Discover How Meditation Influences Your Career / Work

In this audio, you’ll discover how building a strong and consistent meditation practice can influence your career path. I’ll cover the key benefits meditation can bring to your professional life, as well as some of the new challenges and bigger shifts you may need to consider along the way.

Please note: This audio is originally from a video.

Transcript

Hey this is Ish and today I'm going to talk to you about how meditation can affect your career and work life.

So as humans we spend a lot of our days working and what is very interesting is that if you have a consistent strong meditation practice this affects all areas of your life including your career and work choices.

So I'll be going over some of the positive effects that meditation can have in your career but also some challenges as well that come from a deepening of your practice.

This is not really talked about as much and then some overall changes that you'll tend to experience as you progress along your journey.

So let's start off by going over some of the benefits that meditation can have on your career and work life.

The first most noticeable thing is that your focus and your attention span increases.

This is something that is practically trained as you sit on your cushion to meditate.

So there are many objects of meditation such as focusing on the breath or focusing on a candle or an object or listening to a mantra.

Whatever it is the act of coming back to your meditation object whenever you lose focus over and over again actually trains this muscle of focus and your attention span also increases as you sit for longer periods of time and you're able to stay on your meditation object for longer periods of time.

Now this cultivation of indistractibility or concentration is really central to all contemplative traditions.

In Buddhism for example there are practices known as shamatha which are calm abiding which focus on collecting the mind and in yoga for example there are the last three limbs of yoga which are dharana,

Concentration,

Dhyana,

Meditation absorption and samadhi which is union and these three limbs are referred to as samyana yoga.

So this is the active cultivation of this quality.

The next benefit of meditation on your work life is that you become more efficient so as you begin to let go of layers of clutter distractions just various things that pull your attention away and you improve upon your concentration which was covered just now you actually become more efficient because you learn to let go and simplify your focus your attention and your lifestyle overall.

So you're able to get a lot more done with less time.

The next benefit is that your temperament improves as you start to take on more positive or wholesome qualities and more mindfully reduce qualities that are harmful for you.

So this makes sense as you start to say practice loving kindness or gratefulness and gratitude and let go of qualities such as anger and hostility towards others or restlessness for example impatience or irritability you'll actually notice that your relationships with other people improves a lot and meditation generally over time starts to smooth out some of the rougher parts or edgier parts of your personality just a bit more and how this translates over to a working environment is that if you are in a customer facing role you'll actually perform a lot better because you are you know friendlier you're happier you are less irritated you're more patient and this can have a lot of positive effects.

In addition if you're looking to step into leadership roles having an increased control over your emotions and being more stable and resilient to adversity is something that is very favorable.

The last benefit I'll discuss here is an increased level of creativity as you begin to meditate more you have access to more of the hidden parts of your mind so some people like to say the subconscious mind some people like to say you expand your consciousness so you're more aware of things as the capacity of your awareness actually increases in mindfulness and another thing is that your lateral thinking also expands more so you're able to look at different perspectives and tie it all in together so some would refer to this as your prefrontal cortex being more strengthened as you increase your discipline your willpower some will say your consciousness expands however you like to approach this angle there is a definite increase in creativity and coming up with innovative solutions so you can actually become very successful at your craft whatever it is as your level of creativity and innovation increases now let's go over some of the challenges this isn't talked about as much but there are some challenges that you can come to experience as your meditation practice deepens the first is that your mind becomes very sharp but it is also at the same time able to handle less input at once so it's weird that you become very sharp but also slower in a sense and gradually over time you'll also notice that very fast-paced environments can have a draining effect on you and you become a bit too sensitive to really operate well in those types of environments so that is an interesting note and this also leads me to my next point which is covering some of the bigger changes that meditation can have on your life which will evidently affect your work and your career and some of these changes can actually be experienced as very jarring especially if you're stepping up the level of your practice so one of the things mentioned earlier is the hyperactivity quality of the mind kind of dies down a bit which can make it hard to thrive in certain environments but another big thing is your value system which can change over time so before if you were really motivated by extrinsic rewards such as the titles that you may receive by getting promoted or the increased amount of money or your position or status in the company as the main driving factor of why you you know chose that particular career or profession you'll notice a disconnect or a sense of tension as your values change into more intrinsically motivated reasons for working so this could be making a difference or wanting to help others or being contented so if you're you know happy with where you are you may not have as much ambition to climb a certain ladder corporate ladder for example and this could be hard and very competitive type environments if you were working in these environments because all of a sudden you don't resonate with the company values or what they uphold which leads me to my next point is that as you move from being externally oriented as the main driver from your choices to a sense of internal fulfillment it becomes more important to be more selective as far as where you put your time and your attention as your level of mindfulness and discernment begins to increase and you can no longer fake things anymore so when you do make this choice to become more selective and being led from within you can either choose to continue to work as an employee for other people which i'll discuss in a second or you can choose to give your own gifts and focus on what matters to you and spreading your mission out in service of others so what does this look like well as an employee as you begin to read energies a lot better just simply as a byproduct of your meditation practice you can start to see and look into how certain companies operate and you can see if it's an energetic fit for what you want now one funny overlap between the business world and spirituality is actually they share the same word which is the word entity so you hear that often in spiritual communities and also a business is actually legally referred to as an entity at times and what this really refers to is that this group has a certain collective energy about it so a business has a set of values and people that uphold these values and certain mindsets and beliefs and they rely on the people that you know kind of support that in this group to perpetuate themselves so it's kind of like this impersonal energy that draws upon its followers and you can notice this where companies have a certain way of doing things they enforce dress code if they have one they expect people to act in a certain way they expect people to adopt their specific values whatever it is and as you become more mindful you can actually see through whatever they are projecting and see whether it aligns to yourself and as a willing participant you can actually voluntarily enter these groups or organizations and work for them but also just know whether they align with you or not and you can make this conscious choice and you can really start to pay attention more i think really as your intuition and your mindfulness increases you'll notice how certain companies operate so if you're in a company that's overly competitive they may say things like we want to be the best and we want to conquer and beat all the other companies and you know their sense of like arrogance about them well you can actually notice these things and see if it aligns with you and chances are if you as you continue to meditate this unfulfilled desire actually an ambition starts to decrease a bit more so you're not you may actually fall out of certain entities or groups altogether and choose companies that are more focused on helping others at its backbone so this is a conscious choice you can make now the alternative is you can focus on yourself and forge your own path as you discover your mission in life now finding your unique purpose or mission in life can give you a lot of satisfaction and can really change your life to make it more meaningful and gives you a sense of direction or north star if you aren't certain yet what your mission is well there are two general strategies you can take the first is if you have a lot of time available you can actually dedicate entire periods of time just sitting and trying to discover what you may like so traditionally this is done through a vision quest or what we call soul searching or people will just sit in a room and meditate for the whole day and try to you know find the answers which will come to them and this is a path that requires more austerity so you're kind of taking away comforts in life and you have this discipline where you'll sit and you know kind of figure it out so that's obviously on a bigger scale if you have the time to dedicate to this it's very beneficial a lot of people do this they take time off work and and find this calling or purpose in isolation the next thing you could do though is if you don't have you know all this time to take off you can start to take very small steps so for example if you've always wanted to be say a coach or healer and you've thought about making videos for a while well we can just start off by making one video per week let's just keep it at that and then continue to do so and explore this particular avenue and maybe this is not your path but at least you've given a shot and start to experiment and actually start to walk different steps to see what your path might be and it's all about learning and discovering and you'll you know fail a lot but eventually your path will be revealed as you continue to walk your own journey in life and to leave you with a very relatable quote by the Sufi poet Rumi as you start to walk the way appears and while there are many different angles and perspectives to approach this quote what I like about it in as far as this talk is it points to a general different way of being as you begin to practice more and more meditation is that instead of the conventional way that the business world for example operates where you're planning you know a thousand steps ahead and you're using your rational mind all the time and you're constantly planning organizing delegating doing all these things and trying to control every outcome you can actually move in a different way through intuition to presence and actually just not knowing what the next step is it's a complete surrender to the moment and intuition and simply also taking action at the same time but doing it from a place of presence from not knowing what may happen and just being okay with that and you'll find that when you operate from this place and actually having trust that everything's be fine you'll be pleasantly surprised that opportunities will unfold just as they are and they will come to you just when the time is right and how wonderful that is is because you don't have to control or predict everything but you can actually operate from a place of pure presence so I hope you like this talk and I'd also be very curious to see some of your comments on how the practice of meditation has influenced your work life.

Thank you.