Design Your Workspace

Having good posture is a Keystone Habit that you simply cannot overlook if you want to take your career to the next level.

Yes, proper posture is literally on of the most intelligent lifestyle habits that is necessary to take your career to the next level.

That seems like a bold statement, you may be thinking. And you are right, it is a very bold statement. But I say it because it is true. By taking action to correct your posture, you will reap the benefits in your career.

I mentioned that proper posture at work is considered a Keystone Habit. Do you know what that is? A lot of research has been performed in determining how to change habits. If you can learn to change your bad habits into good habits, you can change the outcome of your life from negative to positive.

This puts you in control of your destiny.

Lifestyle habits are the actions that we do daily, they literally shape our lives. Many of these are activities we don’t even think about. It is as if our bodies go through the motions of certain habits, and we don’t even have to thin about it. For example, walking, brushing your teeth, or driving. These are habitual activities, which we are hard-wired to perform without thinking because we do them so regularly. When walking, we don’t have to think about each step and which muscles to move. At this point it just happens naturally, we havee muscle memory of how to perform this activity.

Have you heard the word mindfulness?

Mindfulness, just as it sounds, is the moment-by-moment awareness of our body and our surroundings. With mindfulness, we actively use our minds to perceive our experiences.

Mindful activities are just the opposite of mindless. Mindless activities are walking, or easy repetitive tasks at work where we feel like we don’t even have to think about it. Mindlessness is a dangerous place to be. Because when we are not thinking about what we are doing, we are merely reacting to the conditions of the universe. We are not anticipating or planning, just reacting.

When you learn to be mindful of your body you then learn to be mindful of all actions that you are executing. You are utilizing your conscious mind to interact with the environment, and recognize actions as intentions. Living with intention, instead of just reacting habitually is how you change your habits. The collection of your habits then, is the blueprint by which you navigate your reality.

Proper postural design is a keystone habit. A keystone habit is a habit that affects changes in the rest of your life. Meaning that if you commit to having proper posture, you will see many other changes in your life.

Why is that? Because to change your posture you must develop minfuln3ss. And when you develop mindfulness for how you move your body and hold your body upright, you begin to move better and feel better.

When you can move without pain, and feel good, you are more inclined to commit to doing activities that you enjoy, or may be inspired to finish projects that you started but hand’t finished. Or perhaps you begin a workout plan because you are finally pain free and able to lift weights or go for a run without agonizing of how bad you feel when you are done. A cascade of positive health benefits arises from proper postural design.

And a cascade of positive career benefits also begins from the implementation of mindful postural correction into your daily work routine. As you become mindful of your posture and your surroundings at work, you begin to see things in a different light.

Let me share a story with you, a story of a client named Brian. Brian is a 37-year old computer programmer who works in an office, seated all day at a computer. Brian came to the office with low back pain so bad that when he would sit, he had shooting pain down his left leg. His posture had debilitated completely, when he walked in for his first visit, he was bent to the side. Of course he came in because he wanted to get out of pain, and who wouldn’t in that condition? What he didn’t expect was a lifestyle transformation.

We started working with Brian, doing postural correction here in the office, plus he was instructed to do certain exercises at home. Brian was proactive with his rehabilitation plan, his career was on the line, he had no choice.

In addition to the posture treatments and exercise that Brian was doing, I had a talk with him about his ergonomic habits. See, when Brian came in, he hold me he had no idea why he had back pain, he hadn’t done anything out of the ordinary to cause it. What he didn’t realize was that the collection of his habits that he does regularly on a daily basis or his lifestyle habits, actually have more of an impact on his posture than a traumatic injury. How he was sitting at work everyday, sometimes for up to 12 hours was greatly impacting his postural presentation, which then led to horrible back pain. We discussed his workspace and how we could design it ergonomically on a budget to prevent the low back pain from coming back.

What Brian found, was that by taking care of his posture and being mindful of how he sits at work, he was pain free.

He hadn’t been pain free in year. Feeling good, he started to become more productive, he didn’t miss work, he could take on more clients simultaneously, and he felt very satisfied with his pay increase due to quicker efficiency in finishing projects.

What does Brian attribute all of this to?

He attributes his career advancement to the simple sticker that says, “Check Your Posture.”

Brian placed the posture reminder on his computer at work as his cue to be mindful of his posture while working. I also advised him to make some ergonomic adjustments that were necessary to support the body upright with proper postural design. See with Brian, the keystone habit of having proper posture in the workplace then changed how he viewed productivity in the rest of his life. So his whole life was affected by this one habit, and he didn’t spend a fortune to do it.

Although expensive ergonomic work equipment IS worth the investment, you can make immediate ergonomic changes to your workshpace without spending hardly any money. But what happens to your health if you don’t invest the time necessary to set up your workspace in an ergonomically efficient manner? We for one, you could end up like Brian with excruciating lower back pain to the point of not being able to sit.

Or maybe you feel the effects of headaches from squinting to see your computer screen. This has led to pain in your neck and down your arms from having forward head posture, and now your shoulders are rolled forward. Or maybe, you won’t experience pain at all, but you will feel really fatigued at the end of the day for no apparent reason. See, when we slump, we actually use more energy, wasting it, instead of reserving it for projects that deserve our energetic output.

What is energy anyway? Energy is the ability to perform work.

So even if you don’t feel pain, if you feel fatigue, then you know that your capacity to perform work is diminished, which is going to negatively affect your career.

The implementation of proper posture and ergonomic utilization of equipment while working will actually increase productivity of workers by 54%, will decrease employee absenteeism by 67%, with a reduction of 93% in worker’s compensation cases, and a decreased employee turnover of 94%. And when corporations implement ergonomic and injury prevention programs, they are expected to make 6 times their investment in return!

Doesn’t it seem crazy that more people don’t know this?

As I mentioned before, proper posture is one of the best investments you can make in yourself, because when you do, you are healthy and able to produce more value to the work. When you produce more value the return for value can be increased financial rewards of course; but also greater level of self-fulfillment, and a lifestyle of abundance.