The way to become better in everything in life is not only to optimize the things you know well, but to also start discovering new paths on territories that were untouched from you in the past.
As a super loaded, extremely busy businessman, running a SaaS sales outsourcing agency my daily work was consuming me from the moment I opened my eyes in the morning ‘till the point where fatigue was making it impossible to continue anymore. That was the time to go to sleep, in order to repeat the race, the next day. And although tough work pays, is not only the quantity of the work you put behind but also its quality and the ability to see the bigger picture, see the forest and not only the trees in order to be able to take decisions that concern the forest.
What is meditation?
Having its roots in Buddhism, meditation is a western art of training awareness and getting a healthy sense of perspective. You’re not trying to turn off your thoughts or feelings. You’re learning to observe them without judgment. And eventually, you may start to better understand them as well.
I, as I think many of you, was prejudice about meditation and the real effect it could have in someone’s life. However, in social media very often in previous years, I was listening to several famous motivational speakers like Tony Robins praising the benefits of meditation and the change meditation brought in their life.
As a crossfit athlete, I had a conversation with my nutritionist about how it would be possible to lose weight, without participating in all those strict diets which might help you lose weight temporarily but at the end, you end gaining that weight back. It’s not only a matter of what you eat but also the mindset behind because regardless of how much you are going lose on weight, by eating certain things, you are going to gain it back if the right mindset is not there. If you do not change NOT what you think but HOW you think, no real achievement is going to be made.
The next day on the rush of work, I took out of my drawer an envelope I had with some cash, I opened the envelope took the cash out and threw the envelope on the paper shredder I had, to realize then that inside the envelope 3 bills of 50€ were still inside. The notes became confetti as you can imagine. If I was a little bit more cautious, but most of all a little bit slower, less reactive and more conscious on my daily behaviour, this wouldn’t have happened, I thought.
The next day I visited my first class of meditation, here in Sabadell, and although my Catalan is only basic, it was not difficult to participate in this unique experience.
What effects had meditation on me?
The effects that I experienced immediately after the first session.
- I was automatically more relaxed. If I could rate my alertness and tension throughout the day, with 100 being the max, I could say my daily average was something between 60 and 80. Meditation gave me the ability to be the one that choses where to focus my alertness and on which things I should let it go. That helped me enormously, because now I could really concentrate on what is important and do not let be consumed from stuff that was not important or had little value.
- At last, I was the one that was in control of things and situations on my daily business and personal life, I consciously made decisions and was not anymore reactive on the impulse of situations.
- On my daily sales calls, as a sales development consultant, I was not anymore falling in the trap to follow the conversational rhythm of my client, instead, the pace was given by me, which either increased the possibility of a sale, or where no sale was closable made the client leave the picture fast and saved me hours of work that was driving nowhere.
- The Good – Bad perception that exists in western societies, the judgemental mindset, the seek of purpose in life, …. All those human-constructed ideas were always against my own believes. What we believe it is, the mindset that we have, does not mean it is also like that. Things in life are what they are, they exist, or they don’t exist, the label we put on them does not make them have this quality. Meditation does not take any positioning; it helps you observe things that are there without judgement and helps you understand the world the way it is, so that you can take the right decisions.
- By “grounding” on the breath, by perceiving its own self by focusing on its own breath, can help you immediately hold back and shift from compulsiveness to consciousness.
I strongly advise all my readers to start mediating, ideally find a meditation group close to your home, alternatively you can use many available applications. I personally meditate every morning for 10 minutes with the application “Calm”, it realy helps me start my day correctly. If you tell me you don’t have 10 minutes a day, sorry my friend, but if that is the case, you don’t have a life. This article is to be found also in our resources here.
