10 Minutes to Massive Momentum

This is the Momentum podcast. If you've been listening to me or my podcast for any period of time, then you know that I'm a huge advocate of self-care and of getting clarity and space and being able to reduce the pressure in your life and increase creativity. And one of the ways that I do this is through meditation. And, you know, it's almost seems like it's become kind of popular in the entrepreneurial world to say, I don't meditate or I can't meditate. And I keep hearing that from people. But man, you know, on the same token, I hear from some of the most successful humans on the planet. How meditation has opened things up for them has created their success. In fact, I just recently heard someone who I have a ton of respect for Ray Dalio. If you haven't read his book Principles, It's Worth It and recently said that he he actually credits most of the success he's ever had to learning to meditate when he was younger. And, you know, I think part of the reason is entrepreneurs, we have such a hard time with meditation and we don't meditate is because we feel like we're doing it wrong. We feel like we can't do it. We feel like our minds won't slow down enough so that we can meditate. And so I want to share with you kind of some thoughts and a technique I've been using recently that has just been game changing. I'm Alex Charfen and this is the Momentum podcast made for Empire Builders Game Changers, trailblazers, shot takers, record breakers, world makers and creators of all kinds. Those among us who can't turn it off. And don't know why anyone would want to. We challenge complacency, destroy apathy. And we are obsessed with creating momentum so we can roll over bureaucracy and make our greatest contribution. Should we pay attention to their rules, but only so that we can bend them, break them, then rewrite them around our own will? We don't accept our destiny. We define it. We don't understand defeat because you only lose if you stop and we don't know how. While the rest of the world strives for average and clings desperately to the status quo, we are the minority. The few who are willing to hallucinate there could be a better future. And instead of just daydreaming of what could be, we endure the vulnerability and exposure it takes to make it real. We are the evolutionary hunters. Clearly the most important people in the world, because entrepreneurs are the only source of consistent, positive human evolution. And we always will be. It's really changed my perspective on meditation, you know, and I've done all types of meditation, guided meditations. I have not one, but two or three muse headbands. You know, I've listened to binary or beads. I've done then all different types. And, you know, my goal in meditation is really exactly what I said at the beginning of this podcast, is to lower the pressure and noise lower lower pressure on myself so that creativity and curiosity comes out. And what I found is if I'm working on something and I feel stuck and I feel like I don't have a direction or I'm in a place where I'm just not getting the creativity I want. If I can unplug and reset, then oftentimes that creativity comes back. That curiosity comes back. I start seeing things that I wasn't seen before. And, you know, if you're one of those people who can just go head down all the time and be creative, be curious and never affects you, then, man, I'm. I'm envious. But but I also know that, you know, I used to feel the same way. And what I didn't understand was that even though I could keep my head down all the time and keep pushing through stuff, I didn't realize how much creativity, how much curiosity, how much possibility I was giving up. I was exchanging for not giving myself some space for not taking that time. And so here's here's some thoughts on meditation that might make it infinitely easier for you. You know, I think one of the challenges with meditation is that the way that it's presented and the way that it's consistently presented, you know, in my observation, what normally happens with meditation is it's presented as like you clear your mind and you have nothing in your mind and you're not thinking about anything. And, you know, I remember when I was younger, there was a guided meditation I did where in order to clear your mind, this woman was like, Imagine a blank sheet of paper. Now zoom in on that sheet of paper and now you've created a blank mind. And I remember my mind was saying, No, you haven't. I'm thinking, What type of paper is it? What is it sitting on? What am I going to do with it? What's the grain of the paper? How thick is it? Where is the paper? How come it's just levitating in space, you know? And literally all of those thoughts were coming to me as she's telling me, this exercise is supposed to help me clear my mind. And so recently, here's what I've been doing. No guided meditation. I have been abstaining from the Muse headset for a while, even though I think it's amazing and I like to come back to it. And what I've been doing is just sitting down and setting a ten minute timer and finding a comfortable place to sit. I have a real comfortable chair in my office, not the one I work in, but another one. And then just sitting there and rather than feeling the anxiety of my mind not being clear, I allow my mind to process. In fact, I give myself permission. I give my mind permission for anything to come up, anything from the present, from the past, whatever it is. And I just let the thoughts come up. I acknowledge them, and then sometimes they pass and sometimes I get stuck on a thoughts. Sometimes things from my childhood come up, sometimes things from yesterday come up, sometimes I start thinking about what I need to do next, and I just let whatever comes up come up without judgment and I just breathe through it. Or I'm really trying not to even pay a lot of attention, attention to my breathing. I'm just letting my brain process. I'm giving my my self time with my eyes closed where there's no input and my brain is just processing. And you know, it's interesting, when I first started doing this, 10 minutes felt like a long time. In fact, I used to like take a little sneak peek and say, how much longer do I have? Like, how long have I been sitting here? And now that I've been doing it for weeks and months, sometimes here's what happens. I sit down and my brain starts processing and I started thinking about, you know, what I need to do today and what I need to do. MORROW And maybe something comes up from six months ago or something I might have forgotten to do, or someone I haven't thought of for a while. And then my alarm goes off and I realize that couldn't have been 10 minutes where it feels like that couldn't have been 10 minutes. And what I realized is my brain process and process, and then it just took some time off because I'm not judging because I don't I'm not attached to an outcome like having a clear mind. I'm just sitting there and accepting what is. And more often than not, these days, as I've been doing it on a daily basis, I feel like there's actually some rest in there. I feel like there's actually some time in there. I feel like there's actually some space in there. And, you know, here's here's what I can tell you. The benefits are for me of meditation. Again, curiosity and creativity go up if I ever feel stuck. I see possibilities that I didn't see before, and there's actual measured, measurable benefits. When I'm meditating, I get more deep sleep. My heart rate variability is higher at night, which indicates my body's under less stress. I actually feel better, I feel more clear, I don't feel as reactive. I find myself being able to observe what's going on with me better than I can when I'm not meditating, you know, like if something happens with one of my kids and it triggers me in the moment, I can say, Honey, this is a trigger that doesn't really make sense. I'm not going to react to it, and I feel like it's just made it easier. To do just about everything I do. And so if you're one of those people who doesn't meditate because it's too hard. Well, this way there's really no way to fail. You just sit there with your eyes closed for 10 minutes. You let what's going to happen, happen. And if you do this day after day and you give yourself that 10 minutes time, what you'll find is eventually there's some space there. And you'll also find that creativity goes up, pressure and noise goes down. And curiosity, which is like an entrepreneurial superpower, will go up over time. I hope you give this a try. It can be life changing. And if you are, are. One of those people who's interested in understanding more about yourself and getting even more clear about yourself and understanding how to get more done and be more effective and more efficient is something I obsess over. In fact, I created the first planning system exclusively for entrepreneurs called the Momentum Planner. And the momentum planner has some daily questions that you ask. It is an incredible day to day habit. In fact, my wife calls it her highest productivity habit, and it took me a while to convince her she should start using it because, well, she's my wife and and it's something I created and my kids use it. In fact, the kids at their school use a version of it. All of my high level members use it, and it will just completely change how you accomplish what you accomplish in a day. But here's what's more important. There is a discovery system in the momentum planning product that will show you how to understand where the biggest challenges in your life are coming from and build a plan to address those issues rather than the planning systems that just have you going forward. This one helps you understand what's slowing you down and helps you jettison that that weight you've been carrying and start really creating massive momentum forward. If you're interested in checking it out, you can go to simple operations dot com forward slash m. P.S. Like Momentum Planner system so Mary Paul Sam simple operations dot com for slash amps and check it out. It's an incredible program that will help you create massive momentum. And if you happen to pick up the planner and you mentioned it on social media or anywhere else, please tag me or send me a link. I'd love to understand what you got out of it and how it helped you create momentum.