Written by: Virin Gomber, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
Being an entrepreneur entails starting and growing a business in an environment filled with uncertainty and significant risk. This situation places high demands on your mental ability due to the challenging demands of managing and running a business.
In recent years, meditation has become an essential tool in the productivity toolbox of entrepreneurs. Like every other person, entrepreneurs have discovered meditation as a solution to reduce stress in their lives.
The universal benefits of living mindfully daily make it the most favourable approach. Let’s find out the reasons.
What Makes a Successful Entrepreneur?
Being a successful entrepreneur involves more than just running a business. It requires a cheerful outlook towards business as well as maintaining the determination and grit needed for success. A successful entrepreneur has a powerful inner drive that propels them forward. The following qualities are common to some of the world’s top entrepreneurs:
Passion Work ethic and passion are inextricably linked. Work ethic helps you to keep your business running smoothly, and passion is needed to feel motivated enough to maintain an excellent work ethic. Successful entrepreneurs are successful because they do what their inner drive propels them to do. You’d have noticed how students who are so invested in a school project that they put in extraordinary efforts and earn top grades.
That sense of accomplishment is priceless, and it is how entrepreneurs feel when they see impressive results from the work they put in.
Creativity Companies that thrive are built on the wild creativity of their founders. With such fierce competition in the business landscape, entrepreneurs must develop unique ideas that set their organizations apart. Thinking of unique business ideas is an example of creativity.
You can also use it to solve a problem by discovering insightful connections between multiple unrelated things or events. Creative business owners are always open to the possibility that the traditional solution is inadequate.
Risk-Taking
An entrepreneur must be capable of taking risks. You cannot discover something unique unless you are willing to explore the unknown. And this distinction may make all the difference.
There are numerous aspects to risk-taking. For instance, using unconventional methods is risky. Investing in ideas that no one else believes in except you… is a risk.
Entrepreneurs may take a different approach to risks, but successful business owners are the ones who are always willing to invest their time and money in what they believe. However, they always have a backup plan for any risk they take.
Professionalism Professionalism is a quality that all successful entrepreneurs possess. The behaviour of an entrepreneur with their employees and clients contributes significantly to developing the organization's culture.
Professionalism is accompanied by discipline and reliability. Self-discipline enables an entrepreneur to meet goals, stay organized and set a great example for others. Reliability leads to trust, and for most businesses, trust in the business owner or CEO keeps employees motivated and willing to give their all.
Benefits of Creativity, Intuition & Decision making
Creativity, intuition and decision-making are crucial skills for any entrepreneur. Enhancing these skills fosters scaling for the business.
Being skilful in creativity leads to developing novel and innovative business practices. Exploring new niches and coming up with new ideas leads to efficiency, giving an entrepreneur a competitive advantage.
With an improved intuition, you can make quick, effective decisions in complex situations and highstakes, dynamically changing conditions at strategic and executive levels.
At the same time, entrepreneurs can end up losing some or all of these important skills.
While entrepreneurship can be exciting, it can also be difficult, stressful, and exhausting work. You can only put in so much effort for so long. When people are exhausted, their motivation to achieve goals decreases, and they have little desire to complete work tasks. As a result, they may find it harder to rise to and address challenges, which are essential and unavoidable experiences in entrepreneurship.
The Power of Meditation to Boost Your Business
According to research, mindfulness meditation can have a wide range of positive effects on business outcomes. It increases resilience, reduces stress, regulates emotions, and helps to make the outlook more positive, allowing you to recover from setbacks.
Meditation allows your mind to be open to innovative ideas. It also enhances attention and makes recognizing the novelty and utility of innovative ideas easier.
Moreover, meditation cultivates courage and resilience in the face of scepticism and setbacks, which is critical because failure and setbacks are inextricably linked with any innovation process.
Meditation also helps you to look inward and discover your hidden potential. And with a sharper mind, you're able to think clearly and focus more on the skills that you have, helping you to reclaim them.
Here are 4 Simple Strategies to improve these skills:
1. Trigger your Flow Rate
Staying in the moment is one of the goals of meditation for creativity. This can be achieved by anchoring yourself in the present moment using your breath.
Breathing connects the mind and the body. It aids in relaxation and concentration while directing intent and validating action. It's easier to focus on the present moment and flow with our intentions when anchored in the breath. This is your ‘Flow State’, which becomes more accessible as this skill improves.
The present moment is a powerful and inventive place to be. Before focusing on a creative task, use meditation as a mental cue to induce a flow state. You can use water in your meditation to inspire flow, either through sound or touch.
Using meditation to discover and maintain your passion for your creative goals triggers this flow. Don't be concerned if your mind wanders – practice catching distracting thoughts and returning to the present moment in a kind and gentle way.
2. Discard Negative Thoughts
Science makes us understand that negative automatic thoughts can cause burnout, mental health issues, and damaged self-esteem. This is not a healthy mindset for creativity. When the mind tends to focus on negative thoughts, this is known as ‘negative bias’. Creatives are all too familiar with the inner critic, which can spiral out of control if not trained and relaxed.
Meditation can help with clearing your mind of these negative thoughts. You acknowledge and let go of distracting thoughts as they arise. Positive thoughts and purpose can be used to counteract negative thinking.
As you get better at this practice, the skill spreads to other areas of your life, improving focus and wellbeing. Learning to recognize and reframe negative thoughts boosts well-being and concentration for creative thinking.
3. Improve Visualization
Meditation does not have to be limited to simply clearing your mind. It can also be used for the ultrapowerful ‘visualization’ practice. Nikola Tesla was well-known for this. He would often visualize the entire process of inventing something before writing it down or starting work on it.
You can use visualization meditation to guide creative thinking or to add a visual component to your well-being practice. Guided meditations are excellent for this. You can imagine yourself achieving your goals, healing, happy and relaxing environments, and so on. Moreover, you can visualize how it really ‘feels’ to achieve your goals and let this motivate you.
4. Stress Reduction and Anxiety Management
To overcome daily stress and anxiety, you must tame what Buddhists refer to as the ‘monkey mind’. We must accept that we have no control over external factors. Only our reactions to the outside world are under our control.
Meditation for creative purposes or any other reason is about increasing awareness and returning to a relaxed and restful state. This relaxed state makes it easier to alleviate anxiety and stress. The best part is that you don't have to wait years to reap the benefits. Even five-minute sessions as part of your daily routine can help to reduce stress and improve mental and emotional wellbeing.
The way meditation helps you achieve this is by empowering you to gain a fresh perspective on stressful situations. Meditation can help you physically relax and reverse your body's reaction to anxiety and stress. Just evaluating what you can and cannot control and focusing on what you ‘can’, will transform your stress response.
The Extras
In addition, regular meditation will improve your accuracy and attention. It will help you in developing stronger relationships with your employees and clients. Mindful meditation boosts your productivity, thereby moving your business forward in alignment with your goals and vision. Ensure to keep a consistent routine for your meditation. You can rest assured that you'll step back right on track with a sharpened mind and enhanced power of decision-making.
I hope this article has been of value to you and helped you to shift your perspective at some level. Please feel free to get in touch to share your thoughts – I’d love to hear from you. Disclaimer: The suggestions in this article do not reflect any particular diagnosis or course of treatment. They are meant as a tool to provide you new perspectives. If you have any further concerns about your current well-being, you may contact your GP or a medical specialist.
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Virin Gomber, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Virin Gomber is a leading Mindfulness Success Coach, Speaker, and Author.
Following a successful corporate career that left him with stress and burnout, he learned, created, and mastered highly effective Mindfulness strategies to boost his balance and personal performance. Since then, he has integrated Quantum Physics, Neuroscience, and Positive Psychology principles to craft a unique blend for his Mindfulness success system.
Dedicated to helping people become top achievers, the core of his work is with entrepreneurs, CEOs, professionals, and driven individuals to support them to achieve peak performance, balance and happiness.
He offers more than a decade of Success Coaching, corporate training, and 25+ years of Mindfulness experience.
Virin has co-authored an Amazon bestseller, “The Missing Piece in Self Love,” appeared on TV shows, and contributed to numerous global online magazines.
His ‘WHY’: To empower people to create accomplished personal skills to achieve next-level success and happiness.
References:
Mindfulness and creativity: Implications for thinking and learning https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7395604/
Does Meditation Make You More Productive? These 5 Entrepreneurs and CEOs Think So. https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/310870
Why Science Says, Meditation Can Help your Business https://incafrica.com/matthew-jones/why-meditation-is-great-for-entrepreneurs-according-toscience.html
