18 years after my graduation, I just (March 2020) returned to Harvard Business School to teach a mindfulness workshop. The night before, I had a deeply emotional experience.
HBS is on the opposite side of the Charles River from the Harvard campus. That evening, I walked across the bridge to the Harvard side, sat on a bench and looked at the HBS campus where I spent two years.
I experienced a deep sense of gratitude to be back. It is such a special place. When I was there, I don't think I had the time to reflect and appreciate that. 18 years later, I was struck by such clarity that it actually brought me to tears.
Why does it often take us so long to see what is right in front of us?
Recovery
Elite athletes work harder than anyone, and to make this possible they focus a great deal of thought and effort on: recovery.
They plan rest periods between intense sessions. They eat and sleep in specific patterns, to speed their recovery and thus make possible even higher performance levels. It’s pretty near impossible today to compete at elite levels and ignore recovery.
And yet, business professionals and their employers barely think about recovery. This is especially true at the top firms, where long hours and intense effort are little more than table stakes.
How can this be? How is it possible that humans only need recovery time in athletic endeavors?
The truth, of course, is that the only way to maintain the highest levels of human performance is to follow a regimen that includes recovery time. By failing to recognize this fact, many in business accept pretty good performance and label it as something better than it is. This is a disservice to all: clients, colleagues, the employer and each individual.
It’s time to recognize that top performance is the result of both effort AND recovery time, not just effort.
The Idea Mix
Loved being back with Ana Kertesz and Samhita Jayanti in March 2019 on their The IdeaMix Life Hustle podcast which features essential ideas, stories and resources for people interested in entrepreneurship.
We talked about why tech-enabled disruption and macro-economic uncertainty is driving companies to increasingly invest in wellbeing and mindfulness skills and why each of us should craft our own Wellbeing Canvas to better align our work and life.
Take a listen to my episode and let me know what you think!
Available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Play and on The IdeaMix website https://lnkd.in/gAShtY2
Transformation
What’s the human cost of 12-18 month enterprise transformation projects? These are uniquely grueling assignments that bring together professionals with a diverse range of backgrounds and skills.
They are on a roller coaster ride that will require resiliency from both the team as well as the individual.
Change happens when individuals change. Large-scale change happens as the relationships between individuals change. If you skip the relationship part, you make it much harder to effect change.
The relationship shifts must start WITHIN the team that is driving the transformation efforts.
Some of the questions new transformation teams should tackle in their formation stages include:
—How am I personally being asked to change and grow?
—What are the most substantive things my colleagues should know about me? How can others support me?
—How can I best understand and empathize with people who are different from me? How can I support them?
—How does our team seek to interact with each other? What does it mean to be “us”?
—What practices support living our team values when the going gets tough?
When you start with the relationship aspects of a new team, you increase the odds of that team succeeding.
Tunnel Vision
Although many pursue success in this manner, tunnel vision is seldom the path to high performance.
On my recent trip to Mumbai, I read an interview with Sjoerd Marijne, the chief coach of the Indian women's hockey team. (In India, this sport is a huge deal.)
He said, “I've emphasized the need (for players) to have interests beyond hockey, especially since we work with a tunnel vision where our focus is always on hockey. I've tried to bring them out of their comfort zone and make them realize that in that zone they cannot grow as players or individuals.”
Yes, pour your heart and soul into work. Yes, set big goals and use tenacity to reach them. But the sheer importance of your primary focus can make it nearly impossible for you to engage in the sort of play and experimentation and risk-taking required for personal growth.
In other words, only by stepping away from work can you have the freedom and opportunity to learn new skills and blossom as a human being.
High quality feedback
More often than not, when I’m with my dad at a hotel or restaurant, he asks to speak with the manager or chef. Then, he explains what he didn’t like and suggests how they might do better.
Some might think, “Why is he always complaining?”
He’s not.
Dad feels that most people lack high quality feedback, and so he sets out to offer it. His communications are generally positive and proactive, and 90% of the people he summon seem to sense that his intention is to be constructive, rather than critical.
This led me to a simple theory: it’s what’s in your heart that matters.
Minus his genuine desire to be helpful, my dad might come across as simply a disgruntled customer. But somehow almost everyone seems to understand that he is much more than that. For example, when we have dined several nights in a row at the same hotel restaurant, the chef will often come out on subsequent nights and solicit my dad’s opinion.
Manage your intentions with care, and you can deliver even frank feedback in an uplifting and empowering manner.
Silent Meditation Retreats
Can you imagine what it would be like to be silent for ten days, spending 12 hours each day not even moving?
I do this once a year.
My experience is that for the initial days, your mind and body resists this shift from the “real” world. Your mind wanders. You have countless reactions: I’m hungry, bored, stiff, sore, lonely, frustrated…
But then it flips.
You enter a flow state. You LOVE being quiet and still. You experience bliss and want to remain longer in this silent retreat.
What was once hard becomes easy, pleasurable and desirable.
I’ve just described one of the “support structures” I need in order to lead mindfulness workshops that help teams increase their resilience. Without regularly taking myself out of everyday life, thoughts and actions… I would not be able to be as effective a mindfulness guide. My knowledge and experiences would be superficial at best.
What support structures do you need to reach your goals? What do you need to keep your mind, body and heart in ideal shape to accomplish what you most want to accomplish?
Deep Introvert
I’m a deep introvert, and there have been times in my consulting career where I left a meeting concerned that I had not managed to speak up enough. But when I was at Harvard Business School—where 50% of your grade depends on class participation—introversion wasn’t a problem for me.
What can we learn from this, especially about creating high-performing teams on which everyone participates on roughly an equal basis?
HBS works on the case method. All students come into class knowing they may be called on to answer the professor’s “cold call” question. All know they are obligated to participate, whether that means taking the initiative to speak up or responding intelligently when called upon.
The HBS method gets most people to participate on a roughly equal basis. Professionals who lead teams or meetings in a business setting don’t do as well. The quiet voices are often quiet. The loud voices are seldom quiet.
On highly effective teams, everyone participates equally. As a leader, you might consider stealing a page from the HBS playbook: set the expectation that everyone comes prepared to speak and participate. To reinforce this message, tie compensation to participation. If that’s the way the culture works—and the leader operates this way—even an introvert like me will opt in.
Intention
Thought for the day: before mindfulness, meditation or even heightened awareness there is… intention. All of these only follow the intention to engage in such a state.
Intention comes first.
Effective Leaders
I’ve noticed six qualities that the most effective leaders are using in recent days, and thought it might be helpful to very quickly share them with you.
First, be genuinely empathetic. Acknowledge the struggles people are going through.
Second, use actual facts and state where they came from.
Third, be transparent. If you don't know how bad this is going to be, say so.
Fourth, make it personal. How are you being affected? Help people relate to you, and vice versa.
Fifth, acknowledge the tremendous changes happening around us. If you think there will be a new normal, tell people.
Above all else, be clear. Bring it all together so that people understand and can repeat accurately what you said.
Learning Mindset
I recently (November 2019) did a Spartan obstacle course race for the first time, after constructing and following a three-month training plan. Over that period, I replaced my Can I Do This? mindset with a What Can I Learn? mindset.
Can I Do This? sets you up for failure; it’s like training with a sword hanging over your head.
What Can I Learn? frees you up for growth and advancement. In my case, it got me thinking, “No matter what happens, I will create a baseline from which I can grow in the future.”
One thing I learned is that your mind plays tricks on you. For example, I learned that my preconceptions could be pretty off target. Others told me to watch out for the seven-foot inverted wall, but I ended up clearing it in one swing. That was a lot of stress for nothing.
I was very pleased with my performance… until the last three obstacles. By that time, I was pretty spent, and missed my first attempt on each of them.
Afterwards, I was eager to continue my learning and wanted to sign up for another Spartan event three weeks from now.
My wife convinced me it might be a better idea to train some more, before diving into another learning experience. Smart tip.
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
Achievement Triangle
“Most athletes are ready to make an effort in a race. Few are ready to carry their efforts through months or years of training and racing.”
So says coach Joe Vigil, who has been inducted into 11 Halls of Fame after coaching incredibly successful track and field athletes.
Most people want to be comfortable. They want success, but not necessarily the sacrifice that creates it. This, more than anything else, is what limits our success. Not talent or desire, but our unwillingness to step out of our comfort zone.
This includes me. I have been deep inside my comfort zone for too long.
This doesn’t necessarily mean you have to run a marathon once a week. It might be as simple as putting yourself out there in a much bolder way.
In 2020, watch for me to do just that.
Image credit: Coach Joe Vigil
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.
Eight thoughts about breathing
Eight thoughts about breathing that are helping me fully appreciate how miraculous it is in these uncertain times:
1. Breathing is universal. Everyone does it.
2. Breathing is cyclical. There is an inhale and an exhale, which creates natural rhythm and balance.
3. Breathing can either be autonomous or intentional.
4. Your breath connects you with the outside world. You take the air from the outside, but then bring it inside, recycle it, and give it back.
5. Your breathing is deeply connected to your thoughts and feelings. If your thoughts are agitated, your breathing is agitated. The same is true for your feelings.
6. By paying attention to your breathing, you can influence your thoughts and feelings in a positive manner.
7. It’s free. You can improve your health and sense of welfare without spending any money.
8. It’s always available 24/7.
Three Mindful Months
I developed a new program intended to help companies and their employees adapt to our unprecedented circumstances. It's called Three Mindful Months, and it is designed as a live virtual mindfulness program for leading organizations. The idea is to bring everyone together for a series of sessions I lead to foster well-being and a sense of calm.
Staying healthy does not just mean avoiding the virus; it also means preserving our mental health, and mindfulness is a proven tool for doing this. Please take a look, and share with others who might benefit.
Anchor Habits
I love cheese and chocolate and could easily overdo it, but the way I try to keep it under control is by establishing certain anchor habits, one of which is to primarily eat a healthy, plant-based diet.
You can do the same by establishing your own anchor habits in these five critical areas: how you recharge, move, eat, think and feel.
The image shows my habits, but you should pick those that work best for you. For example, I need eight hours of sleep a night to feel my best; you might be fine with seven.
The more chaos and pressure you feel, the greater the benefit of sticking with your anchor habits.
This is where you recharge
We all need an effective strategy for recharging our physical, mental and emotional energy. Such reinvigoration occurs in a very specific place that’s neither positive or negative, and isn’t rooted in the past or present. You get there by letting go, by shifting into neutral and by simply being present.
Give it a try.