Yesterday, I delivered my new talk, Locked In: The Art of Resilience and Performance from NBA’s Elite, at Oregon and Washington’s joint SHRM conference.
One thing that was helpful for people was explaining how we define mindfulness, meditation and emotional intelligence, which are increasingly being used in the NBA to level up performance. These three terms have become extremely prevalent in our culture because science has been able to back up what practitioners have known for years. Walking through the airport last month, on the way to run a leadership workshop, there was a sign for “mindful snacks”, as well as, a meditation room. When a term is so popular people are using it to sell, you know it’s permeated pop culture!
Here a few common misperceptions:
Mental Training One common misperception is that people refer to mindfulness as anything that has to do with mental training. It’s actually the opposite. Mindfulness is a form of mental training.
Meditation Required Another misperception is that mindfulness requires meditation. While I’d argue that it is the most effective way to train brain, but it’s not required in order to be more mindful.
It’s Spiritual You don’t have to be a buddhist to practice mindfulness. Yes, meditation was derived from eastern practices, but the ones we teach have been completely secularized. When I first started, the only thing I cared about was reducing stress, cultivating self-awareness and improving focus.
So here’s how we define mindfulness, meditation and emotional intelligence.
Mindfulness is the ability to create the awareness of our thoughts, feelings and actions in the present moment.
Mindfulness Meditation is simply an exercise to train your brain to cultivate these higher states of awareness. You can think of the word meditation like you would think of the word sports. Sports includes basketball, baseball, hockey, etc. Meditation includes visualization, mindfulness meditation, mantra based meditation and so many others.
Emotional Intelligence is the ability to create the awareness of what’s driving our thoughts, feelings and actions. It’s getting to that second layer.
You can definitely dive deeper with these, like Daniel Goleman does, putting Emotional Intelligence into four buckets:
- Self-Awareness
- Social-Awareness
- Self-Management
- Relationship-Management
But, we use these three to quickly get to clarity and so people can see the connection between all of them.
Mindfulness meditation cultivates the self-awareness which is the foundation of emotional intelligence.
It took me almost 5 years to come to clarity on these so hopefully they are helpful for you along the way.
If you’d like to learn more about starting your own personal practice or implementing mindfulness in your organization, drop me a note and we can continue the conversation. We’ve put together a 12 month program, Well-Being As A Performance Strategy In The New World of Work, and I can’t wait to roll it out!
