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Introverted Entrepreneurs' Club

10 Reasons Why Meditation Is Essential, If You Want To Run A Successful Business

July 16, 2014 by Clare Josa Leave a Comment

So you’re an entrpreneur or a busy business manager and you keep hearing about what a good idea meditation is, but you’re telling yourself that you don’t have time to meditate – or that it’s just for hippies – or that you’ll do it when you retire…

I know how that feels – I’ve been there.

But I’m curious: is there a single entrpreneur or business manager who wouldn’t like:

  • to feel less stressed?
  • to think more clearly and be able to concentrate better?
  • to worry less?
  • to sleep better and feel less tired?
  • to feel calmer and happier?
  • to have flashes of brilliant inspiration?
  • to have life fall into place and feel less of an effort – to get more done in less time?
  • to calm your mind and tame your Inner Critic?

All of these – and many more – are benefits of a daily meditation practice.

And you don’t have to disappear off into a cave and pretend to be a yogi, sitting for days on end, before you notice the effects.

As little as ten minutes a day of meditation can make a huge difference – when you know how.

Just in case you need a little more convincing, here are ten reasons why meditation is essential, if you want to run a successful business:

Meditation for entrepreneurs and business managers

  1. Meditation recharges your batteries.

    When you’re flat empty and out of charge, ten minutes of the right kind of meditation can have as much benefit as a couple of hours of cat nap.
    When you’re managing a business, having enough energy is vital. And meditation doesn’t bring with it the same post-rush-crashes as caffeine or sugar.
    Taking ten minutes out of a hectic day to meditate can give you hours back in additional creative time.

  2. It lowers your risk of heart disease.

    Researchers (yes, the ones with lab coats, not the long-bearded hippies) have proven that meditation can strengthen your heart, lower your blood pressure and lower your risk of heart disease. Not convinced?
    Here’s the evidence: 3 Secrets Your Heart Wants You To Hear About Meditation

  3. Meditation helps you to feel less stressed.

    It triggers the body’s relaxation response, which neutralises the cortisol and adrenalin that would otherwise keep you feeling totally stressed-out.
    AND it also helps you to spot your stress triggers and habits, so you can consciously choose to deal with them.
    Feeling less stressed means it’s easier to concentrate, meaning you’ll get more done in less time.

  4. It helps you to worry less.

    Regular meditation helps you to let go of your Monkey Mind’s stories. It’s not about making your mind goes silent – instead it’s about reclaiming your power to choose which thoughts and stories to feed.
    This reduces worrying and anxiety, whilst also helping you to feel more relaxed and to trust that things will be ok.
    Letting go of worrying and anxiety opens the door for inspiration and business success.

  5. Meditation helps you to feel happier – and smile for no reason

    By cutting your stress and worry levels, and focussing on balancing your body’s relaxation vs ‘fight or flight’ responses, meditation helps you to feel less angry and irritable.
    Keep at it and the benefits will grow, along with a sense of well-being, ‘ok-ness’ and peace becoming your new ‘set point’. As time moves on, this rises up the scale to general happiness. People will catch you smiling for no reason. 🙂
    It’s so much easier to inspire people to share your vision when you lift their spirits, just by being there.

  6. Meditation helps you to think clearly

    It’s the perfect antidote to ‘fog-brain’. Fuzzy thinking is one of the biggest causes of business mistakes – and procrastination. By learning how to calm your mind (and there are even specific techniques that will do this for you!) you find that the clarity you need for managing a brilliant business is readily available to you.
    Just imagine how being able to think more clearly could help you to implement your business visions.

  7. It can bring you flashes of inspiration

    When you’re regularly taking time out to sit with ‘who you really are’, rather than the stories your Monkey Mind is telling you, then you’ll deepen your connection with your Inner Wisdom and intuition. That will lead to flashes of inspiration on how to solve problems – or dive into a market gap you would never otherwise have spotted.
    A single flash of inspiration could be worth thousands to your business.

  8. Meditation can help you to deal with your Inner Critic

    It’s a rare business beast that isn’t running some kind of Inner Critic. And your Inner Critic is the part of you that means you lash out when you’re feeling threatened or stressed or insecure or worried – and you self-sabotage your success at the 11th hour – or you don’t even start that dream project.
    It’s essential for entrepreneurs and business managers to deal with their Inner Critic in a healthy way – and meditation is one of the most effective and empowering tools for this.
    Just imagine how much braver and bolder you would be in your business if you had dealt with your Inner Critic and felt fearless in your choices.

  9. It brings you insights what’s the Truth and what is your mind’s stories and projections

    When you learn to observe your Monkey Mind, rather than dance with its drama, you can set yourself free from its stories. This helps you to practise discernment – telling the difference between what is Truth and what is ‘tantrum’. When you can calm your mind enough to do this, you’re no longer at the whim of your mind’s soap opera and seeing straight to the Truth of a problem becomes one of your greatest skills.
    Just imagine being able to do this in a tricky business negotiation?

  10. Meditation can improve your relationships

    By being happier, calmer, less stressed and less worried, your relationships will automatically improve. And it’s not just at home. You’ll be more patient with your work colleagues and your upbeat focus can even the performance of the people in your team. The shift you make from living in your head to living in your heart is contagious – it inspires people to become the best person they can and it can even dramatically increase customer loyalty.
    Just imagine the impact the changes you make in yourself could have on your family – and on your staff morale – and on your customers.

And we’re just scratching the surface of the benefits with this list!

Surely all of that is worth ten minutes a day of your time?

If this sounds like something that would be worth you carving out ten minutes a day for, then here’s how you could get started today:

Join me for my “Meditation For Managers” Course

Launching on September 1st 2014, this six week online course is specially designed for business managers and entrepreneurs.

Meditation for managers online courseIt brings you the ‘how to’ of meditation and mindfulness. But it also dives into an inspired blend of modern psychology and Ancient Wisdom, to make creating the daily habit easy. You’ll get to deal with the excuses, blocks and myths that might otherwise get in the way.

It’s a gorgeous combo of videos, workbooks, MP3 audios and moral support in our private Facebook group.

And it’s all designed in bite-sized chunks that mean you can fit it in, easily, no matter how busy your schedule is. If you can find 10-15 minutes a day, then you’ll get the full benefits. And there’s a special VIP launch offer that you won’t want to miss.

I’m curious: are you a reluctant meditator, who is still in the ‘should’ zone?
Or are you ROCKIN’ your business with a daily Zen-like habit?
How has meditation helped your business?
And what would you like to know about how to get it to work for you?
Please let me know, via the comments – I’d LOVE to hear from you!

With love, Namaste,
CJ Sig

Filed Under: Introverted Entrepreneurs' Club Tagged With: introverted entrepreneurs club, meditation, meditation for business, meditation for entrepreneurs, meditation for managers, mindfulness, monkey mind

I Have A Confession To Make… It’s Time To Come Out Of The Closet…

July 9, 2014 by Clare Josa 3 Comments

And I’m wondering… have you been hiding in there, too?

I have been running my own business for over 12 years now, as a certified NLP Trainer, a Meditation Teacher, a published Author and a senior management Mentor.

And my clients love how I can help them almost as much as I love being able to serve.

My inner Leo LOVES getting up on stage and helping people create transformation in their lives.

And I LOVE being on video, creating podcasts and writing articles – and meeting people both face-to-face and online.

But here’s my confession – and it’s something that most people don’t know about me:

I have a confession to make...

I run a really strong ‘introvert’ pattern.

What does that mean?

Well, it certainly doesn’t mean that I’m shy or lacking in social skills (I hope!). But it DOES mean that I have a huge need to recharge my inner batteries in a quiet, solitary environment. So late-night networking parties where people have to yell over the background music or super-sociable mid-seminar lunches are my personal idea of business hell 😉

It also means that most of what works for other business owners and senior managers will NEVER work for me.

And I know I’m far from being alone.

Most of us are running a limiting belief that you have to be a super-high-octane extrovert to be successful in business. But – thank goodness – that’s simply not true.

What IS true, however, is that you have to use different strategies to succeed, if you’re running an introverted pattern.

It impacts how you relate with your co-workers, with your customers and even with your family.

How on earth do you handle being an introvert in an extroverted world?When you’re running a strong ‘introversion’ preference, it can make it hard to spend your day surrounded by people. You need to preciously guard your ‘me-time’, to recharge your batteries and avoid burn-out – or yelling at a colleague or customer!

It can be hard to find ways to do this, when you’re a business manager with deadlines and responsibilities, so I thought you might find it useful if I shared four different ways I handle this, and yet still run a successful business – and do my best to be a good mum!

I hope these mini case studies inspire you – and I’d LOVE to hear your stories and suggestions, via the comments box.

1. How do I handle being a seminar leader and business trainer, with an introvert preference?!

 
I LOVE LOVE LOVE standing in front of a group of people and inspiring them to change their lives – and the world. But I also desperately need to recharge my batteries during the breaks in a training course.

It’s something I had already been doing for YEARS, even before I certified as an NLP Trainer over a decade ago. My Inner Leo loves being on the stage. 🙂

This means that having students milling around in the training room during breaks, rather than drinking their coffee in the break-out area, acts like a short-circuit on my batteries. Add in socialising during the lunch break and perhaps doing informal mini-mentoring during the afternoon breaks and I’m scarcely fit to drive home by the end of the day.

So, over the years, I have had to learn to pace myself, to set firm but compassionate boundaries and to be as flexible as possible with the rhythm of a course. Nowadays I’m up front with my students. I tell them before the break that I’ll be chucking them out of the room so I can have some quiet time to prepare and deliver my best efforts for them in the next session.

As with so many things in life, if you give someone a ‘why’, it’s amazing how happily they’ll help you to meet your needs.

And chances are that some of your students will be breathing a sigh of relief, as they realise that it’s ok for them to have ‘quiet-time’ needs, too.

2. And what about students on my courses who need quiet time?

And as for handling students on my courses with introversion preferences! Well, if they have hit their ‘people-limit’ for the day, then I need to keep an eye on that and, instead of doing big group exercises, I give them the chance to work in pairs or even rejig things to give the group some quiet thinking and processing time. It’s a juggling act, but there’s no point in trying to force someone who desperately needs some ‘me-time’ to keep being part of a group process that they don’t have enough energy for.

And I always run my courses in venues with some great outdoors space, so that I can chuck students outside to recharge their batteries (one of the six essential end-of-week battery rechargers for introverted entrepreneurs and business managers).

Flexibility is the key!

3. What about friends and colleagues who are running ‘extroversion’ preferences?

Another example is a gorgeous friend of mine who, like me, is a reformed engineer and business trainer, though in a different field. She runs a super-high extroversion preference. So she recharges her batteries through high-contact socialising.

For the first year of our friendship we did a yo-yo between me feeling overwhelmed and her feeling rejected, whenever we tried to find times to meet up. Then, one day, we had the ‘Duh! Moment’. We realised that she recharges her batteries by being surrounded by lots of people, whereas I need the quiet time. So if I turned down an invitation, it didn’t mean that I didn’t love her. It meant that I needed to love me.

Now we ‘get’ our differences, we can always find solutions that work for us both.

4. And what about being a mum?

And finally… My kids… This is going to sound realy stupid, but it took me about five years to work out that one of my boys is like me – running an introversion preference, whereas my other two boys run a STRONG extroversion preference.

It means that my eldest son comes home from school and runs upstairs to read a book for 1/4 hour before coming back down to play, whereas my younger sons immediately bounce outdoors for more, more and even more playing. Give my middle son a morning playing at Kindergarten, followed by an afternoon playdate with friends, followed by more playing with his brothers and he’ll get to bedtime wailing that “I haven’t had enough play time yet today!”

The side effect of all of this was that spending time with my eldest – the introvert – recharged my batteries. But spending time with the other two drained them faster than a fire hose on a garden water butt.

I did this for YEARS without realising what was going on. But now I have strategies that keep me going – and allow them to be who they really are. In fact, simply realising our different needs – and finding ways to talk to the boys so we could all be aware of our needs – made a massive difference. Though it’s still a constant learning curve!

The biggest piece of advice I would give you is to consciously become aware of what works for you and what doesn’t. Keep a diary for a week and spot what drains your batteries and what recharges them. Then take inspired action. And don’t be afraid to tell people that you need to go and recharge your batteries!

So there you are, four examples of how I have found creative solutions to needing that rare-as-hens-teeth down-time, whilst being a busy mum and running a business that’s all about spending time with people!

I would LOVE to hear how you handle this, via the comments.

And I’m curious – are you an Introverted Entrepreneur?

Join the Introverted Entrepreneurs' Club today!You are not alone! And that is why I have created the Introverted Entrepreneurs’ Club. Join us today and you’ll get our fabulous fortnightly newsletter – full of insider secrets that you can apply while the kettle boils – as well as membership of our private Facebook group.

Membership normally costs £17 per month, but I’m feeling super-generous while we’re in the pre-launch phase (the bells and whistles arrive in Autumn 2014), so if you register today, it’s yours as my gift – for as long as you’re a member.
 

Six essential end-of-week battery-rechargers for introverted entrepreneursAnd there’s more!

If you’re like me and on your knees by the end of the week, then you’ll love my video series “Six Essential End-Of-Week Battery-Rechargers For Introverted Entrepreneurs!” It’s out next week and it’s yours free (instead of the usual $47), as an early birthday present, if you register today.
 

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I’m so excited to have the chance to share this journey with you.

With love, Namaste,
CJ Sig

Filed Under: Introverted Entrepreneurs' Club Tagged With: how to be a successful introvert, introverted entrepreneurs club, introverted manager

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