Before we start exploring your meaning in life,
we need to get in the proper state of mind.
We will, therefore,
start by introducing you to meditation and invite you to participate in a short meditation
session that will help you reach a mindset to think about your lives purpose.
I fully realize that meditation might come across as “strange”.
I remember that during my engineering studies I made the wrong,
in retrospect, judgment against meditation.
I thought only people without connection to the real world where practicing meditation.
However as a consultant I had the chance to interact with many executives and to my surprise
many do some sort of meditation.
It is a way to deal with the daily hectic lives and the ambiguous,
wicked and unstructured challenges they face.
So what might seem strange is actually common practice by many leaders.
Meditation has many benefits that have been scientifically demonstrated,
including: Reducing stress.
Let me give you an example of one of the many studies that demonstrated this.
A group of people with high blood pressure was split into two groups.
Group 1 meditated regularly for 15 minutes, the other group got health education.
The group that meditated regularly decreased their blood pressure significantly more than
the other group.
Meditation has also other health benefits.
Heightening awareness, improving memory,
increasing learning skills and increasing control of the mind and body.
For example, a study demonstrated that children that were
exposed to meditation actually increased their grades.
Furthermore, research at Harvard Business School and INSEAD
has concluded that meditation is one of the two most effective new business tools for
the 21st century.
Today we will combine a short meditation to introduce you the technique,
together with another technique called “visualization”.
To illustrate the visualization technique, let me tell you an anecdote that will explain
the concept.
Benjamin Zander is a well-known conductor and teacher of classical music.
He noticed that his students were very occupied with comparing themselves with other students
and overly critical about their own performances.
He noticed that this behavior actually diminished their performance and “drowned out the music”
as he put it.
He, therefore,
did the following: At the beginning of the year,
he told each student: “your grade for the year is an A.
There is one condition.
You have to write me a letter at the date of the end of the course,
several months later, which starts with:
Dear Mr. Zander, I got an A because…” This way they would
have to describe who they would have become without their destructive habits of comparing
and over criticizing.
What happened was amazing.
The students got the feeling of what they could become and that this was something that
was in their control.
They stopped focusing on their mistakes and constantly comparing themselves to others.
The result was that Zander saw his students learn more than they had ever done before.
What does this story tell us?
You will all get an A for this course?
Something more important.
If you think about the person you would want to be at a certain point,
you are much more likely to realize this!
Let’s take this technique and apply it to your own life in the next exercise,
where we will use meditation techniques combined with visualization.