Why you should meditate if you want better business performance
As CEO, you are your business. Its performance and yours are forever entwined. So, how you perform both as a leader – and generally as a human, directly affects how your business performs too.
You’re past the scary start-up phase and happy with how your business is coming along. But naturally, you want to scale your success, and grow your business even more. Meditation could be just the unexpected answer you’re looking for.
There are countless benefits of meditation when it comes to boosting your business’s performance, but here at Partner Accountancy, we’ve picked the five we think are the most impactful to your business’s success.
1. Meditation can make you more self-aware
Understanding how you interact with the world, is essential for all successful relationships, both in business and out. Even worse, not knowing your flaws or your features will hurt your business, whether you know about it or not. So wouldn’t you rather know?
Meditation helps you to do this by giving your mind distance from the emotional jumble. This creates space to mindfully observe how you interact with your thoughts, beliefs, and experiences, so you don’t just react based on emotion.
It’s great for improving your communication skills and getting to know what you’re good at and what you’re not so good at. By giving tasks to people that can do things better than you, you free up time to concentrate on the things you excel at.
Recognising when you’ve made an emotional decision or a strategic one can mean the difference between more mistakes or lessons learned.
2. Meditating improves resilience
As an experienced business owner, I’m sure you’re all too familiar with the rough old ride of building a business. And it doesn’t stop once you get some level of success.
In fact, the bigger the success, the more resilience you’ll need. Why? Because the bigger the ocean the bigger the waves – and you’re the captain of the ship.
Resilience is vital as a business owner. How you react to successes as well as failures (and all the obstacles in between) quite literally determines the direction of your business, and whether it crashes and sinks along the way.
Meditation helps you to separate yourself from the emotions tangled up in your failures and successes (we all know the highs and lows of a failed deal and a sealed one!). This allows you to keep a level head during the not-so-fun times, as well as when you’re buzzing off a win.
Being mindful like this can help to make sure neither of those things takes your business off track from achieving its goals.
3. Mindfulness meditation sharpens memory and attention span
As a business owner, it’s fair to say you’ve got a lot on. Whether it’s Pamela from accounts asking you about her pension contributions, or your most valuable client threatening to pull out of the deal, there’s a lot to remember.
There’s also the endless meetings, the actual work, and the countless other things that go along with running a business. It’s safe to say you need the memory of an elephant and the attention span of a pro-chess player.
Meditation is a great tool for improving productivity. Calming an emotionally unruly mind creates mental space for what’s important without getting distracted by the daily grind.
Mindfulness meditation helps boost your business success by building a reputation for following through, without dropping any other balls along the way. Perhaps most importantly, meditation can help you avoid a catastrophic burnout (then your business’s performance will really go downhill!).
4. Meditation can make you kinder
Kindness isn’t something you immediately associate with business success. But it’s arguably one of the most important things to focus on. Not only is being kind to the people you engage with important, but it’s also really crucial to be nice to yourself.
Meditation helps train your mind to spot suffering in others while not getting overwhelmed by their distress when relating to it.
Standing compassionately in other people’s shoes can help boost business performance by cultivating an open, honest workplace. This gives employees the creative freedom to make mistakes and innovate.
And, by giving yourself a break when you mess up that pitch or snap at your employee, you hold space for yourself to reflect and improve. That’s never going to be bad for business.
5. Meditating can improve mental clarity
If you’ve read Essentialism by Greg McKeown (and if you haven’t, you should!), you know the key to continued business success is to focus only on what’s essential to your goals and gracefully decline everything else.
But you might struggle to figure out what’s essential with the mental noise that comes with your current success crowding out your mind.
Meditation pulls your attention away from the mental racket and into the present moment, which gives you the cognitive space to figure out what’s important.
This could be a game-changer for your business’s performance. Imagine being able to make every decision knowing it’s moving you in precisely the right direction.
Will you use meditation to improve your business’s performance?
Mindfulness is key to good business performance. Blindly plodding along, overwhelmed by all those outside influences vying for your attention, is a sure-fire way to create an inconsistent frazzled leader. Which in turn, creates an inconsistent, frazzled business.
There are reasons successful CEOs use meditation as a regular part of their routine. Plenty of them in fact. Can you think of a reason not to? Maybe it’s something to meditate on.