Quieting Mental Chatter

Become aware of your mental chatter, of the random thoughts that spring to mind when you are not focused on things you have to do and sometimes even when you are. Especially become aware of what is flashing through your mind the first thing in the morning, when you wake up. Is there a single powerful thought coursing through your mind like water from a fire hose, or do numerous disjointed thoughts spring up unbidden and vanish just as fast as they arise?

Carry around a notebook. Categorize the types of mind chatter that assault—or beguile—you during the day.

First be aware of two broad categories: Is your mental chatter taking you to a place where you are upbeat, energized, optimistic about the future, and full of beans? Or, is it taking you to a dark place of fear and insecurity about what will happen to you? Become aware of how much of the time your mental chatter is taking you to a place of hope, serenity, and joy and where you want to be. Become aware of how much of the time it is taking you to a place of stress, anxiety, and fear and where you do not want to be. Report on how much time you spend in each of these places.

It is possible, of course, for your mental chatter to be neutral, but this is rare. Even supposedly neutral mental chatter like making a to-do list will take you to one or the other of the two places mentioned above. Either you feel great because you are getting organized and feel your life is under control, or you feel overwhelmed and demoralized at the thought of how much you have to do and how you will never get to it all.

Then become aware of how often you do each of the following:

• How often do you criticize yourself and run yourself down about things you did that were daft, about things you didn’t do that you should have, about characteristics that you should have and don’t, about characteristics that you shouldn’t have but do? How often and how unmercifully do you beat yourself up?
• How often do you criticize others about everything from dress to mannerisms to physical characteristics?
• How often do you compare yourself with others? Do you generally find yourself insecure as you contemplate their accomplishments, or do you find yourself gloating at the thought of how much better you are than everyone else?
• When introduced to a new person or when thinking about persons you know, do you tend to notice their strengths and good qualities? Or do you dwell on their faults and foibles? Perhaps you do both, but which of these is predominant?
• How much time do you spend blaming others for unpleasant situations in your life? Your parents for not doing stuff they should have? Your significant other for not being supportive in some way? Your boss, your work colleagues, your friends, your children, your teachers, and countless others for doing something or not doing something that has had this negative impact on you?

Become aware of your emotional undertones. Is there a dominant one throughout the day, are there two or three such undertones, or are there many equally strong—or weak—undertones that hold sway at different times? Do these change from day to day, or are they reasonably constant? Are they generally negative (anger, self-doubt, anxiety, worry, etc.), or are they generally positive (hope, love, confidence, etc.)? Feel free to challenge whether the undertones characterized here as negative are in fact so, and vice versa. How do these undertones affect your behavior? Are you a better performer at some task when a particular undertone is in charge? Do you tend to flare up when another one holds sway?

Do these undertones tend to disappear when you start noticing them? What does this tell you? In particular, note the effect of strong emotions such as anger, hate, and fear. Does the intensity of the emotion decrease simply because you become consciously aware of it?

Become aware of where you instinctively go. If your friend gets a great job offer, are you genuinely glad for him or her or do you immediately feel a twinge of envy, or do you feel both ways? If you meet a highly accomplished individual, is your pleasure at the person’s achievements tempered by your inability to reach the same place? Are you inclined to go to a place of calm and peace or to a place of insecurity and angst?

It will help if you can set a reminder on your mobile phone to beep every hour or half hour. Each time you hear the beep, become aware of your mind chatter. Persist. Practice will make you better.

How easy was it for you to become aware of your internal mind state? What did you learn about yourself, and what implications does this have for the rest of your life?

Becoming More Mindful

For the next week, do all your activities deliberately and unhurriedly. Focus intently on whatever you are doing. Note that unhurriedly does not mean slowly. It means doing it without a frantic feeling in your head and at whatever pace is appropriate. Many have reported that doing a task unhurriedly, in this fashion, actually gets the task done faster in chronological time.

No multitasking is allowed. No talking on the cell phone while you scan the Wall Street Journal and check your email. For most of us, life has become one huge frantic rush. Slow it down. Firmly and deliberately.

Concentrate on the task at hand, and be methodical. Again, do it unhurriedly, not slowly. Your mental chatter will cut in with thoughts of how much you have to do, the consequences riding on what you are doing, how the world is going to hell in a hand basket, and much, much more.

Let it go. Let it all go. Each time your mental chatter carries you away, just gently detach yourself and come back to the task at hand. Breathe slowly, deeply, and evenly. Try to get to twelve breaths a minute or slower. Just being aware of your slow breathing will largely stymie the chatter.

Being mindful is especially important when you are speaking with someone. Do not get involved in your mental chatter, with the wonderful reply you are going to make, with the image of yourself you are trying to project, and so on. Focus on the other person and what he or she is saying. Observe the expression on the person’s face. Really notice the other person. Really listen to what he or she is saying. Remove yourself from the picture.

If you are talking on the phone, shut your eyes and focus on what you are hearing. Think of it as a blindfold conversation experience. Do not check your email or scan the headlines on CNN or try to be otherwise “productive.” Just concentrate on the conversation and, within that, on what the other person may be communicating nonverbally and what he or she wants. What can you do to help this person?

Imagine, vividly, that your life is like an hourglass. The sand above represents all the things you have to do, all the things that are pressing on you and clamoring for your attention. No matter how much you shake and agitate the hourglass, only one grain of sand at a time goes through the narrow neck.

That grain is the task at hand. Focus on it.

Here is another visualization that you may find helpful: Imagine yourself pouring oil from a jug into a container. See how the oil streams down smoothly with no turbulence or bubbles. Imagine that the oil represents your attention and energy. Pour it, and the essence of yourself, into the task at hand. Mental chatter of all kinds is turbulence; banish it completely.

At the end of a week doing this, reflect on the following: What were your reactions to the exercise? Did you find that you were more productive and effective? What was your emotional tenor during the entire week?

Cultivating Gratitude and Appreciation

Consider gratitude and appreciation. Most of us are blessed in so many ways, which we don’t even see. We just take all of that for granted and focus on whatever is lacking or not working, and we do that constantly. If all our attention is only on what we’re lacking, then that’s all we will see, and this perspective then informs our frame of mind and our ability to relate to others. This exercise is about simply understanding and recognizing all the good things in our lives, meditating on them, and learning to never take them for granted. It cultivates a humble and positive frame of mind, which then affects us in our lives and certainly affects others through our leadership.

Try this for a week, for five to ten minutes every night, just before you retire. Give this important exercise your utmost effort.

Let a deep feeling of appreciation and gratitude well up in you. Allow this feeling to surface. Permit it to take hold of you, to envelop you. Broadcast it as a silent statement of who you are. It is okay if you feel you are play-acting. Do it with the greatest sincerity and emotional commitment of which you are capable.

Doubtless you can find many reasons to be grateful: your health, your family, your career, the opportunity to experience travel and the finer things in life. All the above are valid reasons for gratitude, but go beyond these things if you can. Be appreciative and deeply grateful for the opportunity to be appreciative and deeply grateful, for the feeling such gratitude evokes in you. Remember: whatever you give thanks to and appreciate will increase in your life.

The timing is important. This should be the last thing you do at night. Pay special attention to your first-thing-in-the-morning mental chatter the next day. Report on whether you notice any changes from observations in previous weeks.

Let this feeling of gratitude take hold of you many times during the day. Don’t force it. Introduce it gently, and let it seize you if it can. If it does not, there’s no harm done, but keep trying at irregular intervals. What does this practice do to the mental tenor of your day?

You will find that it is easier to hold on to the feeling of gratitude if you use your body and physical actions. Walk with a spring in your step. Walk with this spring even if you are merely rushing to hit the restroom during a break. Smile, smile, smile. Don’t smile with just your face; smile from your heart. Let laughter begin in the pit of your stomach, engulf you, and overflow through your face.

Every time you interact with a person, even if it is a casual interaction such as paying a convenience store cashier for gum, earnestly wish that person every happiness possible. Do this silently; we do not want to make people uncomfortable with such a strong outpouring of emotion from a stranger. Mentally wishing everyone happiness may be a challenge for some of you if you have toxic people in your life. Do it anyway.

We live in a frenetic society and rush all the time. You are hurrying somewhere and an acquaintance says, “Hi, how are you?” and you say, “Fine, how are you?” over your shoulder as you carry on. Slow down whenever you can. Really look at the person you are speaking to. Observe the face, the expression, the body language. Wish him or her well silently and sincerely.

It is perfectly okay for the interaction to be brief. Just be conscious and beam out peace and well-being as if your life depended on it. In a funny way, it does.

Specifically notice the following:

Do your feelings about people and the nature of your interactions change?

Do you perceive that others’ feelings and interaction patterns have changed?

Finally, what has your emotional tenor been during the week, and how does it compare with the week when you were doing the mental-chatter exercise? Did you fall asleep more easily, and was your sleep deeper and more refreshing? What was your mental chatter the first thing in the morning? Was it less insistent and more peaceful? Did you find yourself greeting the new day with more joy than before? Did you observe changes in other persons’ reactions? What were they?

Living in an Other-Centered Universe

Great leaders become leaders to serve, to help other people evolve and grow. By serving, they attain deep satisfaction and a sense of accomplishment. How can we cultivate this other-oriented take on life?

In the book Give and Take, Adam Grant classifies people as givers and takers and matchers.³ On a spectrum of happiness and impact, takers are at the bottom and matchers in the middle. Givers are distributed between the top and bottom. The happiest and most influential givers focus on giving to other givers. They avoid giving to takers, as that type of giving can thoroughly deplete a person.

We live in a me-centered universe. We evaluate events, near and distant, in terms of their impact on “me.” Our spouse got a great job offer, and we think about how this will affect our relationship. Our daughter got a tattoo and piercing, and we think about how our friends will react and what they will think of our parenting. More violence in the Middle East, and we worry about what this will do to oil prices and how much more we will have to pay for gas and heating oil.

Even our altruistic inclinations are frequently tainted. We want to do good for the world and to give back, but it is important to us to be recognized as doing so. We want our jokes to be laughed at, our contributions to be acknowledged—loudly and repeatedly—and our advice solicited and acted on.

Go back to your mental chatter, and examine how often the word I comes in. I should have done that, said that, felt that. I am an idiot for doing that or not doing something else. What will someone else think of me for doing or saying something? How wonderful am I for pulling off that brilliant conversational riposte, that wonderful suggestion that others were too dumb to recognize the value of, that significant help I provided? Why can’t I be as gorgeous as, or as witty as, or as brilliant, successful, or rich as X?

It is an unbroken and unending string of I, me, and my. All the stress in our lives is because the universe has an unfortunate tendency of not paying any attention to what I want, and we will not accept this.

Even when we are genuinely moved by compassion or love or sympathy, it does not take long for the I and me to creep back in. Tragedy in some part of the world? Let me call up the toll-free number in the news article and make a contribution followed by How Dare That Person Put Me on Hold for So Long?

Pause for five minutes, and think about this. Think about how everything we do is, in some way, a monument to I and me.

Don’t beat yourself up about this. Just recognize and acknowledge it.

For two weeks, practice living in an other-centered universe. At every instance, look for opportunities to serve: you give up your place in line, you buy something for the person behind you, you clean their room, and so on. It’s similar to random acts of kindness, but goes beyond acts to a way of being: self-transcendence. The impact can be startling. It changes the energy around you, and—though you don’t do it for this reason—it usually comes back to you manyfold.

An other-centered outlook is incredibly hard to maintain for lengthy periods, so I suggest that you pick a few one-hour time slots each day. During your selected times, you will do all things for the sole benefit of the person with whom you interact. In conversation, you will not think about the brilliant reply you will make. You will focus on what the person is saying and feeling and think only of how you can be of service to that person. If possible, be of service anonymously, or to strangers, thus taking the I and me out of the picture entirely. Think of how you can be of service to people you know, to people you barely know, to society at large.

Use good judgment! Do not give the contents of your bank account to a panhandler. It is not clear that this is a helpful thing to do anyway.

Be creative! One person left gifts of candy for office mates along with handwritten, anonymous notes expressing appreciation for some positive trait that person expressed. Another paid for tolls for the person behind him and gave the toll collector a page of uplifting quotes to give the person. Another person would—after she had finished with it—leave an unlimited day pass for the New York subway taped to the turnstile along with a note saying “This is an unlimited-ride Metro Card for today. It is meant for someone in need. If you think you qualify, please take it and use it. If there is still time after you have done with it, please tape it to the turnstile from which you exit with this note.” Another would tape coupons for products she didn’t need to the supermarket shelf where that product was stocked.

Each day, deliberately and consciously, do more than one thing to make the world a little better. Do you get irritated when you see a shopping cart ruining a supermarket parking spot? Get into the habit of taking one and returning it to the nest of carts at the entrance. Do you see a clearly misplaced sweater in a department store? Restore it to its rightful place.

The possibilities are endless. Spread sweetness and light. These are similar to random acts of kindness, but wherever possible, give specific help to specific people who need that help. Is someone you know having a hard time in a particular area of his or her life? Think of one thing you can do to make it a little easier for the person. Even a card with a thoughtful quote in it may help.

Be practical and empathetic. A woman wanted to help a friend whose husband died suddenly, leaving her with small children. Her “What can I do to help?” was met with polite thanks. So she thought for a while and organized a group of friends. One went and gathered everyone’s shoes and polished them for the funeral. Three arranged, between them, to bring in breakfast, lunch, and dinner for a week. Another contributed several hours of babysitting for the youngest child. None of this would have happened if the first friend had not set it up.

Your attitude as you do this is important. If you help someone, do not expect gratitude from that person. Instead, you should be grateful to that person for providing you the opportunity to be of service. Try it. This is a very different paradigm from the one we normally use. Don’t get mad at people for not acknowledging how much you have helped them. Focus on being grateful for having had the opportunity to help.

Finally, each day, make someone’s day!

Have you ever had a random interaction with someone and it left you feeling so good that it uplifted your mood for an entire day? Perhaps it was a sales clerk who sincerely assured you that you looked really lovely in the dress you were trying out. And you somehow sensed that she cared about you and was not just out to clinch the sale. Perhaps it was the jovial guy in the line next to you—the man who cracked jokes that left you doubled up. Perhaps an unexpected and thoughtful gesture from a friend really touched you.

You will go out and deliberately, each day, make someone’s day. Just the thought of having to do this will get your creative juices flowing. For some, it will also arouse fears. Shy people will feel particularly pressured. Use making someone else’s day as a lever to overcome your shyness. Or else figure out how to do it anonymously. But do it at least once every day.

Eventually you want to make this a part of your life, not an exercise to be completed. This is true of all these exercises!

Good Thing, Bad Thing, Who Knows?

Look back on your life. Have there been events that you immediately classified as disasters, as totally terrible things, that you now recognize as true blessings? Pick something that you are still grappling with. Can you see how the bad thing may actually be a good thing? Perhaps even a wonderful thing? In Are You Ready to Succeed? Srikumar Rao quotes the following old Sufi tale to demonstrate how the way we categorize events in our lives does not always reflect what they ultimately mean to us.

“Good thing, bad thing, who knows?” is about the idea that when things happen to us, we instantly label them as good or bad and respond accordingly. But in reality, when most people look back on their lives and connect the dots, they may discover that the label was inaccurate. “When I failed and got fired, it felt horrible at the time, but in retrospect, it was the best thing that could have happened to me. I got out of that terrible job, and I had to find something new that I really loved.” “The promotion that I thought was the best thing in the world turned out to be terrible, because now I was in a role that I wasn’t really suited for.” This disconnect between our initial label of an event and what it ultimately means to us can occur with many other life experiences—not all of them, of course. We need to avoid being quick to label, instead recognizing that although one door may have closed, another one has opened, and the “adjacent possible” has now shifted into something new.

A top student at an Ivy League university had his heart set on a summer job in investment banking. A serious illness put him in the hospital for four weeks, and when he got out, the opportunities for summer work in a bank had come and gone. Not only did he not get his dream job, but he had no job. The summer dragged on, and he comforted himself by wallowing in a deep depression. When a family friend introduced him to a doctor who was leaving for Africa to work in a clinic, the doctor asked him to tag along. Having nothing better to do, he went.

There was filth and grime and ignorance and stark deprivation. But as he worked in the most menial of jobs, something came alive in him. The next summer, he turned down the investment banking job he was offered and returned to Africa. After college, he did two years in the Peace Corps. “That illness was the best thing that ever happened to me,” he states flatly.

There are strong elements of “If you get a lemon, make lemonade” in this exercise, but it actually goes much deeper. Consider the possibility that you are never given a lemon. You are given the opportunity to make lemonade. Even better, you are given the opportunity to make a double-dip sundae that tastes delicious and actually causes you to lose weight!

Some life experiences are so painful that you cannot handle thinking of them as good things. Examples are death of loved ones, troubled relations with close relatives, and serious injury. Don’t force yourself to work with such situations; pick something that you are comfortable working with.

Do not do this exercise in reverse. Accept the good things in your life at present as they are. Don’t try to see how they could be bad things.

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Achieving personal mastery is critical to becoming more a conscious human being—to become peaceful, happier, and more powerful. When you become a leader, all this matters a great deal. All these exercises do ultimately make us more effective as leaders, because they deliver us to a better place as human beings, and we see the world with greater clarity with a more positive outlook.