THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN FEELINGS AND BREATH, AND FEELINGS AND POSTURE

You can detect how a person is feeling by their breathing. Please try the following exercises so you can experience what I am trying to communicate:

First, take a deep breath, inhaling slowly. Now exhale quickly. Repeat several times. How do you feel? You are probably feeling angry. The faster you breathe like this, the angrier you get.

Next, try the opposite breathing technique: inhale quickly, exhale slowly. Repeat several times. How do you feel? You’re relaxing, right?

Next, try breathing with a fast inhalation and fast exhalation. Do you feel panic?

Finally, inhale slowly and exhale slowly. You are sleepy or very relaxed.

If you want to control your emotions, first be aware of your breath. If you feel angry, change how you are breathing. Change from a slow inhalation and fast exhalation to fast inhalation and slow exhalation. Notice that your anger is subsiding.

If you are anxious, change your breathing to a slow inhale and exhale. Your panic will slowly diminish.

If our feelings impact how we breathe, manipulating our breath should change how we feel. Breathing and feeling are interdependent.

There is a similar relationship between posture and feelings. When we are worried, depressed, or insecure, our shoulders slouch. In talk therapy, as the therapist tries to improve how we feel, we eventually straighten your shoulders. It takes time to see improvement. At GR8 Life Ceo we take the opposite approach. We straighten the posture by massaging the fascia that developed between the muscles and bones in the shoulders by slouching. Stand up straight and, voilà, something interesting happens. You feel better about yourself. You are not as depressed.

Your body posture can impact your emotional state and you can use it to change your mood in ways that foster greater happiness.

Process impacts structure, but structure impacts process, too. Or in other words, functions impacts form in the long run and form impacts function in the short run.

It is easier to understand it through an analogy: a riverbank controls how a river flows, but, over time, the flow of the river also affects the structure of the riverbank.

Riverbanks are formed over a long period of time, whereas the structure of the riverbanks immediately impacts the flow of the river. The short-run impacts the long-run, in the long-run. Likewise, the long-run impacts the short-run, in the short-run.

By changing the riverbank, we can change how the river flows. By changing the structure, we can change the water flows.

By strengthening the shoulders of a person so that they stand up straight, we change how the person feels. How we breathe changes how we feel, too.

In the practice of managing change, we can change strategy by changing organizational structure. Trying to implement a new strategy with an old organizational structure is like trying to redirect the flow of the river within the old riverbank.

You need to change the riverbanks first. By changing the riverbank first, you redirect the flow of the river, which, in the long-run, will reinforce and possibly adjust the initial riverbanks you developed.

If you want to know how a person feels right now, watch them breathe. If you want to know how they have been feeling for some time, watch their posture or walk.

If you want to know which strategy a company is really following, analyze its organizational structure.

If you want to disrupt the strategy in your company, you first need to disrupt its structure.