What Lessons from Physical Therapy Can Teach You About Business

I recently had a hip injury that took several months to heal. After all of that time keeping movement to a minimum and exercise nonexistent, my body mechanics had forgotten how to move properly, not to mention I had lost a lot of strength and stamina. To combat this and keep me from reinjuring myself, my doctor sent me to physical therapy.

 

Without a long medical description, the first part of my PT experience involved reactivating muscles that were underused during my injury but are necessary for healthy and normal body mechanics (and would help prevent my back muscles from kicking in and causing further strain). These types of exercises are small, tedious, and painstaking, albeit very important. Being a former athlete, my instinct was to go big and push my limits, but that isn’t the goal of physical therapy. Instead, the best thing I could do was hold back, and let my muscles rebuild properly. So every day I did my assignments, regardless of how monotonous and boring they were.

 

Each week, I made progress, though small, and after several weeks I moved on to strengthening exercises, which also start at a low level and build up, and feel fairly tedious. But each day I made the commitment to do my PT regimen, and am finally starting to feel stronger and moving correctly. I am now hitting my goals and making much more noticeable progress.

 

I find this experience to be an excellent analogy for life and for your career. Starting small, even when your instinct is to accomplish as much as you can, will help you build a solid foundation from which to work. You may not feel you are getting anywhere, but trust me, you are. Just put in the work one step at a time, and one day you will look back and realize the small progress has all added up. Once you get the wheels turning, you will suddenly have a ton of momentum and strength, which will propel you far, wherever you choose to apply it.

 

When I say start small, I do not mean pare down your aspirations or efforts. I simply want you to put first things first. In a new business, you may just want to hit the ground running with selling your product or service, but you have to do the sometimes tedious work of making a business plan, creating a pricing structure, and figuring out how things are going to work for you. These tasks create the very foundations of your business, and by having your affairs in order, they won’t come back to haunt you when you are doing bigger and better things. If you can push through those crucial first steps and stick with it, your business will be booming before long.

 

So trust the process. Every baby step contributes to the giant leap, even if you can’t see it know. My physical therapist is definitely right on this one.

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Work With A Mentor Coach

Belinda Brown was an outstanding mentor on my journey to becoming a life coach. She taught me many valuable lessons and provided me with many useful resources. I don’t believe I could have found a more helpful and informative mentor that Belinda and for that I am extremely grateful. This amazing lady will teach you everything you would ever need. Thank you, Belinda!
~Melinda McCann

 

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Communication and Thinking Skills

In all my professional years of experiences and preparation, this is one of the best training sessions I have ever attended!  With Belinda’s methodology, I learned more about myself and about others which will definitely help my communication and thinking skills.  I have recommended your training and coaching to several managers with in order to align operations.

Sincerely,

~Rafael Caamaño, Associate Director, UCF Business Incubator

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Courageous Conversations To Be a Successful Female Leader

“Belinda has assisted me to reconnect with my inner self, to remember my core values and to use those as my guiding force in my life.  She has helped me gain awareness to my weaknesses and most importantly how other people perceive my behavior.  Some of the things people think about me are not who I am at all but it was all about how I was acting – not listening (and didn’t know it), being too direct and too serious all the time. I learned active listening skills and to adjust my communication style to other people. I realized that I did not even really have to change myself – you just need to acknowledge and be aware of your own behaviors or habits. I have also learned to have some of the “courageous conversations” that are imperative to being a successful leader.  All in all, the experience of executive coaching has been a life changer for me and I have Belinda to thank for that!  I will recommend Belinda to all of my friends and leaders”

 

~Shelli Girard, Sr Engineering Manager with Seagate Technology

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Communicate With Persuasion And Influence Others

I recently attended one of Belinda’s workshops on communication for LaunchCode’s candidates at the Idea Center at Miami Dade College in Miami, FL. and I was impressed at the structure and the details of her work, including exercises and role play. The quality of the content was second to none and she provided great supporting material to complement the information, facilitate understanding and reinforce the learning process. The feedback from all the participants was positive above measure. If you want to communicate with persuasion and influence others with the power of your language, this workshop is a must. After this workshop I can never see the communication process the same way again. It will have a long-lasting impact on me.

~Erick Marenco, LaunchCode.org

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Goals Setting: Ease Your Life

Goals Setting with Leadership and Executive Coaching

Goals Settings TestimonialBelinda helped me to follow through with my to-do list and tackle self-motivation issues that come with working alone from home and preparing for the important transition that is welcoming a baby. While working going through the leadership coaching program we assessed my needs, set concrete timelines to my action plans, and I was able to achieve all my set goals (SMART Goals Setting ). Once I reached those goals, we brainstormed to define a strategy and to find more creative and cost effective ways to promote my business. With great positive results from clients and prospects I have now a strategy in place that will keep my business growing while having my baby. With Belinda’s help I have a better and bigger program in place than I would ever thought I would be able to implement. What I liked the most was to have an experienced “sparring partner” that held me accountable, challenge my beliefs and with who I could bounce off my ideas to get new impulses.

~Antje P.,from Germany, Managing Partner, Firewall Computer Services, LLC, Orlando, FL

 

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Time Management TipsGestion du Temps

Time Management TestimonialSpeaking Engagement on Time Management and Emotional Intelligence.

Thank you again for speaking recently at our Coffee Club and Nona’s Café con Leche networking group. We have received numerous compliments on your presentation and the message you delivered at each of those meetings. We definitely appreciated how you tailored your messages on Emotional Intelligence and on Time Management to fit our audience. By doing this, you were able to engage the audience right way, provided examples they could relate to and walk away with tips and tools they could apply immediately.
I will keep you in mind for future opportunities to speak. If I hear of anyone looking for a guest speaker, I’ll be sure to pass on your information. Once again, thank you for your time and professional services to the East Orlando Chamber of Commerce.

~Gege Venant Saintilus, Membership Director at the East Orlando Chamber Of Commerce, Orlando , FL

 

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Burnout, and after?Burnout, et après?

“I was coming out of a burnout and was just leaving a state of high anxiety – which I wanted to quit. At the same time. I knew I wanted to change the direction of my professional life, but was unable to create any steps to move forward. This was greatly affecting my private life – mostly in handling a relationship. I felt stuck and wanted to move forward.
It was a third attempt to say yes to coaching, after two failed experiences… I brought a big challenge for my coach and she actually took a very different approach than the previous ones to challenge me. Despite the fact that everything occurred over phone, I really had the feeling she could understand instantly the way I was functioning. As a result, she was always offering some extremely simple methods, exercises which usually had a huge and immediate effect in my personal and professional life.
Because of my work with Belinda I have managed to get over anxiety, to recover fully from this burnout. Whenever I “FEEL” I am able to analyze the causes of my emotions and try to understand them. I am capable to rely more on my intuition, and this helps me a lot in my daily life. I have the confidence that what I have been looking for is waiting for me, and has never been so close. I just have to accomplish a few final steps to obtain it.
On one hand, it took me a lot of time to be fully started in this process due to my past experiences, and be able to accomplish by myself the steps. On the other hand, some progresses were extremely fast, and I certainly have traveled a long way – by growing more over 9 month than over the 9 past years! I’m really grateful for Belinda’s help.

Anne-Laure C. Project Manager in the banking and financial industry, France“I was coming out of a burn out and was just leaving a state of high anxiety – which I wanted to quit. At the same time. I knew I wanted to change the direction of my professional life, but was unable to create any steps to move forward. This was greatly affecting my private life – mostly in handling a relationship. I felt stuck and wanted to move forward.
It was a third attempt to say yes to coaching, after two failed experiences…! There was a big challenge for my coach! And she actually took a very different approach than the previous ones to challenge me. Despite the fact that everything occurred over phone, I really had the feeling she could understand instantly the way I was functioning. As a result, she was always offering some extremely simple methods, exercises which usually had a huge and immediate effect in my personal and professional life.
Because of my work with Belinda I have managed to get over anxiety, whenever I “FEEL” I am able to analyze the causes, and try to understand them. I am capable to rely more on my intuition, and this helps me a lot in my daily life. I have the confidence that what I have been looking for is waiting for me, and has never been so close. I just have to accomplish a few final steps to obtain it.
On one hand, it took me a lot of time to be fully started in this process due to my past experiences, and be able to accomplish by myself the steps. On the other hand, some progresses were extremely fast, and I certainly have traveled a long way – by growing more over 9 month than over the 9 past years! I’m really grateful for Belinda’s help.

Anne-Laure C. Project Manager in the banking and financial industry, France

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Looking for a Career Transition

I met Belinda at one of the 2012 NSHMBA events and although we had a very short interaction, she was able to provide practical advice to help me advance in my professional career in quite an assertive fashion. She is an energetic and positive individual with highly polished people skills that is willing to put her talent to the service of others.

– Alejandra Guzman, MBA Candidate at Tulane University, New Orleans, LA

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Advance My Career: Great Results, Expert, Creative

Belinda MJ.Brown was very pleasant during my interaction with her as an Executive Coach at the NSH MBA conference. I felt at ease, and her ability to understand and relate to my story was extraordinary. She possesses a remarkable intuition and coaching method. She is able to switch hats between an enabler and an adviser. The coaching experience helped me to be more confident in myself and in the steps I need to take in order to advance my career. Belinda has very strong skills set and I would use and recommend her professional services to anyone that wants to achieve its personal and professional objectives.

– Marco V., Supervisor, Customer Experience, Riverview, FL –

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