Essential Life Skill: Meditation

I realized this morning just how important meditation has been in my life.  This post is written with a specific leadership mindset; however, I have found that my ability to meditate has impacted me on a much larger scale than my leadership studies: it has shown me how to retrain my thinking so that I may also meet some personal goals, too.

My initial goal in working on my meditation practice [emphasis added – you’ll see why] was for one simple reason: focus and stress management.  Now, I realize that focus and stress management are two reasons.  Yet when attempting to separate them, I failed miserably because both were so overlapped in my psyche that, when I attempted to separate both concepts into actionable items, I failed at both.  Meditation helped me to see the correlation and overlap, and allowed me to better address both.  For example, when I worked to resolve my lack of focus, I created a whole lot of stressor feelings in what I was unable to do.  When I tried to manage my stress, I lacked the focus to pay attention and create the conditions to support myself and my efforts.  The realization came to me after another day of feeling like I had no control over…well…anything.

Does this sound like you?  Each day, I woke with the best of intentions.  My to-do lists were set (focus) and my reading was available (stress management).  Then, when my day spiraled away from me, I had no alternatives built in and was quickly defeated and returned to my old habits.  The more to do lists I made, the more I did that I could not check off so my list just grew.  This created stress so that my reading was not an escape but another reason to beat myself up.  When one has such negative self-talk so ingrained, we don’t really need another failure as a reminder of how little we are…or how little we think we are.  Many times, I just gave up and gave in, adopted a perpetual feeling of not being “enough” so that, by the time I laid my head on my pillow at night, I was tired, aggravated and, well, feeling pretty bad about myself.  This created a perpetual feeling that required I worked longer and harder than everyone else, or feeling more productive.

This feeling of unproductivity is important because it is an “emotion” and not really factual.  The emotion created other feelings which included worthlessness, anger, self-hatred, and created behavior trajectories into a whole new realm of psychological distresses.  A spiral of sorts, all silently gathering for the ultimate attack on my self-esteem.  My feeling of the lack of productivity  (which may have been justified or not) devolved into an entire lifetime of negative self-talk and lack of self-compassion.  And, if this is your ‘go to’ coping mechanism, other perceived failures may be addressed in a like manner.  Each situation is seen as a failure and builds layers until a person is left with a totally unrealistic viewpoint of themselves which appears to be supported by facts that, clearly, aren’t facts at all; these are beliefs that I’ve long held so that they feel like facts but are just more garbage talk.  These “facts” became legitimate to me because they initiated a coping pattern; my negative self-talk took over so that – front and center – the lens of my perspective was shaped by this incorrect thinking.  It colored my perspective of myself, my life, and my place in the world.  The lifelong habit of berating myself added to the negative dialogue “loop” of my coping mechanism and continued the fallacy that I was broken.  I began to run a decades long treadmill of mistaken beliefs.

Meditation allowed me to see the distinction between reality and what I told myself.  By examining (not controlling) my thoughts in a quiet setting, I was able to tumble around in my mind my thinking and be able to separate the voice from facts.  In other words, I was able to listen to my negative self-talk and separate from it.  But, it took not just self-awareness and compassion which come with a meditation practice but my willingness to be vulnerable with myself and stop the self-berating loop.  I found much of the self-awareness I lacked through my experience with social media.  (Another post topic.)  As a student of leadership, too, I recognized the power of my own sense of self in the critical decision-making of leadership,  and began to meditate to better manage my emotions and self-awareness – knowing my “hot” buttons.

In an article for Forbes.com, business strategist and executive coach Christine Comaford wrote about a study  that was conducted which “…determined that meditation literally rebuilds the brain’s grey matter. The study only lasted eight weeks and in that time they found benefit equal to prescription drugs—and without the side effects.”  Comaford also wrote that one of the biggest causes of stress is the repetition of thought or “ruminating” in old thought patterns or behaviors.  Comaford adds that “…the brain sets off down an old thinking pattern and stays there.”  A meditation practice enhances “mindfulness” which allows us to view or situation from a more objective place as we have the ability to separate ourselves from the old patterns and focus on a new situation.  Comaford added that she believes that we all have “…repetitive thoughts because most of us haven’t trained our minds to be still. Your mind and thoughts can be directed—and you’ll see results fairly quickly. And best yet, in stillness you will find all of the answers you seek…Mindfulness meditation re-grooves the brain and builds a new neurological network. Do it enough and, like the studies show, you can train your brain like a muscle to stay calm and present in the face of adversity or good old daily stresses of life.”  Comaford adds that this is why the idea of meditation is referred to as a practice.  “You’re teaching your brain to interrupt repetitive patterns, calm and center itself…It takes practice to get to automation, but it’s worth it.”

And, I cannot state this any plainer: if you want to be a good leader, meditate.