In the last five years, what new belief, behavior, or habit has most improved your life?
So for everybody watching, when you get this book, this is one of the questions that many
of us “mentors” have answered.
Yeah.
I would say for me it is a consistent morning practice before taking my phone off of airplane
mode of sitting and doing a meditative practice for say 20 minutes.
And it stuck initially by taking a transcendental meditation class of perhaps three days when
I was going through a very, very difficult times.
The way I’d encourage people to think about meditation –– because it can sound very
woowoo and I certainly was repelled by it for a long time –– is you are sitting
down say on a couch to practice observing your thoughts and feelings and emotions for
a very short period of time, so that for the rest of the day you are less emotionally reactive.
What this means is you are rehearsing.
You are training.
It’s like going to the gym.
So let’s say you’re training for a sport.
Alright?
You're an athlete in X.
You go to the gym to do squats, to do this, this, and this so that when you get on the
playing field you can perform better.
It’s exactly the same.
You're rehearsing and training for your day.
And then when you run into something that normally would trigger you, whether that's
a certain type of email, whether that’s an employee who has a habit that drives you
insane, or you being behind in your schedule and then the line at Starbucks is longer than
you would like.
Whatever it happens to be, the things that would normally cause you to get really tightly
wound or explode or berate yourself or other people, you will then start to spot before
you have the reaction.
And then you say, “Okay, half a second of breathing.
Let me choose my response instead of being a hot, held hostage to these loops and triggers
that we all have.”
So that has been enormously, enormously helpful for me.
And there are many different entry points.
You know, I mentioned TM.
That’s one way.
It’s not the only way.
Headspace, I think, is a fantastic option for people.
The ten minutes a day for 10 days, which is free, or you could listen to a guided mediation.
There are many good ones out there.
Sam Harris, who’s also in here, has some fantastic guided meditations.
Tara Brach also has some really hypnotic awesome guided meditations.
Yeah, we have one.
We have a free one.
You can Google search Marie Forleo Free Downloadable.
It’s a ten minute, it’s –– because it’s been –– similarly it’s been absolutely
instrumental in my life.