Leaders and Entrepreneurs Pay Attention

Mindfulness practices that really work

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  • Embrace the suck!

    I first heard the expression “Embrace the suck!” from an interview with David Goggins. It’s a phrase used a lot in military contexts but also in modern self-help contexts like Stoicism. It’s meaning is quite simple – when you find yourself in a situation that’s unpleasant or uncomfortable, don’t complain about it (which doesn’t change Read more

  • A magic mindfulness Question

    It’s so easy to over-complicate things. Esoecially for me! I love digging into a topic, learning about it, and coming up with new ideas and theories around it. Mindfulness and meditation are perfect examples. If you want to read about meditation and mindfulness, I could easily give you a list of my top 100 books Read more

  • How to not struggle with Thoughts

    “Thought is a wonderful servant but a terrible master.” I first heard that quote about 50 years ago, when I first started exploring meditation. (Yes, I was a pretty weird 15 year old, something my siblings reminded me of constantly!) I liked the quote’s pithiness and the insight it contained. After all, I had already Read more

  • A wandering Mind – Good or Bad?

    In 2010, an interesting headline appeared in hundreds of sources, including Scientific American and the National Institutes of Health: “A wandering mind is an unhappy mind”. In 2018, very different headlines, including one on the same National Institutes of Health website, read: “Mind Wandering Boosts Creativity”. What gives? Is mind wandering good or bad? A Read more

  • 3 Reasons Why I Love Teaching Meditation

    Last week, I wrote about 3 reasons why I hate teaching meditation. This week, I want to share 3 reasons why I love teaching meditation. The first reason why I love teaching meditation is that there’s a method out there for everyone. For instance, my favourite app, called “Insight Timer” contains a library of over Read more

  • 3 Reasons Why I hate teaching Meditation

    I’ve taught meditation to many hundreds of people over 35 years, so why do I hate it? In this blog, I’ll explore this question, but first I want to clarify a few things: Given these 3 points, you would think that I would love teaching meditation, right? Not necessarily. Each of those points is true Read more

  • Dealing with Distractions

    I once read a simple line that said, “The mind is wild. Mindfulness tames it.” It brought home for me the notion that the mind has tremendous power, but we often never fully harness that power. That word “harness”, btw, suggests the difference between a wild horse or ox and one which is used to Read more

  • What you’re Not Noticing

    One of the essential skills of paying attention is meta-awareness: the ability to notice where your attention tends to go. It can be quite surprising to see where your attention goes when you stop trying to control it in any way. I like to use the metaphor of letting a puppy off the leash and Read more

  • My favorite way to pay attention

    In the past couple of posts, I’ve suggested that you try paying attention to complaining, and also that you play with attention. For some people, these might not seem like “real” mindfulness practices, but in fact, they are. When you practice these, you strengthen the pathways in the brain that are responsible for the control Read more

  • Don’t just pay attention, play attention!

    Last week, I suggested that you pay attention to complaining – yours and that of other people around you. I hope that you tried this practice and increased your awareness of just how pervasive and pernicious complaining can be. For this week, I want to propose a practice that isn’t really a “practice”: play with Read more