Staying mentally agile is one of the most difficult elements of being in the business sector. As business professionals ascend to new heights and start tackling more difficult obstacles, they need to be able to critically analyze a situation and then assert themselves.
This goal is simple enough—but throw in a myriad of other challenges, from staying healthy to meeting deadlines, and even the most straightforward goals can start to pile up.
For this reason, many industry pros decide to prioritize their physical health and daily routines in order to get the most out of their brains while on the job. While it might sound like a straightforward enough way to get more done, the ins and outs of taking care of the ‘business brain’ are a bit more nuanced.
First, let’s define what a ‘business brain’ is.
The definition of this term covers a business professional who is able to see and capture opportunities in direct relation to their personal sense of worth and financial motivations. Additionally, the business brain is pragmatic and unafraid to pursue new opportunities and rewards.
But not every person is born with the business brain. If you’re looking to build on your natural disposition toward business, opportunities, and personal and financial worth, we’ve got a few tips in mind to help you get the most out of your efforts.
Let’s explore the ins and outs of how to keep the mind sharp for business professionals who face a multitude of challenges every day—without adding more work to their schedules.
These tips are geared toward entrepreneurs of all stripes and at any stage of their career, whether launching a startup, scaling up their current business, or looking to expand into new markets.
1. Exercise Your Mind
To keep the mind active, it has to be trained—just like the body. While training the brain probably sounds like an odious activity, it doesn’t have to be.
Even strategic games like poker can be used to help the brain move quickly as it analyzes a situation. Let’s break down how this works. You can get started understanding the basics of playing online using trustworthy guides, then start playing hands at real money tables.
The game will challenge your mind to weigh circumstances like card values and stakes while also contending with a series of unknowns, such as your opponent’s hands. Combined with tricks like bluffing, each round becomes a highly complex and nuanced challenge—one that will help keep your brain focused on critical analysis, quick decision-making, and contending with unknowns.
2. Focus on Your Body
Let’s not forget that the brain is an organ—which means a businessperson must focus on their physical health if they want to get more out of their minds. Diet and exercise are extremely important. Your diet is what directly fuels your brain, while exercise preps the body and mind to get into a flow and work seamlessly.
However, sleep is the most important focus when it comes to prepping the mind for a day of work. Getting seven to nine hours of uninterrupted sleep allows the brain to make neural connections, which directly contributes to the accuracy and longevity of our critical thinking skills throughout the day.
3. Optimize Your Hours
Training the brain with exercise and prepping the body for long stints of thinking are two core ways to keep your mind agile. But one of the lesser-known ways to get more out of your brain is to simply optimize when you work. This takes a bit of observation, as you’ll need to be in tune with your body and mind to know when your ‘peak’ work hours are.
Are you a morning person or a night person? Can you push your brain toward more than four hours (the average) of hard thinking per day? Simply being more mindful about when and how you work can help you push your thinking skills to new heights. However, this tip will only apply to businesspeople who are able to control their working hours.
4. Take on the Role of Teacher
Some people believe that a person only really understands a topic when they’re able to teach it to someone else. If you were responsible for creating a class, what topic would you want to cover? And how would you do so?
While it’s not necessary to actually create a curriculum, it’s important to know that taking on the role of a teacher can help train the brain to start thinking critically and thoroughly.
Usually, when we teach others, they have a few questions for us. These questions can challenge us to think about topics in new ways and even confront dissenting opinions. The goal here is to break down a topic from every angle and learn how to teach this topic to different minds.
