Healthy Living

This post isn't directly centered on leadership, but it's content aligns with how I've been directing my life lately, which I feel will affect my ability to lead in the coming weeks and years.

I've never been very athletic and in fact, sports tend to bore me. I'm competitive, don't get me wrong, and when the team I've arbitrarily decided to root for in a particular game loses, I'm upset. However, I don't spend much of my time or energy thinking about sports, watching games, or participating in athletic activities. In fact, in high school, my parents requested that I join a sport and I chose swimming, only to be demoted (or promoted?) to team manager. I continued to swim on the side, only motivated by the little "rewards" my parents would give me to keep me in the pool.

About a year and a half ago I began to experience medical complications with my heart and after months of trying different medications and diets, my cardiologist recommended that I meet with an electrophysiologist to discuss surgery. Last February, I underwent a five-hour procedure to fix the electrical malfunctions causing my heart to palpitate up to 250 bpm and was deemed "healed". My doctor told me that I shouldn't be experiencing any more of these attacks and that I was free to live a healthy life.

However, for me, my daily activities weren't necessarily healthy. I rarely (okay, never) exercised and ate what I want. Fortunately, I'm not enough of a junk food addict that I was content eating poorly for all of my meals and my regular habits included most of my food groups, but still... pizza twice a week isn't good for anyone.

Another health complication came up around April when my doctors and I realized that I had contracted strep throat every month since the new year. That pattern continued through July, so I scheduled a tonsillectomy/adenoidectomy to prevent this illness from showing up again. In August, I had the surgery and spent a miserable two weeks in bed recovering. At my post-op, my doctor told me I was healing well and again, free to live a healthy lifestyle.

At this point I realized that maybe I needed to redefine "healthy lifestyle". Although the causes for my two surgeries this year weren't necessarily caused by my lifestyle, I knew that going forward it would be easier for my immune system and respiratory system to handle sickness if I was taking care of my body. So, I began working out on a daily basis (fueled by my newfound obsession with an exercise class called Pure Barre) and tracking my eating habits so that I'd be more inclined to reduce my sweets indulgence to one per day.

I've dropped a few pounds and although that's always fun to see, it's not really the purpose of the development of this new lifestyle. I put in this effort mainly to improve my health, sharpen my mind, improve my focus, and lessen my exhaustion. I've already been feeling stronger (thanks to those daily pushups we do in Barre!) and can get a lot more done in a day than before.

So, why did I write about this in my leadership blog? Because the healthier I am as an individual, the more effective I'll be as a leader. A leader needs all of the things that I just mentioned: health, a sharp mind, focus, and energy. We can list those all of and resolve to improve ourselves in a professional environment, but I realized that in order for me to achieve those characteristics, I needed to make a personal change. My healthy living has led to an improvement of my entire being-- personally and professionally. I'm making higher grades than I have in all of college (just aced a Global Supply Chain midterm!) and wake up each morning ready to conquer the day. Who knew that this would all be possible with a little athleticism?

Okay, I'm still no athlete and I'm just barely able to grasp the rules of football, but baby steps, right?