Exercise and Leadership: Are They Connected?
When it comes to exercising and making health and fitness a top priority, the benefits are endless. You will experience a better mood, reduced stress levels, increased creativity, better sleep, and you will feel more energized throughout the day. Not only that, but regular exercise helps you maintain a heathy weight, reduces your risk of heart diseases and other illnesses, reduces your risk of certain cancers, and just overall improves both your mental and physical health. You may have already known about those benefits, but did you know that exercising regularly also improves your leadership abilities? Research published in the Journal of Managerial Psychology, found that leaders who exercise regularly were rated as better leaders by their team members over those who did not exercise regularly.
How Does Exercising Improve Your Leadership Abilities?
1. Improved Decision Making Skills: In today’s workforce, it is easy to get caught up in your work and push yourself to complete tasks and projects. This can lead to fatigue and even burnout overtime. Since exercising reduces your stress levels and improves your mood, it helps to prevent burnout. This allows you to view situations with an open and clear mind, and make decisions without fatigue or stress clouding your judgment.
2. Better Perspective: Exercising improves your ability to concentrate and allows you to organize your thoughts, which leads to a better, more positive perspective on the world around you. Not only will this help you more efficiently manage your tasks, but it will also improve the way you interact with your team members.
3. Enhanced Creativity: Regular exercise enhances your creativity, which is a very important trait of leaders. It allows you come up with the best approach to tackle important projects or dilemmas without getting overwhelmed. It also allows you to be more innovative, which benefits both your team members and your organization as a whole.
4. Inspiration: Exercise can help to improve your confidence and when you feel self-confident, you feel inspired to take on challenges. You are also more likely to get our of your comfort zone. This confidence not only inspires you, but it inspires your team members to challenge themselves and make their own lifestyle changes.
5. Improved Attitude: Exercising releases “feel good” endorphins and it is a great way to relief stress. Therefore, exercising makes you an overall happier and less stressed leader. This rubs off on your team members and creates a happier work environment for everyone!
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