7 Surprising Advantages For Entrepreneurs Who Meditate – Forbes
With practice, meditation has the potential to change your life. Committing to even a short practice of just ten minutes per day could bring business benefits beyond a reduced heart rate, lower cortisol levels, and better rest. The effects aren’t uniform across practitioners, each person gleans different results. “Meditation is an exploration”, explains experienced meditation instructor Jeff Warren. “We have to learn for ourselves how exactly it will shift our outlooks and ways of operating.”
7 surprising advantages for entrepreneurs who meditate
Aous Poules
Jeff Warren is a writer, meditation instructor, and co-author of Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics. He writes and records the Daily Trip on the meditation app Calm, and has created many meditations and courses for Ten Percent Happier. His work makes meditation and practice accessible to diverse audiences including the US Army Cadets, police officers, Google execs, distractible teens and “every other conceivable demographic of freethinker.”
I interviewed Warren to find out some of the surprising advantages in store for entrepreneurs who make meditation part of their daily routine.
Boosted creativity
Creativity means discussions and flipcharts and drawing and freewriting, right? Wrong. Creativity doesn’t only stem from busyness and noise; it also emerges from stillness. “When the mind gets quiet and drops out of the usual thinking patterns it makes itself available to surprising new connections,” said Warren. Do the same things, get the same results. Sit down, sit still, reroute your thinking brain and see what happens.
“Strange ideas from the depths bubble up, offering new associations and possibilities,” he added. “Getting quiet is arguably one of the best practices for creativity.” Being active all day keeps your brain in a mode of thinking and doing, chattering away in words and actions. But the calm that meditation brings can help move this to one side, opening possibilities for breakthroughs, discoveries and new ideas.
Trust that your mind has the answers you need, it just needs more peace and quiet to find them.
More time
Maybe you think you don’t have time to meditate. Warren suggests you don’t have time not to. “Most people think of meditation as a time investment,” he said. “Something that takes time and takes away from other things, but the counter-intuitive thing about meditation is it actually makes time.” A practice that brings more blank space? It almost sounds too good to be true.
“By taking a little bit of time to do nothing, you can open up space for more things to happen,” said Warren, who has seen first-hand that, “You get clearer about what’s important and sometimes the things you thought were urgent turn out to be not so urgent, so you can end up making …….
