Today I explore some aspects of the outside world and how to use it to enhance your inner world.
Show Notes:
- My interview with Bobby Kerr, on his Down To Business show on Newstalk FM. "The benefits of working near nature" Listen here.
- Get access to my free pdf on how to clear your mind using my SHiFTS inner process. View here.
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My best-selling book The Inner CEO: The Inner CEO is available to buy in ebook, paperback, hardback and audio formats. All details are here: www.theinnerceo.com
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[MUSIC] Hey there, my name is Shane Kraddock and this is the Interage Podcast where I share a different take on how to lead and live a sustainable high performance life. Over the course of different episodes, I'm going to challenge the belief that tension, stress, and struggle are essential to success and creativity. My experience is that there's an easier way, there's a better way, and indeed there's an essential way that we need to explore for the times that we live in. So let's go ahead, let's jump in and explore. [MUSIC] Hello there and welcome to today's episode which is enhancing the inner with the outdoors. Inspired by a conversation that I had recently with a national radio station in Ireland, where I live and where I'm from, where I was just talking about using creatively some of the benefits that are just outside our doorstep. So how do we extend our idea of the office so that we include almost the outdoor side of things, the outdoor office? And I was sharing some different ideas and thoughts and some research and there was a lot of stuff that I didn't share so I thought I'd actually add some of that in here today. So I'll also put the link to the other interview and the show notes if you're interested. But the key thing that I'd like to get across in today's episode is that you can boost your brain performance and your well-being by using the outdoors simply and creatively. And generally it's probably going to cost you nothing. So why wouldn't you be interested? So what's definitely coming through in all of the research in this area and actually there's one kind of new area called environmental neuroscience, which is really starting to shed light on the impact through a scientific lens that nature has. Now I think we all know us instinctively when we are in nature for a period of time. It could be for a walk by the sea, it could be on a hike or it might just be kind of spending even half an hour or 50 minutes in a local park with a cup of coffee. You just feel better. So we don't necessarily need research to tell us that, but the research maybe is helpful perhaps when it comes to business because we do have a lot of conditioning and thoughts and thinking around how business should be. And I think for a lot of people, including myself, certainly in my past, would have thought well hang on if your outdoors walking in a park or sitting down in a park bench, you're probably not really working. And I don't agree with that anymore. The reality is that the results show that when we're outside, our concentration improves, our working memory improves, our mood improves, and all of that's affected by just being in nature. Now it is important to be in nature, not necessarily to be in nature, but on your phone because you can kind of take away the natural impact by being on your phone or on an iPad. It's really powerful stuff now, there was one 30 that I came across that just showed amazingly that just after 40 seconds of looking out at a green roof, just a green roof, not outside in nature, but just looking at a green roof with a natural roof that subjects made fewer mistakes in a test than when they looked at a concrete roof, which is kind of bizarre, but interesting. And the reality is that fresh air, natural light, the sounds of birds chirping, maybe even water flowing, and also maybe there's a natural energy to being outside that that has this effect on our bodies and then by default on our brains, which affects us. Now I can recall looking back as a young executive when I worked in a corporate environment and trying to complete a very big project at the time, and my boss, I remember being really fatigued and tired, I wasn't even clearly, and I'd hit a bit of a block in one particular project. And my boss very sagely said to me the time shame, take the rest of the day up. Now this is only like 10 a.m. in the morning, he said, look, you're not right, take the rest of the day up. All I wanted to do first was go for a walk in the beach and then maybe meet a friend for lunch and try to have lunch outside. Now we didn't get into the why do that, but that's kind of what I did. Coming back, I think what he was doing, maybe it was instinctive, but it worked, was that get exposure to when you go into an environment like that where it's just natural. Again, for me, it was the fresh air by the sea, maybe the sound of the waves lapping. Even the thought of that is relaxing, and essentially the word relaxing is the key, but is that you start to come out of your thinking, out of your brain, out of your mind, and maybe more into the present moment. You start to come down and maybe the gift of nature is that it doesn't necessarily require a technique. If you can just enable it, maybe just being there, being present, there's something happens. Now in that case, what happened was I got a complete reset within 24 hours and actually I saw exactly how to solve the problem that I've been struggling with for weeks, and that has been a lesson that stated me over the rest of my career. That was probably 25, 26 years ago. I now understand more as to why that happens, because that really is what I would call a mind shift where your mind moves into a different gear, a more relaxed gear, that's more in the flow mode. But when you think about what is an office, for me, an office is where it's a place where work happens, maybe it's a place where I interact with people as well, but in the context of making work happen. So there was a time where you could have thought God going to a coffee shop wouldn't seem like a place to go to do work, but now we just take that for granted, same as going to a hotel. You know, you could be in the lobby now, a lot of hotels have adapted themselves to make it more conducive to use laptops. So coffee shops have become an extension of the workplace. So why couldn't the garden or the local park or the seaside or car park beside the sea become an extension of where work happens, an extension of your office. Now there's also the capacity for nature to improve your attention. An attention is a really powerful, important area in a business and leadership context. Now there's an area as well called ART, which is Attention Restoration Theory. And psychologists are calling, they always love these acronyms, but they call the capacity to sustain focus on a mental task, so where you can, for example, you can ignore external distractions and you can ignore internal distractions like, I don't know, I need to hoover the house or I've got a rumbling belly or I need to do something else. So they call capacity to sustain focus, they call it directed attention. And what psychologists are putting forward as a theory is that our attention is a finite resource. But what they're also finding is that exposure to nature, like real world nature, gives greater improvements in our mood and in aspects of our cognitive performance, which affects things like problem solving, creativity and things like that. Now it's also spawning some interest, say from an architectural point of view, for workplaces where we can perhaps build environments that actually bring nature inside buildings. That's definitely something that is an emerging trend. But for today, I'm talking about more right now for you to test this and maybe test it even more than you've been doing. I'm sure at some level, you use nature a bit, but I wonder, could you experiment using it more? Now, maybe a block to that is our own thinking, which we've inherited, I believe, from, I don't know, the past views of how business needs to be, which I think is out of date. Most of our thinking is coming from the industrial age, we're not realizing it's nine to five, but who works nine to five anymore? Most jobs in today's world, and increasingly so with AI coming in, are much more based on knowledge workers, and the tool of the knowledge worker is the mind. If you can enhance your mind, then it means you're going to do a better job, whereas before I might have had to stand in a factory and maybe move something, it was more physical as opposed to mental, and certainly now there are certain jobs you just can't go outside because if you have to serve somebody in a retail shop, that might work unless the shop is outside. Who knows? But for a lot of people, that won't be possible, so I'm talking about you with possibly a knowledge worker listening to this, where thinking has become much more valuable. And ultimately, as somebody said to me recently, "Well, look, what about people who take advantage of this or waste time or DOS as we say in Ireland, as in waste time?" I would say, "Well, it's down to really results." So first of all, the key thing is to figure out what the results I meant to get or unpaid to get. Get clarity on that if you're not clear. And once you're clear on that, then it's about, well, how do I create and sustain the best version of myself so that I can deliver on my objectives, on my results, and to do it consistently in a sustainable matter, and sustainability is important for humans, probably more so than even for energy in terms of what we talk about, sustainable energy. What about sustainable energy for humans? Because for most people, 65% of people in the Western world, apparently, are on the edge of burnout. And I believe that because I see it every day. Most people are very, very fatigued, very tired. Tired people do not do brilliant work. It just doesn't make any logical sense. So what are ways we could use the outdoors? Well, for example, you can use them perhaps for short reset breaks. I don't think we were designed to sit in the chair or even started a desk looking at a screen for hours and hours on end. Now I know some creative people have actually got these mobile standing desks, which you can bring them out in the back garden or outside in an office environment where there's nature. Very clever. But when I try it out, I think that there's great possibilities around that. For me, there's a local garden. That's where I did the radio interview recently. It's a private garden that you paid into. I have membership there. It's called Mount Usher Gardens in Ashford County, Wicklow in Ireland. It's an award-winning garden. And I'd often go in there. It's only five minutes' walk for my office, but I'll deliberately go in there for different types of things. One, I might go for a reset break. Just for my own energy, I'll go in there, deliberately practice being in the moment through my five senses. I might also go in there with a client because maybe I want to have a different type of conversation with them. And I always will because once we're walking around, we both go into a different mode. It's more relaxing. Now sometimes you have to sit across a desk and that's fine too. It has its role, but it's just more about exploring the possibilities creatively. The other thing is that when you're in an office environment, very often that can condition you to think in a certain way. Much of my column was business thinking or pragmatic thinking about let's get it done. And that's very, very useful obviously. But when you need to go into a mode that's more strategic or more creative or just a higher level of kind of maybe more intuitive thinking, I'm not sure that that's going to really happen in the same way in an office environment. There's nothing like getting out for a hike or a walk or just going somewhere where you can just be connected to nature. So that's highly, highly valuable in my view. And I've got so many clients now that would have been very skeptical and rightly so before encouraging to experiment. Like for me, I wrote my book, The Inner CEO, mostly in different locations. Some of it was outside in that garden in Mount OSHA Gardens. Some of it was actually interesting in the restaurant of Cafe in Avoca in Mount OSHA Gardens. And actually interesting enough on one of the walls, they have a completely covered in what looks like. It's wallpaper that makes it look like trees, which now I'm thinking about it actually is another way of actually bringing nature inside in a clever way. But it is very common to look at that wall because it just leaves and branches. It's interesting as opposed to just looking at concrete. And I have to add this in that if you are using nature, just be there with no tech. Don't be looking at whatever you're looking at on your phone. Just be there. Practice being there. Use my two shifts to help you be there better. I've mentioned that several times. I'll put that in the show notes as well if you haven't heard me talk about that before you can get access to a free PDF about it. But what about you? I mean, how can you experiment with using the outdoors more in your day to day work and your life? It might be as simple as I say as a walk. A walk and talk. It might be as simple as time sitting on a bench, just for a little bit, just to guess time to calm the mind because the interesting thing that we're discovering more and more especially with neuroscience is that calm in the mind actually allows you to think at a much higher level. Just because you're busy doesn't mean you're doing really good work and increasingly people are starting to realize that. So maybe consider using it for high value thinking time this week or today. Perhaps you could try a one-to-one conversation outside. Or maybe even go for a broken, try a group meeting. The same rules apply with the meeting in terms of making sure there's an agenda and there's a purpose, but you might find that something interesting happens with the group. Why not try it out? Ultimately, I mean, from my point of view, we're living in a time which is incredible that we have amazing possibilities and opportunities to reinvent the modern workplace and how we work. And I think it's needed because all the stats at the moment are pointing us in not so good a direction in terms of the health and well-being of people and businesses in general. Most people don't like going to the workplace. And if anything, COVID disrupted perhaps how we look at work, remote work in took off because of that as a possibility. Now there's a big trend in terms of moving staff back to work, which I'm not against either. But maybe there's a happy medium. And maybe even in work, you can still encourage staff to get outside, get a bit of fresh air, get light. I know with one client, he said to me recently that he would never have thought that he'd be using the outside world or the outdoors for himself or to encourage the staff because he'd be resenting people going outside. Because in his mind, if you're not sitting at your desk, you're not working. Whereas now he realizes that we're in a different time where the health of your mind, the health of the inner world is critical. And actually the outdoors, the outdoors really is key in terms of helping you sustain high energy. And energy really is what it's about in the 21st century. So we'll leave it at that, but just the final point is go outside more experiment because ultimately the winner is going to be you. And if you have a business and you encourage it to happen there, definitely it'll help your business. That's it for this week. Ciao for now. [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC]
