The focus of your health clinic may be about fostering wellness and fitness in your clients, but have you let your own health slip as a result?
Taking a serious approach to being fit and healthy is paramount to business success as well as personal wellbeing.
Running a business or clinic burns energy, increases stress and places strain on your mental capacity. All these pressures can easily accumulate and overwhelm clinic owners who haven’t consciously taken steps to combat them. Starting with your own health is where business success really starts.
Structuring your day around a focus on health and wellbeing should be a primary gadget in your business toolkit. After all, health is a suit of armour and a valuable weapon. Let’s see why.
Move that body!
Move your body. Your clinic will benefit alongside you.
You need to incorporate regular exercise into your week if you want to stay on top of your mental and physical game.
Some business leaders and clinic owners prefer to work out in the morning. Some prefer a midday jog or session at the climbing gym, while others enjoy evenings at the squash court or weekends spent ocean swimming.
It really doesn’t matter what physical activity you choose but make it a regular scheduled feature of your working life.
Exercise and staying fit is one of the most important factors in mental and physical wellbeing. If your blood is not pumping a couple of times a week, your performance, mood and aptitude will wane.
Benefits of exercise include:
- improved mood and self esteem
- lower levels of stress, anxiety and depression
- increased mental acuity
- combats a variety of diseases and health concerns
- improves sleep
- keeps you lean and strong
“Training gives us an outlet for suppressed energies created by stress and thus tones the spirit just as exercise conditions the body,” Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Feed your body to grow your business
Diet is just as important in fostering successful business leaders.
You don’t need to be a calorie counting kale muncher or a superfood evangelist, you just need to be aware of your dietary intake.
Start easy:
- Schedule in your lunch breaks to keep your dietary intake regular.
- Bring your own wholesome food with you to your clinic to avoid takeaway traps and junk food.
- Balance fruit and vegetables with lean meat, healthy fats, and whole grains.
- Talk to a dietician or nutritionist at least once to get a meal plan in place.
Why would a good diet help you run your clinic? The benefits of a healthy diet are wide ranging and underpin a successful professional life through a variety of effects:
- manages blood pressure and cholesterol
- improves concentration and memory
- boosts mood
- prevents spikes and ebbs in energy
- improves sleep quality
- helps combat illness and disease
“Let food be thy medicine, and medicine be thy food,” Hippocrates, Greek philosopher.
Get some sleep already!
Many people don’t see sleep hygiene as an integral part of health and business performance. Don’t be fooled. Proper and regular sleep is the absolute cornerstone of health and the ability to nail your clinic work.
So many of us take sleep for granted and don’t realise the incredible wide-ranging benefits of proper sleep, especially for a stressed-out clinic owner. It’s an untapped superpower you need to harness.
We now know that it’s imperative to get over seven hours of sleep, at the very least, to remain competent and healthy with seven to nine hours ideal. No excuses. Some of you might think you’re immune and need less sleep – you’re not.
Matthew Walker, professor of neuroscience and psychology at the University of California, has compiled and conducted decades of sleep research and the results are startling. A lack of sleep is destroying our brains, our health and most certainly our businesses far more than we ever suspected.
“Every key facet required for business success will fail when sleep becomes short within an organisation,” Matthew Walker.
So please don’t fall into the trap of believing sleep is laziness or a waste of time – in fact it’s the single most important thing you can do with your time if you intend to be even close to 100%.
“Sleep is the single most effective thing we can do to reset our brain and body health each day — Mother Nature’s best effort yet at contra-death,” Matthew Walker.
Here’s an overview of the impacts of low sleep levels:
- increased stress and decreased happiness
- high blood pressure
- poor cognition and memory
- high rates of illness
- low mental and physical performance
- increased risk of injury
As a hot tip – try to set an alarm when you should be sleeping not just when you should awake. It will work wonders.