The challenges that you face as an entrepreneur are not limited to just your work; they are diverse. They are interpersonal, infrastructural, administrative, and even emotional. To deal with all these,
one needs to be multifaceted, intuitive, and innovative. And those qualities grow in you when you are established in your Self and are free from stress.
Some level of stress at the workplace is normal. It can keep you on your toes, help you face challenges, and enable you to meet your deadlines. However, stress can leave you feeling frustrated and powerless.
Why does a business owner or entrepreneur need meditation?
When your mind is relaxed, you get the intuitive ability to make the right decisions. Meditation can bring up this clarity in you, bring innovation, and intuition. The success of a business enterprise is directly proportional to the intuition of the owner because greater intuition translates into better decision-making skills. Meditation reduces stress and takes you to the source, which is the seat of intuition.
If you observe any important invention or innovation that has happened on the planet, you will find that it has come when people got over restlessness, desperation, and dejection. It happened when they arrived at a point of breakdown, and relaxed. In that moment of total relaxation, their creativity blossomed. But we understand it the other way around. We think that a relaxed mind is in opposition to creativity or problem-solving. We think that we can be creative only when we are restless and agitated. That is not true. Lethargy is not to be confused with a relaxed mind. A restless mind is the outcome of stress.
The more we relax into ourselves, the more creative and happier we can be. Only then can intuition work.
To succeed in any task, you need to be able to communicate well. As a leader, if you are stressed, your perception, observation, and expression all go for a toss, and then your communication suffers. You can’t see things as they are because you are caught up in your own mind. So an entrepreneur, first and foremost, needs to be free from stress.
You know, we convey more through our presence than just words. Think about it-when a loved one says, “Have a nice day,” it carries warmth and sincerity. But when someone at a shop or flight formally says the same words, it does not carry the same feeling. Why? Because we communicate through our vibrations much more than our words. Meditation helps bring clarity to the mind, purifies your presence, so you can receive and communicate better.
Meditation softens you and makes you emotionally stronger, too. Usually, you are either emotionally hardened or your emotions remain very delicate. But meditation brings that balance between sensitivity and sensibility. It opens the door to the unknown!
There are two primary reasons why decisions go wrong sometimes. Firstly, when decisions are born out of greed or feverishness, or secondly, when someone is gripped by fear, they cannot make proper decisions. All that you need to do is get rid of the fear and greed. That’s it! Certain meditation techniques help manage negative emotions like ‘greed’, ‘fear’, ‘anger’, and ‘jealousy’.
Intellectually, you know everything. But when the moment in real life arrives, when you are overcome by the negative emotions, like the floodwaters, they can completely throw you off balance. All the knowledge you have heard, and read becomes useless. Jealousy, greed, anger, and fear overpower you. What to do in such moments? Breathing techniques, meditation, and ‘Sudarshan Kriya’ can help immensely. They help you to overcome the flood of emotions. Once you learn Sudarshan Kriya, it builds a defence mechanism within you. As if there is a wall between you and your negative emotions. A brief period of time spent in silence and meditation makes you aware of all the sensations associated with the emotions in your body, and how the negative ones can be transformed into positive emotions. When you learn about your own breath, you know that for every emotion, there is a particular rhythm in the breath. By changing the way you breathe, you can have a say over your mood and emotions.
So it is a good idea to bring some M&Ms to your company. Not the American chocolates but Meals and Meditation. When teams have meals together or sit together and meditate, they find it so refreshing that they’re able to carry on for the rest of the day with the same energy with which they came into the office. It also brings people closer and creates a healthier and more enthusiastic work environment.
See, the mind is very judgmental most of the time. A judgmental mind is prone to making incorrect decisions. But with the help of breathing exercises and meditation, prejudice in the mind just disappears. The success of business enterprises depends on that to some degree!
Keeping the mind open to new ideas, not being too anxious, putting in 100% effort, and meditation are important to successful entrepreneurship.
The author is a humanitarian leader, spiritual teacher and an ambassador of peace. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18’s views.
