Founders are famously prone to buildups of stress — which makes them prime candidates for the resilience-building benefits of mindfulness. Gelong Thubten joined us at Boardwave Live to give Boardwave community members a monk’s guide to meditation.
Gelong Thubten, the Buddhist Monk, meditation teacher, and author of books including A Monk's Guide to Happiness and Handbook for Hard Times: A Monk’s Guide to Fearless Living, has helped popularise mindfulness in recent years.
But with its rise in popularity has come a series of misconceptions about mindfulness that Thubten is diligently debunking.
“The first time I went into a boardroom, the executive in charge said, ‘I’m glad you’re here, but please don’t make them too relaxed’”, says Thubten, introducing his Boardwave Live session ‘A Monk’s Guide to Meditation’. “People don’t want to lose their edge”, he adds.
Mindfulness is actually the opposite of a relaxant, Thubten explains. ”It’s all about mental focus, and handling stress differently.”For those leading a company, this is an invaluable skill. Building emotional resilience is an important part of building a business, and mindfulness offers a way to navigate and limit the daily stressors that so often accumulate into Founder’s Fatigue.
But faced with a mountain of emails to respond to, clients to meet, and decisions to make, meditation might be the last thing on your mind. Who has the time to practice mindfulness when there’s a company to be run?
Time shouldn’t be a barrier, says Thubten; business leaders can harness the benefits of mindfulness by practicing small moments of meditation throughout the working day.
Mindfulness 101: Micro-meditations
Thubten was schooled in what he describes as a “hardcore” monastery, immediately thrown in at the deep end with two-hour meditation sessions. He explains that meditation needn’t be this intense for ordinary working people.
“Research shows that even after four days of doing 10 minutes a day, there are visible changes in an MRI scan.”
Start with five minutes per day, Thubten says, and the stress will start to melt away — “not by shutting it out, but by learning to work with the thoughts and feelings that create stress. We are hijacked by our thoughts, emotions, and reactions. Notice the tension, and it will slowly start to drop away.”
Besides instilling good habits, micro-meditations also help integrate mindfulness into your daily life — whether it’s standing in a queue and feeling the ground under your feet, or washing your hands and feeling the sensation of the hands, the soap, the water.
“You can be madly busy while you do this”, says Thubten; this coming from a man who juggles multiple books, speaking tours, teaching courses and charity work. His advice is to deliberately practice mindful moments “every time you’re waiting for something”.
After all, meditation itself is only half the story: the other half is bringing the energy of meditation into everything you do in your daily life, and bringing your awareness into a state of now, one small mindful moment at a time. “It’s hard to do this for long stretches, but it’s very easy to do in short bursts”, Thubten adds.
Soon, you’ll begin to start to look forward to these moments of waiting; what were once tests of patience and temperament become opportunities to practice mindfulness. In Thubten’s words: “You’re developing the habit of seeing a challenge as an opportunity” to stay one step ahead of the build up of stress. For Thubten, this process is symbolic of a core belief: that life's challenges are all opportunities for growth.
Without further ado, Thubten eases our room of CEOs and founders into a guided meditation. Silence falls on the Boardwave Live session, as founders and CEOs of the Boardwave community take a beat to reflect on the life they’re living, the chairs they’re sitting in, the air they’re breathing.
Granted, our room of Boardwave Live delegates didn’t leave as meditation experts. It takes years of practice to master the mind, and even Thubten is still a self-professed novice despite having spent over six years in isolated retreats.
But what they did leave with were the tools to better handle stress, contribute to a stable work environment, and become a more emotionally resilient leader—not to mention a more happy and fulfilled human being.
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