Thinking Just Hurts the Team
Find Happiness and Ignite Your Full Potential by Taking the Principles of Yoga to the Workplace
Thinking Just Hurts the Team offers a place of peace in the harried pace of professional life to bolster, rather than hamper, success.
Thinking Just Hurts the Team: Find Happiness and Ignite Your Full Potential by Taking the Principles of Yoga to the Workplace is Salisa R. Roberts’s personal story of professional success through more than a decade of yoga practice.
Roberts, a financial services professional, always knew that her right brain—the soft skills used for relating to people—were an asset in her personal and professional life, despite the cultural focus on left-brained, cut-and-dried analysis. This book is the story of how yoga helped that part of her to flourish more fully, resulting in authentic relating to herself and others and a balanced, healthy, and successful personal and professional life.
The book examines the detrimental effect of thought-centric approaches to life and business. Thinking is certainly vital, but doing it too much or in isolation is counterproductive, even dangerous. Roberts’s firsthand stories show how such mindsets block self-awareness, cause conflict, and stall problem-solving momentum, though the major focus of the book is showing how a yoga-fueled mentality can bring positive change.
More than specific yoga poses or practices, the book shows the power of a yoga mindset—from the welcome of namaste to cleansing breathing to mindful awareness. It can be hard to imagine that kind of peacefulness in a high-stakes boardroom discussion, but Roberts has experienced it, and offers insight into making such a countercultural, life-enriching shift. While the mindset first changes the practitioner herself, the truly transforming power comes when these principles become part of a team, influencing how people respond to and collaborate with one another.
The book’s tone is warm and friendly. The pace is generally swift, though the book sometimes meanders, more like a conversation than a how-to plan. Advice is shared via a descriptive, personal narrative rather than a prescriptive approach to self-help. The openness and depth of Roberts’s personal investment echoes through her advice, and provides a personal connection that helps instructions pay off for her readers. The slimness of the book makes big change feel manageable, and short chapters make it easy to get a bite-sized piece of refreshing advice, then move ahead or go back to real life—a great fit for busy professionals with only a few moments to spare.
This book is open to all yoga experience levels. Its ideas are clearly explained for beginners, and there is a resource section to help people get started. But the earth-shattering idea of bringing these practices into the professional realm will be new and vital to many more experienced yoga practitioners.
Thinking Just Hurts the Team offers a place of peace in the harried pace of professional life to bolster, rather than hamper, success.
Reviewed by
Melissa Wuske
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book and paid a small fee to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. Foreword Reviews and Clarion Reviews make no guarantee that the publisher will receive a positive review. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
