Moving your body can help clear your mind
Australian Financial Review – Special Report – Business of Health
An alternative approach is helping bankers and brokers overcome their inabilities to meet targets at work, says Miriam Hechtman.
A couple of years ago, Andrew Wreford was working 70 hours a week with no real direction in life. “A lot of companies will deny that it’s there or they’re not interested in it, but staff are generally unhappy with what they do, who they are,” Wreford says. People’s personal problems do exist in the workplace, he says, despite businesses suggesting otherwise. “People bring them in to work; it forms very much a part of the social structure of their work, how they react with other people, how they behave.” Since seeing a kinesiologist, Wreford is now regional manager at Chartres Business Solutions, a business strategy consultancy, and says his life has taken a significant turn for the better. He is also now trained as a kinesiologist. “The benefits have been a lot more than I expected,” he says.
Originally developed in the 1960s by American chiropractor George Goodheart, kinesiology is a chiropractic tool, says Peter Bablis, a doctor of chiropractics and a kinesiologist. It was invented, he says, “as a tool to attain specific information from the body using muscles, joints and reflexes to ascertain and validate what is actually happening in a functional and structural sense in regards to the physical, chemical and emotional status of the body.”
More simply, kinesiology is a way of talking to the body. The muscle testing is a form of biofeedback that indicates how a person’s body is functioning and where there is imbalance. He says many therapists from chiropractors to doctors to dentists to psychologists are using this approach to help collect patient information and diagnosis. Kinesiology is unique because it is about integrating the mind and body. Says Bablis: “A lot of people do courses to help upload their software in other words, their mind and doing these courses is fundamental. But unless you upgrade the hardware and do the body work to integrate the software you’ve basically got Windows 2000 on a 386 old computer. It can’t read or run the program.”
Using kinesiology is faster than psychology and more holistic in its approach, says kinesiologist Natalie Wareham. “The difference is we actually work with a lot of the same concepts but using muscle monitoring and movement actually enables people to move themselves through things a little bit quicker.”Bablis says he treats many bankers and stockbrokers and has worked on special corporate programs, including those run by ANZ and St George that focus on goal setting and achieving targets.
Bablis says people fail to reach their goals for a reason. “This type of behaviour usually stems from a conditioned response,” he says. A common conditioned response is thinking that you will not get chosen for a promotion. Bablis says this sort of response could stem from, for example, not being chosen for the basketball team in high school. This event might have caused you grief and pain at the time that may not have been resolved, and a conditioning reflex is set up. “A Pavlovian conditioned response will always follow a pattern until it’s extinguished. Emotions are good for you but when they’re not integrated properly and they haven’t [been] extinguished, they get stuck in the body so you play out the same routines. Unfortunately your body perpetuates what it expects to see.”
Kinesiologist Joy Moulieri says muscle testing will “bypass the conscious mind and gain access to the wealth of information that is contained within us that we may not even be aware of”. Moulieri’s aim, she says, is to align clients with their own personal power which ultimately helps them to respond and not react. For example, if a major account is falling apart, the chief executive may respond by thinking laterally rather than just indulging in knee-jerk reactions.
All three kinesiologists agree that most corporate clients seek out a kinesiologist because of stress. They are “getting quite burnt out and quite overloaded”, says Wareham. Common complaints include inability to think clearly, inability to communicate easily and losing their ability to prioritise. These feelings manifest themselves in the body through such ailments as fatigue, aches and pains and stomach ulcers. For many business people, public speaking is often an overwhelming challenge and one that Wareham frequently explores with clients. “So what we do is use the muscle monitoring to identify where their blockages are that are stopping them from being able to easily do that,” says Wareham.
Siva Sivakumar is an independent business consultant whose clients live in Asia. A friend suggested he try kinesiology. “While I did try other techniques such as meditation, I was not having much success managing my stress levels,” he says. Since seeing a kinesiologist, Sivakumar says his stress levels are significantly down, even under extreme pressure. “My clients see me as someone who is calm and collected in a crisis,” he says. “They also appreciate my ability to step back from the project at hand and look for less obvious ways of resolving seemingly intractable problems.”
Bablis is at Macquarie University finishing his higher research degree in psychosomatic medicine. He is part of the university’s Injury Management Group. He says he has seen so many positive results and “being the scientist that I am, I like to know why it works”. “It has surpassed the stage of it being just luck. Constant results can’t be random,” he says.
Stress relief
· Kinesiology is a chiropractic tool invented to attain specific information from the body.
· Practitioners say using kinesiology is faster than psychology and more holistic in its approach.
· They say corporate clients seek treatment to try to relieve stress.
