Healthy Mind in Healthy Body – so the saying goes. Take some time out regularly to pay attention to your mental wellbeing. Make it as regular a habit as your physical fitness routine and keep your mind in as good shape as your body. We found inspiration with these mental wellbeing tips.

“I start my mornings listening to inspiring and informative podcasts while getting ready and by the time I reach my desk, I’m completely revved up with ideas and motivation, super excited to start my day.” LeAura Alderson, founder, My Trainer Fitness

Here are some simple ways to practice mental fitness:

• “Collect” positive emotional moments – Make it a point to recall times when you have experienced pleasure, comfort, tenderness, confidence, or other positive emotions.
• Learn ways to cope with negative thoughts – Negative thoughts can be insistent and loud. Learn to interrupt them. Don’t try to block them (that never works), but don’t let them take over. Try distracting yourself or comforting yourself, if you can’t solve the problem right away.
• Enjoy hobbies – Taking up a hobby brings balance to your life by allowing you to do something you enjoy because you want to do it, free of the pressure of everyday tasks. It also keeps your brain active.
• Volunteer – Volunteering is called the “win-win” activity because helping others makes us feel good about ourselves. At the same time, it widens our social network, provides us with new learning experiences and can bring balance to our lives.
• Treat yourself well – Cook yourself a good meal. Have a bubble bath. See a movie. Call a friend or relative you haven’t talked to in ages. Sit on a park bench and breathe in the fragrance of flowers and grass. Whatever it is, do it just for you.

SOURCE

Canadian Mental Health Association (CMHA) 

Bronwen Bartlett is a freelance writer, children’s book author, virtual agency director and performing bellydancer from South Africa. When she isn’t bent over a keyboard, frantically crafting articles and stories, or touting the benefits of moving away from traditional offices into virtual spaces, she can usually be found hiking a mountain with her partner and their dogs, or trying to master rib-cage isolation patterns. You can follow her personal blog or her company blog. Her first published children’s book, Callum and the Tiger, can be found on Amazon.

The post Mental Fitness Tips appeared first on Best Fit Life.

What’s your cardio workout style? Do you prefer the quiet, solo meditation of running, the challenge of a spin class, or do you prefer something fun and exciting, something that feels more like a night out dancing with friends? If this sounds like your style, Zumba is probably right up your alley – and because it’s become so popular in recent years, there’s a good chance you can find a class at your local gym.

These handy hints from Popsugar’s Jenny Sugar will help guide you through your first class and get you on the road to Zumba-mania.

What Is Zumba?

Zumba is a fusion of Latin and international music combined with a heart-pumping cardio workout founded in the ’90s by Alberto “Beto” Perez. The exhilarating class has a party-like atmosphere with the focus on having fun. There are no wrong moves — as long as you’re moving and keeping your heart rate up, you’re doing it right!

Newbie Tips

Certified Zumba instructor Michele Schmidt explains that beginners and students of all fitness levels are welcome in all classes. “Students should come to class with an open mind and be ready to sweat, move, and shake their booty! New students may want to arrive to class a few minutes early and let their instructor know they’re a newbie.”

Michele recommends standing near the front or in a spot that has a good view of the instructor. It typically takes a student three classes to feel like they “get” movements and routines. Michele says, “Instructors also have their own unique styles, so it’s important to try out a few in your area to find one that jives with you.”

What to Wear

Come dressed in comfortable fitness attire that’s easy to move in and can handle sweat. Wear sneakers that support dance movement. Good shoes can include cross trainers, dance sneakers, or even running shoes with a worn-out tread. Students should also bring water and a towel.

How Often Should You Take Zumba?

Michele recommends “starting out twice a week so your body and mind will begin to remember routines, and you’ll build your strength and endurance.” Like any fitness program, it’s good to balance out cardio classes with strength training, stretching, and rest days.

Will Zumba Help You Lose Weight?

Because Zumba is an intense cardio workout, including interval training and strength moves, it can help a person lose weight as well as increase muscle tone. Michele says: “Proper diet and nutrition is also an important part of any weight loss program — many Zumba teachers have said that ‘you can’t out-dance a bad diet!'”

Source

PopSugar.com article by Jenny Sugar

Bronwen Bartlett is a freelance writer, children’s book author, virtual agency director and performing bellydancer from South Africa. When she isn’t bent over a keyboard, frantically crafting articles and stories, or touting the benefits of moving away from traditional offices into virtual spaces, she can usually be found hiking a mountain with her partner and their dogs, or trying to master rib-cage isolation patterns. You can follow her personal blog or her company blog. Her first published children’s book, Callum and the Tiger, can be found on Amazon.

The post Top Tips for Zumba Beginners appeared first on Best Fit Life.

As important as physical exercise is to one’s health, keeping your mind fit and toned is just as important, to help you on the road to success. Maintaining a wide enough perspective and being able to recognize changes in business and the marketplace are critical to doing our best.

In fact, the most successful business leaders have a balance of Visionary and Scientist.

According to LeAura Alderson: “Successful entrepreneurs, CEOs and Leaders have the ability to imagine grand vistas of possibility, while seeing the roadmap there, and the close-up scientific approach down to the smallest aspects along the way.

“This ability to see broad and narrow… floodlight and laser, whether you’re a CEO, a stay-at-home mom, or Steve Forbes, exercises the brain via contraction and expansion, expands our horizon of possibility, and sharpens our vision.”

So whether you’re an “intrapreneur”or “corpreneur” aiming for a promotion, or just want to stay on top of your game, these mental acuity exercises from Forbes.com can help keep the gray cells toned and healthy.

These two quick perspective shifts are examples of an important entrepreneurial skill.

A Flight Overhead

The first exercise is to visualize yourself and your business from above – physically visualizing your surroundings as if lifting up in the air overhead. Expand your perspective up, up, wider, bigger, macro.

Look at your business from the 50,000 foot view and see how it looks.

If we were talking about this perspective shift with regards to a sailing ship, it would be taking your perspective up and away from sea level and looking at it from airplane level. How is it different from up here?  For one thing, you see less of your ship and more of the environment that it is in. Chunking Up further… what can we imagine?

The Microscope

To continue the sailboat analogy, Chunking Down would be looking at how barnacles clinging to your hull increase friction and drag, causing you to travel with slightly less velocity. The chunking down methodology is critical for achieving operational excellence. From a business perspective, it is the process of deconstructing all of the details of how you touch your customers and optimizing all of the little pieces that matter – and judiciously leaving the pieces that don’t matter undisturbed.

These two quick perspective shifts are examples of an important entrepreneurial skill: The ability to see ourselves and our businesses from multiple perspectives.

For the cost of a few moments, and a measure of mental flexibility, new perspectives and insights are there for the taking, and a necessary part of your entrepreneurial routine.

Source

Forbes.com article, by Kevin Rady

Bronwen Bartlett is a freelance writer, children’s book author, virtual agency director and performing bellydancer from South Africa. When she isn’t bent over a keyboard, frantically crafting articles and stories, or touting the benefits of moving away from traditional offices into virtual spaces, she can usually be found hiking a mountain with her partner and their dogs, or trying to master rib-cage isolation patterns. You can follow her personal blog or her company blog. Her first published children’s book, Callum and the Tiger, can be found on Amazon.

The post Vital Business Skill Every Entrepreneur and CEO Must Have appeared first on Best Fit Life.