Coach.me provides everything you need to improve performance in diet, fitness, productivity, and life. If you’re feeling inspired by what you’ve read, try adding these habits to your dashboard:

• Meditate: Try one or more of our guided meditation plans.
• Stand More, Sit Less @ Work: Lessen the health risks that come with a sedentary lifestyle by standing at your desk
• The Whole Foods Diet: Eat only recognizable foods and avoid processed ones.

Rader provides that knowledge and support by offering coaching services, her blog, and in the Coach.me community. Rader is a popular coach and author of the 25 in 25 December Fitness Challenge and 10 by 10 challenge. She shared her daily routine with us along with some of her best tips for habit change that works.

How do you start your own day? Do you have any daily rituals or routines?

I wake up and check my heart rate variability for three minutes, drink at least 8 ounces of water and then straight to exercise. Even if I have plans to exercise in the afternoon or evening, I still do something in the morning. Exercise is like brushing my teeth. I don’t feel like I can get on with my day without it. I feel more productive and energized. After, I meditate using calm.com or a mindfulness meditation for 2-20 minutes. Sometimes I’ll eat breakfast right away or I may wait until my husband wakes up, in which case I start on my most thought-intensive task for work. As many mornings as I can, I sit with my husband and have our bulletproof coffee before we go on with our day. It’s an important ritual that I miss when I can’t do it.

What are your eating habits like? Do you follow any specific program of eating?

I was a vegetarian for about 20 years. In January of 2014 I was diagnosed with Hashimoto’s Disease, adrenal fatigue, leaky gut and hypothalamic amenorrhea. It was a gut-puncher but really changed the way I eat and view my health. Being a gluten-free, soy-free, almost bean-free vegetarian was more difficult than I wanted it to be, so I started eating some meat again. I eat maybe one serving of grass-fed beef, organic chicken, turkey or wild fish a day, but my diet is largely plant-based. I eat 1-2 servings a day of a grain, typically rice, quinoa, corn or buckwheat—but most of my carbs are from vegetables. I don’t eat a lot of dairy—mainly Greek yogurt and kefir. I eat a 40-50% fat diet with about 20% protein and 30% carbs. This is VERY different than what I used to eat, but works well for me with my Hashimoto’s disease and the amount of activity I do. What we (including me!) used to think about fat isn’t true! I even had my cholesterol checked recently and my already stellar levels were even better after 10 months of eating this way.

There’s so much research being done and advice being published, how do you tell what’s real and what’s fake? How do you decide what’s relevant and what isn’t?

Being diagnosed with these conditions led me to research so much more, from a scientific journal perspective and not just what was popular. It has really opened my eyes how much misinformation is out there and won’t seem to go away. I enrolled in the Institute for Integrative Nutrition and will be an Integrative Nutrition Health Coach by June 2015. By the time this article is published I will also have my National Academy of Sports Medicine Fitness Nutrition Specialist Certification as well. I now look at the research that is being cited, how large the sample is and what the flaws or bias is in the study. Having been a vegetarian, I know that I was biased towards that diet so it was easy for me to find only the positives. I think that it happens in research as well. Looking at the whole picture is important. Vegans will always reference the China Study but there were flaws in that study. Paleos will advocate their studies but there are flaws there too. You can be a horrible Vegan eating a bunch of processed soy products and you can be a horrible Paleo eating a bunch of hormone-filled bacon. You can also be great at either with careful and conscious planning. Bioindividuality is what’s important. One person’s potion is another person’s poison. What works for me may not work for you. In the end, there is always going to be a commonality between any healthy nutrition plan that works: no or little refined white flour, no or little sugar and lots of vegetables. If you move toward that, you will succeed!

Is there any current thinking about diet and fitness that needs to be challenged?

That there is one sure-fire way of eating that works best for everyone. That to train for endurance or ultra-endurance events, you have to do an insane amount of hours (which is what I used to do).

Is there anything new you’ve started doing recently, or anything you’ve quit?

I started drinking a tapered-down version of bulletproof coffee with only half the oil and butter. This is new for my husband and I. It is delicious and satiating. I rarely drink coffee in cafes anymore because I prefer our version at home. I quit eating gluten this year due to Hashimoto’s Disease. It was hard for about three weeks, but now it’s fine except at restaurants and when visiting my family. That takes more planning. I can’t go without doing research first or just taking my own food.

How do you make adjustments to your workout? It’a hard to know what to do when you’re tired or having a bad workout.

I’ve had to make a LOT of adjustments to my training this year. I used to compete in ultra-endurance events up to 30 hours. This year was a wash while figuring out my thyroid but I plan to be back in business in 2015 now that things are steady. I don’t know if I’ll ever compete at that level again but I’ll still compete. My biggest realization is that I can stay fit with a lot less hours. I’m taking a more ancestral approach to training which gives me much more time to work on growing my business. I’m also a lot more flexible with my workout schedule and change it up based on my heart rate variability. This was a game changer for me. I bought a heart rate monitor and check my HRV every morning using the Sweetbeat App. Heart rate variability is different than heart rate. It is a measurement of your autonomic nervous system. If my HRV is low, I need to do a lower intensity workout. If it’s high, I can get to movin’!

Can you share some of the specific things you notice your top clients doing differently than the average client?

Consistency is key. People will make excuses for everything. Finding a trigger is important. That trigger can be waking up (like mine) or anything that you do before you move or exercise. I coach my clients to think of exercise as opportunities instead of workouts. The word workout insinuates putting on specific clothes, going to a gym or some other kind of setting, and getting sweaty. I have a hairdresser for a client who I gave five minute opportunities—exercises she can do in a skirt without getting sweaty. After two months of just 1-2 opportunities a day she sent me a text telling me her butt was a little higher, just from opportunities! Now that’s the kind of text I love to get

[Tweet “”Think of exercise as opportunities instead of workouts.” ~@marceyrader, How I Train”]

Coach.me provides everything you need to improve performance in diet, fitness, productivity, and life. Improve yoru fitness habits by adding these plans to your dashboard:

• 25 in 25 Holiday Exercise Challenge: Rader’s challenge for staying fit through the holidays, December 1-25. You can read about last year’s challenge: 25 in 25 Challenge
• 10 By 10 Exercise Challenge: getting just ten minutes of exercise before 10am can have a huge impact on your health and productivity. Beginner to advanced plan. It doesn’t matter what you do. Just do it!

• Set Priorities for Your Day: Make sure you get things done that will make you feel good about your day.
• Meditate: try one or more of our guided meditation plans.
• No Screens After 10pm: set a limit for when you’ll turn of screens, one way you might improve the quality of your sleep. Or search “screens” to find other “no screens” habits based on other times.

• #500WED: a community challenge to fall in love with writing again. Can you write 500 Words Every Day for a month?
• Write for 30 minutes: a timed practice of writing each day.
• Set Priorities for Your Day: Make sure you get things done that will make you feel good about your day.

• Write for 30 minutes: a timed practice of writing each day.
• Unclutter: bring some serenity to your work environment.
• #500WED: a community challenge to fall in love with writing again. Can you write 500 Words Every Day for a month?

Frauenfelder seems to do it all: he’s on the cutting edge of technology, yet he eschews mainstream consumer culture and inspires others to think, do and make for themselves—and he’s simply a delightful, unpretentious person to be around. We were thrilled to find out more about his habits.

What’s your own daily routine like? What habits do you cultivate and what benefits do you find in them?

I wake at 7am. I aim for 8 hours of sleep a night, so I’m in bed at 10, and I read or listen to podcasts until I fall asleep. While Carla and our two girls are getting ready for the day ahead, I make breakfast for everyone. I have coffee only for breakfast because I am more alert and feel better if I’m slightly hungry.

I drive my younger daughter to school then I come back and clean the cats’ litterbox and feed our bearded dragons. On alternate days Carla and I will do a short kettlebell workout. By this time it’s about 9am and I enter my home office to start working. I use the Things app to keep track of the tasks I need to do for my various projects. Every night before I quit working I go over Things and look at the tasks I want to do on the following day and write them down in a notebook I keep on my desk. So on the morning I look at that list and write a number next to each list item to indicate the order I plan to tackle the tasks. When I work on a task I pretend I have nothing else to do but that one thing. That really helps me focus and not freak out about all the things I need to do. I rarely get everything done on my list.

You’re an incredibly prolific writer and maker, but your posts on Boing Boing and Wink Books make it evident that you’re also quite a media consumer. Can you offer our readers any tips for how to balance writing time with reading time, and how you decide what content deserves your attention?

I’ve gotten much better about abandoning books that I don’t like. I used to be a victim of the sunk cost fallacy (ie, “I’ve put so much time into this I can’t give up now”). If a book doesn’t enthrall me after the first 20 pages I stop reading and try something else. Carla and I try to read as much as possible on the weekends. And I read on planes and listen to Audiobooks in the car.

I used to play games on my phone from time to time but in the last year or so I have completely lost interest in playing them. I’m not sure why. But for some reason I start feeling depressed when I play them. Carla loves Words With Friends though!

Are there any habits you’re trying to develop now? What motivated you to work on them?

I don’t like exercise, but I’ve learned that a 10 minute kettlebell workout 3 or 4 times a week has done wonders for my body. I’m much leaner and more muscular now than when I used to ride a stationary bike for 45 minutes, which was torture. Carla and I also like to take walks and talk, which we enjoy.

I’m also working on the habit of keeping my desk clean so it doesn’t get cluttered and rob my focus.

Who or what inspires you? Who’s habits would you like to know more about and why?

My friend and Cool Tools partner Kevin Kelly inspires me because of his approach of taking on new projects. He shoots for the moon and often reaches it, maybe because he is an amateur in the true definition of the word, and uses inexperience as an asset. Even when he doesn’t come close (like when he ran a project to catalog every living species on earth) he has a wonderful time trying! He’s good at asking the obvious questions that no one thinks to ask. He likes finding out about other people’s problems and coming up with smart solutions for them.

[Tweet “”When I work on a task I pretend I have nothing else to do but that one thing.” ~@frauenfelder talks habits w/@coachdotme”]

Coach.me provides everything you need to improve performance in diet, fitness, productivity, and life. Inspired by what you’ve read? Try adding these habits to your dashboard:

• Set Priorities for Your Day: review your to-dos and get focused.
• Kettle Bells: this popular excercise builds strength and fitness fast.
• Read: a daily habit that supports personal and intellectual growth.

“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”]

We were delighted when Warnimont, a Coach.me user himself, agreed to share some of his thoughts about habits and personal development.

What’s your own daily routine like? What habits do you cultivate and what benefits do you find in them?

I’d be lying if I said every day was perfectly structured. I try to wake up every morning and read. If I don’t read in the morning, I read at lunch. If I don’t read at lunch then I read while falling asleep. Ideally I read at all three of those times. It doesn’t matter what profession you’re in; reading keeps your mind calm and fresh. Not to mention reading is one of the few methods of continuous learning throughout life.

I’ll have tea and oatmeal in the morning or else I just think about eating until lunch. In terms of habits, I always take a short break every hour. You can tell yourself you’re being productive but the mind needs breaks, and walking during these breaks helps. I always eat my meals at the same times, and after lunch I do some yoga or go for a bike ride to get the juices flowing.

The most common advice we hear about writing habits is simply to write every day. But what’s your best advice for overcoming procrastination and getting quality work out of your time spent writing?

I’ve always maintained the idea that it’s best to not take pride in your work. Not that pride isn’t sometimes important, but I think that phrase is too often confused for perfectionism or taking forever to complete something. There’s nothing more detrimental to writing or creating anything than perfectionism. I overcome procrastination by writing absolute crap and being content with it. I might end up using a small portion of the work, or I might end up using lots of it, but I know one thing: I’ll always be ahead of the self-proclaimed multi-tasker or perfectionist.

Having too much pride in your work brings up too many questions, causing you to waste time and never ship your work. I usually think about Trey Parker and Matt Stone from South Park who make their shows in six days while most studios take six months to do the same. They claim that 85 percent satisfaction is ideal, otherwise you’ll never get anything done.

Are there any habits you’re trying to develop now? What motivated you to work on them?

I always seem to get overwhelmed by trying to develop too many habits at once, so a few months ago I started using Coach.me and a few other to do list apps to check in on my progress for a few desirable habits. I started doing yoga every day, studying up on my German and meeting new people every week.

I was motivated to do yoga because going to the gym is boring and tedious. Yoga is calming and fun, and you get the health benefits. I started studying up on my German because I took it in high school and plan on going to Oktoberfest next year. It’s such an interesting culture, and reading the newspaper and watching movies in German helps me absorb and pay attention to the information even more.

I wanted to meet new people every week for one reason: I’ve found that showing up is the key to success. If you skip a writers club or meeting or networking event you might miss out on an opportunity that changes you life. I’m an introvert, but whenever I meet new people it seems that my career takes a new step.

Who or what inspires you? Whose habits would you like to know more about and why?

Nature inspires me most. There’s nothing good about sitting in an office all day and expecting your mindset to change. When you walk around outside every step you take is something new to invigorate your mind and spark your creativity. Even if you take the same walk every day, leaves fall, trees sway in a different direction and new animals and people are there to create a brand new story.

Ernest Hemingway also inspires me, not because of his writing, but because he actually got out there and experienced what he wrote about. It’s truly the reason so many people connected with his writing, because you could feel that he actually experienced the Italian front in World War I and watched bullfights in Spain.

Whose habits would I like to learn more about? Neil Gaiman. I know writers who create truly great art and others that pump out tons in terms of quantity, but he manages to do both.

[Tweet “”I’ve always maintained the idea that it’s best to not take pride in your work.” ~@writewithwarnie, writer, @coachdotme user”]

Coach.me provides everything you need to improve performance in diet, fitness, productivity, and life. Join others who are working on expanding their horizons by adding these habits to your dashboard:

• Read: continuous learning and inspiration, every day.
• Meet someone new: make it a habit to expand your social surroundings.
• Yoga: get stress relief, fitness and other benefits from this powerful habit.

“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.

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“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.

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