While I was planning to continue writing my series of posts on AI’s use in sales, I decided today to share my thoughts on an excellent book I just read entitled The Mindful Body by Dr. Ellen J. Langer in which she shares decades of research on the relationship between our mind and our body.
Dr. Langer explores how our thoughts and attitudes determine how we look at our health and well-being. Many of our attitudes about illness can be negative and defeatist. Her research shows that looking at our health from a different perspective—or employing mindfulness—we can take a more positive perspective and positively impact the state of our health. This is by no means akin to pie-in-the-sky thinking or faith healing. It is based on the results (data) of sound research.
Dr. Langer provides innumerable examples of how our thoughts impact our health. Whether it is hotel chambermaids who lost weight when they simply came to see that their work constituted exercise, or patients whose wounds healed faster in rooms with accelerated clocks, she shows how influential our thoughts are to the state of our bodies (quotes from an Amazon review). Mindfulness also helped people in much more serious health circumstances improve.
I know mindfulness is all the rage these days, but I’m definitely a believer based on the research documented in this book. I’ll be employing this concept to the chronic shoulder issues—a competitive swimmer’s nightmare—that I’ve been dealing with for about 6 months now. I hope to achieve what Dr. Langer terms “chronic health” rather than chronic illness. Let’s see what happens!
Come to think of it, this kind of mindfulness is something salespeople HAVE to employ every day in their interactions with clients. Negativity rarely wins the business!
I highly recommend this book. I read it in 2 days.
FluentSales