The Secret to Improved Mental Clarity | 120 Seconds to Better Leadership

*Video Transcription*

I wanted to do a quick check-in on mental clarity and focus.

It's something that we all struggle with in this digitized age where distractions are coming from everywhere. We're also finding people are a little more burned out than maybe they were a few years ago for various reasons. And what we know is that the mind needs rest to be able to perform at its best.

I have to admit. I'm very type A. I'm a lot like my clients, and we don't always take care of ourselves the way that we should.

We don't always sleep as well as we should or as long as we should.

I actually heard last week that women need 10 hours of sleep a night, which would explain how tired I am.

I have no idea if it's true, but we do all need that rest, and we all do tend to neglect that if we're staying up late, checking emails, and getting up early and checking emails.

So I ended up getting COVID, which I still have, actually, but I feel a lot better today.

But I didn't know what to expect, and what I found was for the first 48 hours, I could do nothing but sleep. I mean, it wasn't good sleep, but I couldn't do anything but sleep.

And what was interesting was on the third day, I woke up and I kept my expectations low and woke up just when my body was ready to wake up and started my day by sitting down and reading a book for 45 minutes and getting tea before I started to go to work.

And what I found was the mental clarity for things that usually I find too tedious.

Email—I'm notorious for just being awful about email. It's detailed. It's tedious. It's boring, and I'm chronically behind.

And it was so interesting to me that after just 48 hours of sleeping (not that we can live that way) I got so much done.

I literally have been behind on at least something, if not a lot of things, for at least two years, and I just feel, chronically, like I can't catch up.

And by the time I have the time to catch up, I'm so brain fried that I can't. So it was really sort of an unwelcome yet fascinating experience about the power of sleep.

My goal as I come out of this and return to a more normal work schedule is that I can start incorporating some of the things I did while I was sick that really helped me get the best rest that I could and carry those forward and maybe even some of those slower mornings too.

Maybe instead of hopping on my cell phone first thing in the morning, maybe sit down and center myself first because those things really just brought out a mental efficiency.

It's not just about it being pleasant or getting self-care, although, you know, that stuff's nice.

It made my mind so much more focused and so much more efficient even though I had a fever. So play with your sleep. Play with rest and report below how it goes!

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