The Power of Concentration – New York Times

by | For Business Owners, Stress Management

 

 

The core of mindfulness is the ability to pay attention. …less about spirituality and more about concentration: the ability to quiet your mind, focus your attention on the present, and dismiss any distractions that come your way.

…[Of] those who had received the mindfulness training. Not only did they report fewer negative emotions at the end of the assignment, but their ability to concentrate improved significantly. They could stay on task longer and they switched between tasks less frequently. …They also remembered what they did better than the other participants in the study.

 

— The Power of Concentration
By Maria Konnikova
in The New York Times
on December 15, 2012

 

 

See free, easy Meditation Instructions on this blog.

 

Meditation for Managers video

 

Making the Best of the Worst Part of Your Day

by | For Business Owners

 

 

‘Mindful’ commuters say deep breaths, clear mind keep them calm under stress

Nancy Kaplan, chief operating officer at a management consulting firm in downtown D.C., said she pays attention to her breathing and relaxes when her jaw tightens or her fingers clench the steering wheel during her hour-plus commute. She said practicing mindfulness has expanded her driving field of vision beyond traffic to include trees, architecture and cloud formations.

— The Washington Post

 

 

See free, easy Meditation Instructions on this blog.

 

Meditation for Managers video

 

Return to the Core

by | For Business Owners, Quotes and Aphorisms, Recommended Books, Stress Management

The tempo of modern civilization has a centrifugal force that carries us outward from the core of life toward ever-expanding peripheries. One should return frequently to the core, and to the basic values of the individual, to natural surroundings, to simplicity and contemplation. Long ago, I resolved to so arrange my life that I could move back and forth between periphery and core.
 

–Charles A. Lindbergh

Autobiography of Values

 

See also Tony Mayo’s review of the book here.

 

 

See free, easy Meditation Instructions on this blog.

 

Meditation for Managers video

 

You Don’t Need to be Crazy to be an Entrepreneur…

by | For Business Owners, Quotes and Aphorisms, Stress Management

 

 

…but being hypomanic seems to help, according to John D. Gartner, Ph.D., a clinical psychologist and author of The Hypomanic Edge

In his article for The American Enterprise Institute, America’s Manic Entrepreneurs Dr. Gartner writes,
“Successful entrepreneurs are … are highly creative people who quickly generate a tremendous number of ideas—some clever, others ridiculous. Their “flight of ideas,” jumping from topic to topic in a rapid energized way, is a sign of hypomania. … It is a temperament characterized by an elevated mood state that feels “highly intoxicating, powerful, productive, and desirable” to the hypomanic, according to Frederick Goodwin and Kay Jamison, authors of the definitive book Manic-Depressive Illness. “

–John D. Gartner, Ph.D.
American Enterprise
Jul2005, Vol. 16 Issue 5, p18

I highly recommend the article to anyone who is or works with high-energy business leaders.

 

 

Best-borne trials

by | For Business Owners, Quotes and Aphorisms, Recommended Books, Stress Management

 

 

This child — he thought — has this child heroically persevered under all doubts and dangers, struggled with poverty and suffering, upheld and sustained by strong affection and the consciousness of rectitude alone! And yet the world is full of such heroism. Have I yet to learn that the hardest and best-borne trials are those which are never chronicled in any earthly record, and are suffered every day!

 —Charles Dickens
The Old Curiosity Shop

 

 

 

Shakespeare knew something about ambition, stress, & insomnia

by | For Business Owners




HAMLET
Let me question more in particular: what have you,
my good friends, deserved at the hands of fortune,
that she sends you to prison hither?


GUILDENSTERN
Prison, my lord!


HAMLET
Denmark’s a prison.


ROSENCRANTZ
Then is the world one.


HAMLET
A goodly one; in which there are many confines,
wards and dungeons, Denmark being one o’ the worst.


ROSENCRANTZ
We think not so, my lord.


HAMLET
Why, then, ’tis none to you; for there is nothing
either good or bad, but thinking makes it so: to me
it is a prison.


ROSENCRANTZ
Why then, your ambition makes it one; ’tis too
narrow for your mind.


HAMLET
O God, I could be bounded in a nut shell and count
myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I
have bad dreams.


GUILDENSTERN
Which dreams indeed are ambition, for the very
substance of the ambitious is merely the shadow of a dream.


HAMLET
A dream itself is but a shadow.


ROSENCRANTZ
Truly, and I hold ambition of so airy and light a
quality that it is but a shadow’s shadow.


The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark
Act 2, Scene 1
by William Shakespeare



More Reasons You Are Wise to Walk

by | For Business Owners, Stress Management

 

 

I have written before about the health, mind, and business benefits of walking. I even went so far as to build a treadmill desk so I can walk while using my computer. To bolster your motivation toward movement read this overview of clinical and anecdotal evidence assembled by Arianna Huffington. New in 2022, this from Science News: Do we get our most creative ideas when walking?

 

The moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow.

—Henry David Thoreau

 

 

 

Embrace the Pain

by | For Business Owners, How to Set Goals, Quotes and Aphorisms, Recommended Books, Stress Management

 

 

To live is to suffer.

–The Buddha

 

 

But not only creativeness and enjoyment are meaningful. If there is a meaning in life at all, there must be a in meaning in suffering. … Without suffering and death human life cannot be complete.

— Viktor Emil Frankl
Man’s Search for Meaning

 

 

One always finds one’s burden again. … The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart.

One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

–Albert Camus
The Myth of Sisyphus

 

 

Meaning Is Healthier Than Happiness

by | For Business Owners, Stress Management

 

 

People who are happy but have little to no sense of meaning in their lives have the same [inflammatory response] as people who are responding to and enduring chronic adversity. …

 

Meaning was defined as an orientation to something bigger than the self.

Happiness was defined by feeling good. …

 

“Empty positive emotions are about as good for you for as adversity,” says Dr. Fredrickson. …

 

From the evidence of this study, it seems that feeling good is not enough. People need meaning to thrive. In the words of Carl Jung, “The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it.” Jung’s wisdom certainly seems to apply to our bodies, if not also to our hearts and our minds.

 

—Meaning Is Healthier Than Happiness
by Emily Esfahani Smith
The Atlantic Magazine