This is an amazing conference! I have been blown away by all of you and by what I've been hearing,
has been quite shocking actually. People are talking about generosity and bravery, from Seth
yesterday, and about the importance of reflection and rest and inwardness,
from the talk this morning, and those are things you don't usually hear at a
business conference and these are all also synonyms for mindfulness, which is
our topic. These things are impossible actually without mindfulness. I mean, you
can be intuitive and you can relax and you can, so so forth and so on, without
mindfulness, but it'll just be because you're getting lucky. With mindfulness,
you can do it on purpose. So, I'm excited to share some thoughts with you about
mindfulness, but first I want to tell you a story that involves, not this flower,
but I thought was really pretty, so I thought I'd put it up... So I live here in
Boston and I don't know if any of you have noticed... maybe you live here and you
know this, or you have had to drive here and you've noticed this, but people here
are very aggressive. And they are especially aggressive on the road and I
am one of those people. I'm not proud of it, but I've been a Buddhist practitioner
for close to 20 years, I am a meditation teacher, I've written books about
it, and blah blah blah, but all of that goes to pot when I get behind the wheel.
So, my special pet peeve is rotaries or traffic circles, can I get some, please.
I'm like, the person in the rotary has the right of way and if you don't know
that, mark me. So every time I approach a rotary I'm like, who's gonna f*** with me?!?
Who's not going to know the rules of the rotary?... Is it you? Is it you? Because, bring it!
So, one morning - so stupid! - one morning I'm out driving, going to supermarket, Whole Foods,
and it's like Saturday at 9 a.m. and I'm approaching the rotary - nobody! This could work
out this time. I get in the rotary. I look around, like, this is good, this is good...
BOOM! This, like, Buick comes out of nowhere and just cuts me off, and I have to [squeak sound] veer to
the other lane, and I just lose it! I lose it! I start honking at them, and giving them the finger and I get
right up on their tail. And I'm just, gone insane, and they pull into the parking
lot, I pull in right behind them. Happened to be the parking lot of Whole Foods and
I'm like these are my people! You cannot f*** with me in the parking lot of Whole
Foods! [LAUGHTER]
I pull up right beside her, or I pull up right beside
the car, I should say, 'cause I don't know who's in there, and I point at the person, and I go...
...You! Put down your window! What am I going to say? I have no idea! The window goes down. I look
in the car, and there's a woman who appears to be from another country, and she
is terrified. And in the back of the car is her baby, who is crying, and I look at them
and I'm, like, I did this to you... I look at her and I'm about to go... but suddenly
everything just drops and I go, I'm sorry. I'm so sorry... And she, very intelligently
rolled her window up, and drove away.[LAUGHTER] But I have never forgotten that moment where
it was the meeting of the eyes, and the recollection of each other's humanity
that caused this whole crazy trip to just dissolve. I've heard a lot of talk
in this conference about such moments. And in your business life, in your
professional, forget about your personal life, in your professional life,
how often have you been me [ANGRY SOUND], how often have you been her [FEARFUL SOUND]? If we really want to create
professional lives, companies, businesses, that are based on caring, which is one of
the most hopeful things I'm gathering from this conference is, you people are
creating a culture of caring. That's big.
That's really big. So it's one thing to say, however, I want to be human, I want to
really connect with people in a genuine way, I want to build a company where
people respect each other that is based on values and mission, I want to be
generous, I want to be creative.
That is fantastic. Please, please, try to do those things, but then what?? How, how do
those things, 'cause it's one thing to get in the car and say I'm going to drive to
the supermarket and another thing to get blindsided by someone and that changes
everything, and in your professional life, whether you work alone or you work with
thousands of people, you're gonna get blindsided all the time. It's easy to be
mindful when things, people are saying they love you or, that was awesome,
you did a great job. What about when someone says, "I hate what you just did" or
"you failed" or "you disappointed me"? Where does your mindfulness go?
So, I want to describe what I think is the biggest threat to what you're
attempting to do, and the antidote to that threat. So, it does not matter... these
are gonna be a bold blanket statements, so take it all with a grain of salt...
It doesn't matter how smart you are. It doesn't matter how brilliant your idea
is. It doesn't matter how many talented people you hire. And it doesn't matter
how perfectly positioned your product or service is for the existing marketplace.
Irrelevant. In my life, my working life, which has been long and varied, I worked
as a marketing executive, as a product development person, as a consultant on
health and well-being in companies, a writer, a Buddhist teacher, a blogger who
has founded an online meditation community that's now got 10,000 people
in it... hell, I've been a waitress and a cab driver, seriously, and in all those things, what causes failure, what causes
difficulty, which side tracks everyone, is not, you're not talented enough, or you said
you brought these statistics to a meeting and they were wrong. If you start
to unpack people's complaints about where they work, and again this is from
you know huge companies to being a taxi driver, if you peel away all of it, what you
find that has caused the problem is, so and so did not listen to me. So and so
did not apologize to me, so and so did not notice that I was there, and so and
so did not thank me for what I did. That's it.
This is called relationships and we are all working to create business
environments that necessarily have to include our hearts. The final frontier
in business, the only dirty word you could say in a business meeting, up till about
recently, is feelings. That's where it's at now.
Contact with our hearts, respect for other people's hearts. The antidote to these
problems of you didn't apologize to me and so on,
is mindful communication. That's... I hate that phrase, by the way. Opening your
heart [PICTURE]. To break that down a little bit, then I'm gonna give you four tips for mindful
communication, and then it will be Julian. Mindful, by the way, there's a lot of
talk about mindfulness, a lot of stats, a lot of info, you know, focus on mindfulness and
I'm so happy to hear that, but mindfulness does not mean peaceful. It
does not mean in control. It can certainly include those things, but what
mindfulness really means, is letting down your guard, opening to whatever situation
you're in, and to whomever you happen to be speaking to, letting down your guard
and letting your world
touch you, because if you're not attuned to what's happening, if you're not
letting what's happening touch you,
odds are, you are trapped in your hope for how things should go, or your
fear of how things may go, and that is not mindful. Mindful is taking, is putting,
all your chips on red. Mindful is saying whatever happens, I'm gonna show up for
it, and if I feel... if I am happy I'm gonna be completely happy, completely
confused, and the completely brilliant person that I am,
in every moment. So I just want to dispel any thought that mindfulness
means peaceful... and in communication, it's so interesting, because most
communications are sequential monologues. I make my talk, you make your talk, and so on,
but the space between us, the third... a third thing enters every
communication, and that is us. That's why it feels one way to tell your ideas to your
mother and other way to tell your ideas to your boss, because the space changes.
you are the same, the ideas are the same, the space changes, attunement to that space is
the source of skillfullness in conversation. Does that make sense?
Are you with me?
Does this sound like mindful... what you came to hear about, basically? Some... ok, ok, so here...
as a Buddhist practitioner, these are
ancient teachings, actually thousands of years old, but they're completely modern
at the same time. I'm gonna offer you four tips for mindful communication and they
may sound obvious, they may not. The first tip is called timing. Timing means knowing when
to speak and knowing when to shut up. This is a highly underrated skill.
Allowing the space... to have timing in what you want to say, and you
have to be super aware of the person or the room that you're with, the
person talking to, or the room that you're in. Timing... that's pretty obvious. The second
one is called listening and that may sound very cliche, but I used to have a
boyfriend long time ago, named Mark Krizer, who identified the Krizer syndrome,
which was when you use the time that I am talking, to think of what you are
going to say next.
And that is what most of us are doing in conversation. Listening means dropping
that completely, and literally giving yourself to the person that you are
talking to. Giving them your full attention, not holding back. That's
actually quite scary. Listening is very brave. My favorite definition of
listening is to cease thinking what are your thoughts and to start thinking
my thoughts. That's what you have to do to listen. The third is crazy. It's called
agenda-less-ness. We all have an agenda when we're having a business
communication, but in order to have that communication be genuine, you
have to drop your agenda. And the way to drop your agenda is to be curious... I'm
speeding up a little bit because I only have a few more minutes... And the fourth is called confidence.
We all know when we were listening to someone who is confident. And to have
confidence is very simple. It doesn't mean you have to believe in yourself.
It doesn't mean you have to think you are the best. It doesn't mean you have to
be certain of what you know. Here is the way, guaranteed, to generate confidence.
Are you ready?... Place your attention on maximizing the other person's position.
That is a position of power. Often when we're in business, we feel powerless,
especially were trying to sell something. We're trying to get someone to buy
something from us, we're asking for something. And that can feel powerless
because we're waiting for the yes or the no, but when you seek to maximize the
other person's position, to thinking about them, give them what they need, you
suddenly take the seat of power in whatever communication you're in.
So, between those things: Timing, Listening, Agenda-less-ness, and Confidence, you will
rouse this quality, the single quality that will get people to listen to you,
and in our world getting heard is getting everything. And it is called
genuineness. So in this sense, mindful listening has very little to do with
what you say and has everything to do with who you are. So the way to cultivate
these skills, I would like to posit, is through the practice of meditation.
And I'm not trying to sell you on meditation but, sort of I am [LAUGHTER], so if you would learn to
meditate, that would be a very potent tool on your path to success, so I wish you
all well in your businesses and in your lives.
Thank you.