Tag: inspiration

Mindfulness and Creativity in Our Life’s Work

In a recent presentation for The Contemplative Care Summit, Seth Godin spoke about, Mindfulness & Creativity at Work.  He stressed the importance of being mindful about self-talk and taking intentional action if we are to be creative in our life’s work.  Seth writes a daily post for his creative blog which he has been writing for more than a decade.  He is the author of 20 world-wide best-selling books such as The Practice which is about creative work.  He is also the initiator of many creative projects.  You can find his videos on YouTube, including his five TED Talks.

Self-talk: a barrier to creativity

Seth has previously written about what he calls “the lizard brain” – the amygdala, the part of the brain driven by fear.  He maintains that this is behind our negative self-talk and  can be disabling if we let it control our thoughts.  He challenges the myth of “writer’s block” and suggests that it is a blockage in our thinking created by our fear and perpetuated by self-stories.  He suggests, like one of my early mentors, that a way forward is to write, write, write.  Eventually, our not-so-good writing becomes good and then great – especially if we have a constructive, critical friend who is commenting on our writing out of understanding, comprehension, and good will, not out of ignorance or inanity.

Creative people such as Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love, speak extensively about how fear and self-talk can block our creative genius.  Clare Bowditch – singer, songwriter, and author of Your Own Kind of Girl – describes in detail (in this autobiography), the power and pervasiveness of our inner critic.  Worrying about whether our creation, our work, our project, our song/performance or our presentation will be “good enough” sets in train a series of self-stories that can lead to procrastination.  Tara Brach offers the R.A.I.N. meditation – incorporating the steps of recognise, accept, investigate and nurture – as a compassionate way to deal with our self-generated critic.

Seth talks extensively about a specific fear, the “fear of failure”. We tend to catastrophize the outcomes if something “goes wrong” or “does not work out”.   He points out, however, that we do not have control over the outcomes and focusing solely on them leads to inertia and stifling of creative endeavour.  Seth maintains that “failure” and creativity go hand-in-hand and he talks about his many failures. He argues that if you are doing something that you have never done before or that has not been done by anyone else, then the chances of failure are always present – this uncertainty about outcomes defines the essence of creativity and we capture this in our language, “going out on a limb”, “going outside our comfort zone”, “leaping into the unknown” or “exploring new terrain”.

Seth suggests that we need to stay in the present moment and enjoy the process of creating something new – of bringing our creation into the world for the benefit of others.  Focusing on process in a mindful way creates freedom from fear, space to explore and openness to new ideas.  He also argues that we can overcome the nagging concern that we are an “imposter” (posing as a good writer, performer or facilitator) by accepting that you will act as an imposter if you are being creative – you are taking action with uncertain outcomes, you cannot guarantee success, and you are hoping that it will “turn our well” without any “iron-clad guarantee” that it will do so.

Intentional action

Intention provides the impetus to initiate and sustain creative action. Diana Winston offers a meditation process to help us to bring mindfulness to our motivations and intentions so that we can achieve clarity of purpose, align our energy and strengthen our motivation in the face of obstacles.  Leo Babauta offers a three-step process, incorporating clarifying intentions, that  we can use to start doing the meaningful work that we have been avoiding.  He also offers a daily practice to overcome the avoidance that we experience when confronted with difficult tasks.

Ricardo Semler, entrepreneur and author provides a more fundamental approach to access our underlying intentions.  He suggests that we ask our selves “why” three times to get to the fundamental question, “What am I doing this for?”  Unfortunately, our busyness becomes the greatest impediment to accessing our creativity and opening our selves to wisdom, clarity, and fulfillment.  Taking time to be still and revisit our intentions can enable us to achieve alignment with our overall life purpose and access the resonance that this alignment brings.  We can then begin to experience inspiration and intuition – the seeds of creativity.

Reflection

To fully access our creativity, we need to be aware of our negative self-stories, our fear of failure, and our imposter concerns.  By not facing up to the self-critic and the “lizard brain”, we can numb ourselves into inaction and procrastination.   As we grow in mindfulness, through meditation, reflection, and reframing, we can increase our self-awareness, develop self-compassion to deal with our negative thoughts and bring intention and alignment to our creative actions.  The stillness and silence of mindfulness meditation acts an “incubator” for creativity and innovation.

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Image by John Hain from Pixabay

By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site, the associated Meetup group and the resources to support the blog.

Becoming Grounded to Strengthen Your Intention

We have all experienced being “knocked off centre” and becoming “ungrounded” in the challenging times of the past year (2020).  Now, as we look forward to the new year (2021), it might be helpful to restore our groundedness and reset our intentions.  Diana Winston of MARC UCLA offers a meditation podcast to enable us to achieve these goals.  Her guided meditation, Getting Grounded and Setting Intentions, offers a timely process.

Guided meditation for groundedness

Diana suggests that you begin by taking a couple of deep breaths and as you are exhaling to release the tension and anxiety that you have experienced in being able to arrive at this point.  She then focuses heavily on posture as a means to achieve groundedness.  You are encouraged to have your feet flat on the floor; to adopt an upright, relaxed position for your back; to find a comfortable position for your hands; and to either close your eyes or look downwards to reduce distractions.

To begin with, the primary focus is on your feet.  By focusing on your feet, you can feel the bodily sensations of being supported. You might feel the firmness of the floor beneath the softness of the carpet or the hardness of floor tiles.  Diana encourages you too to envisage beyond the floor to the walls supporting the floor and the ground that is always there, in turn, supporting the walls themselves.  As you focus on the sensations in your feet, you may feel a sense of support, strength, and earthly energy.  You might feel as though your feet are becoming thicker and drawing in warmth and energy – a sense that your support base is expanding.

Diana also offers other choices that can supplement or replace the focus on sensations in your feet (as an anchor to return to when distractions inevitably intervene):

  • Breath – you can focus in on your breath in its natural state without any attempt to control it.  You pay attention to wherever you can sense your breathing and become conscious of the rise and fall of your abdomen or chest or, alternatively, the sensation of air passing in and out of your nose. 
  • Room tone/sounds – here you pay attention to sounds in the room firstly and then to external sounds.  This requires you to avoid interpreting the sounds or identifying their origins or your assessment of them as good or bad.  For some people, opening up their attention to sounds can itself be a distraction and may make it very difficult for them to sustain their focus. 
  • Hands – you can join your fingers together and pay attention to the sensations from the connection.  You may feel warmth, tingling, softness or firmness.  If you persist with this focus, you might experience soreness that is present in your wrist or arm – you can be open to this sensation and focus on self-healing.

Diana has an extended session of silence in this meditation to enable you to really focus in on bodily sensations and the feeling of support that is readily available to you at any time – the more you practise this meditation by setting time aside, the easier it will be to access the sense of support in times when you are feeling really challenged by restrictions, loss, isolation, or disconnection.

Setting intentions

Diana further invites you to revisit the past year and all the challenges that it involved – What did you feel? What did you lose? What was most challenging for you?  She suggests applying a “light touch” to these reflections, not getting lost in the challenging emotions involved.

She then suggests that you recall what inspired you during these challenging times – the selflessness of frontline health professionals caring for COVID-19 patients in ICU and elsewhere, the generosity of individuals, the sense of reconnection with loved ones (even though it might have been virtually), the dedication of emergency personnel (ambulance, police, border officers,  paramedics) and the resilience of people who experienced grief and trauma and yet continued to assist others. 

In the light of these latter inspiring and energizing reflections, Diana encourages you to revisit your New Year’s resolutions or to set new resolutions.  She particularly encourages you to draw on the lessons you have learned through experiencing the past year and what they  signal as a way forward for you.  You might envisage a different world where empathy, compassion, kindness, and consideration replace racial discrimination, self-centredness, violence and hatred.

This consideration of what might be could be the catalyst for you to strengthen your intention to make a positive contribution to your family, your community and the world at large.  Through your interconnectedness, how you are in the world influences those around you and beyond.  It might be that you firm up your intention of providing more emotional and practical support to someone close to you who is experiencing difficulties; it could be becoming more patient with someone at your work who is slow and/or annoying;  or resolving to truly listen to people, especially when they are expressing a personal need.

Reflection

We have at our disposal a ready means to feel grounded and deepen our resolve to pursue our best intentions so that they translate into positive actions.  This will enable us to make better choices and not indulge in habituated responses that can have negative impacts.  As we grow in mindfulness, through meditations focused on becoming grounded and setting our intentions, we can be a positive force in the lives of others, both those who are close and others who are distant.  Diana’s meditation podcast is one way to enable us to move from self-absorption to embracing people in need, locally and globally.  

You can change the negative tenor of social media around a topic by adopting a positive approach.  For instance, the arrival in Melbourne of professional tennis players for the Australian Open has created a real stir. On the one hand, some players have complained that they are locked up in a quarantine hotel room for two weeks because someone on their plane has the COVID-19 virus.  Some Australians stuck overseas are expressing bitterness that they are unable to return home because of the global situation while the Australian Open tennis players arrive from all around the world on chartered flights.   People living in Melbourne have expressed the view that the players are “spoilt brats” because they themselves have experienced one of the most stringent lockdowns anywhere in the world and for an extended period.

The voice of reason and compassion in all this turmoil was that of Australian Olympic swimmer, Cate Campbell.  She suggested publicly that expressing bitterness, envy and resentment is only making a difficult situation worse.  She encouraged all Australians to show empathy towards the tennis players and to truly understand what loss they are experiencing by their enforced confinement before one of the world’s major tennis tournaments.  As an elite sports person, she knows only too well what deprivation of practice before a very significant event means for other professionals.

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Image by marijana1 from Pixabay

By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site, the associated Meetup group and the resources to support the blog.

Ways to Accept What Is

Diana Winston reminds us that part of mindfulness is “accepting what is” – being able to deal actively and constructively with our present situation, however unwelcome.  Diana, Director of Mindfulness Education at MARC, UCLA, defines mindfulness in her podcasts as paying attention to our present moment experiences with openness and curiosity and a willingness to be with what is.  Tara Brach argues that acceptance of what is begins with radical acceptance – overcoming feelings of not being good enough and fully accepting ourselves so that we can live life more fully.  Shamash Alidina stresses the proactivity involved in accepting what is – he argues for a growth mindset which entails being willing to learn from our experiences and to change what we can change.

Ways to develop acceptance of what is

There are many times in life when things do not turn out according to our plans, our anticipation or our expectations.  These experiences can often lead to persistent negative and destructive feelings that undermine our ability to live life fully and be present for others.  Below are some ideas on ways to develop the requisite acceptance of what is:

  • Begin with self-acceptance – Tara’s book mentioned above has resources, exercises and meditations that can help to develop self-acceptance.  Tara also provides a wide range of free and paid resources on her web store – books, videos, e-books, audios, online courses – that provide insights and meditations to help us in the lifelong pursuit of radical self-acceptance.
  • Break the cycle of complaining – complaining reinforces our dissatisfaction through its negative focus.  It also contaminates the emotional wellbeing of those we interact with.  Mike Robbins reminds us that “what you resist, persists” – that what we complain about, what we focus on as unsatisfactory in our life, will become increasingly aggravating.   
  • Get it out of your head – Mike suggests that one way to do this is to make a list (preferably written) of all the things that cause you angst in your life – people, work, disappointments, anticipated or actual changes to your health or wealth.  As you review each item, reflect on whether you can accept the reality of this aggravation in your life.  He argues that acceptance of what is provides the pathway to internal peace and constructive change to make things better in some way. 
  • Get in touch with your feelings – reflect on what you are feeling and why you are feeling this way.  The more you can name your feelings and understand their source, the more you can tame and manage them.  For example, if you can identify envy as a source of personal dissatisfaction (however unpalatable acceptance of this negative emotion is), you can work towards being joyful for the good fortune and success of others in your life.
  • Keep things in perspective – no matter how upsetting or dissatisfying your current situation is, it pays to reflect on what other people are experiencing (and managing) that is considerably worse than your situation.  Sometimes little aggravations can become so large and dominating in our lives that we lose perspective on what we are experiencing – we fail to appreciate its insignificance in the greater scheme of life experiences.
  • Practice loving kindness meditations – it is possible to regularly extend loving kindness to others who are experiencing severe, adverse events in their lives such as the devastation of homes and livelihoods through wildfires or the daily physical and/or emotional abuse from domestic violence.  Loving kindness not only helps us to keep our own dissatisfactions in perspective but also enables us to move beyond self-preoccupation and reach out to others in our thoughts and actions.
  • Read about or listen to stories of people who have overcome extreme adversity – you can encounter such stories in your daily or weekly newspapers, email newsletters or blog posts about overcoming adversity.  A really good source of inspiration is TED Talks©.  You can search the database of over 3,000 videos by using key terms such as “inspiration” or “loss”.

Reflection

It is so easy to get into the negative spiral of complaining about how things are in our life (the “negative bias” of our brains feed this orientation).  However, we can be proactive to avoid moving into a cycle of dissatisfaction and depression.  There are ways to accept what is, develop peace in our lives and become open to the possibility of creating positive change.  As we grow in mindfulness through meditation, reflection and self-observation, we can learn to name our feelings, keep things in perspective, develop a growth mindset, build resilience and extend loving kindness to others.

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Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site, the associated Meetup group and the resources to support the blog.

A Framework for Reflection for Organisation Leaders

Chip Conley, author and hospitality entrepreneur, emphasised the importance of reflection, wisdom and lifelong learning for leaders.  He created the Modern Elder Academy to further that end.  He was especially interested in making the workplace a place for fullment, inspiration and self-actualization for employees – which he maintained was the means to achieve a sustainably successful organisation.  Chip acknowledged that his leadership philosophy was heavily influenced by the writing of two men Viktor Frankl and Abraham Maslow.

Viktor Frankl through his book, Man’s Search for Meaning, impressed on Chip the importance and power of a meaningful life for leaders and the critical role of leaders in providing an environment that is conducive to employees developing a “sense of purpose and meaning”.   Research has confirmed that a meaningful life is foundational to a person’s health, happiness and overall well-being.

Abraham Maslow and his work on developing a Hierarchy of Needs had a very profound effect on Chip and his approach to leadership, both as an owner/entrepreneur and a mentor to other leaders, especially the young founders of Airbnb.  Maslow’s work gave Chip an insight into how to develop a reflective framework to guide his own role as a leader and to assist other leaders to create meaningful work for employees.

A framework for reflection for organisational leaders – the transformative pyramid

Chip explained his reflection framework in a TED Talk© given in 2010 titled, Measuring What Makes Life Worthwhile.  He elaborated further on the evolution of the framework and how to put it into practice in a podcast interview with Tami Simon of Sounds True.  He was particularly concerned about the challenge of applying Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to business and the management of employees.

What Chip realised is that, for employees, meaning provided inspiration which in turn developed intrinsic motivation.  He came up with the idea of a framework which he called the “transformative pyramid” – built on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs which was illustrated as a five-level pyramid with physiological needs at the bottom of the pyramid and self-actualization at the top.

To simplify things and make his framework easy to implement, Chip developed his transformative pyramid as a three-level pyramid with “survival” at the bottom, “success” in the middle and “transformation” at the top.  He pointed out that many leaders focus only on the bottom of the pyramid, the survival needs, by using all their energy to create non-sustainable, extrinsic motivation in the form of pay, bonuses and financial rewards while ignoring what truly influences and shapes employee motivation.

In Chip’s model, “success” relates to recognition that an employee is achieving their role and contributing to the organisation.  He understood that positive feedback was a powerful motivator and that people often left their jobs because of the way they were treated, including feeling a sense that they had been “taken for granted” and their efforts were unrecognised.   Chip explained, by way of example, that during the dot-com crash, he introduced a process of recognition at his weekly managers’ meetings that not only provided some positive element to what was a relatively sober discussion but also helped to spread recognition and positivity throughout the organisation. 

The initiating process for giving recognition was simple – he introduced a ten-minute period at the end of each meeting where a manager would mention someone in one of the teams who “deserved recognition” for something they had done in the workplace or in the field.  This recognition was communicated personally to the individual involved who felt that they were “noticed” and respected, and their contribution was appreciated.  Chip suggested that great companies are differentiated by the fact that they are “first-class noticers”.

At the highest level of the transformation pyramid is personal reframing of work from “just a job” to something that is meaningful and worthwhile.  Chip suggested that this can be achieved by helping employees to understand the higher purpose of the organisation – the inspirational “why”,  and to find meaning in what they do by understanding the connection between their daily work and something broader that makes a difference in people’s lives.  

Chip indicated that he learned this lesson from a maid who had worked for a  long time in one of his hotels.  When he asked her why she seemed so happy doing mundane work every day (such as cleaning the toilets), she said that she was able “to create joy” for people who stayed in their hotel away from their home and often without their family or partner.  She was able to mentally connect what she did every day to a “noble purpose”.  This realisation and reframing were “transformative” for her – putting her mundane work in a totally different light and acting as a source of intrinsic motivation.

Chip encapsulated his “transformation pyramid” and its underlying principles in his book, PEAK: How Great Companies Get Their Mojo from Maslow.  He encouraged leaders to use his framework to reflect on their relationships with their employees, customers and investors.  Since the first edition of the book, many organisations worldwide in different industries have used his framework to transform their businesses. In particular, they have found innovative ways to recognise the contribution of their employees.

Reflection

It is often the simplest ideas that have the greatest impact.  Chip demonstrated that focusing on intrinsic rather than extrinsic motivation was the way forward to transform companies and he proved this through his own roles as founder and CEO of Joie de Vivre and as mentor to the founders of Airbnb.  In the process, he addressed one of the key underlying problems associated with the growth of depression – the loss of connection to meaningful work.  As we grow in mindfulness, we can increase our understanding of leadership and what is meaningful in life for us and others, and notice, appreciate and provide recognition to people we encounter who contribute in whatever way to our own welfare and that of our organisations.  Noticing, appreciating and giving recognition require us to be present in the moment – a key aspect of mindfulness.  Being present builds awareness of our self and others.

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Image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay

By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site, the associated Meetup group and the resources to support the blog.

The Last Lecture – Mindful Living

Randy Pausch, the author of The Last Lecture, was a Professor  of Computer Science at the Carnegie Mellon University specialising in the design of Virtual Reality.  He died from pancreatic cancer on 25 July 2008 after being diagnosed with the disease in the summer of 2006.

Randy’s book traces his life, his medical experience, giving his last lecture and his life’s lessons and achievements.  His Last Lecture, given on the 18th September 2007, was videotaped and is available here.   The lecture has been viewed by millions of people who admire Randy’s inspiration, insight, humour, intelligence and wisdom.

Randy, even though he was obviously dying from cancer at the time, wanted to leave a legacy for his three young children in terms of the lessons he had learned in life – often the hard way by making mistakes.  Some of his insights into the way to live your life are pertinent to developing mindfulness.

Lessons on mindfulness from Randy Pausch

I can’t recall Randy talking about mindfulness in his book or his lecture, but he did have some insights and values that I think are particularly relevant to mindfulness:

Show Gratitude

Being grateful for what you have and what people have done for you is important, because it is part of growing in self-awareness and understanding how you came to achieve what you have achieved.  Randy also talks about the “lost art of the thank-you note” as a timely way to express appreciation.

He went even further and decided to take his 15-member research team (working on virtual reality) to a week-long visit to Disney World in Florida.  Besides enjoying the entertainment, they were also able to take in some educational activities relevant to their studies and research.  He provided this expensive trip as a way to “pay it forward” his gratitude for the mentoring he received from Any van Dam.

Gratitude requires being present to notice what people have done for you and developing an appreciation mindset through gratitude meditation. Often, we are grateful, but fail to express it.   Through this form of meditation, we become more aware of the opportunities to show gratitude and ways to express it.

Seeking forgiveness genuinely

There are many times when we are hurt by the words and actions of others – it is part of being human on both sides of the hurt dyad.  We hurt others and they hurt us.  We can’t avoid this, although as we grow in mindfulness we become more aware of their feelings and what effect our words and actions have on them.

Randy stresses the importance of seeking forgiveness genuinely – in his own words, “A bad apology is worse than no apology”.  He argues that we should not apologise in such a way that we are not genuineor in a way that is designed only to obtain an apology from the other person.   While hurt can be a two-way street, it does not rectify the situation to actively seek an apology from the other party – they may apologise in their own due time.  If you want someone to change their behaviour, you are more likely to achieve this if you change your own behaviour first.

Forgiveness meditation helps us to develop the readiness and willingness to apologise for the hurt we cause others.  In the process of this meditation, we can ask for forgiveness from others – which makes us acutely aware of the reality that we are not the only one hurting.  Associated with this, is the need to also practise self-forgiveness meditation.

As we grow in mindfulness through meditation and learning from the inspiration of others such as Randy Pausch, we can develop the awareness and mindset that makes us willing and able to show gratitude and to genuinely seek forgiveness.

By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

Image source: courtesy of dimitrisvetsikas1969 on Pixabay

Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site, the associated Meetup group and the resources to support the blog.

Looking For Inspiration

Inspiration is everywhere if we just look out for it.  However, as mentioned in the previous post, we tend to become focused on negative news, rather than positive stories.  Inspiration leads to health and well-being, while negative-oriented news creates distraction and emotional disturbance – especially where events are sensationalised to create the maximum emotional impact.

One of the very helpful sources of inspirational stories is TED Talks – an endless source of video presentations on every conceivable topic by numerous people from different corners of the world who have achieved much to improve the human condition.

One such talk was given by Dr. Lucy Kalanithi – What Makes Life Worth Living in the Face of Death?  In this outstanding presentation, Lucy discusses how she and her husband Paul, a neuroscientist, coped with the knowledge that at the age of 37 he was dying from Stage IV lung cancer.

In her optimistic -and sometimes humourous – talk, Lucy makes some key points:

  • the critical importance to keep talking to each other, with no topic off limits
  • realising that the person who is dying must work to reshape their identity
  • making conscious choices together about ongoing health care
  • learning to accept the pain of your dying partner
  • finding beauty and purpose amidst the sadness
  • learning that resilience, in this situation, means bouncing back to real living without denying the reality of impending death.

The video of the presentation by Dr. Lucy Kalanithi is given below:

Besides building bonfires on the beach and watching the sunset with her friends, Lucy found that “exercise and mindfulness meditation helped a lot” after Paul’s death.

Both Paul and Lucy were noted for their compassion towards others. As they were able to grow in mindfulness through this compassion and their intense living-in-the moment, they were better able to cope with the reality of Paul’s terminal illness.

 

By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

Image source: Courtesy of martythelewis on Pixabay