Category: The positive perspective

The reality we come to accept as our life is made up of several elements. Some are perceived as good, some bad, and some neutral.

What we don’t realize is that the way we perceive life situations through our five senses actually sculpts our brain which is the ultimate master of our body.
This is a simplified view of a complex process known as neuroplasticity, which is the ability of our brain to re-organize itself— chemically, physically, and structurally— in order for us to change the way our body and ourselves respond to life situations.

The use of imaging techniques in the field of neuroscience has lent us much knowledge on the way our brain behaves in the face of negative and positive experiences. We now know that when we focus on the negative aspects of an experience, our brain engages our resources to confront a threat. For example, a tiger is approaching. This in turn draws all of our metabolic energy from the executive function part of our brain and from our vital functions and processes, and directs that energy to our large muscle groups. Now we can run from the tiger. But this energy shift places us in a temporary state of cognitive and emotional impairment.

On the contrary, when we focus on positive aspects of any experience, we operate from the space of a balanced nervous system, which has been proven to provide many benefits. We feel better, find more creative solutions to problems, experience less cardiovascular diseases, improve our immune function, and reduce anxiety, depression and overall symptoms of stress.

Our brain evolved with a strong negative bias that has kept us alive and ahead of the tigers for millions of years. Now, that negative bias is more harmful than helpful.

What can we do, little by little, to change the neural pathways of our brain, so that we can use it to tap into our most valuable resources and experience life from our best self?

Performance Excellence and Frazzle

Have you ever had a day like this?

  • You are working hard, yet you cannot complete tasks effectively.
  • You forget what you were doing a minute ago.
  • You have difficulty concentrating, and—as much as you try to—you cannot keep your mind on one task.

If you have days like these, you are not alone. Many of us feel frazzled (hopefully, only occasionally) when stress becomes so great that it starts interfering with our performance.

Contrary to popular belief, stress is not all bad. In fact, stress can be a positive, motivational force that gives us the ability to sharpen our performance and rise to a challenging occasion. However, the relationship between stress and performance follows a predictable bell-shaped curve, where optimal performance deteriorates as stress increases (1908, Robert M. Yerkes and John Dillingham Dodson).

DRAWING OF YERKES DODSON BELL CURVE.

What is frazzle?

Frazzle is the performance zone associated with what we know as distress. It is the part of the Yerkes Dodson bell-shaped curve just beyond optimal performance, where stress increases to a point that results in deterioration of performance. When in frazzle mode, the quantity of hormones released by our stress response lead to a cascade of events, which have the ability to interfere with our ability to learn, innovate, be creative, or even effectively manage our time. Furthermore, if we hang out in frazzle mode for too long, our body systems start malfunctioning, making us susceptible to illness and potential long-term damage to organs and bodily functions.

A different perspective on why employees don’t do what they are supposed to do

When I was first nominated to enter management development, I was expected to read a dozen best-selling leadership books as part of my mandatory training. As much as I enjoyed learning from this incredible list of experts, I noticed something interesting: Every single one of them looked at employees a bit like they were “problems” that managers had to “solve” in order to achieve individual and organizational performance excellence.

The truth is, most of the time the real culprit causing poor performance is not bad employees but negative, physiological consequences, which take place when we humans are stretched too thin without adequate time in between to reset.

We are not machines, but beautifully complex body systems requiring ample time to rest and digest experiences in between jumping over hurdles. Research has proven that performance is negatively affected when the demands of work and life become greater than our ability to bounce back to our calm, balanced state, known as homeostasis. When we are in our neutral state, our heart is beating at the correct rate (80-100 beats per minute), our temperature is just right (97-98 degrees Fahrenheit), we have access to the executive part of our brain, and our immune and digestive systems are working well. Every demand we place on an organism produces stress—a temporary state where our body goes off-balance to meet a demand.

When we are burning the candle at both ends—going to work early and then working late at night to meet yet another work deadline—we don’t consciously think how, in order to meet that deadline, we are actually taking our body off-balance temporarily. For example, whether we are an Olympian running to win a Gold Medal, or a mere, corporate executive giving a presentation to our peers and boss, our heart rate and body temperature will increase above and beyond our normal, balanced states to meet that demand. If we keep this up for too long, we spend less and less time at an optimal heart rate or temperature level.

The sum total of all the adjustments an organism has to make to return the body to its’ balanced state in the face of stressors is called allostatic load (McEwan and Stellar, 1993). The higher the allostatic load, the more our performance deteriorates and the higher the probability is that we will experience functional organ and body damage.

How do we incorporate all the insights that science has lent us regarding the impact of stress to increase individual and organizational health and optimal performance? Here are the most valuable lessons I learned from the team of eight people I had the privilege of leading in my very first job as a manager.

  1. 
 We need to start living our values outside of employee handbooks. Are we really supporting work-life balance if we are expected to give up our lunch to meet yet another deadline, or to take a Sunday night red-eye flight to be at a noon meeting across the country? Work-life balance initiatives sound great inside the pages of our employee manuals, but they actually lead to peak performance when these values are supported by actions.

 

  1. We need to invest in building a culture of community at the workplace. When life’s demands become too high, we humans tend to find comfort in the support kindly offered to us by people who care about us and show up at times of stress. Beyond revenues and corporate objectives, one effective antidote to frazzle is to create time and space to connect with employees as humans, above and beyond corporate meetings and performance metrics. Let’s face it, we all spend a significant amount of our life at work. It is unlikely that we will go the extra mile for a boss or a company that does not really care about us as human beings.

 

  1. We need to start talking about stress openly. We cannot possibly eliminate stress in life, but we can increase our stress resilience. How can we build stress resilience though, if we turn a blind eye to the hidden, negative impact of stress? What if our annual business plans included SMART (specific, measurable, action-oriented, results-oriented, and time-specific) goals around stress resilience?  We need to stop seeing stress as a sign of weakness in employees, but as a larger problem and a significant health and safety issue in the workplace.

 

  1. We need to put down the stick and give more carrots. Despite the robust evidence that behaviorism does not work, fear-based leadership still appears to be the king. In fact, carrot and stick leadership is wreaking havoc in corporate America, costing a staggering amount of dollars in lost productivity and health issues. It’s time to truly see employees as valuable assets. After all, nobody wakes up in the morning thinking, “Today is a great day for me to be a low performer.” Isn’t it time we see with eyes wide open how much a threatened brain hampers performance?

 

  1. Happy employees really do make productive employees. When we review the philosophy and strategies of the companies that continually make the list of the best companies to work for, we can clearly see that these companies provide their employees with unconventional perks that go beyond additional pay. These perks can include on-site gyms or childcare, flex-time options, or even providing employees with designated time to meditate or get massages at work. The common thread amongst these exemplary organizations is that they realize the importance of providing the time and space for their people to rest and regroup in order for them to do amazing things for their companies in return. And they often do!

 

I was extremely frazzled and stressed out when I was given the honor and responsibility to lead a team for the first time in my career a little over a decade ago.

As it turned out though, my people shone for me, and in nine months our team moved from ranking at the bottom of our company to being the number one performing team in the nation! Although I was somewhat unconventional in my leadership approach (I cooked Greek food for my team at my home and even succeeded in changing company policies a couple of times to support my teams’ needs) it was not really me, but my people who actually realized this great accomplishment.

Every organization in any industry needs to perform well in order to remain profitable and survive against market variables. That means we all have to stretch ourselves to meet performance expectations.

But if we wish to see exceptional performance then active steps—such as the five steps listed above—need to be implemented to neutralize the negative impact of frazzle and stress.

And, if we are truly serious about performance excellence, here’s the most potent thing we can do to launch our employees’ superhero: We need to actively reflect that we “have their back!”

Performance excellence and Flow

performance excellence

Performance excellence is a universal human pursuit. No matter where we come from or what our IQ is, we all strive to be our best. But not all of us arrive at self-mastery.

I have been a performer in the top 5% for the majority of my adult life. However, my performance plummeted in all areas of my life when I fell into the depths of burnout and frazzle and lost access to my best self.

But what are the two degrees of separation between our ability to perform a task beautifully with a deep sense of joy as opposed to expending all of our energy without arriving at a successful outcome?

Flow is the term that describes the state in which we can perform and feel our absolute best.

The term was coined by Hungarian psychologist, Mihaly Csikszentmihályi, who in the early 1970’s began the quest of unpacking the characteristics of the state that allows us to perform at the utmost of our ability. Dr. Csikszentmihályi’s work launched a massive, global effort to understand how we can access the super powers that have allowed fellow humans to accomplish the impossible. More recently, neuroimaging techniques have lent us incredible insights regarding the state of flow, such as knowledge of the specific alterations in brain function that occur with this desirable performance state of being.

What is flow?

Flow is a positive state in which we are able to perform a task at hand at optimal levels while also feeling a deep sense of happiness and joy. It has been described as “the sweet spot” or being “in the zone” where we are completely enamored and engrossed in the task at hand and experience an extreme sense of heightened awareness, so much so, that we often lose track of time.

When we find ourselves in flow, we are highly-focused, exceptionally creative, and feel a deep sense of fulfillment and satisfaction.

Research, which includes the use of fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging), has revealed that the part of our brain—the dorsolateral pre-frontal cortex—associated with the voice of doubt within us shuts down when we are in flow. That means that we are free to make decisions and access our creativity and innovation without having to waste any energy quieting the inner critic within us. We also know that the state of flow is associated with several pleasure-inducing neurochemicals, such as dopamine, norepinephrine, and serotonin.

The benefits of flow.

Being in the state of flow appears to have an incredible impact. We can:

  • Learn twice as fast.
  • Solve problems more effectively.
  • Access solutions that we don’t have access to under normal circumstances.

In fact, research has shown that top executives are 500% more productive when in flow.

As we go through the mundane details of our daily existence, we may not often consider our ability to perform in a  similar fashion to iconic athletes like Magic Johnson,  But in actual fact, we are physiologically just as capable of doing what Roger Bannister did in 1954 when he broke the “four-minute-barrier”—running a mile in just under four minutes. Until Roger defeated that barrier, running a mile in under four minutes was not considered humanly possible.

Functioning at this exceptional level of competency and ability means we can not only accomplish whatever we set our minds to, but also that we can have more time for things that matter in life, like our family.

Tips on cultivating flow states

So, if all of us are capable of entering a state that has allowed some of us to conquer the 29,035-foot summit of Mount Everest, how do we enter this state of flow? A large number of scientists around the world have developed lists of the essential components of flow and suggestions on shortcuts that we can practice to become better at entering the state of flow. These methods can be personal, environmental, and/or social.

But here are some simple every day ways you and I can take advantage of the state of human performance excellence known as flow, backed up by scientific research and my own humble experience.

  1. Practice mindfulness.

Mindfulness is the conscious decision of choosing what we focus on. Whether we are Michelangelo chiseling the masterpiece David out of marble, or we are a teacher giving a long division lesson to fourth graders, mastering the art of quieting thoughts that distract and dilute our attention is a very effective way of increasing our ability to experience conscious, focused attention. The more often and the more consistently we practice quieting our thoughts, one minute at a time, the more competent we become at being able to access the present moment instantly.

  1. Practice setting clear goals and priorities for both the smallest and largest pursuits of your existence.

Get into the habit of creating intention for everything in your life—your day, your work, your role as a parent. If we don’t have a specific destination for any part of our lives, we will get nowhere specific. A razor-blade-focus on our goals is critical in activating the parts of our brain that are involved with excellence and peak performance.

  1. Practice consistently aligning your skills to your endeavors in all work and life tasks.

If you ask me to play the guitar solo from Jimi Hendrix’s classic song, Voodoo Child, I will absolutely fail miserably. I don’t have much skill in playing the guitar. If we want to have more moments of peak performance in our life, it is important that we do not allow a desire for external approval to dissuade us and take us off course from our true path. For example, we may want to please our parents by following their chosen career path of practicing law, but if we happen to be Michelangelo, our incredible artistry would be wasted in law school, and we would be miserable!

We need to be really honest with ourselves and brave enough to take an active role in recognizing what jobs match our current skills and what skills we need to become better at. Flow can only be achieved when our skills are fully developed and utilized, so that we can continuously and effectively overcome challenges associated with a job or endeavor.

  1. Commit to actively practicing positive states of mental activity.

Our built-in negative bias is an essential part of life and what has kept us alive for millions of years. However, it is this same conditioned way of negative thinking that short circuits our metabolic energy and shuts down the parts of our brain where creativity and innovation come from. We often don’t know how to bypass our negative bias, or we are too busy to do so. Starting each day with just five minutes of listing what you are grateful for in a notebook or journal can do wonders for allowing you to shift into a positive state, which is a potent precursor for instilling an internal path to the magical space of flow.

  1. Do what you love and love what you do.

In this fast-paced, competitive era that we live in, we forget the importance of doing what we are truly passionate about. Choosing to align our best skills with something that truly excites us and that also makes a positive contribution to the world we live in is a great way to get closer to what Dr. Csikszentmihályi described as the “optimal experience” in life: when our abilities are matched with what we love, what we are best at, and what makes a difference in the world.

Although we tend to look for happiness in checking off endless lists of status quo expectations, it appears that not much can top the immense joy we experience when we can access the powerful, intrinsic state of flow in ourselves – When we do what we use our best skills doing what we are most passionate about, while making a positive contribution to the world, while we are at it!

Unlike the adrenaline rush of winning an award, or getting any external approval, the state of flow represents our ultimate ability to be in control regulate our internal state and channel it toward realizing our smaller and larger noble pursuits.

We cannot underestimate the happiness that comes from human touch, teamwork, or any other source of happiness dependent on external sources.

But the happiness that results from our own flow is the only one that is sustainable, 100% within our control, and invaluable in reinforcing the intrinsic muscle of self-worth that forms the building blocks to our own self-actualization.

The incredible benefits of Meditation

Are you sometimes stressed and overwhelmed by the numerous demands of life? If you are, you are not alone. Almost 70% of us experience moderate to severe symptoms of stress regularly.

However, I am happy to report that there is a very tangible, free, simple solution to this problem that has no side effects—it’s called meditation!

Most of us have heard about meditation, but we seem to be resistant to this practice, although it has been scientifically proven to have tremendous benefits in reversing the negative impact of stress in our life.

The reasons we resist meditation seem to revolve around us not knowing how to do it or feeling we cannot do it because we don’t have time, because it seems like a foreign concept and, most of all, because we are not aware of its’ myriad benefits.

Eight years ago, at the lowest point of the most devastating loss of my life, I was fortunate enough to experience the power of meditation during a weekend retreat. I would love to share with you my inside view of why meditation has single-handedly changed my life for the better over the last eight years and, I am sure, for the rest of my life.

The problem that meditation solves.

Stress is the epidemic of the century and it is now linked to more than 90% of today’s disease.

But what is stress?

What we experience as stress is nothing other than the way our body responds to demands from the environment in order to maintain our internal balance and sense of safety.

A critical part of our stress response that we often overlook is that what causes the symptoms of stress we experience actually comes from the way we interpret life situations and not the situations themselves.

For example, if our boss gives us a large task to complete in a short amount of time, it is the thoughts we have about our ability to complete the task and the consequences of not succeeding (our mental activity) that overwhelm us and trigger the mind-blowing cascade of events that elicits our stress response.

Chronic stress has been proven to cause significant damage to organs and functions of our body, as well as structural changes in our brain regions that are associated with resilience, motivation, executive functioning, and mediation of conflicting information.

We have so much power in how our psychological states are expressed in physical states in our body; we just don’t know it yet.

What is meditation?

“Meditation is the experience of the limitless nature of the mind when it ceases to be dominated by its usual mental chatter.” —David Fontana

It is estimated that we have over 60,000 thoughts per day and that 95% of these are worries. Yet only five percent of what we worry about actually happens!

This means that we invest a tremendous amount of energy in engaging our body systems to address imaginary threats or demands from the environment that are not actually happening now!

As foreign a concept as it may seem, meditation is nothing other than the practice of becoming an active participant in shaping our mental activity by being mindful of what we allow our attention to rest upon.

Meditation involves our ability to adjust the volume of thoughts that do not serve us by simply observing them as thoughts and redirecting our attention to something neutral. This process intercepts our body’s tremendous power and effort to adapt to situations that are not happening and thus reinstates the internal balance of our body systems.

Meditation is often misunderstood as the act of organizing or sorting our thoughts. In reality, it’s more about observing our thoughts and redirecting our attention to what is actually happening in the present moment.

We may think that by redirecting our attention from the thoughts we have about the challenging aspects of our life that we are not being realistic. Quite the contrary, meditation helps us maintain our nervous system in a calm state, in which we may be able to acknowledge the complications each challenge brings forth in our life and determine the most effective course of action for its’ resolution.

How does meditation work?

I must admit that a decade ago, while on chapter three of the book A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle, that when he posed the question, “Have you ever really looked at a flower?” I caught myself rolling my eyes and saying out loud: “Eckhart, have you seen my to-do list? I don’t have time to look at a flower!”

Today, I admit that I was completely missing the point.

The main point I was missing is how much power our mind has over our body—a riddle that we have been trying to solve for millennia and which we are barely scratching the surface in solving.

Science is just catching up with the old truths of ancient philosophers and traditions, substantiating that by keeping our mental activity on neutral, we maintain access to the parts of our brain involved with our ability to overcome problems faster and easier and find more creative solutions to challenges, which leads to a positive outlook. The more positive we feel, the more confident we feel.

Learning how to change what we think so we can change how we feel is the basis of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), which has been proven to be very effective in alleviating the impact of many illnesses associated with the mind, like depression and panic disorders.

By adopting a meditation practice, we essentially engage with the mental gymnastics that yield a positive outcome similar to CBT.

The inside view of meditation

A tremendous amount of research, done with the help of imaging techniques, has uncovered that a regular meditation practice is linked to significant, measurable changes in the brain in regions that allow us to manage our body systems more effectively and increase our capacity to deal with stress.

It appears that our mind takes its’ shape by what it repeatedly rests upon. Specifically, at the cellular level, depending on what we focus on, neurons fire and wire together in different parts of our brain. Much like building our biceps by doing bicep curls, redirecting our attention to positive feelings, like empathy for example (even for someone that cuts us off on the freeway), results in neurons firing and wiring together in the parts of our brain associated with those positive traits.

Neuroscience has lent us much knowledge about the relationship between inner strengths or weaknesses and different regions of our brain.

By consistently being mindful about where we place our attention, we actually have the ability to build gray matter and grow regions of our brain that allow us to be more effective in our life endeavors and to experience more joy and well-being overall.

Here are some research findings on how meditation positively impacts our brain structures and functions even with a practice of only ten minutes, three times a week:

  • Increased cortical tissue and more blood flow to parts of the brain in the frontal regions that help regulate attention and emotion.
  • Increased activity in the left prefrontal regions of our brain, which are involved in our ability to regulate negative emotions. An active left prefrontal lobe means we will be more effective in managing emotions like fear, anger, or shame.
  • Increased gray matter in the temporal lobes of the brain, called the insula, that help us tune into ourselves. We are then able to be more self-aware. As an added benefit, growth in the insula region of our brain allows us to experience more pronounced feelings of empathy for self and others.
  • Increased tissue in a part of the brain called the hippocampus, which is involved with memory, learning, and ability to calm down another brain structure, called our amygdala, which is much like our alarm system and critical in eliciting our stress response. A thicker hippocampus means we will be much better in deciphering true threats as opposed to imaginary ones, so that we do not waste our metabolic energy unnecessarily.
  • Improved immune system function. Calming down our stress response means that our body functions are not compromised by the redirection of energy to address non-existent threats.

Research shows that we can use our mind to change the anatomy of our brain and cultivate elements like attention, compassion, motivation, or resilience.

The way meditation works is by allowing us to nurture parts of ourselves that we already have that are good and beautiful and associated with great outcomes.

There are many different ways to start a meditation practice, and there are many free, guided meditations to ease anyone into the regular practice of quieting their mind. In the “Quiet Your Mind” section of this website, I have saved a few of my favorites for you to try out for yourself.

But the most important component to experiencing the incredible impact and benefits of meditation is being open to the magic that happens when we choose, even for a few minutes a day, to leave behind our conditioned way of thinking and open up to the possibility of simply connecting with anything that is here in the present moment, for example, our breath.

Although we often think that a specific life outcome is what will help us reinstate a sense of safety and calm, the truth is, only when we quiet down the limbic mid-brain (the part of our nervous system involved with emotions, instincts, and memories) can we access problem-solving, motivation, compassion, creativity, innovation, joy, and empathy.

Happiness is finding peace in the natural flow of all the natural changes in life and learning how to be calm and relaxed with all the uncertainty that every day brings.

Meditation is the most impactful way to stay centered in the midst of change. But the only way to truly know the incredible benefits of meditation is to incorporate a meditation practice into your own life.

By shifting our attention away from the endless thoughts our mind usually rests upon, to come into our bodies and the true sensations we experience, we actually awaken to seeing things for what they truly are. Connecting with the infinite light within us allows us to change for the better, which in turn gives us the opportunity to bring positive change in the community and the world we live in.

And not many practices have benefits that can top that!