Chapter 3
Mindfulness Techniques
You learned in Chapter 2 that it's possible for you to gain control of your mind by training it. Training your mind enables you to be a more effective leader, experience greater calm, have more peace of mind, make better decisions, discover what truly matters to you, and find fulfillment in your work and your life. In this chapter I describe generic mindfulness techniques that can be applied both to leadership and to life in general. In later chapters, I'll introduce you to techniques that can be particularly helpful with the various aspects of leadership, including developing greater self-awareness and an awareness of how you impact others.
To lead successfully, it's important to develop:
1. The ability to calm yourself in the face of stress or difficult decisions. This enables you to have a calming effect on those you lead.
2. The ability to understand what's going on within yourself and how you perceive your reality and the business reality. When you understand what drives you and how you think and feel about what arises, you'll have clear judgment, which makes decision making easier.
3. The ability to be in the present moment and clearly understand what you're hearing or reading, instead of being caught up in regretting or reliving the past or fearing and catastrophizing the future. This enables you to respond appropriately no matter what the circumstances.
4. The ability to imagine a life that is positive and fulfilling and to set in motion positive outcomes in your life and business. This enables you to create a vision and strategy for your life and your business based on your aspirations.
5. And finally, the ability to know that all things pass and that nothing is forever, whether it's good or bad. This applies equally to record-breaking quarters or disappointing returns, as well as to bull markets and market collapses.
Mindfulness can help you to develop all of the abilities listed above. The goal is, over time, to begin living mindfully throughout the day. To achieve this, you need to start meditating regularly, developing a daily (or almost daily) practice. This will allow you to experience greater calm and to develop focus or concentration, as well as to hone your intuition or gut feelings. The spillover benefits from adding a formal sitting meditating practice to your daily routine will occur naturally. But, in order to leverage the benefits of your formal practice and maximize their potential, you must also employ mindfulness-in-action strategies. These are specific strategies that you can use anytime—while leading a meeting, making a presentation, developing your business strategy, reading the stock ticker, buying a business, selling a business, walking the dog, driving, playing golf—you get the picture. Mindfulness is applicable to everything that occurs during your day, whether personal or professional. My coaching experience has shown me that clients who pay special attention to using mindfulness in their daily lives greatly accelerate their development of the skill of mindfulness. By applying these strategies consistently, such people are being proactive and, in time, they start to be mindful without conscious effort.
With this in mind, throughout the chapter I'll introduce you to techniques for both formal practice and strategies for mindfulness in action, which you can practice during your regular daily life. Don't panic and think you'll never be able to do this; I have never worked with anyone who was motivated to learn and who practiced regularly (even as little as 10 minutes per day) who couldn't do this and experience the benefits. When you first begin your practice, you may find the audio recordings of guided meditations featuring the various techniques described in this chapter at www.argonautaconsulting.com particularly helpful, as well as my blog on mindful leadership at www.argonautaconsulting.com/blog.
I would like to clarify a popular misconception that meditation is about clearing or emptying the mind and that in fact, the objective is to have no thoughts. Nothing could be further from the truth. There will be times when many thoughts arise. At times they may appear incessant. Other times there may be fewer thoughts. That is just the way it is. The thoughts themselves are not a problem. It is the pushing away or repressing of thoughts that is the problem. Just let thoughts do what they wish to do, without getting caught up in them. You will notice that they appear, disappear, rise and fall whether you are a beginner or an experienced meditator. It is our relationship to the thoughts that makes all the difference. The experienced meditator merely lets thoughts rise and fall with equanimity.
You can do these relaxation techniques sitting in a chair or lying down. Try them in both positions to see which best helps you reach maximum relaxation.
The Breath
We often tell someone who's visibly stressed to “take a breath,” and there are sound reasons for this. Typically, when we're stressed our breath becomes shallow or uneven, which creates a cycle that causes even greater stress. By taking a conscious breath, you can slow things down. Make it a slow, even breath. You might try breathing in for a count of three or four and out for a count of three or four. Doing this for five minutes or so will relax you greatly. Try to pay attention only to the breath, and count as you are inhaling and exhaling. When you become distracted by your thoughts or they become critical (“This won't help one bit”) or doubting (“I hope this helps, but what if it doesn't?”), very gently bring them back to the breath. At first you may need to bring yourself back to your breath dozens of times in, say, a five-minute period, but don't despair—distraction is perfectly normal.
Concentrating on your breathing is also a good strategy in daily life, one that can help calm you as you're about to start a meeting with analysts or about to have a difficult conversation. You may not need to practice conscious breathing for the full five minutes in these circumstances; just stopping to take one or two breaths may suffice to remind you to be mindful, to be in the present moment, and to not be hijacked by any runaway thoughts.
Think of the breath as your ally. It's an internal relaxation mechanism available to you 24 hours a day. You can consciously access it anytime you want to gain perspective or widen the gap between stimulus and response so that you can make better decisions. You can also use this technique as you lie in bed before going to sleep or when you wake up.
Body Relaxation
Another relaxation technique is to systematically relax your body. Begin with your feet. Relax them, letting go of any tension. Then move your way up to the lower leg, then the upper leg, continuing to work your way up to the torso, the shoulders and arms, the neck, and the head. As you're doing this, concentrate only on relaxing the body part you are focusing on and maintaining relaxation in the parts you have already focused on. As with the breath technique, if your mind wanders or your thoughts become critical, very gently bring it back into focus without judging yourself. When you have relaxed your whole body to the best of your ability, try to remain relaxed for a few more minutes. At this point your focus of concentration is the whole body and the enjoyment of being relaxed.
If you do this technique as a daily formal practice, you can do it in 10 to 30 minutes, depending on your available time. As you gain experience, you'll be able to relax your whole body in as little as five minutes, and eventually in seconds. This too is a technique you may benefit from doing just before bedtime for a deep rest or if you wake up at night and have difficulty falling back asleep. Rather than thinking about everything that you need to do in the morning—a sure way of not falling asleep—aim to relax your body.
Strategies for Mindfulness in Action
In daily life, you can use awareness as a strategy to calm your body at will. Train yourself to tune in to your body periodically during the day, and see whether you are holding tension anywhere. If you're like most people, you may have a particular part of the body that tightens under stress. Commonly this is the shoulders, the neck, the stomach, or the back, but it could be any part of the body. By tuning in periodically, you become more familiar with your body, as well as with situations that cause you stress.
For the first week, merely tune into the body throughout the day and pay attention to what you discover. Are you tense or relaxed? Is there a part (or parts) of the body that is often tense? Under what circumstances do you become tense? Simply become aware; change nothing. You may find that just by placing awareness on the tense area, you become more relaxed. Or you may realize how tense you actually are and not become relaxed at all. This is fine; all you're looking for during this first week is awareness.
After the first week, every time you tune into your body and find a tense area, purposefully relax it to the best of your ability. Notice that I said “to the best of your ability.” You may find that at first your ability to relax systematically is very modest. Don't be concerned—it's not a problem. With persistence it will improve, so be prepared to amaze yourself. And remember too, every day is a different day, every moment a different moment: one day you may not be able to relax very much, while the next day you can relax completely. Be patient and don't let yourself become discouraged.
The following formal techniques described below of Internal Awareness, External Awareness, and Imagining Positive Outcomes were developed by Shinzen Young.
Three things matter when you perform these techniques:
1. Concentration, which means that you stay focused on what you are working with.
2. Clarity, which means that you know exactly what space you are noticing and what is arising.
3. Equanimity, which means that you accept whatever is arising internally with a gentle matter-of-factness.
Life is lived in the mind. Our perception is our reality. Sometimes we seem to be stuck in our heads, so to speak. We relive the past, thinking about how we could have better handled a situation. We worry about what might happen in the future: Will we perform well in our new role as leader? Have we made the right hiring decision? Was it the right acquisition? And on and on. For the most part, the worry and fear involves events that will never happen, and we all know that reliving the past won't change any of it, so why focus on either? Most of our mind space is consumed with the past or the future, but with a trained mind you can spend more time in the present moment, which is where life is lived. Remember that the mind is a trickster and not always reliable. You can't believe every thought or every feeling you have.
We all think in mental images and in mental talk that takes the form of us carrying on conversations in our own heads. We can also hear the voices of others in our heads, as when we “play back” a conversation that happened earlier in the day. This is our thinking mind. In terms of the thinking process, sometimes there's only talk or only images; other times the thinking mind may manifest as both images and talk.
We also experience the feeling body, which refers to physical sensations in the body that are associated with emotion. These may result from a mental image or mental talk and can be pleasant or unpleasant. In some instances, feel sensations in the body may arise independently of the thinking mind, as with our primitive reaction of, say, fear of the dark or fear of thunder. These sensations can occur anywhere in the body and may be very subtle or very strong and evident. Examples of the feeling body include tightness in your stomach when you're anxious, tightness in the throat when you can't say what you wish to say, the expanded sensation in your chest when you're joyful, or the curving up of your mouth when you smile.
Together, the thinking mind and the feeling body are a powerful combination. Marketers know this and use it to great benefit; they know that they can get consumers to act in their favor if they can motivate the feeling body, which is the greatest driver of behavior. Often marketing material shows an evocative image, to try to stimulate the feeling body; this is often done by appealing to one or more of the hindrances, explained in Chapter 4. Many thoughts, especially those that are emotionally charged or have a powerful grip on us, are experienced physically in the body. If you're not aware of their connection to the body, you can easily become hijacked by your thoughts and lose touch with the present moment and, often, with what matters. This can cause you to make poor decisions and unfair or inaccurate judgments, and to experience increased stress.
Here's an example of this powerful combination of the thinking mind and feeling body. Imagine replaying to yourself an interview for a leadership role you really want. It was a positive interview. In your mind's eye is an image of the interview or the setting where it took place. You remember the words the interviewer used to tell you that he looks forward to extending an offer. Along with the mental image and the mental talk, you have a pleasant sensation in your chest or perhaps even throughout your body.
Now imagine the opposite. Your present position is being eliminated, and you have just had an interview for another position you really want. The interviewer says she is very impressed with your qualifications but that you are not the right fit. You drive home, but you don't remember any of the drive. Instead, throughout the entire drive you saw the image of the office and the interviewer. Over and over again, you hear the interviewer say that you are not the right fit. Your stomach is in knots, your hands are clammy, and you are starting to get a tension headache. Now new images arise, images of losing your current position and being unemployed, of the conversation you will have with your family—who know how much you wanted this position—how unhappy you are, and how this situation is affecting the quality of your life. You imagine never finding a suitable position you will enjoy and losing your home because you may not be able to pay the mortgage. This brings about deeper sensations in your body. Now you experience nausea, your blood pressure rises, your heart rate accelerates, and your face flushes.
This is a clear example of the thinking mind and the feeling body reinforcing one another and escalating sensations, potentially to a state of panic. This is not an unusual reaction when you are in an unhappy situation professionally or when your position is being eliminated because of the sale of a business unit, say, or a downturn in the economy. You can well imagine how health becomes compromised and judgment becomes impaired in these moments. In this last example, you went from hearing a disappointing decision to catastrophizing that you would never find another job and would lose your home. Now, I'm not minimizing the significance of such a situation; it's serious and unpleasant. But in this present moment, nothing has changed.
It's critical that you understand that the feeling body can drive behavior, and that this can seriously impair judgment. Imagine that you stay awake all night worrying, gripped by the fear of what will happen in the future. By morning you have decided to put your house up for sale before it's “too late.” You ask your broker to price the house well below market so that it can be a quick sale. This may be the right thing to do; most likely it is not—impulsive decisions often are not wise. The fear in your body is simply so great that it drives you to act impulsively.
A trained mind will generally catch itself. If, keeping with the example, you are familiar with mindfulness techniques, you might have connected to your breath, slowed things down, and created some calm. You might have taken a few minutes to relax your body, which would have been quite tense. You would also have been aware of what your thinking mind and feeling body were experiencing, and not been hijacked by it. The technique of Internal Awareness enables you to divide and conquer what's arising so that you don't become overwhelmed. Over time, you'll realize that the feeling body and the thinking mind will arise and that you can untangle them, stopping them from escalating and spiraling out of control.
In fact, in time and with practice, some of these techniques would kick in automatically. You would be able to stay focused on the task at hand or the mindfulness technique you chose to follow. You would be clear about what was arising within yourself and able to apply equanimity to what you were experiencing. You wouldn't be fighting yourself. Your mind would be calm and sharp so that sound decisions would follow, and physiologically your system wouldn't be compromised. The relaxation response (introduced in Chapter 2) would kick in.
Pain and Suffering
A key point to consider in the discussion of Internal Awareness is the distinction between pain and suffering. Pain refers to the difficulties, physical and emotional, that arise in life. Pain is inevitable. This isn't a pessimistic view; it's just the reality of life. Suffering, on the other hand, is optional. Suffering occurs when you resist and aren't equanimous with whatever is arising in your sensory experience. As mentioned in Chapter 2, equanimity refers to an attitude of not interfering with the operation of the six senses (hearing, seeing, smelling, tasting, the thinking mind, and the feeling body). When you resist, not only do you suffer but you also perpetuate the suffering. The reality is that what you resist persists. Resisting what arises internally causes concentration, clarity, and equanimity to decrease, and as they decrease, suffering increases. According to Shinzen Young, “Pain is one thing and resistance to pain is something else, and when the two come together you have an experience of suffering . . . suffering is pain multiplied by resistance.” 1
In the second scenario of our example, the pain came from the fact that you were not being extended a job offer. The suffering is the catastrophizing and worrying about the future. You were dealing with both the rejection and the extreme worry. You resisted admitting to yourself that you had not succeeded in the job competition and that you were overwhelmed by fear. You lost your focus and equanimity, and the moment lacked clarity. The more you resisted and interfered with what was arising within you, the more your suffering increased, and you were much more likely to make an impulsive decision in this state. However, if you had been trained in mindfulness, although you would still have experienced the pain of the rejection, you wouldn't have suffered. You would have allowed yourself to experience the pain fully instead of resisting it through worry or by trying to distract yourself from it with a drink or a piece of cake. By experiencing the pain fully you prevent suffering, because suffering = resistance × pain.2 When there's no resistance, there's no suffering. You can see how quickly you can become overwhelmed by any situation if you're not mindful. Over time, this kind of stress can take a serious toll on your health and judgment and, as a consequence, on personal and professional effectiveness.
Formal Technique
You can practice the technique of Internal Awareness (I also refer to it as feel, image, and talk) either sitting up in formal meditation posture, which includes maintaining the back erect, or lying down.
Feel space: To start, place awareness on the parts of your body where you know you typically experience physical sensations that are associated with emotion. (This might include your stomach, where you hold tension, or your mouth, with which you smile or laugh with joy.) Feel can be pleasant or unpleasant, such as a spontaneous smile or a nervous stomach. You may find that at times you experience these sensations throughout your body, as when you're so filled with fear or joy that you experience it from head to toe.
Image space: Now, also place awareness on the mental screen where you typically perceive images when your eyes are closed. This is usually in front of or behind your closed eyes. You might think of this as the mind's eye.
Talk space: Finally, place awareness at your ears or around your head, wherever you typically hear the sound of your own voice or mental conversation.
Notice what arises in all three of these spaces. Pay attention to one thing at a time. You may find you're primarily aware of the feeling body or of one of the two components of the thinking mind (image or talk), or you may even experience all three at the same time. The key is to give attention to only one at a time, even if they all arise at once. Do this at a leisurely pace, and find your rhythm. For example, you may notice a tight stomach; stay focused on it for a few seconds. Then notice what else has come into your awareness—perhaps an image of your cottage. Stay focused on it for a few seconds. Then see what else has come into your awareness—maybe it's even your inner voice saying, “I feel really strange doing this.”
It's entirely possible that in a given moment there is no activity in your feel, image, or talk spaces because the three spaces are at rest. At any given time any of the spaces can be active or restful. All rest occurs only if all three spaces are at rest at the same time; if they're not, draw your attention to an active space.
Practice this technique of Internal Awareness for at least 10 minutes at a time. With this technique, you pay extraordinary attention to ordinary experience. The more familiar you become with your thinking mind and feeling body, the less likely you are to be hijacked by stress or impulsiveness. The goal with this technique is not to experience total calm but to notice what is arising within you at any given moment. Just notice and don't interfere. Surrender to what arises. This is the equanimity I spoke about in Chapter 2.
Strategies for Mindfulness in Action
At first you may not think of checking in with yourself during the day, so to start, tune into the three spaces (feel, image, and talk) when you have any highly pleasant or unpleasant experiences. This will make you familiar with where you experience them in your body. If you're listening to a beautiful musical performance and enjoying it thoroughly, notice what's going on internally for you in these subjective spaces. Likewise, if you've just found out that a key player on your team has resigned, tune in to your body to see what's going on. Doing this will train you to be self-aware and prevent you from being hijacked. If you're unaware, you may sometimes carry with you throughout the day an unpleasant experience from the morning without realizing its cause; your mother might have called this “waking up on the wrong side of the bed.” Train yourself to experience things fully as they happen so that you don't carry them around all day long. When you have a complete experience and apply equanimity moment by moment, life appears bearable and manageable, even under significant stress.
There are many opportunities to use this technique throughout the day. For instance, become aware of what happens when you're having a difficult conversation or delivering bad news. Is your feel space activated? Notice this and stay with it; don't distract yourself. In a meeting, is there a conversation going on in your head while others are speaking? If there is, you'll likely have missed what was said at the meeting. Have you ever noticed how many times people ask you to repeat what you just said, respond to something you never asked about, or change lanes while driving without checking their blind spot? All are clear signs that they were caught up in an internal story and not really present. By noticing what's going on internally when you're with others or driving, you'll become aware of how often you are in the present moment versus in your head, thinking about the past or future.
Being aware of what's going on around you also helps to train you to live in the present moment. Why is this important? Quite simply, it's only in the present moment that anything happens; everything else is either history or fantasy. It's the best way to enjoy a sunset, the company of your family, a golf game, a ski run, a business success . . . you get the idea. In addition, being in the present moment allows you to make clearer decisions, have better judgment, decrease your suffering, and experience greater fulfillment in life. Living in the present moment allows you to really hear what someone says when they speak, rather than what you wish they had said or what you fear they have said. This technique is especially useful in your conversations with your board, colleagues, staff, competitors, and family. External Awareness is an objective experience. If you're participating in a meeting with someone else who's being mindful, the likelihood is that you'll both see and hear very similar things.
Have you ever noticed how difficult it is to be in the present moment? Try looking at the palm of your hand and doing nothing else. Don't think about the hand, don't judge what you're doing, just focus on your hand. How long did your focus last before you became distracted? If you're like most people, it was probably only a few seconds. Why is this so hard? It's hard because an untrained mind experiences monkey mind. A monkey mind swings from one thing to another and then back again, relentlessly. In our culture, we turned this inability to concentrate into an erroneous interpretation of something positive, and called it multitasking. Multitasking is just an excuse that legitimizes our inability to concentrate. It's so ingrained in our culture that we've parlayed it into a desirable skill, but this couldn't be more mistaken and misguided.
In Chapter 2 I mentioned two significant studies. One indicated that those who multitask the most are the least competent at it. The other indicated that the average person in a workplace is interrupted every 11 minutes and it takes this same person, on average, 25 minutes to get back to the original task. With training, your ability to function in the present moment will enable you to refocus within seconds. Think of how productive, effective, and efficient companies would be if their people all had this ability. “The human brain, with its hundred billion neurons and hundreds of trillions of synaptic connections, is a cognitive powerhouse in many ways. But a core limitation is an inability to concentrate on two things at once,” said René Marois, a neuroscientist and director of the Human Information Processing Laboratory at Vanderbilt University.3 The implications are simple and clear: even if you're doing three things at the same time, only one thing can receive your attention in any given moment. This means that if you're checking your BlackBerry and participating in a meeting, one activity is being shortchanged. If you're talking or texting on your cell phone while driving, the likelihood of an accident is greatly increased. Evidence of this is so conclusive that many major cities have banned drivers from using handheld phones while behind the wheel. A recent U.S. study published in July 2009 by the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute found that “the risk of being involved in a safety-critical event—or risk of collision—was 23.2 times greater when drivers were texting than when they were not distracted.” 4
The reality is that the more you multitask, the less you're able to concentrate. Even if you're not interrupted by others, you'll begin to interrupt yourself. You may be thinking that you're far too busy to have the luxury of working on one project at a time or doing only one thing at a time. Remember that you can work on multiple projects without a problem, but only one in any given moment. By the end of the day you may have worked on four, five, or more projects, giving each one your undivided attention when you're working on it. This makes you more effective and efficient. You'll make fewer errors and gain greater satisfaction because you'll accomplish more. When you are able to focus this way you save time because you don't do anything twice.
Formal Technique
The concept in the External Awareness technique was popularized by Eckhart Tolle in his books The Power of Now and A New Earth; it will train you to be in the present moment. As with the technique of Internal Awareness, External Awareness encompasses three distinct spaces: touch, sight, and sound.
Touch space refers to your physical body and the sensations you experience. These sensations are not associated with emotion, as was the case with feel. Instead, touch is, for example, the sensation of the contact of your feet with the floor, of your clothing on your skin, of the breeze on your face. The body exists only in the present; it has no choice. Your body right now doesn't feel like it did a year ago, 10 years ago, or even 10 minutes ago. Nor does it feel the way it will tonight or next year. On the other hand, your mind does have a choice. It can live in the past, the future, and if trained, in the present moment.
Sight space refers to what you see when your eyes are open. It too exists only in the present moment. As any artist knows, the light changes throughout the day, producing differences in luminosity, creating different quality, shadows, and so on.
Sound space refers to what you hear in the outside world. This too occurs only in the present moment. The airplane that just went by is gone, the presentation you're listening to is only in the present. What the presenter said 15 minutes ago is gone; even if you ask him to repeat the exact same thing, it'll be a new sound—the old one is gone.
Just as with Internal Awareness, it's entirely possible that in a given moment you won't be aware of one of the three spaces because it's at rest. Remember that the state of all rest is when, and only when, all three spaces are at rest; if they're not, focus your attention on an active state.
This is a wonderful technique to work with in formal practice and in daily life. As a formal practice, sit in a chair or lie on the floor in a comfortable position and place awareness on your body; this is your touch space. Now, also place awareness on something you will softly gaze at. It can be a bowl in the center of a table, a tree outside the window, or anything you choose; this is your sight space. Be sure to continue to blink normally and to look at the entire object. Don't fixate on one particular part, as this may strain your eyes. Finally, place awareness on the sounds around you in the room, outside the room, and outside the building; this is your sound space.
Notice what comes into your awareness. You may become aware of one thing at a time or many things at once. Pick one to notice at a time. As with the Internal Awareness technique, notice what you become aware of, focus on it for a few seconds, and then move on to either notice the same thing again, if it's still there, or something different if it's not. For example, you may become aware of your feet touching the floor. Notice this, stay focused on it for a few seconds, and then become aware of what you're noticing now. It may be your feet again, or this time it may be the sound of voices outside. Stay focused on the sound of the voices, not to what's being said. After focusing for a few seconds, become aware again. This time you may become aware of the tree outside the window. Pay attention to sight for a few seconds, then continue the cycle. Find a comfortable rhythm and don't strain, just focus on what arises naturally. This will increase your concentration and create calmness. At first it may feel awkward, but keep at it and it will soon be quite pleasant and relaxing. Do this for at least 10 minutes at a time, ideally every day.
Strategies for Mindfulness in Action
In daily life, you will find that focusing on the present moment brings great fulfillment. Connect to your feet as you walk and you'll find you are quickly in touch with your body. Look at the sights and you'll find that you discover things you have never seen before, even on routes you have taken for years. Listen to the birds sing or go to a concert and truly listen to the music—it will sound magical. Listen to what's being said and you will be amazed at what you pick up.
The External Awareness technique can be used to great advantage in every aspect of business. I have used it successfully for years when negotiating strategic alliances. It enables you to have a keen awareness of leverage points and to determine how to relate to the people across from you at the negotiating table. It can also be used very effectively in sports. When you play any sport, connect with your body, the sights, and the sounds. If you're a runner, become aware of how your body moves as you run, and what you hear and see. If you play golf, be aware of your body as you address the ball, then just be present and swing. This is part of a more elaborate instruction, but you get the idea.
The task is simple: when you walk, walk; when you drive, drive; when having a conversation with someone, do nothing but speak or listen; when you eat, just eat; when you watch a sunset, just watch the sunset. Be fully present with whatever you are doing.
You might be thinking, “That sounds fine, but this leaves no room for planning or dealing with the future because it's not in the present.” Of course, the answer to this is that you certainly can plan for the future in the present. All that matters is that when you're planning, that's all you're doing. Planning is conscious thinking, which is both useful and necessary.
Imagining positive things is empowering. This is one of the reasons so many people enjoy daydreaming. We get to make up the fantasy and create the ending. Some of you may be surprised that there is a mindfulness technique where we do precisely this. It's a form of structured daydreaming called Creating or Imagining Positive Outcomes.
If you play competitive sports, you may recognize this as visualizing your perfect performance. Athletes have long experienced the benefit of training the body and the mind so they both function at peak performance. Phil Jackson, the NBA coach with the greatest number of NBA Championship titles, meditates before every game. Both Christopher Higgins and Mike Komisarek, formerly of the Montreal Canadiens hockey team, and now of the Vancouver Canucks and Toronto Maple Leafs respectively, use meditation as part of their training.
My experience with coaching athletes is that mindfulness is very effective as a way of creating calm and focus at will, as well as for visualizing their best performance. This is a powerful skill that can be translated into any aspect of life, whether preparing for a golf match, running a race, or giving a presentation. This can also be a useful technique when developing a vision for your business or your life purpose.
Formal Technique
This technique involves the same spaces that were introduced above in the Internal Awareness discussion. With that technique, you work with feel, image, and talk spaces without manipulating whatever arises. Now you're going to use the same spaces but this time also create feel, image, and talk.
Start by creating an image or images on the mental screen in front of or behind your closed eyes. For example, you can visualize yourself as being calm and relaxed. Then create your own mental talk that supports the image. You might say to yourself, “I am calm,” repeating this over and over again at a leisurely pace. You may find that after a while you actually experience pleasant sensations, or pleasant feel, in the body. If that is the case, by all means encourage it to grow. Do this for at least 10 minutes a day, either while seated or lying down.
This technique generates confidence and can be very powerful in creating positive outcomes. It's also good for developing concentration.
Strategies for Mindfulness in Action
You can use this technique in daily life to help create your intentions, which can be powerful things. Always intend or visualize the positive; don't create negative self-talk. When you get up in the morning, you may wish to create an intention for the day. Think about what you would like to have happen. Before a meeting, spend a few minutes thinking about what your objectives are for the meeting.
There is a lot of truth in Napoleon Hill's words, “Whatever the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve.” The mind has a way of completing what we think about; just ask any golfers who have said to themselves, “Don't go in the water” or “Don't go in the sand.” What do you think usually happens? More often than not, the ball lands in the water or the sand. Before negotiating a deal, intend to have a positive and mutually beneficial outcome. If you're concerned about your meeting with the analysts after a particularly difficult quarter, take a few moments before the meeting to imagine being calm and equanimous as you present your company's results, regardless of whether they are above or below expectation, and then go into the meeting with these images in your mind.
Train yourself to expect the best by imagining the best. And when you catch yourself in negative self-talk, take the time to notice it and create positive self-talk in its place.
You can apply the next two techniques in particular as you carry on the activities of your day both personally and professionally. The awareness that things are constantly changing and that we often experience uncertainty or not knowing is most evident in our daily lives. The following strategies can help you mindfully deal with these realities.
Nothing stays the same—we all know that. Thoughts change, feelings change, bodies change; in fact, change occurs moment by moment. Sometimes you perform well, sometimes you fall short despite every effort. Sometimes whatever you touch turns to gold, sometimes you can do no right. You win some, you lose some. It's just a fact of life. But whether something is positive or negative, one thing is for sure—it will pass. In fact, it's passing moment by moment. Knowing this and keeping perspective can help you to get over business challenges, disappointments, and family crises. It can also help to keep expectations realistic, such as remembering that growth can't go on forever, regardless of how good your products or services are or how exceptional your human capital.
Strategies for Mindfulness in Action
When things seem like they can't get any worse, proactively speak to yourself about maintaining the perspective that all things are in a constant state of change. Similarly, when your company stock is the darling of the investment community, maintain perspective and remember that this too will change. This may seem like a philosophical view, but it's a fact. This strategy in daily life is about maintaining perspective and enabling equanimity.
You may also wish to pay attention to how much changes around you moment by moment. Notice how your thoughts (image space and talk space) change, sometimes so much so that you can barely keep up. Note how you experience different sensations in the body (in both the touch and feel spaces). Listen to how the sounds change around you—singing birds at one moment, traffic the next, construction after that. As you drive, cycle, or walk along, notice how the sights change. It all changes, nothing stays the same.
Typically, we have the illusion that things stay the same because we play them back in our subjective spaces (feel, image, talk), but the reality is that very often the herd has moved, so to speak, and we haven't even noticed because we're locked in our minds. The memories you relive in your mind are constantly activating your feel space, which creates a mental loop and keeps you from being in the present moment.
The tendency for people is to want to know, to have answers for everything. We seek closure because that makes us comfortable. This often occurs when we prematurely create a strategic alliance with a less than ideal partner, or when we pretend to know the answer because we are embarrassed to be seen to know less than a colleague or staff member. If you really think about it, you'll see how little we actually control or know for certain. The drive to know and to have answers to everything is simply the result of a desire for control and our discomfort with not knowing.
Part of mindfulness is to become comfortable with not knowing (or “don't know”)—you need to practice becoming comfortable with a mind that doesn't have all the answers. This will help you to widen the gap between stimulus and response, and you'll find that in that gap many answers will surface. To be okay with not knowing is to be comfortable in one's skin. There are many things in life that you can readily find answers for; that's what Google and Wikipedia are for. What I'm referring to is different. For example, you may be deciding whether to sell a business or merely restructure it. Sometimes the answer isn't immediately obvious, and you truly don't know what to do. In these instances it may be best to allow yourself to “not know” for a period, rather than forcing a decision because you can't bear not coming to a conclusion.
Strategies for Mindfulness in Action
How many times in your day do you not know the answer to something, and how does your mind react? Does it become desperate and try to grasp at some premature solution or response? This could occur anytime—when you're having conversations, in meetings, or deciding what projects to approve. For a day or two, just notice when this happens and do nothing about it. Simply observe yourself. Then, after a few days, when you have gotten into a rhythm of recognizing this in yourself, resist the temptation to find an immediate answer or premature closure. In the moment, try to not resist the not knowing; be equanimous with it and accept this confused state. Simply say to yourself, “Don't know,” and be all right with it. Soon you'll notice that by allowing that gap to exist and to widen, answers are likely to arise more readily and your judgment will be more likely to improve.
The techniques I describe in this chapter are intended to form part of a regular, and preferably daily, practice and routine. Just 10 minutes per day has the potential to transform your life and make you a healthier, happier, and more effective person and leader. Feel free to take advantage of the audio recordings of guided meditations available at www.argonautaconsulting.com to guide you as you begin your meditation practice. I also encourage you to use the strategies for mindfulness in action so that you can experience even greater benefits. By doing both of these, you will experience greater mindfulness throughout the day in all aspects of your life. In time, you'll experience better control of your mind, so that your mind serves you and you gain more control of your life. This will enable you to maintain healthy and fulfilling relationships, personally and professionally, enabling you to be a mindful leader.