Posts Tagged ‘corporate health’

Motivational Harness #4 – You Don’t Have To Stink!

At a recent iNform Corporate function, I had the privilege of presenting to the cream of Adelaide’s small and medium-sized business directors, and here’s what I noticed:

They all dressed REALLY nicely!

I know…insightful!

The reason I noted this, above anything else is, I was there to talk about the benefits of exercising before AND during work to enhance productivity. I was duly informed this is not practical for well-dressed, nice smelling people who wished to remain that way through the course of their workday.

So I want to throw a spin on the perception that meaningful exercise must ALWAYS make you stinky!

Read the rest of this entry »

Motivational Harness #3 – Flow From Within

In my recent football article, here’s what I eluded to:

Is your workday structured around your physiology, or is your physiology dictated to by your workday?

On a very complex level, asleep or awake, our bodies operate in cycles. It is physiologically impossible to be firing on all cylinders for the entire day, and so the busy structure of our external world can deplete our reserve of internal endurance.

You can’t force productivity.

However you can nurture it. The coming installments will tactically address the requirements of your physiology to create an internal environment that thrives in external conditions.

It was recently presented to me that the greatest barrier to productive workdays were M&M’s! It took me a while to work out that this wasn’t a reference to tasty little treats, but rather the concept of Management and Meetings.

I once worked under a manager who, I’m sure, had a KPI to interrupt work as often as he could! He would constantly pop by for a chat, to see what I was up to, and to add new tasks to my hectic schedule. He called meetings for everything, and scheduled these – without fail – in the most inconvenient times for me. Read the rest of this entry »

Motivational Harness #2 – Internal World Vs. External World

Each waking day there is a battle between our internal physiology and our external environment. In the modern western format, the advantage often lies with the external. Many of us who walk into an office (of varying description) experience the pressure of a tight schedule to fulfill where the expectation of a work-day is grafted around constant output.

I’m going to indulge my AFL bias, and suggest that if our work day were a football game, the match report might go something like this:

Heading into opposition territory, bottom placed Internal Physiology were always going to have a tough day up against ladder leader External Conditions. With the roof closed on External Environment Arena, the home side took early ascendancy with Caffeine and Email goaling in the opening minutes. Ringing Mobile was busy around the packs and provided further scoreboard pressure while Caffeine asserted dominance up forward slamming through a second goal before quarter time. Read the rest of this entry »

Motivational Harness #1 – Finding The Elusive Character

I used to enjoy cooking.

Before I became a parent, the journey of cooking a meal included any or all of the following:

  • a nice beverage
  • experimentation with flavours
  • frolicking in the herb garden
  • good company
  • my choice of music

After I became a parent, the process of making a meal now includes:

  • a selection of steamed vegetables
  • some form of boiled or grilled meat
  • a tired, hungry little person who communicates her lack of appreciation for my cooking by decorating the walls and floors with it
  • Justine Clarke’s album ‘I Like To Sing’, generally for the fifth time on any given day

The end goal is the same – to ensure that everyone is fed – but the path to getting there is very different! Suffice to say that my levels of ‘motivation’ for the latter are somewhat lower than they were for the former.

How does this relate to exercise?

Read the rest of this entry »

Happy Holidays!

Recently I’ve noted a number of reports on Australians who aren’t taking holidays.

In fact, almost a third of Australian workers have no planned leave in the next 12 months.

In a rare moment of nostalgia over the weekend, my mind was cast back to my youth in the ’80′s. I saw a video clip from 1986, where a lady was dancing with total abandon to herself. It may have been my ignorance to the big bad world at the time, but I was taken by the simplicity of  it all. No special effects, REAL instruments, images of books with tangible paper pages. Classic ’80′s production epitomising the world in which I grew up. Read the rest of this entry »

TV Can Kill You, Hey?

I heard a recent statistic that watching two hours of television per day increased risk of death before the age of 65 by 13%, with associated risks of heart disease and diabetes going up by 15% and 20% respectively. Given the average Australian watches the box for around four hours per day, this should be an alarming stat to some of us!

Obviously we’re all smart enough to know there’s more to it than this otherwise, I’d anticipate, we would have seen a massive government legislation against the idiot box!

Surely it’s more about the behaviour that TV watching represents, and the impact that this has on our bodies when carried out over extended periods of time. Read the rest of this entry »

Follow Us On:
  
Archived Articles