Give the Grenades to the Zen Masters

You might think that what I needed most then was to remember the sequence. But aikido teaches us that what I actually needed to do was to clear my mind of everything, including the lecture I'd just listened to on the proper way to throw a damn hand grenade. I needed to stop thinking about that lecture, stop thinking about the Marines standing around me, stop thinking about looking “good” or “bad,” stop thinking about whether I was about to make a truly stupid mistake. I needed to let go of my fear and ego and take relevant action. Quickly.

Imagine a student of classical swordsmanship who's just arrived at an isolated school, somewhere in the mountains of Japan, ready to spend several years studying and training. Imagine that this student is given only menial tasks to do, like washing the dishes and chopping the vegetables for dinner. He goes about his business, doing his best to complete his chores—but knowing all the while that, at any moment, his teacher could leap out of the bushes and hit him with a practice sword.

The great philosopher and student of Eastern traditions Alan Watts used this example in a lecture. He explained that pretty soon the fencing student is jumping at shadows, always braced for attack. The teacher is never where the student expects, attacking him at will. Finally the student gives up. There's no way to predict where this crazy teacher of his is going to pop up next. He relaxes. At that moment, Watts says, “He's ready to begin training.”

When you're braced for attack, you're concentrating your energy in a particular direction. You think danger is lurking in that dark corner over there, so that's where you're concentrating all your senses. When the attack actually comes from the opposite direction, you're not ready, and that slows you down. It's only when you move into a state of no expectation, “no-mind,” that you are ready to respond—in the moment—to the attack. It's only when you stop thinking about whether or not you're going to use the hand grenade properly that you can actually throw the damn thing away and save your own life.

No Expectations, No-Mind

That state of no expectations—no distractions—is called mushin (pronounced “moo-sheen”). Literally, mushin means “no-mind” or “empty mind.” But it doesn't mean not thinking. When you are in a state of mushin, your mind is like a mirror. As Watts explains in his lecture on the topic, “The mirror doesn't wait.” It reflects what's happening around it instantly and perfectly. In a state of mushin, you have emptied your mind of distraction, anxiety, ego, fear—everything that holds you back and keeps you from seeing the truth of a situation. In a state of mushin, your mind is empty enough to receive that truth instantly, the way a mirror receives your reflection as soon as you step in front of it.

Mushin is not an absence of thought; it's a discipline that allows you to think spontaneously. When your mind is clear and calm, reflecting the world around you, you're not stuck hesitating and worrying about what to do. You think and act quickly because you're not distracted by extraneous thoughts. Mushin is about practicing this kind of deliberate spontaneity—not spontaneity in the shallow sense of being a “free spirit” who floats around avoiding responsibility, but a deeper, more meditative kind of spontaneity that comes from being fully present in the moment and responding to it thoughtfully and honestly, but with no hesitation.

As Watts explains, it can take years to learn to achieve a true state of mushin. At first, when you try to act spontaneously, you run the risk of doing something pretty stupid, because you're giving in to your first impulse, and we all have a lot of stupid impulses. But as you train and discipline yourself, you will gradually find that your spontaneous responses become more intelligent and appropriate. You will train yourself to think spontaneously. And you can start building this skill today.

Have you ever seen a great comedian respond to a comment from a heckler in the audience? There's no time to hesitate in that kind of moment. There's no time to stand there and think of the perfect comeback. And yet there are standup comedians out there who can, in an instant, produce that perfect comeback. I couldn't do that. You couldn't do that. Most of the time, when you or I open our mouths to make an off-the-cuff joke, it's pretty stupid. That's because we haven't spent time honing the craft of comedy. We haven't made hundreds and thousands of jokes and internalized what makes a joke land and what makes it fall flat. Paradoxically, effective spontaneity takes a lot of practice.

A comedian, a swordsman, or a CEO who makes that exquisitely perfect choice in an instant is able to do that because of practice—and because, in that moment, they've let all that practice go. It's become instinct. It exists somewhere outside of their conscious thought. In that moment of decision, their mind is empty. But that doesn't mean they're being thoughtless. It means they have achieved a state of mushin. It means their mind is like a clear mirror, reflecting the right action without hesitation.

Mindfulness and No-Mind

So if it takes practice to develop a true, deep state of no-mind, what is that practice? Where do you start? These days, in the West, the ancient and powerful practice that helps you develop mushin is known as mindfulness.

Mindfulness, as it's practiced today in the West, is essentially a version of Zen meditation that's been stripped of much of its spiritual content. It's a relatively easy and accessible way for people to tap into the incredible power of this ancient discipline. There have now been dozens of studies that have confirmed what Zen and aikido masters have known for centuries—a regular meditation practice sharpens and clarifies the mind. It reduces stress.¹ Corporations around the world are starting to train their employees in mindfulness practice. Some researchers are even starting to see the benefit of not only training leaders in mindfulness but directly connecting that training to other coaching efforts.²

Leaders from all walks of life have spoken about how helpful the practice of mindfulness meditation has been in their work. Roger Berkowitz, the CEO of Legal Sea Foods, says he meditates twice a day.³ It's the first thing he does every morning. “Sometimes,” he says, “I'm wrestling with an issue before meditation, and afterward the answer is suddenly clear.” That's a sign that Berkowitz is reaping the full benefit of meditation. When his mind is clear, when he's in a state of mushin, answers to difficult questions appear “suddenly.” Meditation allows him to access this clear, reflective state of mind where he is able to think spontaneously.

Bill Ford, the executive chairman of Ford Motor Company, has described mindfulness as a lifeline that has helped him get through some of the biggest challenges in his life⁴—including the incredible challenge of the crisis of 2008, when he was forced to lay off thousands of people from a company he still views as a family business.⁵ The people he had to fire were people he knew and who had known his family for generations. He has said that his meditation practice, and a simple practice of setting an intention of compassion for the day, helped him get through this incredibly difficult time.

Filmmaker David Lynch found transcendental meditation so emotionally transformative that he created the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace in order to help more people learn about the practice.⁶ In an interview with The Seattle Times, Lynch said that within two weeks of starting a meditation practice, his wife at the time noticed a drastic change—his anger and self-doubt had fallen away. Lynch said that many people experience a change in the way they think after they start meditating:

So something that people say is, “Before I started meditating, I just reacted. Now, with meditation, I have this pause and this reasoning: Do I really want to blow this man's head off with a .357 Magnum in my hand?” And then the answer is, “No, I don't think so.” They have time to think.⁷

That's mushin. That's the spontaneous thinking that comes from true clarity. Without mushin, Lynch and others feel they have no time to think—they act out of an ignorant, impulsive form of spontaneity. When they find mushin, that split second when they need to make a decision expands. Suddenly, it feels like plenty of time because they're able to think spontaneously.

Emptying Your Mind Isn't Easy

Starting a meditation practice doesn't take that much time—but that doesn't mean it's easy. Especially for an extrovert like me. One of the hardest things I've ever done is go on a weeklong meditation retreat at a Zen monastery in Japan. And remember, I've gone through Marine Corps boot camp and intensive chemotherapy almost daily for three months.

I like to work hard. I'm good at working hard. But learning to meditate isn't the kind of thing that responds to hard work in the traditional sense. Meditation is an elusive practice—all you can do is put in the time. It takes incredible discipline—but paradoxically, trying harder may only put you further away from your goal.

Learning to meditate, for me, was an experience unlike any other. On this meditation retreat, I was surrounded by people. At any one time there were between 10 and 30 people around, working, sleeping, and meditating. I love being part of a group—as an extrovert, I'm a team player—but this was a group existing in total silence. I was surrounded by people, but I was completely alone inside my own head. In a world that can't stop talking and communicating, I was forced to be quiet. Not only to stop talking, but to quiet my mind.

Silencing the Monkey Mind

When you sit down to meditate, what Zen masters call the “monkey mind” starts running around. The monkey mind is that anxious, jumpy, excitable, angry, frightened creature that lives inside all of us. And when you stop talking and settle into silence, that's all you can hear—your own fear and anger, your worries, your ego. Your own internal monkey, swinging around, screaming, causing all sorts of trouble.

During the weeklong meditation retreat, physically, we were all sore, because you're sitting still for such a long time. As a lifelong athlete, I'm used to being sore—but I'm used to pushing my body to do something, and I found that forcing my body to do nothing was much more difficult. You're sitting there, and you're sore, and you have nothing else to think about. All you can do is focus on how sore you are, and that only amplifies the soreness. Time seems to stop. You think it's been 45 minutes and you're almost done, and you look at a clock, and it's only been 2 minutes. It's an unbelievable challenge on every level—physically, mentally, emotionally.

At the end of the first day of that retreat, I remember thinking to myself, My God, I have to do this for another six days? I can't believe I agreed to do this. There's no way I'm going to get through this.

When you're meditating, you're overwhelmed by silence. You've got nowhere to go but your own mind. You have to face your fear, your ego, your doubt. Left to the solitude of your own thoughts, you can either become your own best ally or your own worst enemy. You can't push through it—there is no “through” to push. There is only this moment, and then the next moment, and then the next. The second you think that you're making progress, you're no longer meditating—you're thinking about meditating. And the second you think that you're not making progress, you're also not meditating, you're thinking about meditating. There goes that monkey swinging on by. Troublesome little bugger.

Learning how to meditate is one of the most difficult things you will ever do because it requires you to accept parts of yourself you normally don't want to face. In the silence of your own mind, all the parts of yourself you like the least will become crystal clear. And you have to be with it all—the good, the bad, and the ugly—in silence. For many of us, confronting the insides of our own minds is the hardest thing we'll ever have to do.

The Opposite of Mushin

For most of us, most days, the insides of our minds are chaos. We're thinking a thousand thoughts a minute. We're constantly distracted. Our attention is constantly being pulled in all sorts of different directions by our smartphones and our laptops. The second we start to focus our thoughts, there's a ping pulling us back in the other direction—an e-mail from a coworker, a text from a friend, another comment on Facebook.…

No wonder so many of us have trouble making decisions. Say you need a new smartphone. Your old one is a few years old, and the battery runs down really quickly. So you go online to buy a new one. Simple, right? In a couple of clicks, you can have some robots in a warehouse somewhere picking up your new smartphone and sending it your way. Except—an hour after you've picked up your laptop, you've read about 107 reviews of a whole bunch of different phones, you've read three different articles about iOS versus Android, and you're deep into a text-message conversation about which of seven different movies to watch tonight.

Sound familiar? Our world today is designed to provide us endless options, but it is definitely not set up to create clarity. In fact, the more options we have, the more we struggle to make a choice. The more decisions we have to make, the more difficult it is to make each decision. Psychologists call this decision fatigue,⁹ and they've found that decisions involving trade-offs—the cheapest smartphone or the one with the best camera?—are particularly tiring. That means the more complicated a decision is, the more difficult it is to make—and after you make it, you're going to have an even harder time making the next decision.

A Better Way to Make Decisions

Maybe one of the reasons we struggle to make effective decisions is that we go about it wrong. We don't understand how we really should be making decisions. We think the best way to approach that new smartphone problem is to analyze the question from every angle and look at the pros and cons of all the different options. But in reality, decision making is not an entirely rational process.

Neurologist Antonio Damasio had a patient named Elliot who had a brain tumor.¹⁰ After treatment, he had lost some of the portion of his brain that was responsible for allowing him to feel emotions—and he was incapable of making a simple decision. He could spend all day debating how to organize a set of files—alphabetically? By topic? By date?

Damasio concluded that emotions are necessary to the decision-making process. He argued that something he called a “prehunch,” a subconscious, almost instinctual reaction to a problem, is essential in making good decisions. Later experiments proved that people with damage to the emotional centers of their brains were much slower than undamaged subjects to recognize when a card game was rigged against them. For subjects with normal, undamaged brains, their emotional, instinctual brains tipped them off to the unfairness of the game long before their rational brains had been able to analyze the situation. They had a “prehunch.” The subjects whose emotional brains were damaged didn't get hunches. They only had their slow-moving rational brains to rely on.

Trying to make a good decision with your slow-moving rational brain is never going to work. It'll lead you down that rabbit hole of endless smartphone reviews. It'll lead you to analysis paralysis. I once hired a general manager who was a brilliant guy, but he suffered terribly from analysis paralysis. He was a great planner. He could make these exquisite, detailed, long-term project plans—but he couldn't take the first step to put it into action. Step one could be something as simple as “decide who on our staff should be on the project team,” and he'd be stuck on step one for days. This guy was smart. He was a hard worker, and he meant well. But he was stuck. Eventually, I had to fire him—it was heartbreaking to let him go, but he just couldn't get anything done.

Don't get me wrong—making decisions in the mushin way doesn't mean making dumb decisions. It doesn't mean you don't think through your options. But it does mean you don't let those options paralyze you. You analyze and think through the problem, and then you take a moment to clear your head. You empty your mind of all the thoughts and worries clouding it, and you look for that little voice inside you that already knows what to do. You listen for that “prehunch” that comes from somewhere much deeper than your rational brain. And then you take action.

What my poor paralyzed general manager couldn't see was that his desire to find the perfect answer was holding him back from taking action. Ultimately, done is better than perfect. Done is the bridge that leads you to your next phase of growth. An imperfect step forward is at least a step in the right direction.

Moving into a state of mushin helps you get unstuck and move into relevant action. It's an exercise in letting go of your ego. The ego tells you that you have to be perfect. That if you don't get it exactly right, people will reject you. Fear tells you that you will fail. That you aren't capable of moving forward. That you don't have what it takes. In order to move forward, you have to let go of your ego and your fear, clear your mind—and decide. Move. Take action. Now.