You've Optimized Everything. Except the Thing Running All of It.
I had a c-section and went to a meeting three days later. I’m not telling you this as a badge of honor. I’m telling you because it took me years to realize how deeply wrong that was, and how completely I had learned to treat my body as an afterthought to my ambitions.
For a long time, I was good at this. I pushed and performed. I optimized my fitness the same way I optimized my calendar: hard, relentless, with no real curiosity about what my body was actually asking for. I had degrees. I had credentials. I had results. I also had a nervous system running on fumes and a body I had (unknowingly) declared less important than my output.
Now - for all my math people - I’m not earning 10x what I made in my thirties, but my entire life is 10x happier, I’m healthier, I’m more fulfilled, I have more love and joy, I have more personal fulfillment, I have more achievements (that matter), I have more free time, and yes - I also have more money.
The difference isn’t a secret shortcut or a New Morning Routine TM. It’s that I stopped treating my body like a machine I could run into the ground and repair later.
We’ve built an entire culture around the opposite idea. We celebrate degrees and certifications and back-to-back calendars and the ability to function on five hours of sleep. We nod at the data about hydration and food and rest, and then we schedule another meeting over lunch and reach for our phones at midnight. We’ve accepted, somewhere deep in the operating system of how we work, that the body is the last priority, not the first.
What makes this particularly strange is that the body is the only thing making any of it possible. Your intellect, your strategy, your vision: these things require a regulated nervous system, a brain getting adequate rest, a body fueled by real food instead of cortisol and convenience. When we run our bodies hard and ignore what they’re telling us, we don’t just perform worse. We make worse decisions. We miss things. We carry stress in our bodies that we have to to extra work to counteract. Research is increasingly clear that chronic stress and unprocessed emotion are not just management challenges. They are at the root of illness. And a significant portion of that stress? We inherited it from the way we work. We often identify a need to build more resilience when what we really need is to eliminate the issues that are setting us back in the first place.
We are too intelligent and too capable to keep accepting this as the cost of doing business.
I’m not suggesting that you need to install cold plunges and saunas and nap rooms in your office space. I’m not looking to promote a trend as much as I’m asking you to recognize our humanness and honor the vessels that we are all inhabiting.
What if performance wasn’t measured only by output, but by the quality and health of that output? What if 40 grounded, focused hours was genuinely enough, because the person showing up for those hours was fully resourced rather than running on reserves? What if ease and flow and joy were not the opposite of results, but the very conditions that produce them?
We have inherited a lot in business that no longer serves us. But the belief I most want us to examine honestly is this one: that honoring our bodies is a luxury, a trend, or something to get to later. It’s the key to your and your organization Glowe-ing. Don’t do this later…later has a way of arriving all at once.
This week, I’m not asking you to overhaul anything. Just notice one place where you are working against your body instead of with it. One habit, one moment where you could choose differently. That’s where it starts. As Within, So Without.
Glowe’s next invite-only event for CEOs and Senior Leaders in St. Louis is June 10 - want to be in the room?
Learn more about Slow Down to Speed Up