You Don’t Need a Morning Meditation
Rather than adding a morning meditation, take the non-negotiable recurring events already in your day and give whoever is in front of you your undivided attention, so those hours become your concentration practice.
Asked how he helps people who are losing focus, Dandapani goes back to first principles: focus does not come naturally to most people, so it has to be taught and then practised. He shows how to get hours of practice a day out of time you already spend, with your child, with your assistant, and what happens in a workplace when a team does this.
What this talk covers
- Focus does not come naturally to everybody, so the two things that need to happen are teaching people how to focus and teaching them how to practise it.
- Instead of building a separate morning practice, find the non-negotiable recurring events in your day and insert the practice into those.
- He spends two or three hours with his daughter every day around school, dinner, shower and bedtime, and giving her his undivided attention every time turns that into three hours of concentration practice.
- The same applies to smaller pockets, like the cumulative thirty minutes a day you spend talking with an assistant, five minutes here and one minute there.
- After six months of this you are practising three, four or five hours of concentration a day, and a team taught to do it becomes more productive and more present at home.
So rather than create a separate practice in the morning, find the things in your life that are non-negotiable and insert the practice into that.Dandapani
Questions
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He suggests otherwise. Rather than creating a separate practice in the morning, find the things in your day that are non-negotiable and recurring and put the practice inside them.
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Give your undivided attention to whoever you are with, every time. Your child in the hours around school and bedtime, your assistant across the thirty cumulative minutes you speak each day. You are leveraging what already occurs as practice.
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Teach them how to focus and how to practise, from first principles. He says people do not realise focus does not come naturally to most people and has to be learned. When employees bring it into the workplace they are more productive, more efficient, and more present with their families.
Transcript
443 words · 2:24
So as you lead business, you are a hundred percent on focus, right? Wrote a book on it, very into it. How do you help your team? How do you help your people?
How do you help others around you when they are losing focus or they are distracted, how do you help get them back center? Going back first principles, teaching them how to focus and teaching them how to practice.
And if those two things can be done, they'll be able to do it. You know? And I think people don't realize that focus does, doesn't come naturally to everybody. And some people naturally have that, but most people don't. And they
actually have to learn and actually have to practice it. And one of the things I tell people is that rather than doing meditation in the morning, find what I called a non-negotiable, reoccurring events throughout the day. So let me ask you, on an average day, how many minutes do you think you spend with your eldest
daughter, roughly? Three hours, what is it? 180 minutes? Yeah. Those three hours you You gaffer your undivided attention. It would be three hours of practice and concentration. You will never not spend that time with her.
Maybe occasionally if something crazy is happening somewhere, but if not, you would. So for me, it's the same with my daughter. I spend two, three hours with her at least every single day from the morning. She goes to school, she comes back, we play dinner and shower and bedtime.
I end up easily two, three hours. Every time I'm with her, I give her my undivided attention. Now I have three hours of practicing concentration. And that's how you become good at it.
So rather than create a separate practice in the morning, find the things in your life that are non-negotiable and insert the practice into that. Every time you talk to your assistant, and if you talk to your assistant every day, a cumulative total of 30 minutes, five minutes here, one minute there, every time you speak
with him or her, give them your undivided attention. So now you're leveraging what's occurring every day as an opportunity to practice concentration. So after six months, you'd be practicing three, four, five hours of concentration each day, and you become really good at it.
And then if you teach your employees to do that, then they bring that into the workplace. They're more productive. They're more efficient. They're happier at home because when they're talking to the kid, the kid knows mom and
dad's present, finally. The spouses know they're present.