Chapter 1
What Is Mindfulness and Why Should I Care?
Begin doing what you want to do now. We are not living in eternity. We have only this moment, sparkling like a star in our hand—and melting like a snowflake.
—Francis Bacon Sr.
The answer to this chapter's question changed my life, my approach as a leader, and the direction of my career. May it do the same for you.
This is why I care.
I grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the youngest of six kids, and a twin. Our father was an unemployable alcoholic. Our mother has a form of muscular dystrophy and a walking disability. An older sister married a construction worker come drug dealer. Three generations lived under the roof of my grandfather's home. Early on, we had alcohol, drugs, and occasional violence in the home. I learned to be a fighter. I was the first person in my family to go to college. I started my career at Price Waterhouse (now PricewaterhouseCoopers). I thrived on their up‐or‐out culture; survival of the fittest. When it came to fight or flight, I always chose fight. That mentality helped me to achieve more in my career than I ever thought possible. Being a fighter served me well. Until it didn't.
When I was 32, I herniated the L5‐S1 disk in my lower back while playing basketball. At 35, I herniated both the L4‐L5 and the L5‐S1 discs again. Not by playing sports, but by—wait for it—picking up luggage. By the time I turned 40, I'd been suffering from eight years of chronic back pain. I was stressed out, traveling constantly (50 countries, yippee!) and routinely worked 12‐hour days and weekends as a badge of honor. And my health and mental wellbeing was slipping fast. Sound familiar?
Following my second back injury, I was using a cane, limping into my well‐appointed office at Ogilvy & Mather and closing my office door several times a day so that I could lie on the floor, sometimes crying through the pain. Over time, chronic back pain lead to insomnia. Insomnia lead to asthma. Constant pain, failing health, and family challenges lead to anger, fear and a bad attitude. At 37, I lost my sister Mary, a long‐time drug user, to a heart attack. At 38, my twin sister, Julie, committed suicide. She had been a long‐time addict. I had another kind of addiction but I didn't know it at the time. At 40, I was the global COO within a division of Interpublic, a $7.6 billion public company in advertising and personally responsible for managing over $500 million in annual revenue. My declining health and wellbeing were not a good recipe for success. The worse I felt, the harder I worked. I wasn't in survivor superdrive mode. But being a workaholic is how I'd handled setbacks in my life. I was frustrated, angry, competitive, and hurting. I wasn't mean or taking it out on others, but I was certainly commanding, impatient, and not much fun to be around.
None of my training had equipped me to think about my own emotional and mental wellbeing, let alone that of our 50,000 employees around the world.
I was making over $650,000 a year. In my mind, the promotions, bonuses, and stock rewards confirmed that I was great at what I did. But I knew I couldn't continue. So did my amazing wife, Sarah. After our first son was born, instead of being elated, I was a stressed‐out, deeply unhappy workaholic, who was in constant pain and missing out on my life. I had hit a wall.
It impacted my performance to the point at which I was basically being paid to fly around the world to stress people out. Try putting that on a business card.
Skip the Hippy Dippy. At the time, Dr. Alex Eingorn, a chiropractor in New York City, recommended that I try meditation to help manage the pain. As a Type A personality, this just made me angry. The idea of mindfulness or especially “meditation” conjured up the worst woo‐woo images in my mind. It took me many years to escape Catholic guilt. I wasn't looking to replace that with what I mistakenly thought were healing stones or a membership card to the local neighborhood Buddhist society. Other doctors were recommending spinal fusion, drugs for pain management, and a myriad of Band‐Aids you don't want to hear about in your early forties. Ultimately, I was desperate. I would have tried anything. I did. And then I tried my doctor's prescription for mindfulness. It changed my life.
It can change yours too. Together, we're going to discover how the right mindfulness practices can open up health, happiness, and a more engaged life even for the most skeptical and driven professional. We'll explore practices to improve every aspect of your life and career. Don't worry. You don't have to join a cult, say “Namaste,” sit in lotus position, get a spirit animal, wear Birkenstocks, or find a new religion. We're going to learn how mindfulness relates to the natural functioning of the brain: what you think about, you become. Not only will we avoid the woo‐woo, I've found that a modern attention training practice can create a competitive advantage for yourself and your company culture. You can become the leader you aspire to be: happy, confident, committed, energized, connected, charismatic, lovable, intentional, compassionate, and purposeful. For your team or company, you can be the driving force in creating a sustainable high performance culture.
Will you commit five minutes a day to change your life?
I Love My Work and It's Really Hard
We like to start off our Creating Mindful Leaders (CML) Workshop with a discussion. Attendees pick a partner and they speak for five minutes on two topics: What do you love about your work and what are some of your biggest challenges?
I highly recommend doing this exercise with your own team. It's an eye‐opener into what brings joy to your team as well as what's weighing the company down or just plain driving people nuts.
Here's a summary of responses from our recent CML Workshops.
| What I Love About My Work | Some of My Biggest Challenges | ||||
| Accomplishment Affirmation Autonomy Breakthroughs Challenge Change (driving it) Clients Collaboration Competition Connecting Creativity Culture Discovery Empowering | Excitement Fast pace Flexibility Freedom Fun Growth Helping others Human interaction Humanity Impact Innovation Interaction Laughter Learning | Always‐on mindset Ambiguity Bad/dumb bosses Bureaucracy Change Clients Competition Compliance Conflicting priorities Cost cutting/layoffs Culture Distance Distractions | Egos/Narcissism Emotions Fast pace Fear of change Fun (lack of) Generational conflict Getting buy‐in Growth demands Innovation (pace) Lack of alignment Lack of compassion | ||
| What I Love About My Work | Some of My Biggest Challenges | ||||
| Making a difference Mission Money Opportunity People Positivity Purpose Recognition Relationships Solving problems | Teaching Technology Training Transformation Travel Trust Unpredictability Values Variety Work/life balance | Meetings Naysayers People Politics Poor communication Problems Proof/ROI Recognition Resistance Safety issues Secondary trauma Stagnation Stress | Technology Time/Resources Training (lack of) Transformation Travel Uncertainty Unpredictability Unrealistic deadlines Variety Volatility Work/life balance | ||
There's a tremendous amount of overlap (see the bolded areas in the table above) in what leaders both love and find challenging in their work. Different leaders can perceive similar or “normal” work demands in very different ways. By normal, I mean facing constant change, innovation, and disruption. That is today's norm. The pace of modern business requires a new way of thinking. Our mindset and reactions to these norms determines the impact on our mental and emotional wellbeing, leadership style, relationships, and ultimately, our success. Together, we'll explore two recurring themes for leaders around the world:
- We get better at the things we practice most.
- You're training your brain all the time. Why not be intentional about it?
When it comes to training our brains, too many of us are practicing and training the wrong things. Add to this the brain's natural default instincts for survival (feeling anxious; constantly scanning for threats) and it all contributes to our stress, illness, and propensity for disease. It's freeing to learn about the brain's normal and basic survival functions. It takes awareness and effort to engage the higher‐order thinking functions of the brain—and mindfulness is a great way to do this. Attention training helps us build stress resilience, manage our emotions, and avoid the human tendency to make things worse through ongoing negative ruminations, unconscious biases, and lack of self‐awareness.
What Is Mindfulness, Anyway?
Mindfulness is awareness and attention training that helps you create daily habits to calm and focus your mind and relax your central nervous system. It's brain training to improve your focus, mental and emotional wellbeing, and enhance just about every aspect of performance. What I learned over the past six years is that we're training our brains all the time. There's an expansive field of brain research called “neuroplasticity” that dates back to the early 1900s. In short, it's the brain's ability to change based on experience. Your brain is like any other muscle. You get better, stronger, and faster at the things you do the most. You form and strengthen neural pathways. You actually change your gray matter.
Here's the “CliffsNotes” history leading to over 4,500 peer‐reviewed research studies on the health and performance benefits of mindfulness training.
- 1906: Ramón y Cajal, a Spanish neuroanatomist, spent years making painstaking drawings of brain anatomy, mapping neural pathways. He was one of the first researchers to postulate that we change the makeup and function of our brains based on how we use them. He wrote, “Any man could, if he were so inclined, be the sculptor of his own brain.”1
- 1949: Donald Hebb, a Canadian psychologist, was influential in the area of neuropsychology. He sought to understand how the function of neurons contributed to psychological processes such as learning. Hebb's work confirmed that “neurons that fire together, wire together” is now famously known as the Hebbian Theory. It was first introduced in his classic work The Organization of Behavior, with the idea that we create and strengthen neural pathways (both for good and bad behaviors) based on experience.2
- 1979: Jon Kabat‐Zinn founded the Stress Reduction Clinic at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. He subsequently structured an eight‐week course called Mindfulness‐Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) and was one of the first researchers to place mindfulness training into a scientific context.
- 1993: Brain training was introduced into popular culture with Bill Moyers's influential documentary, Healing and the Mind, igniting a new field of study.3
Since the early 1980s, countless studies have confirmed that our brains are malleable like plastic. They change, adapt, and mold based on how we use them. Dr. Rick Hanson does an excellent job of explaining the latest research in his book, Hardwiring Happiness, “Neurons that fire together wire together. Mental states become neural traits. Day after day, your mind is building your brain. This is what scientists call experience‐dependent neuroplasticity.”4
The field of neuroplasticity research has become so advanced that the biggest brains in the world (and me) come together to talk “plasticity” at the annual Brain Futures conference.5
Have you've ever described yourself as a “numbers person” or “good with people?” Beyond your inherent ability lies thousands of hours of training your brain to be good at specific skills to the point at which you can do amazing things without even thinking about it. You actually become that kind of person.
For example, after thousands of hours of training, Tom Brady throws a 50‐yard touchdown. Steph Curry drains three pointers. Itzhak Perlman plays a mean violin. They've practiced to the point at which the brain just takes over. The neural pathways have been created to process information seamlessly to allow them to perform without even thinking about it. That's amazing if you're practicing rewarding and valuable skills —and we can all get better at what we choose to focus on.
We're Practicing the Wrong Things
The problem is that most of us are training the brain and getting tons of practice doing the wrong things. We practice worry, regret, anxiety, and conspiracy theories. We practice distracting ourselves with social media and the same old news feeds that we read five times a day. We train ourselves to fill every waking minute with activity. We're addicted to busyness and toxic Twitter streams; the greatest hits of our friends' pretend lives on Facebook; and we ruminate on negative things that happened years ago. We feed worries that may never happen. More of us train ourselves to be experts at insomnia, lying in bed until we exhaust ourselves into mediocre sleep. Our brains are strengthening neural pathways to make us better at the things we practice most.
When it comes to training ourselves to be distracted, we've gotten to the point at which a Microsoft study estimates that human beings now have the attention span of 8 to 12 seconds.6 That's about the same that a frickin' goldfish has. In case you drifted off, I said a frickin' goldfish.
Multitasking Is a Myth. Stressed out professionals tend to multitask. It gives us the feeling we're getting more done. Research indicates that multitaskers are actually less likely to be productive.7 However, the illusion of productivity helps them feel more emotionally satisfied with their work. Multitasking isn't really a thing. The brain focuses on one thing at a time. What we're actually doing is task switching, and the cost is high. It takes more time to get tasks completed if you switch between them than if you do them one at a time. You make more errors when you switch than if you do one task at a time. In fact, researchers found that a lot of switching in a day can add up a 40% loss of productivity.8 I call it “multislacking.” Moreover, studies have shown that switching tasks leads to more stress. People with high rates of impulsivity and neuroticism tend to switch tasks more than others.9 To recap, our best go‐to strategy for dealing with being overwhelmed actually causes more harm than good.
Here's the point. What you spend your time thinking about matters. You're training your brain all the time. Why not be intentional about it?
How Does It Work?
Power Down. Power Up. Power Forward.™
Mindfulness training helps you to notice when you're distracted and come back to a single point of focus. You can increase your ability to focus with practice. There are dozens of techniques to do this. One is to meditate, using your breath as the focus of your attention. Focusing on your breath is a mindfulness fan favorite because it's always with you.
You can also train your attention on things like your heartbeat, pressure points in your body, a spot on a wall, even music. In fact, you can train your attention using almost any soothing point to calm the mind and relax the central nervous system. Even 5 to 10 minutes of practice a day on a fairly regular basis can be transformative.
There have been thousands of studies on the health and performance benefits of mindfulness. Don't worry, you don't have to read them. We've got you covered in my favorite study. That comes out of Harvard University. One of the reasons it's my favorite is because saying, “Harvard University” makes me feel smart.
In their research, Harvard shares that the human brain cycles through normal states of awareness and neural activity (Figure 1.3). They estimate the average person spends about half their time with the mind “wandering.”10 By wandering, we mean worrying about the future. Worrying about the past. Is my boss out to get me? Fantasizing, fretting, conspiracy theories. Did I leave the oven on? You name it. Most of us have trained our brains to cycle through a myriad of thoughts, except what's actually happening in the moment.
Figure 1.3 Natural cycles of the brain
Source: Modified with permission on a one‐time basis. Copyright © 2014 Scientific American, a division of Nature America, Inc. All rights reserved.
Obviously, this much unproductive time is terrible for business. But it gets worse. They further estimate the average person spends another 20% of their time in “distracted awareness.” This is when you're kind of listening, but not really. Anyone who's married may recognize this state of mind. The research from hundreds of universities, insurance companies, healthcare systems, and think tanks indicate that these natural tendencies for the mind to wander are also terrible for your health. It can cut years off of your life.
There are two analogies I like to use. The first is that our brains are like refrigerators. The equipment is running at various levels of effort all the time. But if you leave the door open, they work nonstop, the equipment breaks down faster and what's inside ends up spoiling. The wandering mind is causing our minds to burn out from overactivity while spoiling the quality of our emotions, moods, and thought patterns. What's worse, much of that overactivity is negative and recurring.11 That means we have a tendency to think about the same unhealthy nonsense all the time. It's the human condition. And because of neuroplasticity, our brains become experts at processing and revisiting the things we think about most. A double whammy.
This tendency to ruminate on the negative can feed self‐doubt, turning us into our own worst critics. That leads to my second analogy. As a kid, I remember Pluto, Daffy Duck, and other cartoons where characters would have a devil on one shoulder and an angel on the other, representing two sides of their conscience. Two inner critics. Pixar took it to the next level with the movie, Inside Out, in which all five primary emotions (joy, sadness, anger, fear, and disgust) took turns tugging at the lead character's conscience. When it comes to the wandering mind, you likely already realize that it's not very quiet in there. In fact, many leaders feel like we have an entire board of directors in our head. The critic. The worrier. The fraud. The savior. The conspiracist. The hot mess. The regretter. The hero. The second‐guesser. Left unchecked, an overly active board of inner critics can feed the constant distraction that has a detrimental impact on your health and performance.
The wandering mind and tendency to constantly worry are the root causes of professionals getting stressed out, burnt out, and opting out at earlier ages and at record numbers. Getting stuck in negative thought patterns creates stress. Stress impacts your health, wellbeing, and performance. That impacts relationships and teams. And that impacts entire company cultures.
Don't let this get you down. The inner critics or voices arise as ways to protect you from fears, failure, or shame. It's an illusion. Often they just need your permission to stop working so hard on your behalf. There are many techniques to reverse the mind's natural tendencies and let them know the job's over.
It's Brain Training
By training the brain to sustain attention on a single point of focus like your breath, you can create new neural pathways and strengthen your ability to pay attention to the rest of your day. By focusing your attention time and again, you're creating muscle memory. You can then become better at noticing when you're distracted anytime, and then direct your attention back to a single point of focus. Over time, present, focused and attentive can become your normal (default) way of being. Doesn't that sound better than training yourself to be constantly distracted while ruining your health, happiness, and performance? One or the other is happening. You get to choose.
Attention Training
Let's give it a try using a one‐minute practice from the Whil training library.
What's the Difference Between Meditation and Mindfulness?
Meditation is the practice of training your attention. This can be done in short bursts. At Whil, we recommend 5 to 10 minutes a day on a fairly regular basis to enjoy the greatest benefits.
Mindfulness is the goal of attention training. It's a lifestyle. It's applying your ability to be focused, aware, kind, intentional, open, curious, nonjudgmental, and compassionate in the other 24 hours of your day. Meditation is just one form of practice. Mindfulness is applying what you learn during game‐time.
Start with Tiny Habits
Dr. B. J. Fogg is a professor at the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford University and one of the world's leading experts on human behavior change. Just like any habit, meditation gets easier to do if it's part of your daily routine. We recommend following B. J.'s advice to start a new “Tiny Habit.”12
- Get specific as to what new behavior you want (meditate five minutes per day). Translate target outcomes into behaviors (for example, I practice every day at 3 p.m. no matter where I am).
- Make it easy. (All I need is my phone app and a place to sit.) Simplicity changes behavior.
- Trigger the behavior. Some triggers are natural (I meditate when I lie down to sleep every night). Others you must design (I schedule time on my calendar and receive notifications from my Whil app). No behavior happens without a trigger.
Why Is Everyone Talking About Mindfulness?
In case you haven't noticed, the world is stressed out. In 2017, the Stress in America poll reported a significant increase in national U.S. stress.13 More of us are reaching the point at which we'll try just about anything to alleviate the pressure. There are three key reasons why mindfulness is taking center stage as the antidote of choice.
Mindfulness Has Gone Mainstream
It's in the news. 60 Minutes even did a special covering it with Anderson Cooper. There's a new book on the topic every week (you're reading one now). It's on the cover of every major magazine, ranging from Cosmopolitan to Fast Company to Wired. Time magazine did a special edition on Mindfulness, featuring Whil.14 Pretty cool. The Wall Street Journal and New York Times cover mindfulness (and stress) like any other important business news topics. Our friend, Congressman Tim Ryan, even wrote the book, A Mindful Nation, covering how mindfulness is changing schools, business, the government, and even the military.15
In the documentary, On Meditation, Tim describes finding mindfulness as his own antidote to stress. “I was a congressman at 29 and doing alright. And then in 2008, after being in congress for about six years and my life getting more and more hectic, more and more responsibilities, more and more burdens ‐ I had a lot of negative thoughts, a lot of self‐criticism of ‘you can do better’ or ‘why didn’t you do this or that.' Really beating myself up to where I felt I was going to be burnt out. And I was 35 years old… I really wanted to jumpstart a daily meditation practice. It changed my life. I got a taste of what it's like to have your mind and your body synchronized… After I got a taste of it, I though we really have to introduce this into the healthcare system in America.”16
It Benefits Every Aspect of Life
You can find help on just about any topic ranging from improving focus to managing back pain to PTSD to mindful parenting to recovering from cancer.
Basketballers from Steph Curry to Michael Jordan are doing it. Footballers from Tom Brady to Joe Namath. Musicians from Katy Perry to Paul McCartney. Actors from Kristen Bell to Hugh Jackman. Comedians from Russell Brand to Jerry Seinfeld. Ellen to Oprah. Mark Zuckerberg to Steve Jobs. Martin Scorsese. Judd Apatow. Eddie Vedder. Tony Robbins. George Lucas. CEOs like Mark Bertolini, Marc Benioff, Ray Dalio, Les Moonves, Eileen Fisher, Bob Shapiro, Roger Berkowitz, Robert Stiller, Nancy Slomowitz, Rick Goings, and Marnie Abramson. The list is endless. Top players in every field are looking for a better quality of life. And they're looking to maintain their competitive edge.
Sadly, I've found that too much of what's written comes from novices who ignore the research and science that correlates recognized practices with improving health outcomes.
There's Been an Explosion in Scientific Research
The American Mindfulness Research Association alone maintains a database of more than 4,500 studies on the health and performance benefits of mindfulness training (Figure 1.5).17 The first research study occurred in the early 1980s. In 2017, there were more than 80 research studies per month.
As a skeptical numbers guy, the science behind these practices was a major factor in my giving it a try.
Figure 1.5 The stress business (and related research) is booming.
Source: American Mindfulness Research Association, 2017; goAMRA.org.
Stress and the resulting impacts of illness and disease are a global crisis. When you dig into the details of these studies, you quickly understand why mindfulness is the new must‐have life skill for leaders. Studies are even showing that mindfulness and meditation can be as effective as medication. But unlike medication, mindfulness has no pill form. It takes practice and I'll share the most relevant research and techniques throughout. But I won't keep you waiting. Here are 10 of my favorite research studies for leaders.
- Increase Focus. Professionals trained in mindfulness were able to concentrate better, stay on task longer, and remember what they'd done better.18
- Manage Your Triggers. People with greater meditation training had less activity in the amygdala (the fight‐or‐flight trigger in the brain) during negative distractions. The more hours of training, the lower the triggering effect.19
- Improve Chronic Stress. Veterans with Post‐Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) had improvements in symptoms such as depression, behavioral activation, and experiential avoidance.20
- Reduce Pain. Just three days of brief mindfulness training was effective at reducing pain ratings and sensitivity, producing analgesic effects.21
- Strengthen Immunity. Practitioners showed decreased anxiety and significant increased activity in the parts of their brains associated with positive emotions. They also developed more antibodies to the influenza vaccine.22 Another study linked training to a 50% decrease in cold and flu symptoms and a 76% decrease in absenteeism.23
- Lower Your Blood Pressure. Mindfulness can lead to lower risk of heart attack and stroke. Patients who received training had significant decreases in systolic and diastolic blood pressure.24
- Be Happier and More Energetic. Professionals who practiced mindfulness reported less emotional exhaustion and greater job satisfaction.25
- Improve Cardiovascular Health. Mindfulness improves heart health, particularly shown in risk factors such as smoking, body mass index, fasting glucose, and physical activity. Practitioners were 83% more likely to have good cardiovascular health.26
- Sleep Better. Two weeks of mindfulness practice produced steady improvements in both sleep quality and duration.27
- Reduce Your Error Rate. Practitioners were able to reduce their personal error rate and increase control over the distribution of limited brain resources to process more data.28 It's like getting more Random Access Memory (RAM) in your brain.
It's no wonder that the leading universities, think tanks, hospital networks, and insurance companies are all focused on mindfulness practices. Large companies are even adding c‐level officers to focus on employee wellbeing, including our friend Andy Lee, Chief Mindfulness Officer of Aetna.
Work (and Life) Requires Performance
Mindfulness training is being embraced by organizations ranging from big business to universities to healthcare systems to the military. In 2016, the National Business Group on Health (NBGH) estimated that 45% of the Fortune 500 would bring mindfulness training to their employees within a year, mostly through extended live training and increasingly, through digital training solutions like Whil.29
It's even occurring in sports in a big way. The last three winners of the Super Bowl, the World Series, and the NBA Championship all practice mindfulness. Here in San Francisco, the championship Golden State Warriors practice mindfulness. I don't think the beleaguered San Francisco Forty‐Niners practice mindfulness. Until recently, we were starting to wonder if they even practice football.
For you New England Patriots fans, your perennial Super Bowl championship team does mindfulness training. Tom Brady has been meditating for years. And when he focuses on his breath, he needs a little less air than anyone else. Sorry, that's a “Deflategate” joke from a bitter Steelers fan.
You get the picture. Coaches are looking to help their players to be able to focus and perform under pressure. They're looking for an edge. They want their athletes to be “in the zone” more regularly. Sound familiar? As leaders, that's exactly what we want for our corporate athletes: to perform under pressure. The ability to calm and focus the mind and perform under pressure is a valuable skill for leaders, and provides a competitive advantage when enough team members apply the related techniques to their work, relationships, communication style, and in creating your company's culture.
Mindfulness Is About as Religious as Red Wine
Even as the business and sports worlds rapidly embrace mindfulness training as a tool for productivity and performance, I still sometimes hear the concern that meditation is considered too spiritual or religious to give it a try. I've even had a few folks in the bible‐belt suggest that meditation is “evil”, leaning on the old English proverb, “An idle mind is the devil's workshop.” It's hard to say, “that's just stupid”, mindfully. Instead, I share that allowing your mind and thoughts to be largely out of your control should be the bigger concern.
As someone who was raised Irish Catholic, I certainly wasn't looking for a new religion when I found mindfulness. I was looking for a way to stop stressing out about every little thing in life (and especially at each quarter's end). I was looking to sleep better. I was looking for help dealing with chronic back pain. I wanted to stay at the top of my game. I didn't want to be angry all the time. And since I'd hit a wall with my health and my decreasing level of patience, I realized I needed help. Separately, my wife was looking for the guy she married and a husband who was more present with the family.
To calm any fears that you may have, I've learned that mindfulness training is about as religious as red wine. Wine has been used for some 9,000 years in a wide array of religions dating back to ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome. This included having a starring role in the Last Supper. As an adult, I was delighted to discover that red wine is also good on its own. Like, really good. Try it with a steak. It just works.
Just like red wine, mindfulness meditation has also been around for a long time (some 5,000 years). Sure, it's been used in every contemplative tradition in prayer, sitting in silence, or actual meditative practices to calm the mind and sometimes bring focus to a higher calling or being. But, just like wine, a mindfulness practice is also really good on its own. Try it with stress. It just works.
I'm not particularly religious these days. But I like red wine. I like mindfulness. And mindful wine drinking ain't bad either. I almost said wine “tasting,” but let's be honest.
It's About Improving Life
I've found what millions have discovered through mindfulness practice: greater happiness, improved wellbeing, and better sleep. My back pain dropped from a constant 8 of 10 to a manageable 3. My resting heart rate dropped 20 points. My blood pressure is down. I've learned to tame the wandering mind. Entrepreneur and author, Jim Rohn said, “One of the greatest gifts you can give to anyone is the gift of attention.” Learning to focus and to not take things personally has made me more kind, calm, and compassionate with the most important people in my life (including myself). And my wife got what she deserved—I'm back to being the guy she married before extreme stress became my unwanted mistress.
A modern mindfulness practice also cultivates many of the community aspects that can be found in contemplative traditions. Beyond the personal desire to have continuing success and a healthier and happier life, I've also experienced the unavoidable side effects of thinking more about my team, our community, and living life with purpose. Being a better parent, partner, and person come first. All of that has created a foundation for improving my performance as a more caring and compassionate leader.