How To Use Meditation To Achieve Your Goals – Entrepreneur University

In last week’s Entrepreneur University YoungEntrepreneur.com reader Brandon mentioned meditation as a good way to kickstart your morning routine.

For this edition of Entrepreneur University I’m therefore turning to Jeff Belyea who is an artist, writer and developer of Living At WOW! Seminars. Jeff has a PhD in communications, a certification in hypnotherapy, and is a personal and business coach.

Today Jeff shares his thoughts about how to use meditation to achieve your goals:

“Imagine a senior management team or a board of directors who are gathered together to make several important decisions. On the table are crucial matters that could change the course of corporate life, or even make the different between success and failure of the company.

As the chairperson lays out the agenda for the meeting and begins to launch into a detailed analysis of the issues at hand, a loud “buzz” is heard in the room. The chairperson looks up from her notes to see that virtually everyone in the room is engaged in loud chatter, and no one is really paying any attention to her at all. As soon as she recovers from the shock of this surprise, she loudly demands attention. The room goes quiet. But after a few seconds, the buzz picks up once again. Once again, the impatient demand for attention is made. And once again, after a few seconds, the buzz starts up again.

Now imagine this buzz, quiet, buzz scene going on in the boardroom for two or three hours. Unthinkable, you say. Just wouldn’t happen, right? How could important decisions be made if most of the people in the room were not really paying attention, and their minds were on something else, except for a few seconds of intermittent focus?

Would the scene be more easily imagined as possible and believable if everyone’s “internal chatter” was somehow made externally audible? Now, that VP of Marketing who is worried about his son who just dropped out of college to take up his true passion, pottery, could be heard calming his wife, or himself, or raging at this son, of and on, through the entire meeting. The General Manager cannot keep his mind off that sweet young thing in merchandising who keeps flirting with him, and he is battling the urge to send her flowers. And the CEO keeps rehearsing his upcoming meeting with bankers scheduled for later that day.

At a time when focus, clarity of thought, the and applied use of well-honed listening skills are critical, most of the great minds in that room are somewhere else, for the most of the meeting. Maybe this is part of the reason that we read that we only use a small percentage of our brain. We’re rarely “in the moment” and attentive to he present for more than brief periods of time. Most of our time is spent reliving the past and anticipating the future, trying to steer the ship of our everyday lives in the right direction, or at least in a direction that will avoid disaster.

Meditation is a proven and effective way of quieting of the mind, and the relaxation and stress management “techniques” that are at the core of meditation practice enhance focus, clarity of thought, and improve listening skills. When we learn to use the simple tools of meditation, we can consciously quiet the mind’s internal chatter. In matters of goal achievement, meditation can take us to “the heart of the matter”. With meditation, we can tap a quiet pool of wisdom that presents solutions and opportunities that the chattering mind misses.

It may be some time before meditation makes it to the mainstream of corporate planning, but it is quite certain that there are visionaries in corporate life right now who are seeking out-of-the-box methods, intuitive means – and meditation is to intuition what pumping iron is to muscles, and creative leaders to open new vistas to them. If we (meditation practitioners and teachers) can overcome the old associated images of “yogis in saffron robes” as the only icons of meditation, and compliment it with a clear thinking corporate executive (or caring parent or spouse) we can bring a subtle, yet powerful means of improving individual and corporate lives. Now, where are those corporate visionaries who are ready to sign up their senior management team for meditation classes?”

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