Achieve success through meditation
If you own or run a business, you know how stressful it can be. Between managing your day-to-day obligations and bearing ultimate responsibility for the success of your enterprise, the associated stresses can become overwhelming. So much depends on you: at work you need to see to your product, process, clients and employees; at home you may have family, friends or other situations that demand your time. You likely wear whatever hat you need to at any given time of day.
This constant pull in different directions can drain you, ultimately impacting your health, quality of life and general feelings of well-being. When you’re fulfilling so many commitments, it’s easy to start letting tasks slip to the side. As your efforts wane, so will your results. When this happens, self-doubt begins to surface. You might start wondering: Will I ever accomplish my business goals? Will running my business ever get any easier? Am I even cut out to own a business?
You don’t need to berate yourself or give up. Instead, learn to master your stress and take control of your emotions – especially the ones that threaten to overpower you with negativity.
Tony refers to mastering your mind and emotions as developing your peak state. One way to accomplish this is through a meditation for success. Meditation is an ancient mind-body practice that can help you develop clarity and calm independent of your circumstances. These factors are important in all elements of your life, but they particularly impact you as a business owner or employee as you face the challenges and surprises of the workplace. By learning the basics of meditation, you can prime yourself for success, overcome your anxiety and get the business results you want.
Meditation for business success: Does it work?
The theory and practice of meditation entails mental, emotional, spiritual and physical elements, with meditation working to bring those elements into harmony. But what does meditation for job success look like? Let’s study meditation and how it affects your mind and body.
The science of meditation
Meditation and mindfulness have been shown to ameliorate depression, high blood pressure, pain and anxiety, just to name a few. The science behind meditation points to the fact that meditation and mindfulness practices impact the hippocampus, prefrontal cortex and amygdala, which are the parts of the brain that control our memory, ability to learn new things, decision-making and fear response. In other words, you’re likely using these parts of the brain quite frequently as you complete tasks, plan ahead and confront issues with your job or company.
As we build the practice of meditation into our lives, those parts of the brain become more effective. They enhance our willingness to take risks and ease our reactions to potential stressors, both of which are desirable traits in a business owner. In fact, business owners and/or investors of highly prosperous companies, including Bridgewater Associates, Salesforce.com and Union Square Ventures, reportedly use (and love) meditation for business success.
Discovering your internal wisdom through meditation
Byron Katie describes meditation as a method of inquiry to meet your internal wisdom. This description captures the spiritual component of meditation: Each of us has an inner core complete with all the understanding and self-compassion we need to stay peaceful and focused. Instead of being tossed about by our stress, meditation helps us learn how to simply observe our stressful thoughts. By detaching ourselves from these thoughts and making ourselves into observers, we can watch them float by like a piece of driftwood floating along a river. You see it and know it’s there, but it has no real effect on you.
This type of detachment allows us to acknowledge our thoughts and feelings without being controlled by them. Once those thoughts can no longer influence the way we think, we develop a deeper understanding of and love for ourselves, which we carry over into our self-care practices, personal relationships and business relationships.
How to practice meditation for job success
The first step in learning to meditate is priming, which helps you achieve optimal productivity by focusing your mind and body through mental and physical exercise. Priming aligns with meditation practices because, like meditation, priming hinges on focusing your mind on the present and visualizing the outcome you want, whether it is healing, professional growth, professional success or another goal. As you practice priming, you’ll become skillful at developing your optimal state.
The science of priming underscores a central tenet of Tony Robbins’ philosophy, which is that our moods and experiences “prime” or influence our reactions. If you’re constantly feeling angry or upset, you’re already primed to react with negativity when something happens to you. However, when we frame our experiences in a good light and choose to cultivate positivity, we begin to master our emotions. This primes us for focus and productivity throughout the day, which changes the way we look at everything we experience.
The concept and practice of priming is so effective that Tony Robbins has created an 8-step priming exercise to help jump-start your day. In just 10 minutes, you’ll learn to sit quietly, meditate on your breathing and cultivate a sense of focus and celebration.
How to make time for meditation
Once you incorporate meditation into your life, you’ll wonder how you ever left it out of your routine. But getting a new habit underway can take practice, and meditation for business professionals can be challenging to accomplish when you’re dashing from one task to the next. Try some of these tips to make time for this important part of your day:
Wake up earlier
Set an alarm for 15 minutes before your usual wake-up time and create a morning ritual around that quiet space to prime yourself for the day ahead.
Devote a break at work or a portion of your lunch to meditation
You’ll still gain the benefits of the practice, and you may find it energizes you throughout the rest of your afternoon.
Take small breaks here and there
If you can only devote five minutes at a time to meditation, that’s still five minutes you weren’t benefiting from previously.
Meditation and redefining happiness
What is happiness? Is it a feeling that results from our lives going as we want them to go, getting everything we want and need without facing any challenges?
If that is what constitutes happiness, then most of the people in the world are probably not very happy!
Facing adversity is an everyday task for everyone on the planet. By redefining happiness as that sense of freedom and inner peace that comes from detaching from external circumstances and attaching to our inner life, we gain more control over what we feel and how we react. By practicing mindfulness and meditation, we learn to overcome barriers to happiness by cultivating our inner lives. We become more able to handle discomfort, which is a key component of being a successful business owner.
Check out Tony Robbins’ podcast with Sage and Michael Singer, author of New York Times bestseller The Untethered Soul, to learn more about the role of mindfulness in breaking unhelpful patterns to find lasting happiness in life and work.
Ready for your business to reach new heights?
Discover how you can use the power of meditation to enrich your business’s success with Tony Robbins’s Priming method.