Using Mindfulness to Get into The Zone

/ Metta Mind + Life/

"If you just sit and observe, you will see how restless your mind is. If you try to calm it, it only makes it worse, but over time it does calm, and when it does, there's room to hear more subtle things--that's when your intuition starts to blossom and you start to see things more clearly and be in the present more. Your mind just slows down, and you see a tremendous expanse in the moment. You see so much more than you could see before." Steve Jobs, tech visionary and co-founder of Apple Inc

Did you know Jobs used what he honed through meditation and mindfulness in his professional career? In a big way—to reduce his stress, gain more clarity, and enhance his creativity.

Read More about how Steve Jobs trained his mind here

As a creative person, some my favorite benefits are intuition, focus and clarity—the FLOW that I can access more readily because I have chosen to incorporate a mindfulness practice every day.

There are many creative and high-performance people that meditate. And no doubt meditation and mindfulness are big players in how they have been able to sustain their passion and implement their visions so successfully. Here’s a fun list:

Artists Sir Paul McCartney, Lady Gaga, Stevie Wonder, Tom Petty, Steve Vai, Marina Abramovic

Jim Carrey, Michelle Yeoh, Jeff Bridges, Jerry Seinfeld, Amy Schumer, Lena Dunham, Keanu Reeves

Martin Scorsese, David Lynch, George Lucas and Clint Eastwood

Dan Harris, George Stephanopoulos, Danny Penman, Oprah Winfrey

Ballet superstar Megan Fairchild, Derek Jeter, Kobe Bryant, Jet Li, Michael Jordan

Entrepreneurs Marc Benioff, founder of cloud-based computing giant salesforce.com, LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner, media mogul Rupert Murdoch, Arianna Huffington, Cofounder of Huffington Post and Thrive Global

“People Like Us do Things Like This”:

  1. Write down and post somewhere (as sticky note or art):

  2. People like us, who are _____ (creative, intuitive, focused, fearless) do a mindfulness practice every day to ______ (be more impactful, get into flow, achieve our dreams, launch a successful business)

  3. Sit down prior to any creative or academic or mentally-intensive task

  4. Set up you environment, have a place and certain time where you meditate where you won’t be disturbed

  5. Dive in, consistently, whether that is 5 minutes/day or 20. The key is that you do this as a practice, no matter how busy you tell yourself you are. Things take me half the time to complete when I’ve recently mediated.

Try this and you’re bound to start your day off with a good foundation. Focus will happen, and you might just find yourself immersed in a project, seeing that brush with the paint on it like it already knows what to do.