How To Relax: The Often-Neglected Way to Make You A Productive Manager

You the Productive Manager

Do you want to become successful in your career? Do you want to start and run your own business? Or, do you just want to lead a happy, peaceful life and somehow make ends meet?

No matter which fields you choose from the above, the question you should ask yourself is “Am I productive?”

This is the thing that’s most important to you if you run a business, do a job, or even stay at home. Thought it might look like profit and sales keep a business running, they’re only a demonstration of what helps a business survive – productivity. If you’re the manager of any business, it’s not going to be your salesperformance, or even profits, that determine if you’re going to survive and prosper in the corporate world. A productive person is someone who has value, has done, or does things of value. His work somehow benefits, or fulfills a recognised need or want of another person. When you have value, people want to have your value, usually with a currency like money. If you as an employee or a business only consume and have no output, then survival is going to be a challenge for you. Before we discuss the first key to professional success, let’s first clarify what productivity is not.

Misconceptions about productivity

You are sweating and hyperventilating, running around from one place to the other, shouting out directives for the floor workers. Other people calling you because they need your services. After doing over-time you end the day with a boisterous meeting with the colleagues. The cut-throat life. You are fooling yourself if you think that’s what it means to be productive! Take a look back and you’d see that to live a lifestyle like that you also need to consume much more – be it money, or food, or other people’s approval. It could very well be that you would also need to give much more, even to people who don’t matter to you. Productivity is not being busy maintaining other people’s expectations, neither it is not having any expectations from yourself!

Productivity is how much you can give to others compared to how much you need to take, it depends on your own attitude towards life.

Within your workplace, what you need to take could be your remuneration, recognition, non-financial rewards, the environment and even the food. What you need to give could be your performance, but also your time and presence to your colleagues. The more output you can give with the least amount of input, the more productive you are considered.

Secondly, it’s a mistake to think if we pushing our limits (stressing ourselves) is going to ‘toughen up’ or make us ‘strong men’. You’re going to end up with problems like anxiety, depression, memory loss, sleep issues, heart diseases and so on. This is because the stress hormones really wreak havoc on your nervous system in the long-term. Knowing what makes your team productive is only the tip of the iceberg, many things can get in the way for your performance.

Things that hinder productivity:

Two ways in which you could face productivity issues in your organisation is through ineffective communication and lack of employee engagement. If you or your colleagues have gone through stressful situations (i.e corporate scandal), periods (i.e mass lay-offs during recessions), or even smaller interpersonal conflicts when you couldn’t keep your calm and started to break-down under pressure, you know what I’m talking about. You have to be calm to be effective in these circumstances no matter what! If you lose your nerves you can’t be the leader. Symptoms that you have employees who are not engaged are absenteeism, refraining from corporate social events, lack of participation in problem-solving.

Moreover, these things can cause productivity issues: if the colleagues can’t trust each other and believe each is hiding information from the other.
if you’ve faced conflicts or accidents in the past and you feel like just avoiding similar situations would give you some time to think.
if you think you’re going to face fault-finding no matter what you achieve and wish to escape the nagging.

Do you want to come out on top of this?

Relaxation is the answer.
Here are the business benefits of being relaxed:

More motivation towards work: it would stop the dwindling levels of serotonin and dopamine in your body. Lower levels of serotonin and dopamine make you depressed. Being depressed, you’d be busy tackling emotions that others shouldn’t get exposed to. Depression such a state of mind that it could affect your thoughts, beliefs, and even the body. With relaxation, you feel much better about yourself and the world around you. You would naturally feel more energetic to pick up and carry out tasks at work with a positive mindset.
Better prepared for physical and emotionally strenuous work: If you have anxiety, hypertension or attention issues, relaxation loosens up the muscles of the body. Chronic tension gives you the feeling of the muscles in your body ‘tearing and burning’ – you feel exactly the way you’d feel if you go to the gymnasium and over-work your muscles. Of course it’s not a pleasant feeling! When you relax, your mind would focus away from the thoughts
that causes your muscles to contract.
Better teamwork: your heart-rate would slow down and save you from high blood pressure. Our blood pressures go up when we feel stressed. Practicing relaxation works directly with the body and reduces the heart-rate. Your mind becomes free to make reasonable decisions even during intense situations of interpersonal conflict. You become able to make win-win negotiations, instead of experiencing kill-or-be-killed feelings.
Access to unseen information: the brain emits electric impulses at different frequencies depending on the state of the mind. Alpha, beta, delta, theta, gamma, lambda, and epsilon are the frequencies. While beta is known for our activities from waking up to before falling asleep, the others are sleep and non-sleep states. Each of these frequency levels allow us think in specific ways and tap into new sources of information and ways of knowing. You’d be able to know the past of the problem, the hidden agendas of the actors, and also the approximate future with your solution. Relaxation is the key to this.

What is relaxation?

By its Latin roots, relaxation means the state of losing something again (which was originally lose or free). This practice of using the mind to focus on our body’s muscles was invented by the Dr. Edmund Jacobson, the father of progressive relaxation. It was originally meant to address problems such as insomnia, anxiety, and sports injuries.

How to Relax the Silva Method Way:

There are several techniques of relaxation:

‘Autogenic’ way where we visualise situations or scenes that make us ‘calm’ and focus on breathing or body parts.
Visualisation technique- where we not only visualise a mentally calming scene but also utilise all the senses to live that experience.
Non-pharmacological methods such as aromatherapy, hydrotherapy, music, or art therapy.
Body massage
Biofeedback – using the brain connected to electrical wires to send instructions to the muscles of your body.

The Silva Method stands apart from all these techniques in these ways:

Silva Method

Target-oriented: the method requires you to have clearly defined desires, beliefs, and expectations about your end goal. This gives you power over environmental distractions (sound, temperature, people etc.).

Practical for the business manager: you are trained to use the techniques in ordinary sitting positions, as opposed to sleeping or resting postures. You could use it pretty much anywhere, even in short breaks during international travel.

Time-saving and guided: you’d be guided by an expert trainer who’d be directly instructing you step-by-step verbally about what to do. This saves a lot of time compared to techniques you do only by yourself – where you can get off-track with your thoughts. Also, after you get trained in a few other techniques within the method, you’d be able to reach specific mind states within a minute. It’s like a map which you draw first. Once you learn the way to these specific states of mind, you would be relaxing automatically as you reach them.

Personal power: using the powers of intuition, the method helps you decide when to relax and when not to.

Other methods

Without such demands, other methods are going to help you achieve your goals, but costing you a lot of time and

Some of the other methods require sleeping and resting postures. You can’t use your mind as much during resting as you could during day-time.

These don’t require the active participation of the power of the brain.

These are only techniques meant for relaxation only.

Let’s get started with our first little exercise.

Identify a deep desire within yourself that you’d passionately want to achieve. Find out a way how this desire is connected to you being able to relax.

Identify a belief that you’ve held in your life to be successful in anything. You have seen first-hand how this belief has helped you make profits. Try to form a similar belief centered around relaxing.

Learn to expect that anything is possible if you desire and belief in something. Identify a time when you had a deep feeling of expectation about something happening. Since you’d be relaXing this time, connect the feeling with your goal.

Find out a reason, belief, or value to be positive in stressful circumstances.

The leaders of tomorrow need to demonstrate humanity and intuition as opposed to the past. The future belongs to level-headed managers who can stay calm and controlled in rapidly changing contexts.

How do you work on being more productive manager or/and business owner?

Share with us your experiences and ideas in the comment box below.

The Silva Method Ireland

References

https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/stress-management/in-depth/relaxation-technique/art-20045368

https://www.nerinstitute.net/blog/northern-irelands-productivity-challenge-exploring-issues

https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-34714591

https://www.healthline.com/health/what-is-jacobson-relaxation-technique#localized-technique

https://www.mountsinai.org/health-library/treatment/relaxation-techniques

https://itif.org/publications/2017/04/03/fact-week-productivity-matters-more-profitability-new-firms-survival-and/

https://www.nerinstitute.net/blog/northern-irelands-productivity-challenge-exploring-issues

https://www.binauralbeatsfreak.com/brainwave-entrainment/epsilon-waves-lambda-waves