Daily Moments

Meeting your spouse for the first time. 9/11. The day you got into college. We tend to focus attention on the so-called defining moments of our lives… but I’d like to suggest that the daily moments are far more pivotal.

When someone passes you the milk container at Starbucks, just to be kind…

When you smile at a stranger and s/he smiles back….

When you exercise, for the sheer joy and satisfaction of moving your body…

When you express gratitude because you feel grateful… 

When you work hard because you enjoy working hard…

When you embrace your emotions…

These are all daily moments that define who and what you are. They aren’t something that happens to you. They are the essence of “you.”

Mindfulness in Asset Management

I am often asked, if mindfulness workshops can help professionals in high-performance, high-stress workplaces like asset management, private equity and investment banking.

In response, I always share the stories of two industry leaders…

Ray Dalio of Bridgewater in his book Principles says…

“I practice meditation and believe that it has enhanced my open-mindedness, higher-level perspective, equanimity and creativity. It helps slow things down so that I can act calmly even in the face of chaos, just like a ninja in a street fight.”

Stephen Schwarzman of Blackstone in his book What It Takes says…

“When I started in finance, I was ill prepared for the stress of the work. I observed that when I was the one making the decisions and the voices rose and tempers flared, my heart would beat faster and my breathing would become more shallow. I became less effective, less in control of my own cognitive responses.

The fix, I found, was to focus on my breathing, slow it down and relax my shoulders, until my breaths were long and deep. The effect was astonishing. My thoughts became clearer. I became more objective and rational about the situation at hand, about what I needed to win.”

So there it is, in their own words.

Mindfulness can help you get into and stay in your high-performance zone by shifting you from “distracted to focused" and from "overwhelmed to equanimous”.

How mindfulness empowers leaders

Can a mindfulness program strengthen leaders—and leadership skills—across an organization?

Absolutely. That’s exactly what my mindfulness workshops accomplish.

To understand this connection, start at the base of this framework and work upwards.

—Mindfulness leads to greater self-awareness
—Self-awareness increases your ability to self-manage your actions and reactions
—Self-management helps you get in better touch with your motivations and purpose
—Deeper understanding of your own motivations makes you better able to grasp and respect the motivations of others, which leads to empathy
—Empathy helps you relate to others, making it more likely they can also relate to you
—Leadership is all about influencing others, and the only way to do this is to relate to others and have them relate to you

To put this another way, when a leader lacks some or all of the lower levels in this framework, it is far less likely that person will be an effective leader.

Viewed from this perspective, it is hard to imagine how any organization would fail to support an ongoing mindfulness program.

I’d value hearing your thoughts on this framework…

P.S. The arrows go down as well as up because you are never “done” with this process, and success is never a straight line.

Self-awareness

There’s a lot of talk these days about self-awareness, but most of it falls short of what’s really necessary to make a significant difference in your life. To do that, you need very high resolution self-awareness, which is hard to maintain when your attention is distracted or externally focused.

To move in this direction, try this 10 x 10 exercise. For ten days in a row, write in a journal for ten minutes each day. Focus on your core values. Instead of simply writing general thoughts, do this:

1. Ask yourself what thoughts come into your mind when you talk about a particular value? How have you expressed your values in life, or failed to do so?

2. Describe the way your body feels when you talk or think about that value. Do you feel more or less energy? Are you excited or nervous?

3. Review your writing for insights, and in doing so, each day you will dig a little deeper.

You don’t have to write about one value and then move on. It’s okay to focus on one value for several days in a row, being sure to stop and literally examine how you feel as well as what you think.

Developing the skill of paying attention to your thoughts and to your feelings will allow you to form a high resolution level of self-awareness.

How to be mindful without being alone

One of the key resistance points to mindfulness and meditation, especially meditation, is this sense that you are not doing anything and you should be doing something.

Many people struggle with the idea of sitting in a chair, alone, and doing nothing. It can feel like they are withdrawing from the world, in a bad way.

But to achieve stillness, you do not need to withdraw from the world. You simply need to be able to let go of distractions and be fully present.

To me, this image represents what it’s like to be “in the zone,” totally immersed in a single activity and have the rest of the world appear to recede.

Think about running at the water’s edge down a beautiful but utterly deserted beach. The light and temperature is just perfect. Your body is loose, limber and athletic. You feel as though you could run forever. Nothing else matters, and nothing intrudes on this moment. Your mind is quiet and calm.

This is the intersection of stillness and being fully alive. You did not withdraw from the world; you simply are giving all your energy and focus to a single activity.

When you are 100% involved in whatever you're doing it, it almost feels like time slows. Even difficult activities feel easy.

When you look at Olympic athletes before a competition, they often seem utterly immersed. They are visualizing what they want to do and how they are going to do it. They are literally running a race in their head, before the actual race… and they are doing it in front of thousands of spectators. To accomplish this, they must let go of everything except for… the race.

To translate these observations into your own life, you don’t have to lock yourself inside a room for an hour. You could just enjoy a few moments of stillness before a meeting or before you pick up the phone to call a client.

By being calm and focused, you will be able to harness more of your talents and to be better able to serve other people that you subsequently encounter.

To cite a personal example, on those days when I teach a workshop, I am most grounded, centered and fully connected with myself. I am 100% focused on what is happening in our room. Nothing else matters.

People think of stillness and aliveness as opposites, but the best moments in life occur when you bring them together. That is where the magic happens.

When you commit to one thing, it frees you up from worrying about everything else. You leave behind the hundreds of choices we must normally make each day. For whatever period of time you devote to one thing, you are both still and fully alive.

The distracted state into which many of us often slip is not the same as being fully alive… not even close. Instead, it is one in which one obligation competes with another and another and another. It is a superficial and generally unsatisfying way to exist.

Stillness gives you space to fully experience yourself and a single moment or activity. It gives you access to a higher level of awareness, and that often unlocks a higher level of human performance. With commitment comes the ability to devote every fiber of your being towards one activity. That is what opens the door to peak performance and the flow state.

Gautam Deviah leads mindfulness workshops for high-performance organizations and teams

Experiencing Mindfulness

Leading mindfulness workshops within a corporate setting is quite different from most other business training programs.

Mindfulness—and its benefits—is not something you think about or analyze. You must experience it. The proof, so to speak, is in your personal experience.

People sometimes come to me and talk about research, or that they’ve read books on this subject. That’s all well and good, but it’s not enough. You have to be aware as you experience what compassion or empathy feel like “in the moment”. What does it feel like when you're emotionally triggered or challenged?

To take this one step further, having such experiences requires you to maintain a mindfulness practice. You have to work at it on a consistent basis. I can’t just tell you to be more mindful and (poof!) it happens.

It’s ironic that sometimes business leaders are resistant to mindfulness programs because they don’t see the point in “stepping away” from work. In reality, the opposite is true. Making a commitment to mindfulness equals a willingness to do the hard work to cultivate greater awareness.

Name It to Tame It

When negative emotions such as fear or anxiety or despair arise in uncertain times, an excellent strategy to keep them in check is Name It to Tame It, a technique introduced by Dr. Dan Siegel.

Simply by naming what emotions are coming up, you create a bit of space between you and that emotion.

So, rather than feeling that “I am frustrated,” shift your perspective to “I'm experiencing frustration.”

Simply doing this starts to calm you down. When you calm down your amygdala—that part of your brain involved in the “fight-flight-freeze” mode— it gives you space to come up with a more thoughtful and appropriate response than simply being swept up in frustration or whatever else you are experiencing.

Dr. Siegel explains that you are using storytelling to appeal to the left brain’s affinity for words and reasoning. This calms emotional storms and bodily tension originating in the right-brain.

Name the emotion to tame the emotion.