Meditation

Or how to stay adequately sane in the world

Overview

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1. What is meditation and why?

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• Our brain is wired for the bad stuff
1. The old brains and the neocortex → the negativity bias
2. The left and right hemispheres → your affective style

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• The benefits of meditation

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• How to meditate?

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Images: Illustrations belong to Headspace

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1. What is meditation?

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Meditation can be defined as a practice where an individual focuses their mind on a particular object, thought or activity to achieve a mentally clear and emotionally calm state.

–– Wikipedia (web I go to for ‘factual’ answers)

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It’s about training in awareness and getting a healthy sense of perspective.

–– Headspace (app I use to help me meditate)

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Why are you talking about this Zo?

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• I was assigned an Asana task (and have been meditating)

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• Our mind and body can control us (section 2: We’re wired for bad stuff) and meditation can help rewire our brain

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• Everyone and especially leaders can benefit from meditation to make better decisions and build better teams (section 3: The benefit of meditation)

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2. We are wired for the bad stuff

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We will cover this in 2 parts:

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1. The old brains and the neocortex → the negativity bias
2. The left and right hemispheres → your affective style

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1. The old brains and the neocortex

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Instinctual or reptilian brain

Instinct, survival

Emotional or feeling brain

Emotions, feelings, memory

Rational or thinking brain

Rationality, language, ideas

The negativity bias

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• For survival, our brain (and our ancestors’) is built in a way that information has a shortcut to the lizard brain and limbic system first before neocortex

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• Our brain is hard-wired to have a deeper impression of danger and negativity

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E.g. The Gottman’s “magic marriage ratio” is 5 to 1. This means that for every negative interaction during conflict, a stable and happy marriage has five (or more) positive interactions.

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Book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Happiness_Hypothesis

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• The left and right hemispheres

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Right hemisphere

Holistic thought

Intuition

Creativity

Negative emotion

Left hemisphere

Analytic thought

Logic

Language

Positive emotion

Your affective style

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• Unfortunately, our affective style or how we regulate our emotions is determined by our brain activity, whether we’re more right-brained or left-brained

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• People with more active right brain activity i.e. creative type (like me, ew) are more prone to depression, anxiety

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Book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Happiness_Hypothesis

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3. The benefits of meditation

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Mindfulness:

• helps strengthen our limbic system (emotional regulation) and decrease the brain cell volume in the lizard brain, (anxiety and stress)

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• helps us become aware and mindful of our thoughts and feelings, detach from the immediate emotional response

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Benefits for leaders and teams

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• Resilience

→ decrease anxiety, boosting resilience and performance under stress

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• Emotional intelligence

→ detach yourself from your immediate emotional reaction, develop empathy

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• Focus

→ help curb our tendency for distraction, strengthening our ability to stay focused and even boosting memory

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Benefits for leaders and teams

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• Creativity

→ encourages divergent thinking i.e. coming up with the greatest number of possible solutions to a problem

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• Improves relationships

→ stress narrows your perspective, meditation helps increase our sense of connection, kindness and compassion to others

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Read more here: https://hbr.org/2015/12/how-meditation-benefits-ceos

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4. How to meditate

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• Just 5 - 10 minutes a day could do wonder

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• Use Headspace or other apps: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_yXe_6mYTA

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• Actions speak louder than words so let’s meditate for 3 minutes together

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5. TL;DR.

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• Meditation is a practice where an individual focuses their mind on a particular object, thought or activity to achieve a mentally clear and emotionally calm state

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• Our brain is out to get us

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• Meditation changes our brain physically and therefore our thinking and feeling, how we react to situations → make us better leaders and teams

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• Get started with apps like Calm, Headspace, or even youtube

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Thank you

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