Written by: Rita Farruggia, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
Think about the skills required to achieve high levels of success. We have heard them a million times: laser focus, clarity, emotional mastery, creativity, flexible thinking, great leadership, problem-solving, communication skills, and high energy are some of the top skills required to achieve success. Meditation enhances our ability to cultivate these skill sets required to achieve high levels of success.
Relationship Building and Sales
A top skill to achieve success in business has great people skills. We are always dealing with people, even if you are a solopreneur. As a solopreneur, you are still dealing with people: clients/customers, vendors, pitching to secure speaking engagements, and converting (communication skills) strangers into paying clients. When you are dealing with people, you interact with multiple personality types with different perspectives, communication styles, and personal past histories (education levels, experiences, beliefs, values, etc.). We have all encountered people in our day-to-day business life that appear to be rude. The important thing is how we deal with both pleasant and not so pleasant people so that our energy doesn’t get depleted if we let them change our state into an angry state. Meditation helps you build emotional strength. You are less likely to become upset when dealing with difficult people because practicing regular meditation, we can observe and understand the truth behind our own emotions (gain clarity to see that people who chose to act disrespectful are insecure, it’s about their personal wounds, their bad behavior is not about you) and you become better at seeing how those around us are feeling. This gives you the ability to develop deeper connections with people when you are deeply connected to yourself. This enhances your communication skills because you are becoming aware of the truth between your interactions with people.
You are more aware of what the other person needs to hear in your conversation because your listening skills increase along with your intuition. This is because when you meditate, you quiet your mind from mental chatter and stop living in a reactionary state from external stimuli. This allows your nervous system to calm down. It is from this calm place we can see more clearly. When tuning into ourselves, our intuition increases; therefore, we can receive clear insight from this theta state. Therefore, we become used to observing our breath and ourselves more. This is the reason after you complete a transcendental (quiet) meditation, you see more details in the room, you feel more present and alive once you open your eyes (you are becoming more tuned in). This is why daily meditators don’t respond with a quick reaction to an offensive statement; instead, they can recognize the other person’s feelings and have more emotional flexibility in their response.
Being more aware of our emotions and thoughts allows us to motivate people who work for us. This allows you to have advanced communication skills to ensure your team members' emotional and mental needs are met in order to feel fulfilled in performing their work. For example, if one team member is doing something that you see as inefficient, you have the ability to communicate with diplomacy because you are not quickly reacting based on emotion. Instead, after you react in your body and mind, you process your reaction by asking yourself questions as to why that specific team member is taking that action? (it could be for a number of reasons, maybe someone else told that team member to take that action or a misunderstanding in communication, etc.). Therefore, you can have a calm, respectful conversation to discover the truth and explain the action you prefer that member took because of efficiency. You apologize if you weren’t clear in your instructions.
Improve Mental Performance
Our mental performance declines as we age. We can combat the aging process with a daily meditation practice. Meditation, when practiced regularly, is training the mind to concentrate and focus. You need to be able to concentrate on your breath initially to get into a meditative (theta) state which is a state just above the delta (sleeping) state. Studies prove that meditation helps people sustain their focus, even during mundane tasks.
Researchers have discovered that Buddhist monks who meditate daily have high performance on concentration tests than the average person. Those who meditate regularly not only increase their ability to concentrate they also boost their attention to detail. Every entrepreneur wants to get more done. This research proves how meditating can improve your productivity levels and the quality of your productivity. Therefore, you are likely to achieve the results you desire with laser focus as a result of daily meditation.
Learn Faster and Improve Your Memory
In order to be a successful business leader, you need to process and learn new information quickly. All entrepreneurs can relate to this. Technology is always changing, our culture always changes, the market always changes, and new opportunities arise that require a new skill or knowledge to adapt. Researchers have discovered that meditation stimulates areas of the brain associated with memory, concentration, and learning.
One study of college students who took a mindfulness class four times a week for two weeks demonstrated that their working memory capacity improved during that time. Other studies demonstrated that meditation increases gray matter volume, also enhancing the performance of other areas of the brain that assist with learning, memory, cognition, or emotional regulation. Researchers highlighted that meditation is likely to change the brain’s structure, increase mental activity and think faster. This means that meditation improves your mental performance.
Increase Your Creativity
Being creative leads to business innovation. If you are not innovating in this fast-moving business world, your business can get left behind. The ability to be creative is a must-have skill in order to succeed. Having rigid and in-the-box thinking can get you stuck at a certain level in your business. Meditation activates your creativity.
A study discovered that open-monitoring meditation, a type of meditation that involves observing how you are feeling in the present moment in your body, your thoughts, and sensations, increases “divergent thinking.” This kind of thinking involves generating creative ideas by exploring many possible solutions. Research has discovered that open-monitoring meditation improves working memory and increases flexible thinking.
Tools To Amplify Your Meditation Practice
Burning Sage
There are tools you can use to amplify your concentration during your meditation sessions. You can burn sage. Smelling sage is aromatherapy for your brain, it activates your brain to concentrate by calming down your nervous system, and it is also known to increase your intuition. Also, looking at the swirls of smoke in the air puts you into a trance/meditative state.
Crystals
Each crystal emits a different energy frequency to amplify your meditation session. Depending on the intention of your meditation, you would choose a crystal to match your intention. For example, when doing self-love or increasing compassion mediation, hold rose quartz in your hand since it emits a love frequency. To gain more clarity on making a decision, you can hold clear quartz, amethyst, or selenite crystal. Clear quartz amplifies clarity, and it also amplifies the energy of the other crystals around it. Amethyst crystal increases your intuition, and selenite helps communicate with your higher self.
Essential Oils
You can diffuse essential oils in an oil diffuser for aromatherapy. Smelling the wonderful scents of essential oils puts you into a calm state, feeling more peaceful and more at ease to go into a trance/meditative state. Also, health benefits are associated with smelling the wonderful scents of essential oils. Note that some people also run the essential oil of their choice onto the palm of their hands then smell them before meditating.
Some Top Essential Oils for Meditating:
Also, guided meditations performed by a person certified in hypnotherapy (two meditations below) helps guide your body and mind into a deeply relaxed state to ensure you are in a theta state for the specific guided imagery the meditation facilitator is painting in your mind, a trained hypnotherapist is trained in activating emotional responses through voice techniques, choice of particular words to increase the success of your transformation with daily meditation.
Two Excellent Guided Success Meditations to Activate High Performance:
After reading this article, now you know why some top business leaders meditate regularly, such as Marc Benioff (CEO and Founder of Salesforce), Arianna Huffington (founder of Huff Post), Jeff Weiner (CEO of LinkedIn), Tony Robbins, Oprah, and Ray Dalio (Founder of Bridge Water Associates) among many other top business leaders. My passion is to motivate and inspire people to live their best lives by improving their minds, body, spirit, and confidence. If this article has inspired you to meditate daily, please share the gift of mental health by sharing this article with your network.
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Rita Farruggia, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Rita Farruggia is the CEO and Founder of HappyBeingWell.com, with the mission of being the 1 Self-Care Community in the world. Her mission is to awaken a billion people globally to their love while teaching them how to love themselves, reprogram their subconscious, align with truth, universal laws, and create a daily spiritual practice that involves self-care practices. HappyBeingWell.com offers the tools/products, education, and inspiration to use in our daily spiritual & self-care practice. Rita believes a daily spiritual practice is not limited to yoga and/or meditation. The truth is when we are manually cleaning our dishes, we often go into a trance. This is also a form of meditation. Rita believes our personal hygiene (self-care) and home cleaning sessions can also be our spiritual practices. Self-care and spiritual practices changed Rita's life, increased her ability to love herself.
