Action Follows Thought
While sitting in my
office, behind my desk full of papers and general clutter, an employee of mine
came rushing in with a large stack of files.
He dropped them in front of me, causing them to slide off one another just
to make a larger mess. The man, George,
was out of breath and his face was a bit red. He looked like his blood pressure
was about to burst off the chart.
I asked him why he
was so flustered and out of breath. He began to tell me how stressed he was
about the upcoming deadline and how much more work he had to do in order to
meet that deadline. His speech was going a mile a minute and I could tell he
was on the verge of a complete breakdown.
I asked him to close
my door and have a seat for a minute. He hesitantly closed the door and sat down
as rigid as a board at the very edge of the chair.
As he sat there,
trying to catch his breath, I asked him to close his eyes. He glared at me with
a look of misunderstanding. Being his boss, I held a certain authority over him,
so he gave in and closed his eyes.
I told him to take a
very deep breath, hold it for three seconds and let it out. As he drew in his
breath I told him that when he exhaled to say out loud the word “relax”. As he said the word, his face muscles that were
tight and tense a couple of seconds earlier began to relax. I asked him to do
it two more times. With his second breath, his shoulders began to relax and
drop down to a normal position. On his third time of taking these deep
breathes, he leaned back in the chair to a much more relaxed position. By this
time, the color in his face had begun to return to normal and he was a lot less
tense.
I thanked him for
doing this and asked him to open his eyes.
He opened his eyes quite wide and looked at me with a very relaxed look
this time. His first response was, “how
did you do that?” I explained that it
was just a small relaxation exercise the he could use at any time. He thanked me several times and went back to
work. Incidentally, he met the deadline and his work was fantastic.
The 17th
century, the French philosopher René Descartes once said, “I think, therefore,
I am” which is very true. When we think,
we have to use our imagination. Our
imagination is the language of our subconscious mind. Our subconscious mind is
what controls our actions to a large extent. Therefore, when we think we are
relaxed, our subconscious tells the rest of our body to relax and the action
follows.
In today’s fast paced world,
it is very easy to become stressed. Our bodies can only handle this stress to a
certain extent before it starts to shut down.
This is why it is so important to learn how to deal with stress before
it becomes unmanageable, either by using a relaxation technique or by removing
some of the stress causes in our life.
Back to top