November :: 2006 :: Thinking Home Business | Practical Tips For People Who Work From Home

As a follow up to my post yesterday, If You Own a Small Business, You’d Better Stay Healthy, I thought tonight I should mention something that has been very helpful for me and is very manageable in terms of space and time for even the busiest home based professional (or for that matter even those not home based).

The Five Tibetans are not a group of jolly monks (there may be such a group, but I don’t know about it), but a shorthand term for the Five Tibetan Rites, as expounded in the book The Fountain of Youth by Peter Kelder. I learnt them from an amazing Australian woman, Carolinda Witt (pictured left), who has taken the original system and adapted it, to suit us more sedentary Westerners, into her T5T system.

Here’s a short summary from Carolinda’s website:

T5T (The Five Tibetans) is an ancient Tibetan rejuvenation technique that has long been credited with the ability to maintain youthfulness and vitality. Comprising five yoga-like exercises and an energising breathing technique – it is combined with modern exercise methods such as core stability to provide a 10 minute a day, step-by-step program – that can be done safely by anyone, anywhere and at any time.

I have to say when I heard the word “yoga” I had images of being required to stand on my head and twist my body into positions I regarded as being quite impossible for me. I need not have worried. Carolinda has given a lot of thought to how to make the exercises (the “rites”) quite manageable even for those of for whom running onto a football field or other field of athletic endeavour is personally, as it is for me, a distant memory. So I started slowly and carefully built up my repetitions over a period of time, never straining.

The exercises are also great when you are travelling. You need no special clothing or even a gym and you can do the exercises in your hotel room before you go off to meetings or a conference. They only take 10 minutes out of the day and they more than repay that, in my experience and the experience of others.

There’s also Qi Gong or Qui Gong, which I enjoy, and actually I have been doing that and not the Tibetans for a while, but have been enjoying getting back into the Tibetans.

Carolinda also has a blog called, yes, The Five Tibetans, where she shares from her extensive knowledge about diet and other health matters.

And I’ve just noticed on the blog that there will be a US edition of Carolinda’s book in 2007:

The US version of the book is called The 10-Minute Rejuvenation Plan and will be published by Random House on April 3rd 2007.

In the past - a long time in the past – I had the good fortune to work in situations where I actually got paid even while I was off sick. I was enough of a workaholic – fact, not particularly proud of it – that I was usually keen to get back to work as quickly as I could, but I did not have the financial worry about being ill that is usually part of being in business on your own.

Then some time after I’d had my own business I was put out of action for a couple of months and on about half strength for six months, through a medical mishap during a ‘routine procedure’. I had some good and loyal clients so my business did not collapse, but it certainly took a knock.

The fact is, for those of us who have a home based or other small business, being healthy and fit is basic. Health insurance is also a consideration. Although in the situation I experienced where I was put out of action, the insurance company used some fine print to weasel out of paying me the income substitution my premiums were supposed to cover – but that’s another story under the heading “caveat emptor”. I’m not knocking the value of insurance, but since that experience I’ve learned to take more responsibility for my own health as part of my insurance provision. And I’ll be at the gym tonight even though part of me would rather kick back with a beverage of my choice in hand.

On the new b5media business channel blog Small Business Boomers, entrepreneur Jim Norton has some good advice about health in his post Your Business Is All About You.