Taming the Elephant: Mindfulness Strategies for Seasoned Leaders
Meditation and mindfulness are the darlings of optimal performance, non-negotiables to add to your daily schedule if you aim to tease the most from your mind. It’s not as hard as it sounds, and the rewards are exponential.
Meditation traditions describe meditation as taming the wild elephant of your mind. They refer to the inner chatter as the monkey mind. I bet we can all identify with this Buddhist description, “Just as a monkey swinging through the trees grabs one branch and lets it go only to seize another, so too, that which is called thought, mind or consciousness arises and disappears continually both day and night.”
That’s what the mind does.
Whether you read Game Changers: What Leaders, Innovators, and Mavericks Do to Win at Life by Dave Asprey, or Tools of Titans by Tim Ferris, you’ll find out that a common practice of the world’s top performers is that they meditate—at least 80% of them have a mindfulness practice.
In its simplest terms, this practice consists of observing the mind, the monkey. And from observation, taming the elephant arises.
Why Bother Meditate?
Fifteen minutes of meditation will reduce cortisol levels (that’s the stress hormone) by 19%.
Furthermore, through meditation, one becomes aware of automatic thoughts and behaviors and learns all kinds of things about that inner voice—such as when it is right and when it is steering you wrong. Meditation also cultivates control over reactions, by creating just that tiny fraction of awareness before you actually respond—the space to introduce choice. It actually rewires your brain to make you happier, calmer, and more focused.
Ordinary, non-meditating brains get stuck in the “me center,” particularly the part of the noggin that takes things personally. Meditators manage to loosen the hold “me” has. It becomes easier to ignore sensations, say of anxiety. New connections form that help to respond rationally. And sitting in meditation activates empathy centers: we understand other people better.
The list of meditation benefits goes on: better sleep by directly increasing melatonin, lower blood pressure, less pain, better immunity, more creativity, better memory recall, more gray matter overall—meditation actually grows your hippocampus and your prefrontal cortex and plumps up the connection between the two hemispheres in the corpus callous.
For skeptics, all I can say is try it. Do it regularly for a month. See if there is any difference.
How to Meditate
It doesn’t matter what kind of meditation you do, just do it. Everyday. Start with 5 minutes. Work your way up to 20 or more. Tailor it to you: guided or unguided, with or without music, sitting or walking. Five minutes here, five minutes there, or all together all at once. Changes begin with 10 minutes a day.
There is apparently a Zen saying that says if you don’t have ten minutes in your day to meditate, then that’s when you need to meditate for an hour.
The Key to Meditation
Meditation is not about calming the mind. It’s about observing. Sitting back and watching the monkey swing from branch to branch. Every time you realize your mind has wandered, come back to center. That’s all. It can help to focus on your breath. When you realize the chimp has taken off again—and it will—come back to observe your breath.
Tips That Make Meditation Easier
Find an app. There are tons of them, free and paying.
Start by releasing tension. Relax the soles of your feet and the palm of your hands. Let go of all tensions in your face, around your eyes, your ears. Let your tongue and pelvic floor settle.
If your monkey is particularly wild, exhale for longer than you inhale, which will help you calm down by activating the parasympathetic nervous system.
If you keep dozing off, inhale for longer than you exhale. It will wake you up.
Remember that it is continuous intention that counts, not perfection.
The endorphin rush of physical exercise quiets the monkey, so try meditating after a run.
Too much caffeine or other stimulants, and too much sugar or alcohol will throw your meditation off.
For some reason, garlic makes it hard to meditate. Eat your aioli afterward.
A Shortcut
Binaural beats can help change the frequency of your brainwaves to produce specific states, including to help induce a meditative state. This is when you play two separate frequencies in each ear and your brain compensates for this difference creating a third tone. You can use this for focus and relaxation too. See brainfm.com, for example. Or Holosync.
Hack: A 70-second Anytime Meditation
Here is a quick meditation sequence to repeat as often as you can/want during the day—particularly as a break when respecting the 50 to 90-minute productivity cycles.
Yawn. It slows down excess activity throughout the brain that causes neurological stress.
Do some super-slow stretching movements, particularly of the neck, shoulders, arms and torso. This sends out a general relaxation signal to bring you into the present moment.
Gently, slowly stroke your forearms and hands. This will decrease negative emotions and stimulate confidence centers in your brain.
Look into the distance, or close your eyes, and focus on your breath coming in and out for 60 seconds.
Go back to your day.
Alternate version: you can repeat a word such as “release” over and over again during the meditation. Or use a phrase such as, “I breath in (something positive), I breathe out (something else positive, or something negative).