuck wherever you are right now. People often wait for motivation, or to “feel like it” before they move forward. Regardless of how you feel, you must get out of bed and take action. Self-esteem is partially developed from the repeated experience of meeting commitments head-on and coming through on those commitments on time, or even ahead of time.
Start by learning to make and keep commitments to yourself. Every day, write down the actions you are going to take the next day, and on each step of your journey. In order to reach maximum effectiveness, you need to begin to work toward a 100 percent hit rate on that to-do list. When you’re consistently reaching 100 percent, up it to 120 percent. Getting to 120 percent means that you did more than your daily goal, that you overachieved. In the beginning, living up to your commitments is like learning to ride a bike, or using a part of your body again after a serious injury. It’s awkward at first, but it gets easier the more you do it.
Don’t be the drunk at the party! Green tea or chamomile tea is a much healthier relaxation tool than alcohol. Alcohol can reduce levels of serotonin, the “well-being hormone,” and increase cortisol, the “stress hormone,” sending you into a downward spiral. Stress also reduces serotonin, so stress and alcohol together can make you feel like a shell of the person you are. If you’re playing too hard, you have to make time to recharge.
There’s another reason to limit your alcohol consumption: drinking around work colleagues, especially drinking to excess, will negatively affect your reputation at work. I remember an Oracle corporate function where a newly hired Oracle sales employee was sitting next to the executive VP of sales. He was trying to build rapport, and doing well for quite a while … until he threw up on the bar. All the progress he’d made vanished in that instant. I also saw a Harvard grad who’d played rugby start head-butting everyone at a similar event after a lot of drinks. And then there was the female manager who was circumspect and professional during working hours, but had a habit of getting very drunk at after-hours company events and telling people what she really thought. Keep it together. You never want to be the gossip du jour around the watercooler. (Unless it’s for your stellar achievements and meteoric rise to the top!) If you’re having alcohol or drug problems, please look into the twelve-step programs offered by Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) or Narcotics Anonymous (NA). Many famous people and business leaders are leading happy lives of continuous sobriety thanks to these programs. If you’re a spiritual person, ask for help through prayer. Then go get the appropriate professional help. Those who ask for that help are the strong ones. They often become society’s future winners.
Adjust your outlook. I’ve seen people begin to make huge accomplishments by putting in a huge amount of effort, but first, they had to decide to put in that effort. It started with an outlook, a willingness to go above and beyond with tenacity. The universe may test your commitment to hard work and willingness to go outside the box and do different and creative things. My own commitment has been tested many times, but I’ve found that when I am highly responsible, take care of details, make that last phone call, and manage my internal well-being, I get results.
It’s also important to recognize the people in your life who don’t support you in winning. Learn not to listen to them. Consider taking a little time away from them—or a lot!—when you’re focusing on overachievement.
Create a platform or space for excellence through due diligence. Doing things like paying bills, returning phone calls, or finishing tasks you’ve left incomplete clears physical and mental clutter while it wipes your karmic slate clean. If you can get the energy of the universe behind you through proper action, you’ll have a very good chance to accomplish expectations beyond your wildest dreams.
I’ve crossed off everything on two dream lists I made for myself earlier in life and am in the process of writing a third. The rewards are the peace that comes with having continuous employment, a satisfying career, the ability to be with family, and the opportunity to give back to others. The mission of this book is to give the same chance to all those people I’ve seen miss out on these rewards because they weren’t prepared. Gandhi said, “Be the difference you wish to see in the world …” It’s my hope that reading this book will make a real difference in your career path, and your path through life.
I wish you energy, excellence, and success.