Category Archives: Productivity

Body Mindfulness – Your Everyday Active State

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“Mindfulness in Action – This is something to be practiced throughout the day, rather than just for 10 minutes.”

Leah Weiss – Stanford University’s Compassion Cultivation Program

Mindfulness in action. This is a good term. When you do a mindfulness meditation practice regularly, eventually what begins to happen, is that the inner focus you have while your eyes are closed transfers to your waking active state and for longer and longer periods, before the day and your intellect take over once again.

The ultimate aim of meditation is to have that inner calm connected aware state throughout your day. No matter what you are doing – doing it, in a mindful present state is much more productive and enriching than rushing through and/or over thinking everything.

It is not very enjoyable to live the moment in a rushed over thinking state. It is probably why people are doing whatever it is quickly, in order to get to that state that they long for, all the while missing it, in this present moment now.

As I emphasis in every mindfulness class – you are already perfect inside. That perfection, still, alive, loving, free self is already there within you. Closing our eyes and focusing within for long periods, help to get glimpses of this and helps to have those glimpses shine throughout your day in your daily actions.

The big value of Stillness

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“True intelligence operates silently. Stillness is where creativity and solutions to problems are found.”

Eckhart Tolle, Stillness Speaks (2003)

Those still moments in your day are very precious. It is very important to have time in each day where you have that quiet stillness in your body and your mind.

In those moments you will think clearer and be closer to the real solution to issues and problems that you have to solve.

Rather than thinking through everything. You stop, be still, be blank, allow space and time for things to reveal themselves in a new way. It is a reset of your normal habitual pathways and programmed thinking.

By allowing stillness you affirm that there is an intelligence far greater than thinking thoughts which also exists. If you don’t believe this, you will highly likely never allow your mind to be still.

But this stillness time is vital to your health, productivity and fulfillment in life.

So, have you taken time out today to be still? If not, plan it in, make it important. You will progress much more smoother in life with such a practice.

If you are not used to it, stillness may initially look and feel like staring blankly into thin air or out of a window. If you haven’t practiced stillness much in the past you may find yourself drifting off. Your mental mind has been so over used with little pause, that it is exhausted when you stop and not think.

You haven’t used the pause button for so long that when you do, you feel the tiredness and habit of wanting to sleep or just staring blankly. That’s not quality stillness. That’s your body wanting to catch up, rest and recharge. So you may need to rest for a while before the quality returns and benefits are there. Although the resting will also be beneficial to your brain.

NEWS
For people in Melbourne, I will be appearing on a new TV show that started three weeks ago on Channel 31 titled Health, Wellbeing and Lifestyle.
It will air every Tuesday 12pm and repeat Thursdays 9am and Fridays 8.30pm.

I will appear in the following episodes (2019) and the topic:
Dec 24th Episode 5 – How we Heal
Dec 31st Episode 6 – Trauma (Biggest block to healing)
Jan 14th Episode 8 – Anxiety (Hyper Arousal)
Feb 4th Episode 11 – Depression (Hypo Arousal)
Feb 11th Episode 12 – Full Presence and Spirit

Each of my segments runs for around eight minutes. The show runs for 30 minutes. If you are not in Melbourne, the program will be streamed live and you can watch it here from Channel 31’s website.

Eventually these episodes will appear in my youtube channel.

How far ahead are you playing out your day?

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On describing why he meditates, AFL Football player Zak Jones recently replied..

“I started very slow, but then it became before every game to clear my head and try not play out the game before it began.

For me it was enjoying this for what it is. There’s going to be highs and lows and if you’re worrying about what’s going to happen you’re not enjoying it.”

This leads to a great point that meditation helps reduce worry. How far ahead are you thinking throughout the day? Your body only needs to deal with this moment right now.

Anything more than this is extra stress that is not necessary. Future worry creates stress on your body that affects the quality of your present moment action right now. It also adds extra stress on your body, (which is responding like it is real.)

So how far ahead are you playing out your day right now in your head, while doing what you need to do in this moment? Bring all your thoughts right back to just this moment right now, reading this. These words right now. Nothing more.

If you manage to bring yourself back to this moment and just reading these words right now, you will find there is more enjoyment, doing just this moment. There is also more peace and quiet in your head because you don’t need to be thinking and worrying about the future right now.

When it’s actually time to plan your day, then that’s when you deliberately do it. Any other time, is just added body stress and wasted energy.

Mindfulness meditation helps to bring your mind and body back operating more from this present moment.

Distraction is the way we avoid our inner Pain

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“As is the case with all human behaviour, distraction is just another way our brains attempt to deal with pain. If we accept this fact, it makes sense that the only way to handle distraction is by learning to handle discomfort.”

Nir Eyal, indistractable, (2019)

Stopping, closing your eyes and meditating on your inner world isn’t always comfortable if you are doing it for self healing. There will be times when uncomfortable feelings and sensations arise. And these will arise when you are disciplined enough to stay with your practice long enough, that you go deeper.

Going deeper isn’t always comfortable. When you have the first sign of an uncomfortable feeling you can tend to 1/ Distract yourself from feeling the pain. 2/ Stop sooner and open your eyes, 3/ Switch to focusing on the thoughts in your head rather than your body or 4/ Leave your body entirely and float off.

All of these are escapes from feeling what’s actually going on in the present moment in your body now. You cannot heal further if you don’t accept and allow the deeper pain to release.

Feeling the difficult feelings is the key. Making it okay to feel what is there in manageable doses. Accepting that they are normal. Staying with the body part and sensation helps to keep you out of your head. Adding a story about the painful feeling doesn’t help. Feeling it directly in your body is what helps it move and release the most.

It is okay to feel difficult and painful feelings. They are part of the human condition. Ignoring them will likely just create more problems later that you don’t need. So allowing pain, fear and anger to arise without judgment, in manageable doses, can go a long way to releasing painful feelings easily.

As you accept and release the discomfort, you will need to distract yourself less. So it becomes easier to stay on task and follow through on commitments.

Mastering Stillness and Speed

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“Stillness is what aims the archer’s arrow. It inspires new ideas. It sharpens perspective and illuminates connections. It slows the ball down so that we might hit it. It generates a vision, helps us resist the passions of the mob, make space for gratitude and wonder. Stillness allows us to persevere. To succeed.”

Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key, (2019)

Stillness is vastly underrated. Although with mindfulness this is now slowly changing.

There is an amount of speed that is optimal when doing and working that allows us to get a lot done without too much stress. At some point additional speed doesn’t help to get more done. That’s where more mistakes creep in, thinking jumbles, creates drama and the effort creates more costly maintenance and wastes time.

Conversely, there is an optimal stillness level. Where things slow down, get into focus, thinking clears, more intelligence and creativity are freed up and new ideas and solutions are hatched. At some point any additional stillness creates complacency, laziness, disengagement, over drifting and stuckness as momentum grounds to a halt and direction is lost.

How do you make sure you stay in that optimum range? Also how do you make sure you don’t stay stuck in speed or stillness too long? You need the alternating flow of both, in that optimum range for the best productivity and best use of your time and energy.

We have been culturally stuck in that high gear speed for too long and not nearly spending enough time cultivating the power of stillness.

Stillness allows you access to your depth and to more time in the present moment, within which everything gets done.

It is very important to make some stillness a priority in your day. It will sharpen your mind and help focus more of your doing and its speed.

Persistence always beats Talent

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“As any coach or athlete will tell you, consistency of effort over the long run is everything.”
Angela Duckworth, Grit – The Power of Passion and Perseverance, (2016)

This is a great book, a massive best seller a few years ago (it remained on the New York Times best sellers list for 20 weeks. She also has 18 million hits on her TED talk on this subject.) This is great research on why some people succeed very well and become masters and experts in their field and why others with talent do not.

The key is finding your passion in a a field and then having persistence to keep practicing, learning and correcting (even when you fail or get it wrong) over many years.

Angela has created a grit scale test that can show you or a potential hire if that person will succeed in their field or job. Just having a high test mark from school or University doesn’t correlate with success on the job. But having perseverance and not giving up, does.

In order to not give up you must home in on your passion. The passion will give you the drive to persist, especially through the rough and down periods when things are not going well.

She summarises mastery into two equations:

Talent x Effort = Skill
Skill x Effort = Achievement

The more you practice and don’t give up, the higher the chance of achieving mastery in a field or job. Talent can help but it is the effort that really does it. In fact you can have very little talent up front but with persistent effort become a master in your field.

A lot of experts and geniuses in their fields actually got that way through huge long term effort and yet only had average talent in the beginning, if that.

The same with Mindfulness practice – the more you practice, the more you will learn and correct, and in the long run, mastery will be there.

The balance your body needs in a revved up world

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“in 1990, 49 per cent of Europeans felt their work schedule was too strenuous. By 2000, that had increased to 60 per cent – and those who felt themselves to be rushed were almost twice as likely to complain of classic stress disorders, such as back pain, or tight shoulders and necks.”

Robert Colvile, The Great Acceleration – How the World is Getting Faster, Faster, (2016)

A study was conducted in the early 1990s of 31 countries and then repeated again with the same countries in 2006 to measure the pace of life. What psychologists found was that the pace in 2006 had gone up by 10%. World wide, people were covering the same stretch of ground on the street in 10% less time.

So you are not imagining it when you feel like people are running around faster than ever before. It is actually happening. And more so in the more advanced and industrialised countries.

This type of speed is often good if it helps us get more done in less time, and it is tied into technology advancements. But when we get caught up in it and cannot switch off regularly, is when the body begins to feel the type of stress that can lead to problems. Problems personally and problems with others.

Psychologist Stephanie Brown says ‘for many people, their relationship to technology and speed has become more important than, or even replaced, human relationships.’

A body mindfulness practice can help bring our stress levels back into balance. So you can enjoy the benefits of the speed, (getting more done in less time,) but also enjoy the ability to switch off by choice without getting trapped in that high revved up state.

The Effort Required to Produce Quality Results

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“..how total are you in what you do?
Is your doing surrendered or non-surrendered?
This is what determines your success in life, not how much effort you make.”

(Eckhart Tolle, Stillness Speaks, 2003)

Another timeless classic from Eckhart. This book came out a year before the world wide best seller, The Power of Now.

This is one of my all-time favourite quotes.

People think that you need a lot of effort to accomplish things well. But there is a big difference between lots of doing doing doing action and quality embodied action. You can put in a lot of effort and strain and sweat and produce little of value. Or you can put in quality measured, embodied effort and achieve high quality great results.

It’s not the amount that counts, but the quality of that doing. And you cannot produce quality without first being present in your body in the here and now. Without body mindfulness meditation it can be hard to be consistently present enough in your body to produce that quality result.

Another way of putting it, the quality comes from being in the ‘zone’. That alpha deeper state in your body, where your brain is not obscured by a multitude of thoughts that are irrelevant to the task at hand. Unnecessary thoughts that make you push through, strain, strive and sweat to produce a quality result.

The habitual interference of thoughts that have nothing to do with the present moment you are working in, is a world-wide phenomenon. Each of those thoughts will link back to something unfinished on your mind, or something habitual that you thought was normal to think right now.

How do you let them go? How do you drop them? By surrendering to this moment. By practicing focusing on your body and the here and now and not giving up or beating yourself up when the thoughts take over.

You can do it. It is inherit in your primary nature to be able to do it. You had it as a child before you were taught to over think through everything.

Healthy Work – Finding your Sustainable Level

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“According to the World Health Organization, stress is considered a worldwide health epidemic. The American Institute of Stress links stress to the six leading causes of death (heart disease, accidents, cancer, liver disease, lung ailments, and suicide).”
(Joe Burton, Creating Mindful Leaders, 2018)

Working in a high performance, high stress major company, the stress will eventually takes its toll. After 20 years and in their mid 40s managers and staff start to burn out and if unchecked, in the worse case scenario, leads to one of those leading causes of death.

If you survive and don’t die then there are other issues that arise, frequent sickness, anxiety, depression, loss of direction, moodiness, lack of fulfillment, relationship breakdowns, unemployment, financial issues, addictions, family issues, ageing faster, and general poor health. Luckily many companies are now turning to mindfulness meditation to improve mental, physical and emotional wellbeing.

It sounds crazy that this is the state that our work culture is in. What leaders would design a company like that? Rather than push a person for the maximum output, hence into a zone of high prolonged stress levels, why not find the sustainable level of work?

How do you know when you are working at the optimum sustainable level? My gauge for this is to ask the following question…

At the end of the day when I arrive home – am I calm and relaxed?
If the answer is NO, you are overworking, and over time it will take its toll.

If you are self employed or have a decent boss, you are able to adjust your work week to work at a sustainable level. And by sustainable I mean that you can keep doing those hours and activities indefinitely, for years to come and not tire. That’s the beauty of sustainability, it’s repeatable over and over and over again without much wear and tear.

This is a big work secret to long term health, success and happiness. Find the level for you that is repeatable, over and over again. The added length of time, gives you the benefit of accomplishment – higher income, more experience, and fulfillment in being able to do the things that need time, without burring yourself out in the process.

I adjusted my number of work client hours years ago when I was seeing too many people in a week and almost burned out and collapsed a number of times. Once I asked the sustainability question my whole practice changed. I now see the exact number that I know I can keep seeing indefinitely for years and decades to come. It has worked beautifully now for about a decade.

Initially you seem to earn less, but the quality of your work goes up because you are not stressed out. So over your work lifetime you actually earn much more and also feel happier in mind and body.

You also get the benefit of having a great buffer that you can draw on when unexpected stressors and traumas hit you. Your body has room to absorb the impact and see it through with less reaction. I had some major ones (totally unjust) hit me like a ton of bricks over the last six years, major assaults, that would have adversely affected many people. But my body had room to absorb the impact and release it over time.

I’ll be talking more about this process in future articles.

When do you ‘hang in there’ and when do you quit?

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“We fail when we get distracted by tasks we don’t have the guts to quit.”
(Seth Godin, The Dip, 2011)

One of the problems with the intellect is that it is very good at giving you reasons to do a lot of things. You can make a case for doing many things and making them all sound important. So what do you choose?

We are in a unique period of history where we have more choices than ever before and more marketing coming at us to convince us to do more. A lot of these choices are in our face literally, with our smart phone.

And not only do we have more marketing thrust at us, but we now have (with social media) more opinions to wade through about what we should be doing. So not only do we have information overload, we also have opinion overload.

This gives rise to decision fatigue. The danger with this is that overly operating from the intellect, we lose the ability to filter what is important and what isn’t.

Enter body mindfulness.

Stopping and focusing on your body is the best antidote to the racing overload of choices, opinions and information that the intellect has to try to sort out. When you take time to stop and go within, a multitude of options drop away and you edge closer to dealing with only the essential, only what’s required, only what’s truly most important. Your intellect cannot do this alone. Your body and your feelings have to be involved. The sifting happens much faster and deeper when you do it through your body.

This doesn’t mean that you will magically get answers every time you stop and focus inward. Sometimes a lot of old clutter has to be addressed, faced and accepted before it drops away, revealing the true core path or option. With that inner certainty, it is then much easier (as Seth Godin says) to quit something that was just leading to a dead end for you. And it is also much easier to hang in through the dip you will experience, the hard slog, the depth necessary to do something really well.