Inspired Project Teams

Audio: Practice Mindfulness [Time - 22:10, File Size - 20.8 MB]

[Acknowledgement:  The main inspiration for this post comes from various interviews and articles featuring Jon Kabat-Zinn, Professor of Medicine Emeritus and founding director of the Stress Reduction Clinic and the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society at the University of Massachusetts Medical School.  Kabat-Zinn started his career as a scientist at MIT and it is with this scientific perspective (along with his clinical research to support many of his positions) that he shares his thoughts on the power of mindfulness. He teaches mindfulness meditation as a technique to help people cope with stress, anxiety, pain and illness. You can check out the links below for more about Jon and his work.]

In this post I hope to convince you of the power of mindfulness — the practice of bringing your full awareness into the present moment. This is very different from that “kinda sorta” awareness that you have while you are attending a meeting, firing off a text message, and eating lunch all at the same time. And it is different from the awareness you experience within a conversation while you are trying to stifle clever or fearful or angry or resentful thoughts that are clamoring for your attention. And it is different from the awareness you experience when sitting alone at your desk, working to solve a problem while thoughts of past difficulties and future fears challenge your concentration. Instead, it is a cleaner, simpler kind of awareness. It is simply being fully present, with all your attention. It is, in the words of Jon Kabat-Zinn, “paying attention, on purpose, to the present moment, without judgment.” This is mindfulness.

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Audio: Accept What Is [Time - 16:45, File Size - 15.8 MB]

Imagine this situation: You are in your beautiful, newly remodeled kitchen wiping the counters clean after dinner.  Out in the hallway you hear your big labrador retriever galloping toward you. In a flash, he bounds across the tile to the table, plunks his meaty front paws up on a chair and begins sniffing the dinner plates for leftovers. Stopping your clean-up chores, you whirl to see what he’s getting into and bam!… his big nose knocks over a nearly full glass of dark, purple grape juice left untouched by one of the kids. The tough plastic tumbler bounces all over the place, spritzing the walls with purple droplets, while a big puddle of juice begins expanding across the tile. It’s flowing straight toward your new beige living room carpet.  Do you:

• A. Deny that this is actually happening, telling yourself that you are a good, hard-working person who doesn’t deserve this kind of misery?
• B.  Find your spouse and begin an angst-filled review of your family’s history of owning this dog, bemoaning the fact that while the dog is lovable, he has always caused too many minor disasters?
• C.  Sit down with your wife and kids and imagine a future that has in it no potentially staining leftovers and no dog anywhere near the kitchen?
• D.  Run across the room, placing yourself and your counter-cleaning sponge squarely between the expanding puddle of purple and the new carpet, thus preventing the major stain?

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Audio: Just Do It! [Time - 15:47, File Size - 14.9 MB]

It is my intent in this post to convince you of the tremendous liberating power of simply taking action. I want to encourage you to get moving… to get unstuck… to just do it! If you and your project team members are sometimes plagued with fits of analysis paralysis or procrastination, accompanied by worry over all the bad things that might happen when you take action, then this post (podcast) is for you.  Let’s start with some a couple of powerful quotes:

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Audio: Trust Your Judgment [Time - 14:45, File Size - 13.9 MB]

“A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages… Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.”  Ralph Waldo Emerson in Self-Reliance

“… the best in every business do what they have learned to do without questioning their abilities — they flat out trust their skills, which is why we call this high-performance state of mind the ‘Trusting Mindset.’ Routine access to the Trusting Mindset is what separates great performers from the rest of the pack.” — John Eliot in Overachievement

“Skill in any performance, whether it be in sports, in playing the piano, in conversation, or in selling merchandise, consists not in painfully and consciously thinking out each action as it is performed, but in relaxing, and letting the job do itself through you. Creative performance is spontaneous and ‘natural’ as opposed to self-conscious and studied.”  Maxwell Maltz in Psycho-Cybernetics

“By banishing doubt and trusting your intuitive feelings, you clear a space for the power of intention to flow through.”  Wayne Dyer in The Power of Intention So, do you trust yourself — really trust yourself — to come up with that creative leap, that exactly appropriate solution, that powerful insight that maybe no one else can generate?

The message shared by all these great teachers… indeed, by many other great philosophers… is that to achieve anything great you must trust that voice which lies deep within you and is trying to be heard. Read the rest of this entry »