(upbeat music)
- The last place I was working
with companies like that was Wisdom Labs.
And at Wisdom Labs we created an app called Wise@Work.
And created a bunch of material to
help people specifically with mindfulness at work.
So it's not just a learn mindfulness app,
it's a applied mindfulness at work app.
And what we found is that,
just as you mentioned
it's hard to get people to...
It's easy to get them to download an app,
it's very hard to get them to use it.
The number one thing that people are finding
that makes usage go up is having challenges.
So all of those things you see
like the monthly meditation challenge
or whatever that is effective in getting people to use apps.
The big thing that I learned that was surprising in one way
and should not have been surprising as apps started to
get more popular was there's a particular, fairly famous app
in the marketplace that I was brought in as an advisor for.
And
I was like, "Look,
"we need to make this app actually teach people to
meditate like in a long sequence, learn mindfulness
and go deeper and deeper and deeper into mindfulness."
And there was some buy-in on that.
And it turns out to not be the way
people want to use an app.
And instead
what
that happened
virtually every popular one has done
is create a specialized guided meditation
for every possible situation.
As I call it, he cat peed on the rug meditation.
To me, it makes no sense.
I mean, you want to, which would you rather do
like learn how to meditate
and then apply that to every situation
or learn have a separate guided meditation
for every possible situation that could come up in life.
It just...
That second model, I just don't get it
but that's how people want it to use apps.
And so to me, it makes them even less useful
in my mind.
And yet that's
because the person
is not actually learning how to meditate.
What's happening is the guided meditation
on the app is sort of teaching them
to sooth about a particular situation.
And of course, there's nothing wrong with (laughing)
helping people to suit in a particular situation.
That's great, but we're kind of doing a disservice
by not showing them how to really meditate
and to understand the principles of mindfulness
and apply them.
So, very few apps do this.
Some of them do, but not the big ones.
And you'll notice that even the big ones,
when they're teaching
mindfulness
it's not really what I would call mindfulness.
It's more of Shamatha right?
They're teaching people to basically relax on their breath.
Again, it's soothing and that's great.
I'm glad people can get soothed,
but that's
a tiny, tiny fraction
of what even basic mindfulness can help someone
to achieve with their meditation.
How it can really, really positively
and powerfully affect their life.
I'm from Michigan and every once in a while I go back there
and meet extended, extended
relatives
or fans sort of like not even family members
friends of family members.
My family has the difficult job
of saying what I do for a living.
They have to be like,
"Well, Michael what do you do again?"
I'm a meditation teacher
and invariably what any one guess
what the invariant responses
it's always exactly the same.
And he guesses.
It is,
"Oh, that's great.
"I need to relax."
Or, there is a second version of that which is,
"Oh, that's great.
"I need help going to sleep."
So, it's two variations on the exact same idea,
which is that it's all about soothing
and relaxing like that.
So, there is
a huge advantage
that somehow everyone out there
understands that there's this thing called mindfulness
and you can do it and it's worth doing, that's great.
On the other hand, everyone's idea seems to be out there
in the world that it's simply about relaxing, right?
Simply soothing.
And I guess this is a long, long answer to your question,
but it's just to say that
I think the apps are doing in general an extremely poor job
of teaching people to meditate
and they could do a better job.
I mean, it's not hard for example,
the Brightmind app teaches Shinzen style Vipassana,
like hardcore technical mindfulness
very well
but it's not popular.
And this is why all the big apps have gone
to this mode of
simply teaching people to relax
'cause that's what the market wants.
And so, yes.
I think that it's not really about in-person versus zoom
or virtual it's more about whether,
number one,
a live human being who understands mindfulness
is actually working with you
and answering your questions or not.
And number two,
whether that person is really teaching you mindfulness,
or is more like teaching you to kinda
chill out only.
It's very, very important to me personally,
this is just my opinion
but I really
like working one-on-one
with people
or at least being able to answer
people's questions individually.
I'm at a place where if I give an online course
and I were to open up the registration
there would be a large number of people
that showed up far more than I can work with one-on-one.
So when I do online courses I,
limit it to like 20 people.
'Cause that's as many people as I can actually have
any kind of real teaching relationship with at a time.
So, it's not so much about the platform
whether 'cause doing this,
we can still have a conversation.
When I do one-on-one coaching,
it's almost always just on the phone.
People often want video
but I actually don't do that
for a whole bunch of reasons.
So you'd think that
just talking on the phone might be lesser than,
but actually
it's very intimate
and very, we can really get in there with what's going on.
I can really get in there with people deeply, deeply deeply.
And in some ways I think better
than if I'm doing visual and auditory,
just auditory alone
somehow there's a more concentrated experience.
That's just me.
But in other words, the platform is not as important.
What's important is that you have the ability to do,
to hear people's questions and to talk to them individually.
So, you got me on a rant about apps (laughing).
So sorry about that.