Here Are Two Mindful Steps

I’m a blurter. When I get anxious in meetings, I'll just say exactly what comes to my head, or I won't filter. I sometimes offend people, I overshare, I'm not able to articulate clearly what I mean, and I commit to things that are dumb. My good ideas get buried by noise. But I’ve been able to reduce my anxious blurting significantly by bringing simple mindfulness tools with me into meetings. Mindfulness doesn't have to be hard!

He may now be the CEO of a famous meditation app, but my guest this week-- Headspace's Russell Glass -- wasn’t that impressed when he first tried mindfulness meditation. Nothing really happened. But he stuck with it. “And three weeks into the practice of 10 minutes a day, I was actually in a meeting and I remember literally… There were four or five people in the meeting, and somebody said something in the meeting that I knew would have triggered my stress response, would've triggered an anxiety response." Glass already knew what anxiety usually felt like in his body and how he often reacted in meetings. “It was a tightening of the chest. It was faster breathing. It was a sort of a tunnel focus. I had trouble processing and thinking clearly [and] I would sort of get stuck in this response I was having. And my natural sort of stress shape is to try to react and solve as fast as possible. And so I'd quickly go into solve mode. Often later on I'd look back and sort of regret the decision I made at that moment… like that was obviously not the right decision, and so often I would have to undo those decisions.” 

But learning how to meditate gave Glass a choice. He no longer had to rely on that hair trigger reaction pattern. “I remember sitting there and thinking to myself, ‘Oh, that's interesting. I can feel that I should be anxious right now. I can feel how this anxiety response would start, but I just noted it and let it go, and immediately it clicked. This is what meditation is; this is what mindfulness is. It is the ability to just notice and validate. These are real emotions, these are real feelings. This is the human experience, but it doesn't mean I have to respond to it in the sort of traditional way. It doesn't have to be a fear response.”

Glass says that without exaggeration, he has “been a different person since that moment in terms of my ability to bring mindfulness to literally everything I do.”

You don’t need to run a meditation company to bring the benefit of mindfulness into your own meeting anxiety! 

The legendary meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg says that “anxiety is high energy confined to a restricted space.” Sometimes when we’re in a meeting or other intense situation at work, that anxious energy just bursts through and we act impulsively.

Here's how I use mindfulness to calm impulsivity. I call it my “two step” (corny, I know, but my husband is a big country music fan). 

This is open awareness, which refers to our ability to observe conditions as they are without feeling the need to change them. Sharon Salzberg notes that this “Leads to acceptance…which ends conflict in ourselves and with others.. It leaves nothing out, including our basic cluelessness about what our work will mean in the long run. It helps us give colleagues the benefit of the doubt, endows us with patience, and gives a more amenable attitude towards criticism.”

Mindfulness is the practice of bringing your attention to the present moment, whatever it may be, without judging or interpreting. It’s anchoring yourself in what’s happening right now by bringing calm awareness to your bodily sensations, thoughts, and emotions. Most of us find that the second we allow ourselves to become still and quiet, our minds seem to fill with a thousand random thoughts. This is what Buddhism practitioners call the monkey mind, which leaps continuously from one thought to the next. For anxious individuals in particular, recollections tend to involve ruminating on past mistakes or regrets, while forward-projecting thoughts consist of fretting over all the ways things could go wrong.

Mindfulness shows us a way through the mental maelstrom. It helps us pause before we react. It gives us space to feel, but not act on anxiety.

PS: Here’s a 5 minute audio meditation from Sharon Salzberg that you can do at your desk! Use it whenever the workday has you feeling anxious or overwhelmed.

Sharon notes: The whole idea is we've got this energy, it's kind of running wild. We want to balance it out with greater centeredness or more groundedness. And then we have the benefit of the energy actually, without it being so intense. Listen for more.