Ok High Achievers, Go-getters, and Type As, this one’s for you, so listen up!

Do you want to know what the difference is between you and the High Performers? Well, according to Brendon Burchard, in his new book High Performance Habits, there are a few. But the one that stuck out to me the most was their high congruence; how well they’re aligned with their desires. They’re just happier! Yes, they work their butts off, but they’re somehow doing it in a way that allows them to find a sense of balance and happiness.

How the heck do they do that? Well, for starters, they meditate.

Oh no, not THAT again! Who has time for meditation!?

High performers, that’s who.

I know it’s hard to take up a meditation habit when you highly value productivity. It feels like the LEAST productive thing you could do… ever. Like, WTF would I sit down and do nothing for 20 minutes when I could be: reading/responding to e-mail, cleaning dishes, putting a load of laundry in, triple-checking that document, or [fill in the blank].

There are literally a GAZILLIION other things you could do that feel way more productive than meditation.

But what you might not realize is that meditation, if you learn it and build a consistent practice, very quickly becomes your Superpower as you skyrocket into a new level of productivity and performance.

Seriously. Once you start building a consistent practice, everything becomes easier. It’s hard to explain unless you’ve experienced it but let me give it a try.

You flow from one activity to the next as if you’re on a cloud. It’s all just seamless and you know exactly what you need to be doing in any given moment. Potentially triggering interactions and situations just roll off your back like rain on an umbrella. It’s not that you don’t care. You just gain the ability to see the bigger picture and choose not to place importance on things that don’t matter in the grand scheme of things.

For example, every time I go to Tim Horton’s, no matter which one I go to, they ALWAYS mess up my coffee or it just doesn’t taste right. That used to bother the crap out of me. Now, I just fix it myself if I can, drink it anyway, or choose to go elsewhere for my coffee. I just don’t care that much about the quality of my purchased coffee. Mark Manson explains it by saying that we only have so many fucks to give in any given day. So, I choose not to give any about my $2 coffee.

Once you start meditating regularly, you’ll see that the skills you learn through meditation and/or mindfulness very quickly begin to permeate the rest of your life.

Here are a few ways that you can 10x your productivity AND your life by adding regular meditation to your schedule.

Meditation teaches you to be more self-aware

When you learn mindfulness meditation, you first learn to become aware of your body. The most basic mindfulness meditation is the body scan. You “check in” to all the parts of your body and train to just notice, without judgement, what’s going on there.

Then, as you practice, you learn to associate emotions to specific reactions in your body.

For example, when I get nervous or anxious, I feel my stomach tightening. My hunger is the first thing to go. I have to force myself to drink water. If it’s particularly bad, I actually feel indigestion, even if I haven’t eaten recently.

What this does is teach you to become aware of changes in your body as indicators that something more subtle might be going on. Like, why does my stomach feel tight right now? Oh right, it’s because I have an important presentation coming up in an hour and I’m nervous.

Meditation is also great for emotional regulation.

You won’t just feel physical things when you meditate, you’ll get all sorts of emotions bubbling up from the depths of your psyche, sometimes randomly. Practicing that skill of non-judgmental observation helps you to catch yourself in regular daily life, when you start to feel a strong negative emotion. With time, you can stop yourself before reacting and CHOOSE a different behaviour instead.

For example, when my sister makes a passive-aggressive comment at me about something, I can either choose to fall into the trap of getting angry at her, or I can take a breath, center myself (i.e. stay calm), and choose not to respond or choose a positive thing to say in the hopes of changing the direction of the conversation.

Meditation teaches you compassion

That whole non-judgemental thing I mentioned earlier? Yeah, it’s easier said than done. But when you practice it during meditation, it translates into first increased self-compassion, and then increased compassion for others.

In your quest to become happier, when you incorporate meditation you learn not to beat yourself up. In fact, that’s the FIRST thing you learn in meditation.

Because your mind WILL be racing at first. It’s ok. It’s totally normal, and in fact, it’s expected.

Just like training a puppy to sit & stay, your mind will inevitably “see” something shiny over there and go off and follow a thought. You don’t beat the puppy up for walking away (at least I hope you don’t). Neither should you beat yourself up for allowing yourself to follow a thought during meditation.

Just keep practicing.

And slowly, you’ll get better at it. Start with just 2 minutes of meditation if you have to (i.e. just sitting quietly).

As you learn self-compassion in the task of quieting your mind, you’ll learn not to beat yourself up for having a bad day, or for making a mistake at work, or for failing at something.

How does that help you be more productive? It helps you bounce back quicker. Rather than spending the next week wasting time feeling sorry for yourself, the next day, you get up, get back to work, and try again.

And as you learn self-compassion, that naturally translates into compassion for others. You start to let others off the hook a little more. You don’t allow other people’s emotional reactions trigger you into being reactive yourself. You might even be able to respond with compassion and ask “Hey, you’re reacting to something that you would normally consider insignificant. Are you ok?”

Meditation improves relationships

Along the lines of having compassion for others, meditation helps you be more present when you’re with someone, whether that’s a friend, a colleague, or a loved one; and I’m sure I don’t have to explain how being more present with your partner deepens your connection and intimacy with them.

At work, being more present at meetings means you can catch subtle ideas as they’re spoken at meetings, rather than missing something important because you were too busy reading and responding to an e-mail. If you’re a manager, it means you’re more open to seeing subtle changes in your employees’ behaviours that might be indicating that they’re under more stress than usual or that something’s off, leading to an important conversation.

And with the emotional balance that you feel when you’re meditating regularly, that makes you an excellent co-worker to collaborate with because you’ll be seeing solutions to the challenges you’re presented with, rather than just focusing on the problems. You’ll also be more open to listening to what others have to offer, rather than just focusing on yourself and your ideas.

Meditation helps you focus

If you’re a high achiever, you like being productive and effective with your time. Mindfulness has been shown to helps us focus better. It improves our memory, our attention skills and even decision-making.

And rather than multi-tasking (i.e. trying to do too many things at the same time), we instead learn a trick called “efficient attention switching” which is where we switch quickly between tasks but are fully present and focused while doing each task. Working in this way makes us less prone to making mistakes as well.

Have I convinced you yet?

How to get started

Yes, yes! But how do I start? I can’t meditate! My mind goes a mile a minute!

I hear you. I know it’s hard to believe you can get to all the good stuff I just talked about. But the fact that you have a powerful mind that is constantly full of thoughts and ideas, just means that for you, what you just need is to start smaller than the rest of the population.

This is why I almost always recommend Insight Timer as my app of choice. You can preset the timer for however long you’re training your mind for.

As I mentioned before, start by simply sitting quietly for 2 minutes.

That’s it. Just 2 minutes. Seriously, don’t tell me you can’t afford 2 minutes. Try it for a week.

Then, try 3 minutes, and try just following your breath for those 3 minutes. Try it for another week.

When those 3 minutes start flying by, increase to 5 minutes.

Then 10. Then 15. You get the picture.

Don’t go more than 20 minutes until you’ve been meditating for a couple of months at least. And don’t increase your time too quickly. I know your inner achiever will want to race up there, but only do that once you’ve experience a few sessions where time really flew by quickly.

If you have a meditation where it feels like it’s dragging on forever, reduce your time back to what it was before.

Take your time with it. Give yourself a break. Try short guided meditations, or meditative tracks that are instrumental only (I especially enjoy those with binaural soundscapes). Those are especially helpful for cutting out any background noise, allowing you to focus better.

Have fun with it. And let me know how it goes!

If you run into any snags, reach out to me! Anyone who knows me, knows that I’m always happy to talk about meditation. Even if we’ve never met, I’m still happy to answer your questions.

-Mel