The primary task of a leader is the mastery of his or her energy.

—Peter Drucker

Natalie, a media relations director, shared this experience:

Natalie’s organization got away with the deception, and her boss was comfortable with her performance. However, Natalie paid a price in terms of her health and self-esteem. Who she defined herself to be and how she was required to act were out of alignment, and, as a result, she lost her integrity. Soon after this experience, she quit her job.

Few of us will ever have to deal with issues of such magnitude, yet each of us is called upon at work to make decisions and take action when we are under pressure. Although you can’t control other people’s decisions and actions, you do have a choice between becoming a victim of the situation and preserving your integrity.

The word integrity is often defined as a consistency of values, beliefs, and actions. Sounds simple, but it’s not always. Integrity has another meaning, which is the condition of being whole and complete, and it is this broader definition that I am using in this chapter. When you are whole and complete, it is much easier to decide and act on what you truly believe and value. Wholeness implies that all the parts of you—your mind, emotions, body, and energy field—operate as one, aligned and unimpaired. In this context, I will introduce you to the process of centering, which, when experienced deeply, positions you to act with integrity and authenticity even when times are the toughest.

Natalie suffered on both counts. She wanted to act with moral integrity but decided she had to make compromises, and, because Natalie’s vision of herself and what she had to do to preserve her job were out of alignment, she became a victim of the situation. As a result, she paid a high price physically and emotionally.

FINDING BALANCE UNDER PRESSURE

In this chapter we will focus on centering and grounding, the second and third elements of the inner map to stresslessness (for a refresher, see the Introduction). We’ll describe the levels of experience, identify the benefits they provide, and map out what you can do to deepen your center/ground experience so you remain balanced and whole under pressure. Let’s begin with the link between maintaining our integrity and the mind/body relationship.

Integrity and the Mind/Body Relationship

As Natalie’s story demonstrates, the damage that occurs when we lose our integrity manifests on physical and emotional levels. Without our conscious intent, the body serves as our honesty meter, reacting to our mind’s rationalizations and challenging us to assess our decisions and actions.

Elmer and Alyce Green tell us in their classic book, Beyond Biofeedback, “Every change in the physiological state is accompanied by an appropriate change in the mental-emotional state, conscious or unconscious, and conversely every change in the mental-emotional state, conscious or unconscious, is accompanied by an appropriate change in the physiological state. The body affects the mind, the mind affects the body, and then the new body affects the mind and so on.”¹

If you are unaware of your emotions, physical sensations, and intuition, or if your conditioned mind is so invested in your point of view, you either won’t notice your body’s signals or you’ll try to ignore them. Over time you might develop a stress-related disease. However, if you are attuned to your mind/body, as Natalie was, you can make another choice.

Most people try to change their behavior and reduce the stress using insights, self-talk, and affirmations. Sometimes this works; often it doesn’t because personality, which is like your mind’s software, is preprogrammed. Thus, it is often easier to go through the back door, so to speak, by shifting the body in order to change your thoughts.

Reduce Stress by Aligning the Three Perceptual Centers

Your body has three main perceptual centers—your head, heart, and hara (located in the lower belly). Wherever you place your attention affects your experience and draws your energy to that location. Throughout the course of the day your attention shifts from one to another, but if you are like most people, your attention resides more often in one of these, and that generally is in your head.

The cognitive mind enables us to think, analyze, synthesize, and evaluate information. However, living in your head cuts you off from your emotions, bodily sensations, and intuition; therefore, you may not notice the nuances of a situation or recognize how your words affect people emotionally. When life is primarily about thought, you lose the richness of experience. Relationships may not be as deep; you may feel lonely. Pressure and stress experienced by the mind lead to overthinking, worrying, making false assumptions, doubts, Pollyannaish optimism, and/or stories of doom and gloom.

For this reason, some business gurus suggest living from your heart. When your attention resides in your heart, you feel connected to everything around you. You feel compassionate, giving, and kind. You care about your coworkers and want to motivate, empower, and inspire them. Relationships may flourish that may enhance your influence. Sounds ideal, that is, until you get carried away by your emotions and lose sight of the bigger picture.

For example, I asked teachers and administrators at a childcare center what made them glad. “We are like a family,” they responded proudly. This network of caring, this joint attention to the heart, maintains them through hours of listening to noisy children, through countless renditions of “The Wheels on the Bus,” and through stacks of paperwork. “It’s my calling,” many of them told me. Yet, they have difficulty marrying their good work with the business of running a multimillion-dollar nonprofit organization. Thus, when the CEO of this nonprofit announced, “We can’t continue to care for infants. The program is expensive to run, we are losing money, and we have to raise $1.8 million just to keep our doors open,” few were open to hearing it and no one offered proactive suggestions. Sometimes leading from the heart shuts down common sense.

The third perceptual center, known in aikido as hara (meaning “one point”), is located a few inches below the belly button, which is your center of gravity. Here, the weight of your upper body and torso is channeled down through your legs into the ground. More than just a physical location, hara pulsates with energy. Meditation students are taught to breathe from here in order to relax the body and experience finer states of consciousness; singers learn to breathe into it for richness of sound, endurance, and control; and martial artists use it to learn to move. Psychologist Richard Strozzi-Heckler describes it as “the place from which we are both inwardly calm and outwardly ready for action.”²

Focusing your attention in your hara ignites the process of centering, which occurs when the three centers are fully integrated and balanced. When you are centered, you are able to draw on a wealth of information derived from your cognitive mind, heart, and body, which allows you to deal with enormous pressure and invites breakthroughs and mastery.

HOW IT FEELS TO BE CENTERED

You don’t have to be a disciple of yoga or a New Age philosophy to experience your center. Everyone does. In fact, centering often occurs accidentally while walking, listening to music, or exercising. Although we tend to think of it as a particular experience, centering is an ongoing mind/body process that gets stronger the more you practice it. Centering operates on three levels—the subjective, objective, and universal. However, for our purposes, we will focus only on the first two.

Let’s begin with the subjective or personal. Jim Detwiler, an executive director of packaging, spent eight years in high school and college running sprints and jumping hurdles, which was physically demanding. He found his center when the race began:

In this first level of centering you feel balanced, relaxed, and present. Your perceptions expand and you feel more self-contained. Your breath is located deep in the lower belly, and everything that was out of alignment (the shoulders that were raised to carry your burdens, the slight leaning forward that came from racing around with your attention outside yourself) comes back into alignment so your mind and body act as one unit. That’s the integrity Jim noticed in his mind/body when he ran.

Martine, a Type 5 personality, shared the following:

Centering increases your awareness, energy, and confidence. You trust yourself more and act decisively. Your presence grows, and people notice you. However, at this level of centering you may or may not be willing to maintain your integrity by speaking up when you disagree with your supervisor or organization, and your goals are not necessarily in alignment with what is best for you and others. It depends on how locked in you are to the worldviews, coping styles, and beliefs of your conditioned mind. However, as your centering practice deepens, your reference point shifts.

How Centering Opens You to Possibilities

With practice, the experience of centering shifts from the subjective to the objective. Instead of being rigidly ruled by your conditioned mind, its tight boundaries soften, and you have more options in how you respond to people and situations. Philip, an executive trust banker, describes it this way:

As centering frees you from the bonds of your conditioned mind, your energy expands to include others. You recognize that center is not just in you; you are in an expanded center, which provides a spaciousness and ease. Thus, instead of reacting to slights or threats, you remain composed and emotionally detached and, therefore, do not to take them personally; even if they were meant personally, you respond in a calm, compassionate, and effective manner. The stronger your center, the more equipped you are to handle conflict with integrity.

Peter, a senior vice president of quality for a global company, confided:

“Centered” at this level means “grounded in your deeper values and connections with others.” When centered, you are authentic. You no longer need to be what others—the organizations to which you belong or your culture—expect you to be. You can be yourself and, without fanfare, acknowledge and act from your inherent value and uniqueness. The more centered you are, the more integrity you have, and therefore, the harder it is for you to be torn asunder by self-doubt, fear, and high-pressure situations.

Peter continued:

Centering places you in the midst of the action and guides you by expanding the clarity of your perceptions. As centering deepens, you experience it as not just something within you that divides and balances two halves such as the right and left sides of your body or two opposite points of view; instead, centering gives rise to the two halves, includes them both, and, at the same time, is something unique in itself. Applying this level of center to business strategy provides a third way that is much more effective than either fighting with or succumbing to the competition.

To see how applying this level of centering to a business problem works, consider this example. When Cellular One was starting up in San Francisco during the 1980s, they were competing with giant GTE for market share. GTE had a two-year head start, had opened a significant number of retail stores, and was in the process of educating the public about cellular. There was no way tiny Cellular One could compete with them on their turf. From its inception, the Cellular One team, headed by Jim Dixon, held retreats led by consultants Chris Thorsen and Richard Moon. They practiced slow-motion aikido and dialogued about the principles they learned and possible applications to their business strategy.

At one retreat, the team practiced multiple force attack. With many people simultaneously pressuring one person, that person doesn’t seem to have very many options and it’s easy to feel hemmed in. Yet as they practiced, the centering of whomever was attacked deepened, and the person learned to join with an attacker’s force and find the open space within the field of attackers, which enabled the person to deal with the multiple attacks strategically, not just tactically.

Their dialogue sessions then focused on applying what they had learned to create a successful strategy for handling the multiple forces in the marketplace. They decided to take advantage of GTE’s advertising initiative, and let them educate the public about cellular, while they looked for open spaces in the marketplace that GTE had missed or ignored. By teaming up with existing electronic retailers like Radio Shack, they created a large, secondary distribution network. On the day Cellular One formally entered the marketplace, they had 70 percent of the market share.

Centering Under Pressure

Our experience of center shifts with the pressures that are exerted on us, which lets us adapt to our inner and outer environments. We are constantly re-centering ourselves, though, at times, the shifts may be too subtle for us to notice.

Put under enough pressure, each of us reacts by hardening and pushing forward (attacking), weakening and collapsing, spacing out, or distracting ourselves. When we push forward, we resist the pressure by attacking the problem or person. When we collapse, we absorb the pressure and become its victim. When we space out or distract ourselves, we may say we don’t care, drink excessively, or compulsively shop. In this way, we refuse to acknowledge the pressure even though our mind/bodies are negatively affected by it.

Although each of us tends to react in a particular way, we also employ each of these ways of reacting at different times. One is no better or worse than another; they are all limited. In time, whichever way we react ultimately sends us in the opposite direction. For example, we may speak harshly to an associate and then feel guilty or remorseful. At the height of a success, we may exude enthusiasm only to feel let down or sad later. Under pressure, our emotions, perspective, and physical state flip-flop until our energy comes to rest at our natural center. This pendulum swing occurs naturally. As physics tells us, every action has an equal and opposite reaction. This is the two-beat of life. It is why when we exert or resist a great deal of energy without replenishing it, we later feel exhausted or burned out. For this reason, “to bring mind, body and spirit to peak condition, executives need to learn what world-class athletes already know: recovering energy is as important as expending it.”³

Scott Barrett, the former chief information officer for a large public firm, described his experience as a younger manager this way:

Although it only takes minutes or seconds to re-center, we tell ourselves we are too busy, that we will do it later, or that the workplace doesn’t support us in doing this. Oh yeah?

A couple of years ago, I participated in a jury selection for a retrial. The case was a serious one in which two men, who had been convicted of murder and were on death row, alleged that they were innocent and that they had been framed by the police. To protect potential jurors from information overload and potentially spacing out, the judge took movement breaks. Everyone including the lawyers, defendants, jury, bailiffs, press, and observers was ordered to stretch. The judge, herself, also stretched. When she first ordered everyone to rise and follow her movements, the attorneys were visibly shocked and the jury laughed, but we all rose, stretched to the ceiling, twisted our torsos, and wiggled our fingers. When she had to meet with the attorneys outside the courtroom, she would appoint someone to lead us in the stretches. People began to look forward to these breaks. The energy in the room became more alive as people got out of their heads and became centered and present.

PRACTICE: HOW TO CENTER

Step One: Pause

To change your mood and stress level, you first need to realize that you are no longer centered. This means that you need to stop and sense/feel inside you. Since you might forget to do this, here are a few suggestions you can use at work:

•   Set your phone, clock, or timer to go off every sixty or ninety minutes. Stand up and sense/feel how you are.

•   Create rituals in which the pause is built in so you can take time to assess your inner state. For example, every time you put the phone down or turn the computer on, pause before getting involved in the next task. Or, instead of rushing off to the next meeting, take a moment before you leave your office or cubicle to pause. Are you centered?

•   Notice when someone or something grabs your attention. Initially, you may not be aware of it, but that person or object may be providing you with a clue to center/ground. Here are two examples:

•   Does the tall redwood tree you see from your office window capture your attention? It can serve as a reminder that there is an up and down energetic stream that moves through you. A center. Better check to see if you are slouching or leaning towards one side of your body.

•   Do you notice how surefooted the woman in the next office is? She moves so deliberately. Now notice how grounded you are. Can you even feel your feet?

Once you recognize the amazing intelligence of your attention, a tree will not only be a tree; it will be your wake-up call.

Step Two: Ways to Re-Center

Modern life has us paying attention to the future: our to-do lists, the next meeting, or upcoming deadlines. When your attention moves from center into what is in front of you, you lose a sense of your back, which supports you, and the ground that anchors you. To re-center yourself you need to get out of your head and shift your attention into your body. Here are some quick ways to shift your attention back to center:

•   Take three deep breaths into your lower belly, allowing your rib cage and chest to expand wide rather than rise up.

•   Take a walk, get something to eat, or speak to a colleague in person instead of writing an email. As you walk, feel the way your body moves. Experiment with moving with your attention in your hara.

•   If your workplace has a campus in a natural setting, bring a blanket to work and lie on the ground. Spend five to ten minutes lying on your belly doing nothing and then flip over for another five to ten. You will be amazed at the energy you feel as your mood improves and your tension eases into the ground.

•   Use humor to dispel the heaviness of your situation. Laugh your stress away by compassionately surrendering yourself to the imperfections, learning challenges, and moments of jerkiness that make us human.

•   If your shoulders are tight sense/feel the soft angel wings that are connected to your shoulder blades. (Think John Travolta in the movie Michael.) As they expand wider than your physical body, feel the release of tension and your ability to sense your back increase.

•   Once you have a sense of your back, it is easier to gain a sense of the ground. Imagine that you have a large, thick dragon tail growing from your lower back and resting comfortably on the ground. Notice how this helps drop your tension into the ground so you are moving with gravity instead of resisting it.

In the personal practice section you’ll find a center/grounding exercise that I recommend you use daily. The more you engage in this practice, the more your muscles, tissues, and nerves will gain an intimate knowledge of center/ground. In time it will become second nature to recognize the difference between being centered from being off-centered, and easy to come back to a deeper and deeper home. After a while, as educator and author Peter Drucker suggests, you just may become a “master” of your energy.