Laura Motes - Healthy Living and Positive Rituals

Laura Motes has been working as a police officer for a long time and she knows about the power of positive rituals.
Great athletes, CEOs, and doctors all rely on positive rituals to structure their lives and achieve their goals. The same is true of people who ground their lives in certain values, such as healthy living.

It is easy to dismiss the idea of rituals because it may seem that they would make your life rigid and extreme.
At the same time, if you observe the areas of your life where you perform exceptionally well, you will notice that you already have a lot of rituals around it. These rituals may include a morning routine of getting ready, a planning session for the day or week ahead, or the time that you spend with your family.

Rituals do not preclude spontaneity. On the contrary, they provide a level of security and comfort that allows us to try new things, take risks, and improvise. They provide a stable, predictable environment where breakthroughs and records can happen. Think of a great athlete establishing a new record or an executive making progress by coming up with a highly unusual structure for a deal that works for all the involved parties.

Rituals can also facilitate recovery and renewal. By their nature, rituals conserve energy. Will and discipline are resources that have very limited reserves. The unfortunate truth is that we have very little will power, and can control our behavior consciously for only short periods of time.

This is why rituals are so powerful. If you want to take your health to the next level, don’t hope that you will have enough will power. Create rituals that will help you accomplish your goals. As someone who worked as a police officer for twenty-one years, Laura Motes has created a number of rituals for herself, including spending time off on Broad River.
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Laura Motes - Healthy Living and Emotions

As a former police officer, Laura Motes knows how important it is to stay emotionally calm no matter what.

When thinking about healthy living, many people focus on physical exercise, eating properly, and sleeping enough hours, and completely forget to pay attention to their emotional well-being.

Physical energy is what we need to be able to do any kind of work or activity. At the same time, to be able to perform well we need to have pleasant and positive emotions in addition to having physical energy.

Negative emotions such as fear, anxiety, anger, and sadness release stress hormones into our bodies. This is why they are associated with feeling toxic.

In addition to having a healthy body, healthy living is impossible without the capacity to skillfully manage emotions, have high positive energy, and achieve full engagement in both personal and professional life.

Emotional energy works very similarly to physical energy. Our emotions need a balance between exercise and recovery. When our emotional muscles are weak, for example if we lack confidence or have too little patience, we need to learn to push through our current emotional capacity and then rest and recover.

Not only do physical and emotional aspects of our lives work in a similar manner, but physical and emotional capacities are extremely interconnected.

When we have a deadline that we need to meet, we emotionally feel a sense of urgency. This emotion immediately influences our physical state. We start moving faster and working quicker to meet the deadline.

This is why mastering emotional energy is so important for a healthy and productive life, especially if you work in a profession with high levels of stress like Laura Motes, who was a police officer for twenty-one years.