Three Simple Steps: A Map to Success in Business and Life (17 page)

        
Your eyes can be open or closed, but I find closed easier for concentration. Take a deep breath. As you exhale, do so with a sigh. Making a sound here helps concentration, and it feels good. Repeat a few times until you feel nicely relaxed. Now, sit as still as you can. Breathe normally, and let your mind become aware of your body in the chair. Take your concentration to your feet, legs, torso, head, and arms like a probe. Tell each part of your body to relax. Imagine your face and head, your spine, your heart, and your stomach relaxing. You start to feel as limp as a rag doll. It is a good feeling. Keep the quietness.

        
Once you feel more relaxed, it helps to imagine yourself connected to the Earth. This is another Native American technique that allows your mind to be more
fully in the present. It reduces some of the chatter in your head. Simply spend a few seconds taking your awareness down to your feet. Imagine roots growing from the soles of your feet and down through the floor, through the walls, into the foundation, down into the soil, and farther down toward the Earth’s core. Don’t spend too much time trying to get the image perfect. Just a few seconds of imagining those roots connecting with the Earth has a very useful grounding benefit.

        
When you feel relaxed, it is time to distract your left brain. The goal is to think of nothing. This is unnatural. Focus on your normal breathing—in and out. Just as you did when committing to change, follow it with your imagination as it goes in through the nose, curling into the lungs, and back out. Keep stillness. Try to do nothing but follow the breathing. Counting in and out is fine. This time, we are not going for deep breaths. Breathe normally. Follow the air with your concentration. Do this for around ten to twenty minutes. You don’t need to keep formal time. Your mind will tell you when it has recharged sufficiently. If you are like most people, you follow your breath a few times, and then suddenly realize that your mind has drifted back to some everyday thought. Don’t fret. That is your ego, indignant about being set aside. It happens to everyone. Just smile and refocus on your breath. Get stillness back. Taking quiet time works in ways we don’t need to understand, so just enjoy this wonderful personal time.

        
Open your eyes. Smile. Stretch. Thank yourself for this gift of a few minutes peace. You deserve it. You just
took 2 percent of your day for
you
. Do it every day. In Step Three, we will add an image exercise to do immediately after stretching. For now, just enjoy the benefit of taking quiet time.

        
When you take quiet time every day, you may not even realize that you achieved a few moments of stillness. Because it is nothingness, it is impossible for a human to notice. They can be nanoseconds in duration. Rest assured that many times during the exercise you regressed to nothingness, and new neural networks were fired up.

        
This rewiring of the brain is vital. The new networks have none of the old learned patterns of behavior. You are free to decide how to live for yourself. You are relearning how to be an individual again. They have none of the damage caused by negative impressions from media or people, so they have unlimited potential so long as you use mentality control to keep them that way.

        
In the weeks, months, and years ahead, you will build such a large reservoir of this nothingness that the rewiring builds its own momentum. Nanoseconds may even grow to seconds, and you will wonder where you just disappeared to. Keep in mind that the aim is not to stop thinking for twenty minutes. Only mystics can achieve that. Attempt to take quiet time daily, nothing more.

In 2007, a study conducted at UCLA was reported in
ScienceDaily
that provided the first neural evidence of why “mindfulness,”
which they described as the “ability to live in the present moment, without distraction” seems to produce a variety of health benefits. Although this book is not concerned with that particular benefit of taking quiet time, the study drew interesting conclusions.

The technique they used was very similar to the one described in my “Taking Quiet Time” approach and with a focus on following the breath. Participants followed their breathing without judgment, released their thoughts, and “just let go.” Then Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging was used to study the subjects’ brain activity when they were shown pictures of common expressions and asked to give them an emotional label.

They found that the more participants let go, the more activation was seen in the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, and the less activation in the amygdala. They also saw activation in widespread centers of the prefrontal cortex. Their “so what” for this is that it demonstrated an activation pattern similar to the effects of dampening chronic pain and raising mood.

They concluded, “This is such an exciting study because it brings together the Buddha teachings, more than 2,500 years ago with modern neuroscience . . . now for the first time since those teachings, we have shown there is actually a neurological reason for doing mindfulness meditation. Our findings are consistent with what mindfulness meditation teachers have taught for thousands of years.”

I had read many biographies in which the subject found a way to escape the madding crowd by practicing some form of contemplation or meditation. I knew I had to try it and was motivated to change the pattern of learned behavior that I recognized in my ancestors. In those biographies, people claimed their time of
solitude was the source of moments of insight. If it worked for them, I figured who was I to think it esoteric nonsense?

I worked shifts at a busy teaching hospital, so with the aid of two alarm clocks, one on the bedside table and one under my pillow, I literally had to force myself to get up an extra half hour early, bump from wall to wall through the darkened house so as not to disturb my wife or dog, and find my way to a quiet corner in the back bedroom.

In those days, cash was tight, and the heat did not turn on until the evening. Wrapping myself in clothes and blankets, I sat upright in a wooden chair, and stared out through the window at the streetlights, which were usually distorted by rain.

My mind was always full of chatter, which I found frustrating at first, and sometimes I was so dog-tired from the previous shift, I fell asleep again. I was easily interrupted by outside noises—the electric whine of the milk van and clink of the milkman’s bottles as he made deliveries to every house in the street. The chorus of dawn birds and the early commuter traffic would draw my attention. I used to feel that my ears deliberately tuned in to the noises and amplified them, just to drive me nuts.

Our small, three-room house overlooked the main road, and the thin windows offered little protection from sound or cold. The secret is just to stick with it long enough for it to become a habit. Eventually, the noises ceased being disturbing, and the mind learns to set itself aside. Once it becomes habit, it becomes natural and easy. But you have to stick it out long enough to achieve that.

At the outset, I didn’t understand that the goal was stillness rather than silence, and that was probably the cause of my frustration. With practice, however, I made the external noises part of the process. I stopped being
against
them, and then they no longer bothered me. Today, I actually miss the sound of those clanking milk bottles.

There is no getting away from it—taking quiet time in the morning takes discipline. Anyone can do it for a few days in a row, but then your ego tries to turn you back to the old habits, and you have to fight for the new habit. I don’t know how long you have to stick at it before you make it a habit. It is probably different for everyone. I remember feeling it was quite a chore for a long time, perhaps weeks. Today, however, it is one of the things I look forward to the most every day.

Early on, I made the mistake of telling people what I was doing and received ridicule in return. This is something best kept to yourself. Why invite negative energy into your mentality when you don’t have to? The teasing made me question my sanity. My wife, however, encouraged me to stick it out because she could see real benefits, both in my demeanor and in the miracles that started happening in our life.

Within a few weeks, I noticed marked changes in my ability to solve puzzles and challenges. While I was sitting in a meeting room while my peers wrestled with an issue, an insight would pop into my head. Where it came from I could not say, but often I left the people in the room stunned by the clarity of the solution. I was equally stunned, but smart enough not to admit it. Over the years, I heard other people describe these moments of insight as
brilliant
or
uncanny
, and I developed a reputation as something of a troubleshooter. I found myself being sought after to join other teams’ projects.

Once we close our eyes, we could be anywhere, so the location is not as important as the doing of it. When traveling I have contented myself with sitting on a hotel room floor with my back to a wall. Later, as miracles started to show up in my life, my Taking Quiet Time place changed. I had the luxury of a comfortable couch in a warm sunroom, then a tower room overlooking the ocean.

Today, I walk barefoot across a warm patio, surrounded by beautiful landscaping where a gentle waterfall runs into a pond. Hummingbirds feed from red hibiscus flowers around a raised terrace overlooking a seemingly endless view. I sit in the shade of the wisteria and listen for a while to the myriad of birds chirping in our private garden before closing my eyes and disappearing for twenty minutes.

Everything about my quiet time setting has changed for the better, and I mention it this way so you know what you also have to look forward to. It matters not where or how you start but where and how you end up. When I close my eyes, however, I could just as easily be in a hotel room. The location is unimportant. It takes less than two percent of our day. As busy creators, don’t we deserve that much time to ourselves when the benefit is so great from something so easily practiced?

In the beginning, I was fortunate to be able to get up early and find alone time most days. I think that helped me establish a good habit. Over time, I have had to mix things up, although I always found a way to fit it in before heading off to work. Sometimes I had to wait until everyone left the house to sneak upstairs for twenty minutes of quiet time and breathing before heading off to work myself. Other times, the only alone space I could find was in my car, and I would take twenty minutes or so before heading out of the garage. It was not ideal, but I’m a believer in “every little bit helps.”

These days, my wife and I typically take turns getting up first. The first one up makes a pot of tea, and the second one up gets the luxury of an extra fifteen minutes in bed. I take my tea outdoors to enjoy the view. When I’ve drunk my tea, I take my quiet time, which never lasts more than twenty minutes. It is as important to me today as it was in 1983, and I could not imagine my life without it.

My advice is to be as disciplined in the beginning as your situation and lifestyle allow. Just find a way to get it into your schedule. If you close your eyes and follow your breath while traveling on a packed subway, you will still get a benefit, and perhaps someday enough of those benefits will get you out of the quicksand of the sardine commute. Don’t let any situation be an excuse to avoid taking quiet time altogether.

The question now is what to do with our newly rewired neural networks. Like any wires, they are simply potential until we plug them into an energy source. Before you knew how to control your mentality, you might simply have wired them back into the chronic complainers or sensational news headlines. To get those great ideas we are looking for, however, we need to plug the network into a powerful and beneficial source.