Mindfulness Is Good Business
The biggest misunderstanding about mindfulness is that it is some kind of squishy self-help luxury item, that you can take or leave it. That it is only for people seeking inner peace or deeper spiritual meaning. The truth is, mindfulness is now table stakes for leaders who want to be great, who want to build great companies.
Being a good leader is super hard, particularly if you run your own company. You need your mind to be sharp and clear at all times. In other words, mindful. And yet, when the pressure is one and there seem to be “more important” things going on, a focus on mental fitness and clarity is one of the first things to go out the window.
Building companies can be intense, where sometimes key customers churn out, the competition gains ground, your numbers fall short of their targets, the board puts immense pressure on you.
All of these heavy, emotional things are pulling at your attention all the time. It’s hard to keep calm and not over-react. If you want to be the best leader you can possibly be, and build the best organization you possibly can, you can’t afford to just react to things however feels right in the moment. Being mindful helps you stay aware of the thoughts and feelings coming up for you in the moment, and avoid being reactive.
Mindfulness is the state of being aware of one’s thoughts and feelings, and those of the people around you, in the moment, whether while doing any particular activity or just sitting there.
Consider a few concrete examples (just five out of thousands) where mindfulness makes a crucial difference:
Decision-making. Leaders regularly face critical decisions that can determine their success or failure, yet may struggle with overwhelm and cognitive overload. This internal mental state leads to poor, rushed, or biased decisions that can harm the company. Mindfulness helps clear mental clutter and enhances focus, enabling them to make well-considered, effective decisions.
Team morale. Leaders may find themselves disconnected from their teams due to the busyness and stress of leading a growing company, resulting in low morale and high turnover. This disconnection is a mental state of being overwhelmed and not fully present with employees. Mindfulness encourages presence and attentiveness, allowing CEOs to genuinely connect with their employees and boost engagement and retention.
Focus. Distractions and multitasking can significantly reduce efficiency and increase errors. The mental challenge here is the inability to focus on one task at a time due to constant interruptions. Mindfulness promotes single-tasking and deep focus, improving overall productivity and reducing mistakes.
Creativity. Growth companies rely on innovation, but rigid thinking and high stress levels high lead to stagnation. Mental rigidity and stress inhibit the flow of new ideas. Mindfulness reduces stress and opens the mind to new perspectives, fostering a creative environment essential for innovation.
Consistency. Effective leadership requires consistency and authenticity, yet leaders may struggle with internal inconsistencies and a lack of genuine presence. This mental state of inconsistency can result in a loss of trust and respect from the team. Mindfulness fosters qualities such as patience, resilience, and authenticity, enabling them to lead more consistently and earn their team's trust and respect.
In all of these cases, there is real material risk to the company from poor leadership performance. And in each case, sharpening the “inner game” can stabilize one’s performance just when it’s most needed.
Rumination Machine
So, why aren’t we mindful all the time already?
It’s not from a lack of desire. Certainly, we want to be focused. We want to be at the top of our game. But something gets in the way. For example, there is that little voice in our head, the constant inner monologue, telling us all the things to worry about, that we might have done wrong, that misinterprets the words and intentions of others and gets us in trouble.
From recent decades of neuroscience research, we now have a name for that phenomenon. It’s called your Default Mode Network.
According to Google:
”The Default Mode Network (DMN) is a group of brain regions that are more active when someone is not focusing on external tasks or events. It's also known as the "task negative" network because its activity is correlated with rest and decreases when someone is performing cognitive tasks. The DMN is especially active when someone is engaged in introspective activities like daydreaming, thinking about the past or future, or considering another person's perspective.”
As we ruminate, feelings can emerge, such as fear, doubt, and so on. Those feelings are not necessarily bad. They typically carry information that can be useful to us. What is bad is completely absorbing oneself in those feelings, rather than looking at them objectively as just something that’s happening to us.
Increased mindfulness will not stop the rumination machine. It will always be there, it is part of how the brain works. But, more mindfulness can enable you to gain control over your reactions to rumination in the moment. It can help you distance yourself from emotional reactions to that internal monologue, to create a space between stimulus and response.
Performance Requires Practice
You can learn to be more mindful by practicing with real interactions with real humans any time. But that’s like trying to learn a sport without attending any practices, and only practicing by playing real games with other teams. Yes, you’ll improve over time, but it’s pretty high stakes at the beginning when you’re just learning. You will improve faster, with a lot less collateral damage, if you have some sort of meditation or reflection practice that you do during your downtime, away from others and when things are calm, and then applying that practice to the real world when you need it.
Meditation is a specific practice you can use to build up your ability to be mindful. There are other practices that can help promote mindful states, like exercise, gardening, yoga, chopping wood, and so on. But some form of meditation is by far the most common, and a particularly pure and focused way to practice your mindfulness.
There are two simple aspects to building a meditation practice. It’s just like if you wanted to bulk up in the gym.
There is what happens during each individual practice session.
And there is what happens over time as you develop a consistent practice.
Like exercise, there are immediate benefits from a single session, though they are not always obvious. Usually, you’ll feel good physically leaving the gym because the body gets many benefits from even a moderate level of exercise (you might also be a bit sore). The same is true with meditation. Single sessions leave you in a healthier, more calm, and well-grounded state of mind (you probably won’t be as sore).
So starting to meditate can help you right now. Five minutes of sitting quietly paying attention to your breath will lower your blood pressure. I guarantee it.
Like exercise, it’s hard to see any progress in the beginning, after just one or two session. Benefits tend to accumulate over time. It gets easier to do exercises the more you do them, and it gets easier to meditate the more you do it.
If you are new to mindfulness and meditation, your first 5 to 10 sessions will be somewhere between difficult and boring. Don’t give up. Whether you realize it or not, benefits are accumulating. They may just be hard to detect at first. But by the time you get to 20 sessions, you will see what I mean.
Getting Started
There are countless methods of meditation, old and new, and I am not going to get into any particular philosophy or approach here. If you want to explore particular meditation schools, knock yourself out.
When I sit to meditate, I set a timer for between 15 to 30 minutes. When I first started, I was very consistent with 30-minute sessions. Over time, though, I’ve found that even 15 minutes is enough.
Most days, I just do 15 minute sessions in the morning. If I’m in a hurry, I may even do just 5 minutes. And that still makes a huge difference throughout the rest of my day. If it’s a slow day or a weekend, I may enjoy the luxury of a 30 minute session for fun.
I don’t do it every day, but I try to do it most days. Sometimes, if I have to skip it in the morning, and if I can find a quiet moment later in the day, I’ll just do it then. But some days, I miss it entirely. Oh well, not the end of the world.
I get into a comfortable sitting position, turn off all distractions (except my timer), and close my eyes. I pay close attention to my breath, and try to experience it as something that’s just happening to me without actually forcing it. I imagine it flowing into my lungs, and then flowing out again. Sometimes I count my breaths, but not always.
As I am sitting, thoughts arise.
“Oh, forgot to reply to so-and-so. I have an idea for my next post. What did I say I was going to cook for dinner?”
It’s totally fine. You can’t actually stop them from arising. You can, however, notice when a thought has pulled your attention away from your breath, and simply let it go and return your attention to your breathing. Don’t worry—if a thought was important, it will still be there after your session. And if it isn’t, it probably wasn’t all that important.
If you’re just trying this out, you will probably be more successful sticking to it if you set a regular amount of time, and do it at the same time of day, each and every day, at least for the first 30 days or so.
Building a Habit
Maybe it feels like a lot of time to be “doing nothing”. After all, you’re pretty busy. But here’s the thing:
The more you do a regular practice of focusing your mind on something simple, like your breath, or the bird songs outside, or the bubble of a water fountain, the more you will be able to command your mind in moments of intense emotions at work when you need to say calm and focused.
And having that mental discipline will enable you to navigate stressful situations, build better relationships, make better decisions. You’ll also enjoy your work more. Your colleagues will notice the difference. But most of all, you’ll see the difference in your business outcomes themselves. And that will make it worthwhile.
One last thing. The real punchline is that by the time you have practiced being mindful for long enough to make a real impact on your business, you will find that you come to just enjoy being mindful for its own sake. The business benefits are just a pleasant bonus.
30 Day Challenge
Finally, I know you might have trouble trying something new unless you’re pushing yourself through some sort of grueling challenge. So here’s my challenge to you. Try meditating just 15 minutes a day for 30 days in a row, and see if it doesn’t make a clear and measurable impact on your professional life. I dare ya. ;)
