One fear of meditation that high performers have is that chilling out will make them lose their edge. Most people that are high performers are type A, go go go people. We can’t imagine not checking our email first thing in the morning, because what if there’s something important that can’t wait?
The thought of meditation is equated with “just relaxing” and that does not sound productive. In reality, taking time to meditate each morning will boost your productivity by increasing mental clarity. There is a major distinction between efficiency and productivity.
If you’re the leader of an organization, I don’t care how fast you can transfer emails into an excel sheet, you shouldn’t do it. You may be efficient at that activity, but it is not productive leadership behavior. Efficiency is doing things quickly. Productivity is doing the right things.
When our minds are not where they should be, we’re easily distracted by the wrong things. We make little improvements, respond to every email and fail to think about the big picture.
Meditating will not take away your edge. It will put you on a different plane. While everyone goes around doing what they’re told and responding to every email until they’re burnt out, you’ll have the energy and presence to make real change.
If you really get into meditation, you may no longer feel the immense pressure you’ve been putting on yourself all these years. That’s scary. It feels like you’ve lost your edge.
Why keep going when there’s no pressure?
This gets into the second misconception of meditation. This is one that I’ve had trouble reconciling for years: If you are enough, why get better?
I struggled with this. I believed that my self-critic was the thing that made me keep improving. If I didn’t criticize myself, then how would I know what to improve? I believed that self-criticism –> improvement.
The problem is that self-criticism is a negative behavior. Instead, why not try a neutral behavior like self-reflection? In meditation, you learn not to judge and label things. You learn to simply to accept them. In reflection, we can accept the past and move forward. Whereas with criticism, we are looking at the past in order to highlight the negative.
The fact is that in any moment, you are enough. This doesn’t mean there’s no room for improvement, but it means that you need to accept you for who you are at that moment. Don’t beat yourself up about how you could get better. Simply note potential improvements and then take steps to make them happen.
We can be enough and still get better because we are wired for improvement. Progress feels good. You do need to examine the past in order to learn for the future, but instead of looking for the negatives, congratulate yourself for what you did while still knowing you can be better.
Your self-critic isn’t the reason for your success. You do well because you are smart and hard-working, not because you beat yourself up. You can eliminate your self-critic. You can get rid of the feeling that you aren’t enough. Meditation will help you get there. There is a happier place. There is a better place where you can do work on another level. There is a place where you become your fullest self.
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