“The goal of meditation isn’t to control your thoughts, it’s to stop letting your thoughts control you.”

Jon Andre started practicing meditation 20 years ago as a way to find calm and reduce stress. It’s made such an impact on his life that he transitioned to becoming a meditation teacher through his work at meditationSHIFT. He told us more about his practice and the benefits he has received from daily, consistent practice.

Why did you start meditating? What was your goal?

My goal in the beginning was simple: I wanted to reduce stress. This is important, because it seems trendy these days to say that there should be no goals in meditation. I disagree. There needs to be something that brings you to the practice in the beginning, and motivates you to turn it into a habit that you do every day. If there isn’t, you will most likely try meditation once or twice and then give up. Mindfulness and meditation offer a wide range of benefits, but you have to develop a consistent practice to realize them. The only way to develop that consistent practice is to have a reason to try in the first place.

What is your meditation routine?

I do “formal” meditation a minimum of twice a day, for 20 minutes each session. More important, though, I work to bring mindfulness to everything I do during my day when I am not formally meditating.

For me, meditation is like the practice a performer or athlete does to execute well on the stage or in the game. My formal meditation sessions (“practice”) enable me to bring mindfulness to the rest of my life (the “stage” or “game,” in this analogy).

Too many people look at meditating as a chore. This instills a negative mindset, and makes it easier to give up. If, however, you view it from the standpoint of what it can do for you when you aren’t actually meditating, you start to see it more as a way of life – not an item to check off your “todo list.”

Can you tell me a story about how meditation improved your performance?

I don’t think there is one story I can isolate, because everything is connected. Instead, I look at how meditation has improved my life as a whole over the last 20 years. Meditation teaches you to cultivate awareness of your mind-made activity, and in doing so you learn not to get attached to it (or swept away by it). The applications for this are numerous: it can help with stress, worry, fear, anxiety, depression, regret, self-confidence, etc. The foundation for all of these things–what we commonly refer to as the “struggles of life”–is our mind. And, once you learn to understand your mind and how to deal with the challenges it creates, your life can improve dramatically.

I realized these benefits and many others over the past two decades, and my direct experience compelled me to begin teaching mindfulness and meditation to others. In my opinion, understanding your mind and developing a consistent practice are the most important things you can do for your happiness, health, and well-being. I started my company, meditationSHIFT, over 11 years ago. Between our self-study course, seminars, and speaking engagements, we help individuals, groups, and businesses realize the benefits of a consistent practice.

Do you think meditation gives you a competitive edge? Why?

Actually, meditation has helped me realize that I don’t need to be competitive with others. By learning to observe my mind, my thoughts, and all the other mental activity, I see that the concept of “competition” is a mind-made construct that only serves to separate me from everyone else, and promote a “me vs. you” mentality.

What I have learned through a consistent meditation practice is that I am not this entity alone on an island, struggling against the world. Instead, I am connected with everyone and everything else. We all strive for the same thing: to avoid pain and increase pleasure. Some of us do it in ways that are labeled “bad” and “unacceptable,” but we are all still striving for the same thing regardless of our tactics.

When thoughts pop up that I’m better than someone else or that someone else is better than me, I see them for what they are: temporary. They can go the same as they came, provided I don’t cling to them and turn them into “my story.”

Meditation helps you see things as they are, and it helps you reverse conditioning that you have developed over a lifetime. From this standpoint, you can say it makes you better and gives you an edge. But, that advantage should be used to contribute to the world, as opposed to distinguishing yourself from it.

What is the biggest misconception about meditation?

The biggest misconception is that you are supposed to stop thinking, or that you are supposed to control your thoughts. People come to the practice with these misconceptions, and they quickly grow frustrated when they are unable to accomplish them. The goal of meditation isn’t to control your thoughts, it’s to stop letting your thoughts control you.

Don’t try to stop thinking: it will continue to happen. And don’t try to control your thoughts. The content of your mind doesn’t matter. Instead, cultivate awareness, learn to observe non-judgmentally, and condition yourself to not follow your mind wherever it leads. If you do this on a consistent basis, you learn that there is this underlying state of contentment that is always there. You just have to strip away the mental baggage that is piled on top of it.

Get your free chapter of The Strongest Mind in the Room: How Meditation Boosts Human Performance. Find free guided meditations on our How to Meditate Lift Guide.

[Tweet “”The goal of meditation isn’t to control your thoughts, it’s to stop letting them control you.” – @5rulesforlife via @coachdot”]

“Meditation and aggression are completely compatible. Think about it: Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant meditate in the service of being as effectively aggressive as possible.”

Jonathan Rosenfeld, Ph.D., is a Change Strategist who coaches CEOs and companies in mindful leadership, including Medium.com where he leads Leadership and Change Strategy. Jonathan is extremely passionate about building mindful workspaces that create environments for better work and more effective leadership (read this if you want to learn more about how he’s building a mindful workspace at Medium). He sat down with us to explain the benefits of meditation for leaders and how he’s seen the practice empower leaders and employees alike to do their best work.

How did you get into meditation?

I was curious about meditation from the time that I was an adolescent, both in terms of how it alleviated psychological distress and also just the idea of learning to do something that would be so transformative and helped you be in the world in a more meaningful, perceptive way. And so as an adolescent, I looked into different meditation practices and went on various retreats. I was never completely taken by the experience, though. I thought I was bad at meditation, just as most people think they are when they first try it. You get tired of being really bad at something, so even though I continued to meditate those beliefs stayed with me through my adult life.

About three years ago, various things were going on with my career that were very exciting but also created a lot of stress. This frustrated me. Granted, it’s a well established phenomenon that the things that are exciting are also anxiety-producing, but I was still annoyed. I thought that if my career was blossoming, that I should primarily be happy, have fun, and not feel so stressed out.

I was a bit concerned that being stressed out was costing me some degree of intellectual acuity. I wanted to bring my full cognitive ability to coaching people and being as effective as possible. So I decided to give meditation another try. I talked to various friends about meditation and was directed to Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), Jon Kabat-Zinn’s state of the art model. They really distilled down the actual meditation practices that are psychologically transformative in a very methodical, instruction-based way. So I said OK, I’ll give this type of meditation a try. The next challenge for me was to find a teacher because I didn’t want a teacher who in any way felt new-agey to me. I found Bob Stahl, a down to earth, working class guy from Maine. During his retreat, I felt like I was successfully meditating for the first time. That was three years ago. I’ve very conscientiously stuck to my meditation practice since then and it’s just gotten stronger and stronger. Of course there are peaks and valleys but the meditation practice has gotten stronger and stronger over time.

What was the breakthrough moment for you?

I had a two-part breakthrough moment. One of the reasons that I’d given up on meditation previously is that all of these unpleasant thoughts would come to the forefront of my mind when I would start to meditate. This was the last stuff that I want to be thinking about: terrible things that have happened to people I know, thoughts like that. So when I went on that retreat, sure enough I did the first meditation and these horrible, horrible things popped into my head. I talked to Bob about it and he was just very compassionate. He encouraged me to hang in there. I found myself sort of melting and getting more and more relaxed during the meditation. My heart felt more robust and I began to feel a lot of compassion for myself and for other people. By the end of the second day, I was thoroughly enjoying meditating, which had never happened to me before. Meditation had always felt like work. When I got home from the retreat, my children blurted out that I was smiling more than usual and said that it was really uncharacteristic of me to seem so happy. And I thought, wow, that’s a pretty fantastic endorsement.

When did you start incorporating meditation into your coaching practice?

Pretty immediately. I started talking to a client about meditation, recommending it not just for them as leaders but also for their employees. They were convinced enough to give it a try, so I ended up bringing Bob Stahl to an all-hands retreat where he spent half a day instructing us in meditation and mindfulness.

But I’d incorporated mindfulness into my coaching even before then. While I didn’t develop a deep meditation practice until a few years ago, I’d always done some type of meditative practice. I’ve been doing what I call micro-meditations since I was an adolescent and have always incorporated those in my coaching.

What is a micro-meditation?

A micro-meditation is effectively a way to slow down and pause your overreactive brain. So maybe you stand up. You take a few breaths. You do muscle stretch or a full body scan from your head down to your feet. You identify where you hold tension and you release the tension. Just thirty seconds of calming yourself down can improve focus and lead to better outcomes. When you get the physical and mental tension out of you, your presence, demeanor, and temperament become more relaxed. You feel more connected to yourself.

I used to coach people to pay attention to their muscle contractions during negotiations. If you use a micro-meditation to get your body neutral before a meeting, you’ll have the awareness to notice any increased tension during interactions. New tension is a signal to pay attention because something is going on in the room that you’re not totally comfortable with. You might not be cognitively aware of a problem, but you’re subconsciously aware which triggers your body’s stress response.

You don’t get the same transformational insight with micro-meditation that you get with a deeper meditation practice but it’s a really valuable practice and skill.

How does meditation make you a better communicator?

Well, we all in a non-pathological way, deal with a tremendous amount of fear. If you want to use a less charged word, we all deal with a tremendous amount of apprehension. And since we are wired to survive and procreate, as opposed to optimize, that apprehension becomes the reason that we don’t take action. That inaction is routinely a conversation we have to have because we’re too apprehensive about a negative outcome.

I think that if you meditate, then your threshold for moving into an apprehensive state is much lower. Your improve your ability to treat your apprehension as an existential phenomenon as opposed to information that should lead to how you make a decision in one way or another. Here’s a story from my coaching experience to illustrate this point. Recently, one of my clients had to have a critical conversation with his boss. He was worried that he might be out of a job if the meeting went poorly. We walked through as much data as possible, framed the situation, talked through everything, and then I asked him what he would recommend if he had nothing to fear. And he spills out, “Blah blah blah.” I asked him how it felt. He said, “That felt great!” So I said, “That felt great because this is in fact what you need to say. That’s exactly what you should say to your boss.”

The client had all of these irrational fears around how his boss might act. Let’s assume that his boss is a rational, reasonable, compassionate person who highly values him and wants to make best use of him at the company. Then he should say exactly what he wanted to say in the first place.

One founder told us that meditation made them more aggressive in their leadership. That seems contradictory to me– what do you think?

One of these days, I want to do a big talk on the subject, because meditation and aggression are completely compatible. Think about it: Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant meditate in the service of being as effectively aggressive as possible.

One hallmark of highly effective leaders is their ability to make complex decisions. Leaders are often faced with massive amounts of ambiguous data with which to make these decisions. They have to accept the ambiguity but make a clear decision. People won’t follow confusing messaging or believe in an ambiguous mission. And so what leaders tend to do is create false dichotomies by ignoring or getting rid of data that doesn’t support their decision. They try to make decisions black and white so that they can act with more conviction. But of course there is no intellectual integrity in acting that way.

The challenge every leader faces is, can they accept high levels of ambiguity and then convincingly make the best decision that they can make at that time. I think meditation helps immensely with that and allows you to accept the phenomenon of the ambiguity without having to be pained by it. I assume this is what the founder means by meditation makes them more aggressive. They’re making quicker decisions. They’re doing things with more conviction. They’re not equivocating. Meditation made them a more powerful leader but that doesn’t make them any less compassionate or sensitive or thoughtful, either.

If you talk to leaders, you’ll hear this all the time: what I did today I should have done 6 months ago and I knew it. There’s often very little to be gained [by stalling] once a decision is made in your mind. A strong meditation practice let’s you make better decisions, earlier, and with more with more conviction.

Stalling on making a decision is a huge issue for CEOs. I mean you’re also dealing with cognitive dissonance: once you’ve decided to fire someone of course you should have fired them six months ago, whether it’s in fact true or not.

Can you share some examples of how being a mindful leader makes you more effective?

Well speaking of firing, it’s good practice and compassionate leadership not to fire someone too quickly. If you’re unhappy with somebody, before firing them you want to see if you can turn them around. But the main strategy for turning people around is to give them more chances to make the same mistakes that they’ve made previously. That’s not a winning strategy. More often than not, they’re going to make the same mistakes if you do that. I think that to the extent that meditation supports self-awareness, if you’re going to give a person another chance, then give them a really different chance. Put them in a position where you are both going to learn more about who this employee is.

Here’s another example of how you can be a more mindful leader. Say that there is somebody doing X in your company. They tell you they want to do Y. They do X really well and other people are in charge of doing Y, so there’s no real incentive to support the change. But if you slow down enough to acknowledge that you don’t truly know who they are or what they’re capable or not capable of and you give them a measured opportunity to do Y, then one of two things happens in my experience. One is that they do Y and they do Y surprisingly well. You’ve just opened up the door for them to develop their talent and be an even more productive member of the company. The other outcome is that they never do anything. In that case, they probably never really wanted to do Y in the first place–they simply wanted to push or pull in some way, but you’ve removed the tension from your relationship with your employee. Now you haven’t blocked them from doing something and they have made their own choice as to whether they want to do it or not.

What other skills do you think meditation gives leaders?

There are so many. For one, meditation helps leaders be less reactive. This is huge. People look to leaders to see how they are supposed to feel. Should they be optimistic? Nervous? Excited? Leaders set the tone and energy in many ways. Among the things that meditation does is that it lowers all of your physiological indices. So people who meditate tend to present as calmer, more relaxed people. Given again how much people scrutinize leaders, I think that’s phenomenally impactful.

Meditation can also help leaders remove everyday stress and anxiety from their lives. Leaders absorb massive amounts of anxiety and tension from everyone around them. That’s part of their job. In fact, if you’re absorbing people’s tension and anxiety then part of their association with you is that “When I am around So-and-so, I feel better.” That in and of itself really empowers you as a leader. But you can’t absorb it and hold it and continue to be effective. You have to metabolize it. You can do that through anything from cognitive exercises to rigourous exercise to meditation.

Meditation also gives leaders more poise. Leaders might go into a situation that feels like a crisis, but if they’re self-aware then they can ask themselves, “This feels like a crisis but is it really a crisis?” Most of the time, it isn’t a crisis, which also reduces the pressure, which should reduce stalling on a decision. Usually there is a significant window within which a leader has to take action and being less reactive lets leaders calmly and assertively deal with a stressful situation.

Finally, I think that meditation simply makes people happier. People enjoy their lives more when they meditate. They savor their successes more. One of my clients manages a sales team. Every time that the sales team had a success, he would raise the bar for what he wanted them to do, which is perfectly normal when managing sales teams. But in doing so he never let his sales team celebrate. He was so hyped up by their success he encouraged them to immediately achieve more. My client learned to relax and allow his team to celebrate for a few days and revel in their success before giving them another challenge. The employees were more energized and began to see him not as an unremitting task master but as somebody who celebrates and appreciates their accomplishments. It made them more motivated to work for him.

How does meditation nurture poise and presence?

That’s a great question. I was just talking to a leader this morning who is bringing me into his company to do the keynote for a retreat. This particular company has always prioritized making sure that it’s leaders have strong emotional intelligence. But I told him that no matter how good you are, some days you are smarter than other days. I asked him how he would know the days that he is out to lunch versus the days that he is not? How can you track that? It’s really hard, if not impossible to do so, but you can set yourself up for more success if you meditate. Meditation increases the number of days when you are on and when you are present.

Nobody whose amygdala is highly agitated is present. From neuroscience we know that one of the basic human dilemmas is that the amygdala up-regulates. The amygdala, or the memory and fear center of your brain, routinely, erroneously tells your conscious brain to be apprehensive even when there is nothing to truly be worried about. Worry is distracting. If part of being an effective leader is that people experience you as empathic, as really listening, really being present, you might be able to pull off the ‘look’ but the substance isn’t there if you’re just chronically agitated by all of the things that being in a leadership role carries. But if you meditate, you increase your ability to be present and put aside all of those worries that you can’t do anything about at that time. For example, right now I am in a room with you. The best use of my time, right now, is to be fully present in our conversation. I could pay half attention to you and ruminate over some problem that I’m not going to be able to solve until next week anyway when I get new resources or new data, but it’s more effective and more enjoyable for me to be in the moment with you.

One of the things that I really passionately believe is that people have a need to be accurately seen, not necessarily agreed to. For example, let’s say I have a report coming to me about an upcoming decision and my employee makes a compelling case. If she feels like I’ve really heard her out and understood her argument, yet I don’t follow her proposal, she’ll have no problem with the final decision. Presumably, she’ll defer to my greater authority or experience. If she feels like I didn’t listen to her side of the story, then she’s left at the end of the conversation going, “You know, if he’d actually listened to me, he would have done what I had suggested.” That creates tension and makes it harder for her to follow the the plan. Meditation is the practice of paying attention. Paying attention makes you phenomenally more effective in connecting with people and making them feel heard, which makes it easier for you to inspire them and bring them along with you in whatever direction you need to as a leader.

Do you think meditation gives you a competitive edge?

Well the short answers is yes, absolutely.

The longer answer is that if you can hold complex data in your head and not create false dichotomies, you’ll be a better leader since you usually make better decision if you have more data. If you’re more aware of your confirmation bias, then your ability to consider a broader range of solutions will help you come up with better solutions to problems. If you’ve increased your ability to absorb anxiety around you rather than transmit anxiety, you’ll lead more confident, more effective teams. If you can be more actively empathic in a meeting or negotiation and recognize the tension in the room, that’ll give you a huge advantage.

None of that is meditation per se, but meditation helps you do that. In terms of what we know about how the brain is re-architected as one meditates, I think the practice gives you a humongous advantage. It’s sort of a no-brainer that meditation will make you a better leader. You asked earlier, how much I’ve incorporated meditation into my coaching. It’s not the first thing that I suggest, but once I develop a certain amount of rapport with somebody, I highly encourage meditation. No matter what you’re trying to achieve, it’ll give you a leg up.

Do you have tips for people who want to incorporate mindfulness into their work lives?

One thing I have found helpful over the last several years in terms of bringing your meditation practice into the workplace is to return to your body and the breath over and over again throughout your day. I often set a timer when I know I am going to be working for many hours straight. Every hour when it goes off I close my laptop, raise my gaze, and practice shamatha. After a minute or so I return to my work, setting the timer again for another hour. Doing so breaks up the work routine and habitual stressful momentum, and allows me to return to what’s going on right now, several times throughout my work day.

Get your free chapter of The Strongest Mind in the Room: How Meditation Boosts Human Performance. Find free guided meditations on our How to Meditate Coach.me Guide.

[Tweet “”Meditation and aggression are completely compatible.” @coachdotme interviews @rosenfeld_j on meditation for leaders”]

“In the morning, I’ll roll out of bed, drink a glass of water and immediately start my practice. No email. No TV. Just water and mediation.”

Steve Schlafman is a Principal at RRE Ventures, where he focuses on investing in early-stage startups including Breather (by Coach.me user Julien Smith), Giphy, and The Black Tux. He’s also a new meditator on a 54 day streak on Coach.me. We asked Steve about why he started meditating, how he’s fit the new habit into his busy schedule, and how daily meditation has made his life and work better so far.

24 straight days of meditation. The benefits have just started to reveal themselves. I feel more mindful, energy and productive than ever.

— Steve Schlafman (@schlaf) September 22, 2014

Why did you start meditating? What was your goal?

I started to meditate because I desperately wanted to spend less time in the past and the future and more time in the present.  Additionally, I tend to be a very anxious person so I was looking for a daily practice that ground me and calm my mind.  When I initially started, my goal was to practice least once a day and record how I felt after each session. I found it very easy to incorporate it into my daily routine.

What is your meditation routine?

The style of meditation that I learned is called Vedic. The idea is to practice twice a day for about twenty minutes.  I’ve adopted that schedule and have found it super easy to incorporate into my busy life.  I’ve made this a priority so each day I block out enough time to make sure I get in my fix.  In the morning, I’ll roll out of bed, drink a glass of water and immediately start my practice.  No email.  No TV. Just water and mediation. It’s the first thing I do every day.  In the afternoon when I’m about to hit a wall and I usually reach for sugar and caffeine, I’ll lock myself in a conference room or my office for a quick session. Before I started to meditate I’d usually take fifteen to twenty minutes in the afternoon for coffee so finding a bit of extra time wasn’t an issue.

What benefits have you noticed in the first month of practicing?

I’m a lot more patient and I don’t let small things bother me. Before I embarked on this journey, I would stress about things that were in the past or future and totally out of my control. Meditation has helped me become more mindful of my emotions. Previously I found myself running around and trying to do a million things at once. It was very hard to notice how I was truly thinking and feeling. By incorporating meditation into my daily habits, I’ve become more aware to my environment, others around me and the people I’m interacting with. Over the summer and prior to meditating, I read the book, ‘The Power of Now,’ and it helped me prepare my mind for deeper awareness.

Can you tell me a story about how meditation improved your performance?

I’ve only been meditating now for about fifty days so I’m still very new on this journey. My friends and colleagues at work claim that my ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder) is virtually gone. I find that to be a huge complement because I’ve always had a hard time sitting still.

Do you think meditation gives you a competitive edge?

Absolutely. I fundamentally believe it’s important to slow down a few times each day and allow my body and mind to rest. Most importantly, setting an intention during the meditation helps me focus on a certain aspect of work and/or life. When I finish a meditation session, I’m able to focus on what’s in front of me for the next three to six hours. Most importantly, I don’t hold on to things in the future and the past which helps me open up mental space for what’s in front of me.

Get your free chapter of The Strongest Mind in the Room: How Meditation Boosts Human Performance. Find free guided meditations on our How to Meditate Coach.me Guide.

[Tweet “Why @RRE’s @schlaf kicks off his mornings with meditation”]

“In the morning, I’ll roll out of bed, drink a glass of water and immediately start my practice. No email. No TV. Just water and mediation.”

Steve Schlafman is a Principal at RRE Ventures, where he focuses on investing in early-stage startups including Breather (by Coach.me user Julien Smith), Giphy, and The Black Tux. He’s also a new meditator on a 54 day streak on Coach.me. We asked Steve about why he started meditating, how he’s fit the new habit into his busy schedule, and how daily meditation has made his life and work better so far.

24 straight days of meditation. The benefits have just started to reveal themselves. I feel more mindful, energy and productive than ever.
— Steve Schlafman (@schlaf) September 22, 2014

Why did you start meditating? What was your goal?

I started to meditate because I desperately wanted to spend less time in the past and the future and more time in the present.  Additionally, I tend to be a very anxious person so I was looking for a daily practice that ground me and calm my mind.  When I initially started, my goal was to practice least once a day and record how I felt after each session. I found it very easy to incorporate it into my daily routine.

What is your meditation routine?

The style of meditation that I learned is called Vedic. The idea is to practice twice a day for about twenty minutes.  I’ve adopted that schedule and have found it super easy to incorporate into my busy life.  I’ve made this a priority so each day I block out enough time to make sure I get in my fix.  In the morning, I’ll roll out of bed, drink a glass of water and immediately start my practice.  No email.  No TV. Just water and mediation. It’s the first thing I do every day.  In the afternoon when I’m about to hit a wall and I usually reach for sugar and caffeine, I’ll lock myself in a conference room or my office for a quick session. Before I started to meditate I’d usually take fifteen to twenty minutes in the afternoon for coffee so finding a bit of extra time wasn’t an issue.

What benefits have you noticed in the first month of practicing?

I’m a lot more patient and I don’t let small things bother me. Before I embarked on this journey, I would stress about things that were in the past or future and totally out of my control. Meditation has helped me become more mindful of my emotions. Previously I found myself running around and trying to do a million things at once. It was very hard to notice how I was truly thinking and feeling. By incorporating meditation into my daily habits, I’ve become more aware to my environment, others around me and the people I’m interacting with. Over the summer and prior to meditating, I read the book, ‘The Power of Now,’ and it helped me prepare my mind for deeper awareness.

Can you tell me a story about how meditation improved your performance?

I’ve only been meditating now for about fifty days so I’m still very new on this journey. My friends and colleagues at work claim that my ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder) is virtually gone. I find that to be a huge complement because I’ve always had a hard time sitting still.

Do you think meditation gives you a competitive edge?

Absolutely. I fundamentally believe it’s important to slow down a few times each day and allow my body and mind to rest. Most importantly, setting an intention during the meditation helps me focus on a certain aspect of work and/or life. When I finish a meditation session, I’m able to focus on what’s in front of me for the next three to six hours. Most importantly, I don’t hold on to things in the future and the past which helps me open up mental space for what’s in front of me.

Get your free chapter of The Strongest Mind in the Room: How Meditation Boosts Human Performance. Find free guided meditations on our How to Meditate Coach.me Guide.

[Tweet “Why @RRE’s @schlaf kicks off his mornings with meditation”]

“If I have an emotionally upsetting experience, I don’t get so derailed by it.”

Dr. Kristin Neff is a leading researcher in self-compassion, “extending compassion to one’s self in instances of perceived inadequacy, failure, or general suffering.” You tap into your self-compassion when you forgive yourself for a mistake or muster up confidence to overcome a challenge like she has in raising her autistic son. In her research, Neff breaks down self-compassion into three elements: kindness toward oneself, recognition that suffering is something that we all go through, and mindfulness. She explained to us more about what it means to be self-compassionate, how she trains people to build self-compassion, and why it’s such an important life skill.

Why does your body and brain react the way it does to self-criticism?

There are a few ways that it happens. One is that we tend to identify with our thoughts, so the system which is designed to protect our bodily self gets triggered when there is a threat to our self concept. Our body really reacts the same way [that it does when it sees a physical threat]. When our threat system is triggered, we basically have three ways of reacting. One would be to FIGHT, which takes the form of self-criticism. One is FLIGHT, which would be avoiding thinking about the issue but still feeling really stressed from it. One example is procrastination. The third would reaction would be to FREEZE. When people freeze mentally, you usually observe rumination. You’ll get stuck in this loop of thinking, with the false noti0n that if you think about it for the 67th time the problem will go away.

Can self-criticism be helpful?

There’s lots of pressure out there but we don’t need to add any more pressure by beating ourselves up. Usually there is enough stress inherent with deadlines and the nature of situations that we don’t need to artificially create more. It really depends how you are defining criticism when you ask that. There is absolutely a benefit to constructive criticism. Is there a benefit to negative criticism? I don’t know. I think that people think there is an it does work to the extent that if you are so afraid of your inner critic that it might lead you to take some action. But what would it look like if you motivated yourself because you wanted to do well, because you cared and you wanted to reach your full potential, instead of acting out of fear?
The best set of studies out there is a paper by Breines and Chen. It’s a nice study because it’s all experimental, whereas many studies in the subject matter use self-report scales. The researchers didn’t have people criticize themselves. Instead, she had a self esteem boost control and a neutral control. The lack of self compassion is criticism. And she found that people who are induced to be more self-compassionate about a failure do better — they’re more motivated and they try harder at the task. In our own research, we have self report data that shows that self-compassion is linked to less fear of failure and more perceived competence, two hugely motivational variables.

What drives you to self-censor or self-criticize?

It comes from a variety of sources. For some people, it might the internalized voice of someone who criticized them in the past. We know that parental criticism is linked to lower self-compassion, for instance. Another reason you might criticize yourself is to “beat the other person to the punch” so to speak. Let’s say that you are an artists and you are afraid that someone will comment negatively on your work; you might criticize yourself publicly before they have a chance. That takes some of the emotional weight out of hearing it from others.
I think that if you start looking at the inner critic, the inner critic knows what is right and what should be done. Sometimes it’s easier to feel that you should have been perfect, which implies that you could have been perfect, rather than to accept the reality that as human beings, we aren’t perfect.
Another problem with self-compassion is that people usually have compassion for others but not for themselves. They tend to exclude themselves from the circle of compassion.

Why is that?

That’s a good question. For one, it’s not encouraged in our culture to have self-compassion. People sometimes think that it’s selfish or narcissistic to love yourself too much. Or they think that they will to lose motivation if they are kind to themselves. But they don’t have any of those concerns with compassion for others!

Are there any cultures that do encourage self-compassion? What have you learned from studying them?

There is very little cross culture research, but we know that practicing Buddhists have more self-compassion than the general public. We did one study looking at Thailand, Taiwan, and the United States. In Thailand, they take their Buddhism very seriously. For instance, men are supposed to go on a week-long meditation retreat before getting married. It’s really part of their culture. People in Thailand had the highest levels of self-compassion. But it’s not just an East-West thing, because people in Taiwan had the lowest levels of self-compassion. In fact, it was found that in a lot of Asian cultures criticism has really seemed to be a virtue that people practice. Americans are more in-between. In all three cultures, self-compassion was linked to higher life satisfaction.

What is the connection between mindfulness and self-compassion?

Well mindfulness is a core component of self-compassion. You can’t have self-compassion without mindfulness. You have to be aware that you are suffering, you’ve got to turn toward it and be with it certainly long enough to respond to the suffering with compassion. We know that the MBSR (Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction) program raises self-compassion even though there isn’t a lot of explicit instruction around self-compassion. You receive a bit of loving kindness meditation on the retreat day. It’s mainly conveyed through teacher warmth. For some people, that seems to be enough, but for people who tend to really lack self-compassion, it seems to be and we have pilot data that suggests that they need more explicit practice around self-compassion. So if you were to take our self-compassion workshop, it’s pretty radically different from a traditional mindfulness workshop. We give a lot of exercises in which you call up a difficult situation in your life and practice self-compassion.
What was interesting in 0ur study of the self-compassion program is that there was no difference between formal meditation and informal practice in terms of how much self-compassion was gained. The informal practice might be something like putting your hand on your heart when you are suffering, using self-compassionate language toward yourself, dealing compassionately with your inner critic and trying to understand what it’s trying to tell you. We have a lot of practices that don’t require being on a cushion, so to speak, and that are typically shorter. They were equally predictive and both Chris and I were surprised by that.

How does meditation build self-compassion?

That’s a good question. It depends on what type of meditation you are talking about. I also don’t think that we have the answer to that scientifically yet.
One type of meditation that people have looked at is loving kindness or Metta meditation. Loving-kindness meditation is aimed at increasing loving-kindness (tenderness and consideration toward others). The research has shown that this kind of meditation increases self-compassion.
In our self-compassion program, we adapt a lot of meditations to increase self-compassion in particular. So how does the meditation increase it? I suppose by training the brain to have more positive emotional experiences toward oneself.

How do you modify traditional mindfulness meditations to build self-compassion?

We have two ways of adapting loving kindness meditation. The first is to target, or think thoughts toward, a loved one — it’s very easy to feel loving kindness toward a loved one. You imagine yourself with the loved one, you kind of slip yourself in.Then you switch your focus from the loved one and you to just focusing on yourself. We then give people an exercise to think about what’s deeply meaningful for them and what they yearn to hear from others. It makes them feel loved, validated, and accepted, and they use that as the basis for coming up with their own phrases that they can then say to themselves.
We also have a variation of a breath meditation that we call affectionate breathing. So it is a breath meditation but we layer in a lot of things like putting your hand on your heart, get your oxytocin flowing, being very gentle when they bring their mind back, which they do in mindfulness meditation too, but using metaphors of like, imagine your attention was a little child that had wandered off, and the gentleness with which you would usher that child back. So that’s mindfulness with a little bit more explicit affection in there, it’s not as radically different.
And then our third core meditation is called giving and receiving compassion. You might say it’s a variation on tong glen. With tong glen, you breathe in the suffering of others and you transform it and breathe out compassion. We found that this was a more advanced practice. So instead we have people breathe compassion for themselves and breathe out compassion for others. We use this as the basis for both compassionate listening and relationships and also for caregivers.

How does meditation give you a competitive edge?

Does it give me a competitive edge? Well, it depends again how you are defining competition. Meditation allows me to be more productive and do better work. So that you could say provides a competitive edge. Does it mean that somehow I can outsmart the competition more? I think sometimes it may not or it may makes me want to compete a little less. But I’m certain that it makes my work higher quality and helps me be productive. You know in academia, that is a competitive edge — if you get more papers out there so that people read what you do.

What have you noticed about your productivity since you began meditating?

Well one is that if I have an emotionally upsetting experience, I don’t get so derailed by it. One example is when my son got diagnosed with autism. It was very hard but the experience didn’t totally derail me — I could still do my work, I could still function, I could still keep going.
This may sound roundabout but because of my self-compassion and mindfulness practice, I took a big risk by choosing to study self-compassion in the first place. 15 years ago, it was still a little “woo woo” to study anything related to meditation or self-compassion. I mean, there was some mindfulness work out there but even back then there wasn’t a lot. I think my practice helped me make that choice because I was passionate about it, even if other people might raise their eyebrows. And so I think that meditation gave me a competitive edge in the long run because I chose to study something risky but that I was really motivated to research.

Get your free chapter of The Strongest Mind in the Room: How Meditation Boosts Human Performance. Find free guided meditations on our How to Meditate Coach.me Guide.

[Tweet “”If I have an emotionally upsetting experience, I don’t get so derailed by it.” @coachdotme interviews Dr. Kristin Neff @self_compassion”]

“My biggest rule is no email before meditation.”

Jeena Cho started meditating to relieve the stress from her high-pressure job as a lawyer. Meditation made such a positive impact in her life that she now teaches meditation to other lawyers and is even writing a book on meditation for the American Bar Association.

Cho is also a popular coach on Coach.me. She told us why she thinks meditation is such a powerful tool for lawyers or anyone in a high-stress job, how meditation has boosted her performance and gave out her top tips for people just getting started.

How has meditation improved your performance?

In short, meditation has helped me become more of myself. It has also helped me to let go of my tendency to cling to a certain outcome. I’ve loosened my grip on wanting things my way and demanding perfection. The only thing I can do is show up, do my best, and recognize that the outcome is often not up to me.

As a bankruptcy lawyer, I’m the bearer of my client’s suffering. I’ve worked with clients who ended up in dire financial situations due to unexpected death, illness, divorce, and/or deceit. I used to internalize all my clients’ suffering, and carry it around with me. This led to some detachment from my clients; I’d resist hearing their sad stories. Now, I can be fully present with my clients, and listen to their stories with kindness and compassion. I can also acknowledge my emotions that may come bubbling up to the surface. I can just be with my clients without immediately jumping into “lawyer mode.”

The way I interact with people in general has shifted in a positive direction. When I’m stuck in traffic, instead of getting irritated or angry, I practice loving-kindness meditation and send well wishes to those around me who are also stuck in traffic.

I also find that I am able to focus on the task at hand so that I can get more done. But, I’m not doing more just for the sake of accomplishing more. I’ve become more intentional about why I am doing (or not doing) a task. I now instinctively focus on tasks that are aligned with my mission, values and vision, instead of mindlessly doing more for the sake of checking a to-do item off the list.

Why did you start meditating? What was your goal?

I started meditating because I was losing clumps of hair due to constant stress and anxiety. My options were go on antidepressants or try something new. I decided to try Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) based on the scientific research.

My goal was to reduce stress and anxiety so I’d stop losing hair. Thankfully, it worked! In hindsight, my body was giving me clues along the way that I was completely overwhelmed. I had constant insomnia, backaches, and headaches. I think losing hair was my body’s way of saying “pay attention!”

Do you think meditation gives you a competitive edge? If so, how?

Meditation has helped me become more focused and this certainly gives me a competitive edge. However, I feel it’s misguided to meditate solely to gain a leg up against your competition or peers. Meditation is so much more than a vehicle to increase concentration, focus, or productivity. Yes, meditation can help you do all of that, but that’s like buying a Porsche to drive to your local 7-Eleven.

Can you share a story about how meditation has helped you overcome obstacles?

One experience really stands out when I reflect on my meditation practice. I grew up in New York City and we were poor. I always felt a lot of pain whenever I saw a homeless person so my default reaction for many years was to avoid them. I’d cross the street or look away. It just felt so hopeless.

During one of my meditation classes, I read Rumi’s quote:

“Don’t turn away. Keep your gaze on the bandaged place. That’s where the light enters you.”

As an experiment, I decided to practice my loving-kindness meditation whenever I saw a homeless person. So, instead of turning away, I’d look at the person, make eye contact, and I’d silently wish that person well. I’d wish that person happiness and freedom from suffering. Then one day, as I was walking into BART, I saw a homeless person. He asked if I had any spare change and I told him that I couldn’t offer him money. He then saw the box of pastries I was carrying and asked if he could have a donut. I gladly obliged. He was delighted, and I felt so much joy that I almost broke into tears.

I was practicing looking at the painful places and I allowed for opportunities for the light to enter. Since I started this practice, I’ve had other similar encounters with homeless people. I once read that one of the most painful experiences of being homeless is the feeling of being invisible. Knowing that when I’m simply witnessing or being there for someone, even if it’s only for a moment can make a difference was a very powerful realization for me.

You’re writing a book about mindfulness for the American Bar Association. What is it about and what inspired you to write it?

I am writing a book called The Anxious Lawyer. It’s an eight week, self-guided course on cultivating a mindfulness practice for lawyers. The practice of law presents amazing opportunities for being mindful. There’s a tendency to demonize the opposing side, which leads to a lack of civility that is rampant in our legal system. My hope is that as more lawyers begin to practice mindfulness, we stop demonizing our opponents and recognize that we’re all playing our role. I have a role as a lawyer to represent my client to the best of my ability, and this needs to include recognizing our common humanity.

In addition, I hope that lawyers can put the “counsel” back into Counselor at Law. Often, clients come to us wanting “justice,” which most often means financial compensation. However, that’s not the end of the story. There’s often deep wounds, pain, and suffering beneath the surface. This may be the reason why even when my clients prevail and obtained a judgment in their favor, the victory feels hollow. I’d like to see lawyers play role of peacemakers, facilitating opportunities for forgiveness and healing.

What is your meditation routine?

I roll out of bed and go straight to my meditation cushion (after a “bio break”). I find that if I don’t meditate immediately after waking up, I can get easily distracted and skip meditation. My biggest rule is no email before meditation.

Depending on the day, I’ll sit for 5 – 45 minutes. I try to do a longer sit at least couple of times a week. I also like meditating on Caltrain on my way to work. Usually, I’ll set a timer using Insight Timer but occasionally, I like to use guided meditations.

Typically, I’ll do some combination of checking in, breath awareness, body scan, following the breath, noticing sensations, sounds, thoughts, loving-kindness and/or mantra meditation.

Recently, I started meditating for five minutes right before I fall asleep. I’ve found that adding the second meditation has helped me deepen my meditation experience and I sleep better.

Do you have tips for making meditation a habit?

Yes! Here are a few:

• Start small. Find a time commitment that you can easily accomplish on a daily basis. This may be 60 seconds or 10 minutes. Choose a goal that’s easy enough to maintain and slowly increase.
• Find a way to link your meditation to another routine so that you develop a habit, such as following your morning bio break or meditating immediately before or after brushing your teeth.
• Set your intention the night before. Before going to sleep, reaffirm your commitment to meditate everyday. You can imagine yourself getting out of bed, walking to your meditation chair or cushion and meditating.
• Begin again. Even if you don’t meditate for days, weeks or even months, you can always begin again. Don’t waste time criticizing yourself or judging yourself for not meditating. If you notice negative chatter, acknowledge it, but don’t get trapped in that negative thought train. Each moment is a brand new opportunity for you to begin or continue your meditation practice.

[Tweet “”My biggest rule is no email before meditation.” @coachdotme interviews lawyer @Jeena_Cho”]

Get your free chapter of The Strongest Mind in the Room: How Meditation Boosts Human Performance. Find free guided meditations on our How to Meditate Coach.me Guide.

“Meditation is like defragging my personal hard drive. If I don’t meditate, everything is slower. If I do meditate, I think and feel more clearly throughout the day no matter what the task.”

Derek Flanzraich is the founder and CEO of health media website Greatist, which aims to be your top source of health information on the web. We definitely recommend checking out their resources on meditation. Derek told us about how he got interested in meditation, his trick for fitting the new habit into his daily routine, and why he’s excited that meditation is becoming more mainstream.

Why did you start meditating? What was your goal?

After reading more and more studies about how impactful meditation is scientifically proven to be, I finally caved and decided it was worth a try. I’m pretty open-minded and up for attempting just about everything, but for a long time felt meditation somehow seemed less actionable, less obvious, and less easy practical every day than most things in health and fitness. But boy was I wrong!

What is your meditation routine?

It’s changed a lot over time. It began as a struggle. I meant well but struggled to find a “trigger” that would allow me to stick with. A friend (and, to me, part-time guru) suggested I meditate for a few minutes after working out, something I do pretty regularly. Seemed crazy, but I tried it and the effect was powerful. When I decided I wanted to meditate more than 2-3 times a week, I moved the trigger to the only thing I for sure do every day, which is wake up. Now I spend 5-10 minutes focusing on my breath, on sound (using Calm.com‘s app), on a voice guiding me (using Headspace‘s app), or in simply silence depending on how I’m feeling every single morning before I shower and get ready for the day.

Can you tell me a story about how meditation improved your performance?

After a few weeks of truly consistent meditation, I was really able to feel the difference between a day I meditated and a day I didn’t. A mentor once told me the job of the CEO is to be the most calm person in the room and I’ve taken that powerfully to heart. If I spend that 5-10 minutes (seriously–that’s it!), I more easily find my breath all day, breathing into the present moment (whether amazing or stressful). If I don’t, I find I’m foggier and struggle to keep myself grounded in what’s going on then. For some odd tech-y reason I think of it like defragging my personal hard drive. If I don’t meditate, everything is slower. If I do meditate, I think and feel more clearly throughout the day no matter what the task.

Do you think meditation gives you a competitive edge? Why?

Of course. I think science is only beginning to really unpack the danger of stress, so things like working out, eating healthy, sleeping enough, and meditating regularly are undoubtedly powerful, and probably the most unexplored, tools in anybody’s performance arsenal. I like to believe they’re sort of super powers that anyone can tap into (the best kind of super powers). I’m stoked more and more people are championing the effect these activities can have on less obvious things like focus, communication, creativity, and happiness. And I hope it’s only the very beginning!

[Tweet “”Meditation is like defragging my personal hard drive.” @coachdotme interviews @thederek”]

Get your free chapter of The Strongest Mind in the Room: How Meditation Boosts Human Performance. Find free guided meditations on our How to Meditate Coach.me Guide.

“[Our studies found that] Open Monitoring meditation induces a control state that promotes divergent thinking, a style of thinking that allows many new ideas of being generated. Second, Focused Attention meditation does not sustain convergent thinking, the process of generating one possible solution to a particular problem.” ~ Colzato, Lorenza S. et al.

Dr. Lorenza Colzato is a cognitive scientist and researcher at the Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition in the Netherlands. Her recent research revealed that meditation can boost your creativity. Specifically, Colzato found that open monitoring meditation (such as when you notice different thoughts and feelings) improves divergent thinking, which is the kind of thought process that helps you brainstorm many ideas. Further, she suspects that meditation enhances creative thinking by improving people’s moods. We asked her a few questions about her research, which you can read in full here.

What inspired your research?

Steve Jobs, who is a very inspirational person. He is arguably one of the most creative minds of our time and he dedicated his life to Soto Zen Buddhist meditation practice.

Steve Jobs has often referred to meditation as the main source of creativity. So, I wanted to test the idea that indeed meditation makes you more creative.

What practical insights can someone take from your study?

The practical lesson for people is that if they need to do a brain storm session at work, they could do an open monitoring meditation (such as Vipassana) before it. By doing so, they will be able  to generate even more new ideas. So, in this respect practitioners could change “when” they meditate.

Do you have any future research planned?

Currently we are investigating how much practice is necessary to obtain meditation effects on creativity and whether this effect is due to a trait (of being an individual interested in meditation), a state (ad-hoc induced by meditation), or both. To test for these possibilities, we are comparing a group of practitioners and a group of novices.

[Tweet “Meditation For Creativity: an interview with cognitive scientist @LorenzaColzato”]

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