Every breath you take

Breathing properly helps promote self-awareness and, as a result, personal and professional success.

by Carole Moreira

Dorothy Spence is the Nova Scotia chair of the Executive Committee, a global think-tank for CEOs whose mission is to increase the effectiveness of business leaders. When Halifax–based Spence, 46, was younger, stress used to limit her life and career. Then she discovered that something as simple as focusing on breathing properly helps promote self-awareness and, as a result, personal and professional success. Now she’s forging a new career by taking this message to top executives all over Atlantic Canada.

It sounds almost too simple at first. After all, breathing is something everyone does naturally, so how can we be doing it wrong? In fact, many of us breathe in a rapid shallow way that stops us from focusing both on ourselves and others. When we breathe like that, neither we nor our endeavours can achieve their full potential.
 
“I wasn’t even aware of how I was breathing,” recalls Spence of the time when she was forced to sell TecKnow-ledge HealthCare Systems, a company she had co-founded in 1993. “I’d get into a stressful business situation and I’d start breathing shallowly and my mind was racing. My posture was of protection—rounded shoulders, head tilted forward.”
 
After a two-year stint studying at the Ottawa–based WEL-Systems Institute, a personal development and leadership centre, Spence founded Halifax–based Growth Matter, a business consulting company focused on growth, through which she teaches the value of a reflective practice that promotes self-awareness and self-discipline through yoga.
 
As well as teaching yoga, she also holds seminars for the general public centred around the philosophy of yoga—the idea that individuals need to look within to fully connect with themselves and others. Most people, when they identify a problem taking place in their office, blame others instead of themselves. Spence immediately turns around the conversation. She asks, “How are you accountable and how are people behaving who are reporting to you?” That, she says, is the beginning of cultivating self-awareness.
 
“It’s important to learn how to engage with the unique potential of everyone in a company,” says Spence. “It changes how you interact with people and how they perform. It makes staff willing to take on more responsibility, and it leads to high-performance teams.”
 

 

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