My Journey to Health During COVID

Posted on by Byron Darden

When COVID struck in March of 2020, I stopped going out to eat. I stopped shopping in crowds and began cooking all my meals at home. I treated myself with thoughtful plating. You never knew when COVID might strike, so I made each meal unique and elegant. By the twelfth month of COVID, I’d created a line of healthy nonalcoholic beverages and delightful meal options; I developed a variety of recipes that make for picturesque and nutritious meals. While you might not want to judge a book by its cover, meaning in this case – how food looks on a plate – yet, visuals are a significant component of healthy eating. It is its own art form. Much like we are inspired by art, you can inspire healthy eating through the senses, with sight representing over 50% of what attracts most people.

Why did I wait so long? I encourage you to try it if you are not on this path. Adopting a slow food lifestyle (and slowing down in general) will do wonders for your health and career. This doesn’t mean you must come home and cook a three-course meal every night. Meal prepping in advance makes it quick. 

Here are some ideas to get you started:

  • Organize your kitchen to be efficient for all aspects of preparing and storing meals
  • Choose one day to shop, plan, and prepare for large-scale cooking
  • Choose a day to cook your meals or split with a prep day
  • Portion food in small Ziplock bags and freeze/store
  • Plan menus in advance so that stored portions are ready when you are
  • Be sure to create a ritual around food preparation and mealtime. Honor the abundance of talent, knowledge, and grace you give yourself each time you invest in creating a meal for yourself. That is a beautiful gift to give oneself—the gift of a well-prepared and served meal that nourishes the mind, body, and soul.

When you walk into your house at the end of the day (or move from your home office to the kitchen) and are famished, having a plan will prevent you from dialing for delivery service. In which case, you bring the unknown and potentially harmful into your home and body.

Do you Still Need Help?

Eating right for your body or condition can be challenging. A nutrition coach or dietician can be the key. And here’s where we diverge into diversity and inclusion. Most of us tend to look for a professional with whom we can relate. Let’s say you grew up on a particular ethnicity of foods. When you search for someone to create a diet for you, you are more likely to find substitution suggestions from someone familiar with your heritage.

On the same note, let’s imagine you are a female in her 50s. You have completely different nutritional needs than a man aged 25. Ethnicity plays a role as well. Should your family hail from Asia, you have different health risks than a family heritage being African American.

The Role of Your Heritage

As a side note, heritage also plays a role in other aspects of life where nutrition is essential.

Diversity of a different nature was brought to my attention when figure skating coach icon Carlo Fassi asked me to research why he couldn’t get more African-American skaters interested in the sport. His premise was that our bodies are made for the sport, and he knew he could create champions out of our heritage. I didn’t need to research anything because I know, as an African American skater, that few families in my community would give a second thought to the idea of sending their children along with their hard-earned money to be spent on figure skating. They’d instead send them to an ivy league school – mainly a family with the means to do so – before most African-American families would invest in the sport. They’d rather see their children become doctors, lawyers, and executives. My family was similar. My dad was an attorney. My mother had her MSW and chose social work. My sister focused on business, and my parents reluctantly allowed me to follow my passion for figure skating. Carlo would be hard-pressed to get a flood of those within my community to figure skate back then. Since my day in skating, more African-Americans have found their way to the sport. Yet they still account for a small percentage of the skating population.

Here’s the challenge and what we must strive to correct – there is historically little diversity in nutrition health professionals. Over 90% are women and white. While a nutrition coach or dietician can do some research and provide you with suitable alternatives, more trust comes from someone like you. That means your search will be more challenging as a male looking for a nutritionist.

In addition, socio-economic status plays a huge role in nutrition. Those in food deserts or those on a fixed income have extra challenges when creating proper meals. A social program that serves these groups must take care to meet their needs as well.

We must remove biases that prevent all cultures from choosing to study nutrition and encourage those looking for help to seek out professionals to whom they can relate.

Benefits of Good Nutrition

Posted on by Byron Darden

Aside from a potentially longer life, more energy to accomplish our goals, and the absence of disease, good nutrition has many other benefits:

  • Nutritional benefit of preparing your own meals

We’ve touched a little bit on this earlier. Preparing your meals allows you to control exactly what goes into your body. Let’s take a simple meal of chicken, rice, and vegetables. You can choose organic chicken breast, wild rice, and steamed broccoli. Or you can choose a frozen chicken patty, uncle ben’s rice, and a can of corn. The nutritional difference between these two meals is astounding. In the first case, you control sodium levels and GMOs and get many more vitamins and minerals.

  • Meditative benefits of mindful cooking and eating

Spending time cooking at home can be a wonderful experience. Cutting ingredients, stirring them in the pot, and tasting them is rewarding. Your creativity is awakened. Your brain is engaged.

  • Physical benefit of preparing one’s own meals

Those who prepare their meals tend to eat fewer calories can control the allergens in their food and how food is handled. One-time cooking can also provide multiple meals, allowing you to take leftovers for lunch or freeze them for a future meal.

  • Spiritual connection to cooking

Knowing where your food comes from is essential to good nutrition. You have a more advantageous connection to your food by going to a farmer’s market and building a relationship with the person who grows the plants or raises the animal. Let’s say you buy a can packaged in China; the relationship to that food connection is lost. You can also learn to experiment with different foods. It’s time to try kale or raspberries grown in the wild. Start a garden or visit a farm and pick vegetables or fruits. That meal will then mean more.

  • Impact on mind, body, soul

There are many benefits of eating fresh, local food prepared at home. Should you have a family, get them involved in the process. Enjoy good food with great company. Your body will benefit, and your mind and soul will as well. Let’s also remember the impact on the planet through less waste, reducing carbon emissions, and fewer pollutants. Plus, you will feel more socially conscious supporting a local farmer than a big corporation.

You Are What You Eat

Posted on by Byron Darden

This is a phrase we can agree on. Nutrition affects every cell of our body. They define our structure and allow us to function. Nutrition affects our muscles, bones, digestion, and immune systems. Consume fruits, vegetables, grass-fed meats and dairy, nuts, seeds, whole grains, and good fats, and your body will reward you with good energy and mental clarity. Your body may not respond well to chips and beer.

Ready to Treat Yourself Right?

Posted on by Byron Darden

The concepts that apply to nutrition apply to the executive lifestyle as well.   Slowing down, taking one task at a time, and applying what you learned about nutrition will help you develop facilitation skills. Want to know more?

I’m Byron Darden, and nutrition has been an important part of my life since I was a small child. I wouldn’t have been able to train as a championship figure skater or coach world-class skaters had I not nourished my body. Through life’s ups and downs, proper nutrition and caring for myself have allowed me to thrive. A big part of coaching women in business is to look at the big picture. Inconsistencies in nutrition even affect performance in the boardroom. While I am not a nutrition coach, seeing the overall picture is my specialty. Click on the button below to book a strategy session. We’ll discuss this and more and get you on the track to success.

STRATEGY SESSION

Founder’s Corner

Posted on by Byron Darden

Recalling the day when my therapist shared her observation that I was not in touch with my emotions, triggered the memory of Goldie Hawn’s character, Elise Eliot-Atchison in the First Wives Club when she learns of a similar observation about her emotions.

“You think that because I’m a movie star I don’t have feelings. Well, you’re wrong. I’m an actress. I’ve got all of them.”

– Elise Eliot-Atchison

I’m not a movie star. I am an actor. So to hear about yourself that “you’re not in touch with your emotions” is on par with learning poor acting skills. It’s a bit of a mountain to face and climb. Yet, I took on the task to scale that mountainside which soon revealed evidence that Indeed, I was not demonstrating being in touch with my emotions.

Instead, I seemed to hide my emotions in a nonchalant way I responded to important news, issues, and happenings in my environment. It wasn’t that I wasn’t in touch with my emotions. It was that I managed them to the point of often leaving others unsure just how aware I was that being diagnosed with prostate cancer is severe news. I took the news in stride and I shared the news with equal parts of concern and confidence. I also knew that should I choose to go to a very dark emotional place about having it, the severity increases in my mind and body. Then it can be a matter of time before I head down a rabbit hole each time dark news passes through my life.

It is one thing to have a choice in expressing emotion and to decide not to express yourself. It is quite a different matter to consciously choose to emote or not because it will help you cause or hurt it. I know that heightening my expressiveness with a fellow enthusiast regarding how much I love chocolate will most likely inspire a desirable conversation about the heavenly brown, silky substance. Raising that level of expressiveness to a fan of Hershey is an example of lacking care or knowledge of your audience.

It takes a deliberate mindset to steer emotions in such a way that they bring value to a communication interaction. Less effort can easily bring about miscommunication. Or at best, a communication that comes across as foggy and non-specific.

It’s at the level of specificity that effective leaders go beneath the surface to what we really mean when we say what we say to others. At the level of meaning, we profit from mindful choices of language from which all things are born. Therefore we are wise to give thought to what we say given our words will manifest in a tangible way. Put another way, once we speak and take action, there’s no taking it back.

Leading with Emotion

Posted on by Byron Darden

A great leader guides, inspires, and motivate. They do not just bark orders and handle discipline for an organization – they are so much more! Ideally, personnel under their leadership thrive as they feel understood and appreciated.

Often, leaders are taught to take the harsher road – to leave their emotions out of decision-making processes. This approach is ineffective and outdated. At the same time, outbursts of emotions (i.e., your boss yelling at you for missing a deadline) are also detrimental. In addition to industry knowledge, today’s leaders need a high emotional intelligence level.

Emotional Intelligence is recognizing emotions that arise, understanding them, and how they affect those around you. Effective leaders use these emotional intelligence traits to lead their teams effectively.

  1. Self-awareness
  2. Self-regulation
  3. Motivation
  4. Empathy
  5. Social skills

Each of these traits promotes a workplace where people feel heard and understood.

Defining Emotions

Posted on by Byron Darden

Successful businesses use the power of emotions to appeal to customers. These may include fear of missing out, the need to fit in, a way to make your lives easier, and more. The product or service seems disingenuous when emotions are not used in the creative process. The same logic applies to the use of emotions in the workplace.

Historically, we are taught that emotions do not have a role in the workplace – we are not to mix business and personal. The old way is to keep your feelings out of the decision-making process. Research finds that this is contrary to human nature and that businesses thrive when emotions are utilized correctly. Bringing a natural human aspect has immense positive effects.

A leader that utilizes emotional intelligence adapts to situations quicker and more effectively. Rather than react impulsively from an emotional place, a leader utilizing emotional intelligence responds thoughtfully and in control to authentically express emotions so that the message is received from a place of congruence.

Company culture thrives on empathy and inclusiveness. Conflicts are handled with honesty and fairness.

Emotional intelligence involves understanding your own emotions and using those emotions in your dealings with others. Included is an effective grasp of how others perceive the emotions of others and using this reasoning to understand and manage your teams.

Using Emotional Intelligence

Posted on by Byron Darden

For the past twenty years, I’ve personally coached executives in some of the biggest global businesses. Throughout those years, I’ve seen the changes and challenges in the “no emotion” era of business. I’ve found that what separates great leaders from the rest is how they can read a situation and respond appropriately.

“great leadership works through the emotions…even if they get everything else just right, if leaders fail in this primal task of driving emotions in the right direction, nothing they do will work as well as it should or could.”

– Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis, Annie McKee on Emotion Drives Expressiveness

As a leader, you can use emotions to your advantage by remembering some simple guidelines:

  1. Choose your words and respond wisely. Rather than using emotions to drive decisions, they can be an effective way to express the importance of the decisions to be made. You are missing half of the equation when decisions are made solely with emotion or with non at all. For example, in the heat of the moment, you lose your temper in a meeting. Once your words and actions are out in the open, there’s no taking it back.
  2. Look at the facts, discuss the situation with others, and ensure you lead with your heart and head, rather than raw emotions alone. Unmanaged emotions can cause the road to become foggy. They can cloud judgment and lead to ineffective decisions.
  3. Avoid carrying emotions from the rest of your life into your business decisions. Getting cut off in traffic on the way to work or getting your coffee with soured cream can affect the rest of your day. Find a place to calm yourself and approach work situations with a clear mind.
  4. Use your emotions to heighten your communication effectiveness and engage with empathy. Use intuition and listen to your heart. Keep an open mind and make decisions that align with your personal and organization’s values.

In the event you believe otherwise, then consider this. Why do you imagine so many generations of corporate employees have been told to “check your emotions at the door” unless emotions continued to show up despite the warning for all those generations?

Emotions can be threatening to some. They are uncomfortable and challenging to process. They can muddy the waters of the process. Avoiding emotions leads to other issues, including not being heard, fear of retribution, resentment, and shame.

The challenge is to strike a balance between how you are feeling and how you will productively articulate those feelings. Using emotional intelligence will help you recognize your feeling, understand why you feel the way you do, and allow you to reorient your thinking and actions to promote understanding.

Another important aspect of this is how a leader recognizes the emotions of their team members. From quiet types to more spirited members, leaders benefit from nurturing their responses in addition to how they disseminate information down the line. For example, a leader has a meeting with their next-line managers. Each manager is directed to take information to their team and, depending on how the managers feel about the information, they will determine how to communicate it to their team. A great leader will recognize the emotional blocks that might cause strife down the line.

DO NOT Check Your Emotions at the Door

Posted on by Byron Darden

I’m willing to bet that there’s not an ad agency in business that isn’t or hasn’t flooded the market relying on emotion to sell everything you can imagine. Their best tool appeals to our sense of fear, jealousy, or desire. Ad agencies do this with a great deal of research and a comprehensive understanding of their target audience. Without this forethought, they are likely to miss the target, because emotions are “an essential part of being human. Emotions drive us.”

In the event that indeed this emotional appeal is so effective for selling goods and services, then why have business leaders been expected to show up at work every day without their humanity? You might argue that selling with emotion has nothing to do with leading with emotion in business. I encourage you to seek a more worthy argument to have. Without emotions, you have created a robotic workforce that lacks creativity and will not appeal to customers. Hence one of the reasons why I often hear from leaders about their challenge with team’s inability to be innovative.

In addition to my years of coaching executives, from entry-level leaders to the C-Suite, I’ve studied the effects of expressed vulnerable emotion in the corporate environment. I’ve also studied the impact of changing emotional behavior in the Organizational Change Management work I’ve been leading for even longer, dating back to 1983 in the nonprofit space. Two decades before, I began working in the for-profit space.

The Effect of Emotions on your Bottom Line

Posted on by Byron Darden

Taking stock in what is known as a business’s intangible assets in classic terms does not include people. Yet when we read between the lines, while people may not qualify as such, according to generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP), they represent what is known as “wetware,” which accounts for the mental capability, intelligence, and additional mental skills that employees possess.

Those qualities are a benefit to the company. Those benefits qualify as intangible assets. Consider that 349,000 associates work for Starbucks. Imagine the wetware that number turns out given the type of employee you’ll find worldwide that brings a level of people capability to that brand.

Essentially, the people behind a brand or, more aptly, the folks who run businesses account for a great deal of wetware. So how does this wetware relate to leading with emotion? I believe that is a question that can be answered in one word, humanity. When one brings their humanity to work, there is an expression of caring and appreciation that is shared, magnified, and measurable.

Expressions of humanity alter human energy creating a nurturing environment where growth, advancement, the rise of positive neurons, and effervescence exist in its immediate atmosphere.

Examples of expressed humanity are enthusiasm, passion, being present, vulnerable, empathetic, confident in its generative state, listening, and feedback. I can stop there because I could fill pages with more examples, and I believe the point is clear.