One of the things I like most about my career is the mind/body balance.
When I first started teaching martial arts, I was in the trenches. It was and still is quite physically demanding. And it keeps me accountable to myself because I have to lead by example and be the byproduct that I want my students to strive for.
As I evolved over the years, I started building skills that could be used to solve other problems in the organization I worked for and I started taking on more mentally challenging tasks. Things like marketing, curriculum development, class planning, systems management, website design, event planning, and so on.
…Until eventually, my day-to-day work was split pretty nicely down the middle with 50%-ish of my day focused on mental tasks and the other 50%-ish focused on physical ones.
Which, quite appropriately, is something martial arts aims to teach its practitioners to seek in everyday life. You never want to be doing mind-only work for the entire day and you also don’t want to only be doing physically taxing work that completely disregards the growth of the mind.
In everything you do, think about how you can develop skills in a complementary way in the complementary mind/body realm.
Some examples:
- Real Estate Agent? Mostly mental work. Build physically focused handyman skills.
- Construction Worker? Mostly physical work. Build marketing skills to challenge the mind.
- Financial Advisor? Mostly mental work. Build health/fitness skills to become a more multi-dimensional (life) advisor.
- Professional Athlete? Mostly physical work. Build pedagogy skills to optimally share gifts.
- Social Media Marketer? Mostly mental work. Create and run a meditation group to physically balance the mentally taxing media effects.