Master your Stress: Meditation by Stealth
Week 5 of 6 Monday Morning Tools to clear your head and lift Your State of Mind
I trust you managed to try some alpha activities last week and felt the benefit of just doing one thing at a time. This week: counteracting the addiction to busy-ness and worry, and the effect it may be having on your team.
Issue # 5 Stressed and possibly addicted to worry, adrenalin & cortisol
Know anyone who is constantly on the edge and frequently boils over, taking it out on those around them? This behaviour can completely undermine a healthy workplace culture, and result in trust being broken, as one persons poorly managed stress (particularly if they’re the boss) ripples out to the whole crew. Meditation is one tool amongst the broader suite of tools that can help us to notice more quickly if we’re about to lose it, helping us to recentre ourselves in the middle of, or just prior to, an upset. It takes some practice ‘off-site’ so to speak, so we can draw on the calmness in the heat of the workplace, but clients have said how noticeably different their behaviour is, once they have a regular practice.
Tool # 5 Meditation by Stealth with N.O.W. Pods
So how to do it? Meditation by stealth means dropping into a relaxed state for 3 minutes a few times a day. Many people will tell you that you have to meditate for 20 minutes morning and evening (bravo if you are already doing this – don’t stop!), but for many beginners, that’s just too much, and the practice falls away. So the invitation is to sneak in shorter periods of ‘focus on the breath’ when most needed. This is just one version of many types of meditation, but an excellent one to start with. If you find you don’t have the self-discipline to set a timer, or you’ve never been shown how to focus on the breath and keep coming back to it when the mind wanders, there is another solution.
N.O.W. Pods are two small speakers that work together to create one singular meditative-style experience, and are unlike anything you’ve heard before. Not music, not guided meditation, not white noise, and not requiring wifi, they are the creation of an audio engineer and a coach, designer & entrepreneur, both of whom deeply understand the power of Presence and who simply wanted to free people from their nagging inner critic. Combining sound and vibration, they are an amazing way to kick-start your practice and they work by switching you out of your left brain into your right brain (see my first post of March 11 for the science). See a review here, and if you feel called, order some here using the code ‘lift10’ for a 10% discount.
Dr Samantha Graham’s programs give her clients the tools to manage their state of mind, whether needing composure under pressure, focus for productivity and efficiency gains, or to disarm the mind chatter of the inner critic that can lead to fatigue and overwhelm.
