It’s Time for Business to Get Serious About Meditation

It’s Time for Business to Get Serious about Meditation Imagine waking up to a dark roast from Green Mountain Coffee Roaster as you read an article about Bridgewater, the world’s largest hedge fund. On your way to work, an old Def Jam hit is playing on the radio. You have last night’s leftovers in some Tupperware in the back seat for lunch as your phone pings you with a Salesforce update.

What do the top business leaders at each of these companies -Robert Stiller, Ray Dalio, Russell Simmons, Rich Goings, and Marc Benoiff – have in common? Each of them practices and promotes meditation. Paint them as New Age if you like, but each believes that meditation has both personal and practical benefits for business leaders and their employees. I happen to agree. For many years, I’ve spent the first 20 minutes of my morning ritual in meditation – and my business and well-being are better for it.

For far too many companies, meditation doesn’t fit with an entrepreneurial mentality. That’s a shame, because a calmer mind can make a noticeable impact. If business is all about people, then we better take care of the people leading our businesses. Based on evidence offered by the American Psychological Association, I want to share five benefits of meditation and mindfulness for entrepreneurs and business leaders alike.

Cognitive Flexibility The best leaders in business are not only skilled or experienced but able to adapt their wisdom and abilities to changing circumstances. As ground shifts beneath them, they find new ways to leverage that new ground. That’s cognitive flexibility at work. It’s how we adapt to meet novel and unexpected challenges. Meditation helps our brain ‘go with the flow’ so to speak, recovering more quickly from stresses so that we can better prepare the organization for what’s to come.

Mental Focus Some of our most lasting contributions come from deep work – work that we pursue while in an uninterrupted state of concentration. Research shows that those with more experience meditating are better performers when it comes to staying focused and paying attention to the task at hand. Even – and especially – in a busy workplace where deep work is a luxury, meditation can help us make sense of the multiple of stimuli vying for our brainpower.

Working Memory While it may be unlikely that you remember the names of the five CEOs above, our business lives require us to command an immense amount of information. We have KPIs, clients, industry trends, product feedback, sales cycles, and so on. As a VC, I’m expected to speak intelligently about companies and their market positioning across 30 countries (without staring at my phone). Simply put, meditation increases the capacity for what we can keep in our head at one time.

Emotional Balance In a 2007 study, researchers observed how soon participants were able to successfully move on from a negative stimulus to focus on a cognitive task. Ever had a stressful meeting in the morning before a crucial meeting in the

afternoon? Meditation can help us be more resilient in rolling with the punches and getting back to the task at hand. Yes, meditation can even play a role in our entrepreneurial grit.

Relationship Satisfaction Finally, meditation helps bring out the best of our emotional intelligence so that we can better communicate with partners, whether they be business partners or romantic ones. For most of us, we will spend even more waking hours in the office than with our loved ones at home. Meditation enables us to bounce back from the stresses of relationship conflict in a healthier and more mature manner. This means that we are not only more effective at our work, but also much more pleasant to work with. You might be catching onto a pattern here.

Even the busiest among us is capable of taking a shower and brushing our teeth – at least, I can speak for those within sniffing distance of my office. Meditation can be a part of our daily ritual just as much as taking a shower or commuting to work. There are communities worldwide to help in getting started, and even a litany of mobile apps. But the real challenge is being willing to take the definitive step towards taking action. We owe it to ourselves and those who depend on us.

---ADAM JIWAN, Entrepreneur, Investor, and Meditator