The Leader’s Body Budget
Lynn Harris
These days, we are bombarded with messages and advice about managing our well-being. Most of it is hard to disagree with: eat a healthy diet, exercise, get enough sleep and maintain good relationships. It sounds easy, but most of us know it’s hard to achieve consistently, especially if we have a demanding job and family commitments. This article does not give you more advice about what you should do, i.e. get more sleep, eat healthier, exercise more and spend time with people you like. There are mountains of books, videos and articles in circulation if you want more information on these areas. In this article, I explore motivation and mindset. I offer two mindsets that could help change your behaviour to achieve better health and better leadership. The first mindset explores thinking about your health in terms of a body budget, and the second mindset is about body budgeting as a leadership competency. Both mindsets can motivate different choices around personal sustainability and better leadership.
Mindset # 1: Think of your body as a budget to be managed.
Body budgeting is a term coined by neuroscientist Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett. She explains that our body must balance energy and resources to sustain life. By resources, she means biological resources such as water, salt, and glucose – essential biological elements that keep us alive and well. Energy expenditure is anything that uses our biological resources, such as physical exercise and mental stress. Actions that replenish our resources, such as eating and sleeping, are like deposits. Just as your corporate finance department manages your company’s financial budget, your brain manages your body budget to keep you functioning and in good shape. Both your company CFO and your brain are responsible for balancing the books. Your brain does this by predicting your body's needs and deciding where to spend resources.
Balancing your body budget
Your lifestyle choices and ability to understand what your body tells you either help or hinder your brain to balance your energy and resources effectively. Modern corporate life creates many challenges to effectively managing your body budget. For example:
Long working hours can reduce time and energy for activities that replenish your body budget.
Around-the-clock digital availability can create higher stress levels through an ‘always on’ culture.
Persistent high stress sometimes leads to harmful self-medication.
Convenience foods loaded with refined sugar and bad fats can disrupt your core metabolic functions.
Although it has advantages, remote work can result in loneliness and social isolation.
Many of us are very good at ignoring signals from our body and brain that we are running a deficit. We think we’re getting away with it because we can keep going, but it’s not sustainable. Just as ignoring a growing deficit in your bank account will create problems, the same is true of your body budget. There comes a point where we’ve spent too many resources without replenishing them, and we’ve run up a debt. Like our bank account, our body can survive for a limited period on a deficit, but eventually, the debt must be repaid.
Over time, a body budget deficit can manifest in mood swings, unhelpful emotions, persistent tiredness, irritability, and poor decision-making. In the longer term, it leaves us vulnerable to disease, mental illness, and, ultimately, premature death. You may think it will never happen to you, but I’ve coached several leaders who have collapsed and had significant health issues through draining their body budget. The bottom line is that it’s impossible to show up at your best and be the leader/partner/parent you want to be if you fail to manage your body budget. The good news is that much of this is within your control, even though it often feels like it isn’t.
We all know the critical deposits we need to make to replenish our resources and maintain a healthy balance. Thinking of your well-being in terms of a body budget is a helpful mindset shift because it’s easy to relate to and is backed up by neuroscience. However, on its own, it may not be enough to help you make good choices that consistently keep a balanced budget. Many leaders consider personal well-being a luxury, something they would love to achieve but a low priority compared to everything else on their plate.
Mindset #2: Make body budgeting a leadership competency.
The most significant breakthroughs I’ve seen leaders make in managing their body budget is where they stop seeing their physical and mental health as a ‘yet another challenge I could do without’ or ‘a nice to have if I can fit it in’ to ‘maintaining a balanced body budget is a foundational leadership competency.’
This shift in mindset can be life-changing (and, in some instances, lifesaving). With this mindset, investing in actions to balance your body budget becomes a crucial element of your leadership behaviour that is just as important as all the other leadership competencies that define your role. It’s no longer a luxury but an expectation and an essential component of how you lead. Consistently investing in balancing your energy and resources is something you do as a good leader and role model to others. It would be helpful if organizations integrated body budgeting as a foundational leadership competency and measured and rewarded it as they do other competencies. But given not many of them do, it’s up to you to manage it yourself.
If you view managing your body budget as part of your job as a leader, it can help you make good decisions. When you are faced with a choice between investing in your body budget and one of life’s other demands, you can remind yourself that it’s part of your role as a leader to maintain your body budget so you can show up at your best. You are literally doing your job as a leader when you get enough sleep, eat healthily, exercise and maintain good relationships. You are also creating the conditions to positively affect your colleagues' body budgets.
Our behaviour can positively or negatively affect the body budget of those around us.
Did you know that simple actions such as raising your voice or dismissing someone else can affect other people’s heart rates or the chemicals in their bloodstream? Whether we intend this is irrelevant; our bodies are wired to react this way.
Acknowledging that your behaviour can positively or negatively affect the body budget of those around you may motivate you to manage your body budget to be the leader/partner/parent you want to be. You have a choice. Do you want to make positive deposits in other’s body budgets? Or do you want to be a drain on them? If you embrace this opportunity, imagine the possibilities. Imagine managing your body budget so well that you consistently perform at your best and have the energy to co-create a great work and home environment where others perform at their best and want to be around you.
I’m not pretending this is easy. Depending on your current body balance or deficit, this advice might require significant changes at work and home. If you want to experiment with a different mindset, you might find it helpful to inventory your current body budget and identify where you want to make meaningful deposits. Start with small changes, and do not punish yourself if you don’t always succeed. Just keep practicing and experimenting with the mindset of body budgeting as a leadership competency and see if it helps you to make different choices.
Lynn Harris is a founding Partner at Leadership Mindset Partners.