Managing Risk and Its Impact on The Body
In business, we often talk about risk: risk-return profile, risk management, risky assets. We intellectualize this notion and address it mostly in a spreadsheet, often by running various scenarios and mapping out a range of outcomes.
But for one group of people, in particular, risk resides somewhere else. For an entrepreneur who has put everything on the line, who perhaps has taken other people’s money to fund their venture, who perhaps grew up with not much and is now taking their biggest swing, risk is felt in the physical body – almost literally, on our shoulders. Or perhaps it manifests physically in a tight chest, a cramped stomach, or a migraine.
To make the matter more challenging, for an intellectually-oriented entrepreneur, often we (I’m in this bucket too) are not entirely in touch with the body, and so this dynamic plays out without us even knowing. And hence often, ‘dis-ease’ manifests in the body as one type of ailment or another. Is it any wonder that entrepreneurial burnout is now commonplace?
I have found it critically important in my entrepreneurial journeys to realize how stress from taking risk manifests in my body and to take steps to address that.
One of the key mechanisms to sense stress is our nervous system. When we are in parasympathetic nervous system mode – the rest and digest mode – life is brighter and more easeful. When we sense danger, the body shifts into sympathetic mode, getting ready to fight, freeze or run. We are not meant to be in this mode for prolonged periods of time. Yet as an entrepreneur managing constant risk, with one emergency after another in the business, we often find ourselves in this suboptimal physical state for long stretches at a time.
There are a variety of ways that I have found to help me shift back into the parasympathetic mode – too many to discuss, but most are body-based practices such as yoga, sauna, listening to music, meditating and breathwork (both pranayama and more intense modern techniques), etc. For me, straight up exercise, while having many benefits, including releasing endorphins which can feel great, does not actually shift me out of sympathetic nervous system mode.
The starting place for any modality or body-based practice, however, is the actual awareness of the bodily sensations themselves – and I mean this quite literally – placing the awareness on the felt sensations of the body. This process of ‘interception’ has the physical benefit also of flexing the prefrontal medial cortex (PFMC) which has been associated with dampening the fight, flight, freeze response.
One very basic way to work on this is to simply feel the energy field of the hands and the feet. For the section of those body parts that is not touching anything and with our eyes closed, we can ask “how do I know that this body part exists?” Can we feel the energy field, the tingling, the temperature of the air that is sensed through these body parts? This exercise can then be spread to the rest of the body feeling a unified energy field of the torso, for example. This is different than a body scan where we flex and relax various muscles. In this practice, the aim is to feel into a more nuanced energy of being alive within our body. I like to practice this for ten minutes laying down, either first thing in the morning or last thing at night.
When we have become proficient at this, we can then play with moving the center of awareness from the head area, down into the body. We can ask, “where do I feel my awareness resides right now?” Often we point to our head. “Is there also an awareness directly in the body itself?” This has helped me connect with my body and stay ‘out of my head.' I need to constantly work on this, especially in periods of high stress when I’m thinking a lot about how to solve problems.
Finally, I really like the practice of setting an intention each day to keep 10% of my awareness residing inside my body while doing other things throughout the day such as while in a conversation or writing an email. This practice helps my to stay more connected with my body so that I can improve my ability to be aware of and mitigate the stress that results from my role as a risk-taker.
At Manifestations, we consider it a privilege to be involved in the journey of our entrepreneurs who are taking tremendous risk and managing it on our behalf.
May we all be aware of the risk we manage with the totality of our being and develop the wisdom and skillfulness to transform the stress and anxiety that results from this so that we can be more fully in our potential and help others to do the same.
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