Career: Aim for primacy!

“Orandum est ut sit mens sana in corpore sano” wrote Decimo Giunio Giovenale¹. To aim for personal branding and career leadership, we must try to stay healthy, both physically and mentally.

So let’s keep away from workaholism ², an obsessive-compulsive disorder of a person too dedicated to work and who puts his social and family life in the background to the point of causing damage to himself, his family and, in basically, even to your own company. Work and private life don’t have to fight, they have to integrate in harmony. If you are lucky enough to operate in an organization that believes in these principles, you will certainly have a competitive advantage.

Let’s reserve space on the agenda to practice sport, this will do our body good, but above all our mind. Playing sports will allow us to carve out the space to think, with renewed enthusiasm, about new solutions and new strategies.

Sports endorphins are analgesic and exciting. Abuse it, but don’t let it get hold of you and increase your stress. And stress is the life partner with which you must learn to live with: “Stress is like a spice in the right proportion enhances the flavor of a dish. Too little produces a bland, boring meal; too much can suffocate him”writes Donald Tubesing ³.

Study yourself, try to understand how you can keep your stress level within the limits widely described by Daniel Goleman ⁴  in his text “Emotional Leadership”: the best performances are obtained when motivation and concentration are at their maximum values, “at the point of balance between the difficulty of the task and our ability to cope with the problem “.

Still Goleman, in his inverted U model, explains how “normal cortisol levels give us energy and allow us to work hard. Positive moods stimulate cortisol production in the light-moderate range which corresponds to better learning. However, if stress continues to grow and exceeds the optimal point that corresponds to the maximum level of learning and functionality, a second neural system comes into play which stimulates the production of norepinephrine at levels comparable to those of pure and simple fear. From here on, we are at the beginning of the downward curve towards panic, mental efficiency and the level of performance drop in proportion to the increase in stress”.

After all “Stress is nothing more than a socially acceptable form of mental illness” wrote Richard Carlson⁵.

A superior of mine, a few years ago, taught me to plan my days in order to always keep stress at the right level, to leave 15-20 minutes between one meeting and another in which to rearrange the ideas that emerged during the previous meeting and plan goals and strategies for the next meeting. The method works: an emotionally centered presence is good for work groups and your business.

¹ https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimo_Giunio_Giovenale
² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workaholic 
⁴ http://www.donaldatubesing.com
³ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Goleman 
⁵ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Carlson_(author)

Bibliografy:

• Ditch. Dare. Do! 3D Personal Branding for Executives, William Arruda, Deb Dib
• Fai di te stesso un brand, Riccardo Scandellari
• Emotional Leadership, Daniel Goleman
• Codice Montemagno – Diventa imprenditore di te stesso grazie al digital, Marco Montemagno