Meditation and Stress Reduction
Meditation is beneficial in relieving stress and can help leaders in the way they represent themselves to their teams. If we’re in a leadership position, and we become stressed out, we are going to project that onto our team. They are going to sense it and they will likely become stressed as well. If you’re calm and collected, you can be friendly and confident and you have a better mental state of leading yourself and the team through the problem. This is obviously more desirable than being stressed out, paralyzed, and not knowing what actions to take next. Meditation is a version taking time for yourself and taking care of yourself. We would not hesitate to brush our teeth or shower in the name of self-care. But, for some reason, when it comes to mental health, we often have trouble taking days off, meditating during the day, seeing a professional counselor, or finding ways to reduce our stress load.
Confidence and courage are contagious and so are lack of confidence and fear. Imagine that you are like a tuning fork. If we have two tuning forks in the room and we strike one of them, the other tuning fork will vibrate at the same frequency. People are like that in families, small groups, and the workplace. If I’m nervous, anxious, afraid, angry, that will resonate to the rest of the folks in my immediate environment. However, if I’m calm, relaxed, and centered, that is the frequency with which my tuning fork will vibrate.