Increasing Your Capacity For Adaptive And Holistic Thinking
The practise of mindfulness meditation is a powerful life skill, as it reduces stress and it dramatically enhances your capacity for adaptive and holistic thinking - necessary qualities in mastering the art of how to think effectively.
Are You At The Mercy Of Your Uncontrollable Thoughts?
This is very relevant to our core theme of "how to think effectively" as for many of us, there are significant aspects of our personal and organisational lives that are out of our control.
The experience for many of us is that change is imposed upon us and/or we are considerably constrained by factors totally beyond our control.
These things are frequently very stressful and often not fully resolvable.
How to cope? How to gain insight, guidance and perspective?
The practise of mindfulness meditation, or present moment awareness, has profoundly changed my perspective and experience of some very difficult circumstances.
Here are articles that I wrote specifically on this subject:
Ok, try sitting still on a chair or cushion facing a blank wall and just sit there for 15 minutes. No music, no Ipod or mobile phone or any other distractions - just sit there - and stop thinking!
If (or more likely when) you find that you can't stop thinking - just watch your thoughts with no internal analysis or narrative - just witness, watch and observe, like watching clouds blow across the sky.
You can do this with practise. Take just one of the 6 exercises and practise it several times a day for 3 weeks until it becomes a habit.
Observe how a greater self-awareness starts to develop and how your interactions with others start to change.
A Mindful Approach To Communication And Leadership
Mindful communication is an extraordinary tool for problem solving.
It allows you to tolerate the discomfort of confrontation with others and the embarrassment of discovering how you might have contributed to the problem.
Mindfulness also allows you to find your creativity and resourcefulness, so that you can approach the situation differently and perhaps transform it. It helps you to easily tap into your core creativity to solve problems and achieve goals.
Mindfulness meditation is non-faith based - you don't have to be a Buddhist to do this - and it won't make you one if you do!
Whilst mindfulness meditation practise has its origins in a Buddhist meditation practise, it is a non-faith based approach that can be applied by anyone regardless of what you do or don't believe.
I am very aware that people coming from certain types of Christian background - usually, but not exclusively, evangelical Christians - have difficulty with the idea of any form of meditation.
This is largely based on a deep-seated and (in my opinion) mis-guided belief that meditation will either "open them up" to "external forces" that may gain entry to their minds and/or that engaging in any form of meditation practise will in some way lead them into a non-christian and buddhist practise.
Two further difficulties are firstly that whilst there is a strong tradition of meditation in the Christian faith, it is largely object focused or guided or creative meditation, stemming from the 6th century practice of Bible reading among Benedictine monks called "Lectio Divina" (i.e. divine reading) and there is considerable resistance to eastern style meditation where there is no object of focus other than the mind itself.
The second major difficulty is simply cultural - in that meditation (of any sort) is not "on the radar" and thus is not found in the mainstream evangelical churches.
For many people reading this, what I have just said may seem odd or incomprehensible, but there are significant minority of Christians in the US, UK, South America and Africa who will believe this.
So anyone reading this who comes from this background and who believes this and feels apprehensive, may I respectfully suggest that you view mindfulness practise and present moment awareness as developing an increased and enhanced sense of the presence of God.
I would also add that "listening to the inner voice of God" is easier with a quiet mind - think of the prophet Elijah in the cave!
The Cognitive Neuroscience Of Mindfulness Meditation
It Isn't The Process Of Prayer That’s The Problem, It’s The Way It’s Framed. Regardless of what we feel about Madonna or her song the topic of prayer often arouses strong reactions. Usually, it is som…
Chaos, Disorder And Decay Is The Natural Order Of Things. Nobody has the perfect life. We all struggle and strive to attain health, wealth and personal happiness. Yet these three big areas: our health…
How To Tell The Difference Between Intuition and Anxiety. How do you know whether the voice of your intuition is real or just the product of your inner anxiety? Several months ago I was having a drink…
How the truth and nothing but the truth is often not the whole truth. My great aunty Flo broke her arm and died. It is true that she broke her arm in 1923. It is also true that she died in 1949. But t…
Duality and life beyond your thinking mind focuses on the limitations of time, foreground and background, duality and "stuckness". The first aspect of duality and life beyond your thinking mind focuse…
Being aware is the first stage of being prepared. The conscious mind is limited in so many ways. There are some who would argue that there is no such thing as conscious thought and that it is represen…
The big picture of how your inner map of reality creates your feelings, thoughts, and behaviours. Your inner map of reality is based on the filters of your own ethnic, national, social, family and rel…
Why we need to wear our beliefs lightly and develop negative capability. Throughout history people have campaigned to fight beliefs, ideologies, and injustices that they perceived to be oppressive, di…
Most People Spend Their Entire Life Imprisoned Within The Confines Of Their Own Thoughts. This first of the 4 big reasons why we get stuck is, in my view, the most important. The "self-help industry…
We Would Rather Die Than Change, And We Usually Do In my experience, the vast majority of people who say they want to change don’t change. Most people reading this won’t change because they don’t real…
Beyond the content of your mind you are so much more than you think you are. When we talk of "myself" this is the conventional way of referring to our self image which is in fact the ego's constructio…
This is not an instruction manual, it is a wake up call!
Over this past week I have read Professor James Carse's highly regarded "Finite And Infinite Games - A Vision Of Life As Play And Possibility"…
How Your Lizard Brain Sabotages Your Happiness We are hardwired to measure our progress in any and all areas of life where we have goals and aspirations. We can't not do it. But what we measure and ho…
So What Exactly Does It Mean to Wake Up - What Is "Enlightenment"? There is nothing magical, mystical or mysterious about waking up we’re actually having glimpses of enlightenment all the time. Enligh…
Situational communication is about taking account of 3 often ignored factors about the other person. You are a situational communicator when you recognise that effective communication is not an event…
The secret to how to influence without authority is that you get what you really want by giving other people what they really want. We live in an interconnected world and knowing how to influence with…
Asking The Right Questions Is Critical For A Successful Change. Every time we initiate a significant change - whether in our personal life or in an organisation - we will most likely over-estimate our…
Group culture is: "How we do things round here". We like to see ourselves as free agents making our own choices and living authentically but the reality is that The Matrix has many layers and we are u…
In circumstances of significant change, the progress from A to B will not be in a straight line. We run our lives largely on auto-pilot. In most circumstances your experience of getting from A to B is…
To be successful in the art of persuasion you must ensure that certain things happen. To be successful in the art of persuasion you must establish a framework of what has to happen to get you to that…
Create The Environment Where They Want To Buyin to Your Proposal In order to build the win-win you have to uncover what it is that the other person really wants or needs, and to do that you have to as…
The art of persuasion is based on the simple idea that you get what you want by enabling the other party to get what they want. Being a nice friendly person with good inter-personal skills may be a go…
It's not the strongest that survive, nor the most intelligent, but those who are most responsive to change, the most persuasive, and the best communicators. We are living in an age of unprecedented ch…
What Is Important Is Seldom Urgent And What Is Urgent Is Seldom Important. The Eisenhower Box is a time management and decision-making model devised by President Dwight Eisenhower to help him prioriti…
Lost In Our Delusions About Enlightenment. There is something in human nature - a desire to glamorise, sanctify, objectify and idolise – that elevates people who have offered deep insights to the huma…
The Wisdom Of A Person Who Masters In Any Art Is Reflected In Their Every Attitude. The state and quality of your mind has a very large bearing on the quality of your performance in any area of life t…
Toxicity Is The Price Tag Of Accessibility. In the early days of online dating, users were vetted and had to go through a registration process and agree to comply with a code of conduct designed to en…
How Not To Be Fooled By Randomness. Ergodicity is an ugly word from the world of mathematics. It is an umbrella term for two sets of conditions of probability and outcome. These two conditions form th…
How You Frame A Situation Has A Profound Impact On How You Respond To It Emotionally. Imposter syndrome is a psycho-emotional experience of a fear of being found out as incompetent despite ongoing evi…
Issues You'll Face When Playing The Long Game. The challenges of the road less traveled is loosely based around the phrase popularised by M.Scott Peck with his book "The Road Less Traveled". This arti…