⚕️ Your health underpins everything

Your health underpins everything else. Health is your foundation. It is hard to focus on building your business when you're sick.

How you spend your time underpins your health - do you make time to eat healthy, to exercise, to give yourself space to think freely?

Nothing is more urgent. Nothing is more important.

While some people are aware of this lesson via Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, they often fail to implement it.

You must prioritise your health above all else. That means prioritising your time.

This ties in well with calendar-priority alignment that I discussed in an earlier issue of Work Smart Wednesday. Additionally, many people schedule their calendar backwards - they schedule work first, then family time, then time for themselves (such as working out). Doing this means you will miss out on the things that are truly important to you, much like the story of the sand and stones in a jar, what you schedule first reflects your priorities. Your health should always come first.

Here is a direct quote from one of my client’s newsletters. Jen is a dissertation coach specialising in helping PhD students, particularly people of colour, to complete their dissertations. She dealt with this lesson on health recently after catching Lyme disease (now in recovery).

“There’s an obvious lesson here – one that I woefully neglected. For close on four weeks, my body was telling me that something was wrong. However, I was on holiday, there were people to see, things to do, experiences to have … and then I was back, and there were deadlines to meet and obligations to fulfil. I didn’t have time to be ill.

Well folks – bodies don’t care about that sort of thing. When I didn’t listen to it, mine shouted louder, and eventually marched me down to the ER.

It's easy to fall into the trap of putting mind before body, and trying to power through the physical signs that tell us we need to slow down. This week has been a much-needed reminder that that strategy is never a winner.

So, in this edition, I challenge you to stop work within the next hour and take care of any basic needs you have been neglecting. The work will be there when you get back – but you only get one body.”

Regardless of where you are with your business, make sure you have the right foundations in place and that you do the fundamentals correctly.

💡 Quote I'm pondering

“20 years from now you’d give anything to be this exact age, exactly this healthy, in this exact moment. Take a second to enjoy it.” — Richard Webster

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I shared this in my Work Smart Wednesday newsletter. Want the full set of related insights? You can read them here: https://worksmartwednesday.substack.com/p/work-smart-wednesday-october-4-2023

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