The Über-Secrets, Part III: Wake Up Your Spirit
Bonnie St. John has spent years living, working, and training with world class performers as an Olympic skier, a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, a White House economic official, and a consultant to hundreds of global companies. Her most recent book is How Strong Women Pray.
I have always been interested in how people find inner strength and nurture it. One of the most practical suggestions I have ever heard came from Ken Blanchard, best-selling author of The One Minute Manager series and more recently published, The Secret. When I interviewed him, he stressed the importance of “waking up your spirit” in the morning. Your spirit, he explained, wakes up more slowly than your task mind. It is easy to jump out of bed, hit the alarm, rush to get dressed, and then speed from one task to the next all day long. You can get to the end of the day never waking your spirit at all.
It’s important to wake up your spirit because it helps you be clear about what is important and what isn’t. You are less likely to blow up over silly little things or, conversely, let something go that you should get outraged over. Waking up your spirit gives you perspective on what matters. Those who lead others especially need to have sharp instincts and good reflexes with their inner wisdom.
To wake up his spirit in the morning, Ken gets up and plays with his dogs outside for 30 minutes. He will get up as early as 5am if that is the only “slow time” he can find in his morning.
Libby Pataki, the First Lady of New York for twelve years, described a similar process of finding her inner strength in the morning when I interviewed her for my most recent book. “I like to walk for about an hour,” she said, “so that’s why I have to do it early, before the day starts. In essence, I feel like for an hour, I can literally leave things behind. I can walk to the top of the hill. I can just breathe and listen. I hear birds. I hear the wind. I look up and it is so pretty sometimes. Even when it is not pretty, I am in a quiet place, just where I want to be.
“You have to turn off the cell phone and the Blackberry. What happens is that I get into a frame of mind where a tranquility comes over me that enables me to go back down the hill and to not be swallowed by the things that are thrown at me, to not be overwhelmed by what’s waiting for me.”
As the wife of a Governor, Libby weathered many ups and downs, media firestorms, and intense public scrutiny. When she talks about what gets “thrown” at her, it is probably more than you or I could imagine.
I also interviewed Nadia Comaneci, the pint-sized little Romanian girl, with the signature pony tail, who won five Gold medals and scored the first perfect 10 in the history of gymnastics. To defect from Romania she had to walk in the dark for miles, falling in icy puddles and fearing a shot in the back at any moment. She climbed over barbed wire and arrived scratched and bloodied at the American Embassy.
In her book, Letters to a Young Gymnast, Nadia wrote, “Do you understand, dear friend, how desperate a person must be to attempt defection? I had to weigh the value of seeking a better life against the probability of my imprisonment or death if I failed in the effort.
“There are moments in life when you lose your edge, so to speak. Even though there’s a small voice inside you that is desperately trying to shake you out of the haze it is hard to hear it. Try always to listen to that voice because it speaks the truth, even when you don’t want to hear what it is saying.”
Waking up your spirit in the morning helps you to hear more clearly the inner voice that Nadia is talking about. Here are a few tips for finding your own “wake up your spirit” morning activity:
1. It must be something enjoyable and relaxing. For some people exercise works. If you hate exercising, that won’t work. It must be something you look forward to.
2. It should not be goal oriented. Some people putter in the garden in the morning. They focus more on enjoying the plants and flowers than trying to weed a large patch of ground.
3. Change it if you need to. After a couple of years in one routine, I burnt out. My yoga and prayer routine became a task instead of a refreshing and joyful time. Now I still pray and do yoga, but not in the same routine I did before.
Don’t underestimate the power of waking up your spirit in the morning. In hundreds of my interviews with high performers, this concept of waking up your spirit in the morning has been brought up in one way or another more than anything else. If leaders facing highly stressful jobs with responsibility for thousands of people and millions (or billions) of dollars wake up their spirit to nurture their inner strength, chances are it can help leaders of smaller teams, too. You could say it is the Ubër, Ubër-Secret.
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