Part 1: Stillness. What every business needs.

You can’t have a successful business without people, and you can’t have a successful business without people who feel empowered to do what’s needed, whenever it is needed.

Teamwork is everything. Equally important is working with clarity and focus, not doubting or second-guessing yourself, but working steadily with regards to whatever may be at hand.

What guarantees this steadiness, clarity and ability to work solidly on one’s own as well as in a team, is stillness. It’s what every business needs.

But – it’s not what every business has or purports to want to have. Stillness today is absent from the business world. Stillness and business aren’t considered as compatible bedfellows. Business is all about fast pace and getting things done, often as quickly as possible, whereas stillness is about chilling out, mostly likely horizontally, and being ‘still’, i.e. not moving – right?

Wrong.

Stillness isn’t about sitting or lying still and being inactive. It’s about being in connection with ourselves and feeling the deep inner settlement this brings – and from there, acting, and getting on with whatever needs to be done.

Stillness gives you a vitality, focus and clarity like nothing else.

People I’ve worked with will often comment on how ‘calm’ I tend to be regardless of the intensity of the work environment. I’ve often been asked – how do you stay so calm and alert at the same time? The answer is very simply, that I make a point of nurturing this stillness that each and every single one of us naturally has within us.

When we make the choice to rekindle this inner quality, we are in effect operating in harmony with our body’s natural way of being. And so it is a natural by-product if you will, to feel more vital, more alert and aware. We re-awaken a crispness and clarity that we then move with and work with. It’s pretty cool!

Stillness is the answer and antidote to foggy brain syndrome, to Fridayitis, Mondayitis and the all-pervasive drops in energy and productivity levels that plague the day for so many of us. Stillness is what brings to us a steady consistency of energy, and not the spikes and lows that end up with us feeling exhausted at the end of the working week, if not day.

So it’s not just what every business needs. It’s what all of us need.

How we access this stillness is much simpler than we’ve made it out to be. And I’ll give you a clue – all the mindfulness techniques in the world will not activate this stillness, because it has nothing to do with quieting our mind, and everything to do with listening to our body. More on that in part 2.