Like everyone else, I’d heard lots about mindfulness over the last several years. I’d even gotten into the habit of doing some simple breathing exercises when I found myself getting upset or frustrated about something. When it occurred to me that is.
Most of the time though I was going through life as I always have: with my heart on my sleeve, spending a good portion of each day frustrated, and often not dealing with it particularly well. It finally came to a head one night at the dinner table about a month ago.
My son, who is one of my favorite people in the world, was goofing off and ended up dropping some of his pasta and sauce onto his shirt and lap. He thought it was kind of funny until he saw the look on my face. I didn’t scream or even raise my voice much, but what I said bordered on emotional abuse. It was mean and totally disproportionate to the mistake my son had made. I reduced him to sobbing tears right there at dinner.
Acknowledging you have a problem
My wife and I went out to lunch the next day, and she (carefully) mentioned that I needed to something about my behavior at dinner the previous night, and she suggested a meditation app named Headspace. She had heard about it somewhere, and I was happy to take up her suggestion, because I was pretty ashamed at my behavior as well. That night my meditation journey began.
I started out on the easiest setting, which was frankly all I could handle. Trying to calm and clear my mind, which had spent over a decade on the hamster wheel of constant mobile phone distraction, was more difficult than I can describe. But my motivation was strong so I persisted; meditating with the app every day, progressively for longer and longer periods.
The change wasn’t immediate, but it was far faster than I expected. It wasn’t complete, but it was far more drastic than I would have ever dreamed.
Who are you, and what have you done with myself?
The first thing I noticed after about three weeks of daily meditation was that my pace of walking and talking slowed down, and my voice softened. Nothing the kids did bothered me. I could recognize that what they were doing was wrong, and that they should stop, even taking on a stern voice if necessary, but these were all conscious decisions. Meditation didn’t make me OK with everything my kids did, it put me in control of my reaction to it.
I found myself, for possibly the first time in my life, in complete control of how I perceived my environment and those in it, and how I reacted to everything. I was OK with being in the moment, and the urge to pick up my phone whenever I had a free moment slowly evaporated.
I would go for walks without my phone and see, for the very first time, the color of the leaves, the quality of the light as it passed through the trees, the texture of the clouds, and really feel the wind on my face. I was experiencing Earth like I was a visitor who had never been here before.
It starts with a single step
I know my journey is not done, and I am by no means a finished project, but the impact that meditation has had on my life in the month that I’ve been doing it has been incalculable. It turns out that meditation isn’t at all what I thought it was, and the effect it could have on me is not something I ever could have expected.
You might be wondering what this is doing on a leadership blog, and I’d tell you that this experience has shaped the way I see my family, my co-workers, and those I have been entrusted to lead to a greater extent than any education, learning, reading, or advice I have ever received.
I don’t know if everyone can expect similar results to what I’ve seen. Maybe I was particularly ready to receive this wisdom. I honestly have no idea. I just know that it has made me better at everything that is important to me in my life, and I desperately wish that I’d discovered it decades ago.
I don’t know what your meditation journey would have in store for you, but I would highly recommend finding out.
