Give It a Rest!
Directing the Mind to Inner Peace

By Beata C. Lewis, J.D., Executive Coach

A woman CEO and I were recently talking about the value of inner peace. Aware that I was developing curriculum for a workshop on inner peace for busy professionals, Jan (fictitious name) sought me out for guidance. The question of what a person who desperately wants to rest can do to quiet a mind in overdrive is provocative on its own. It is, in a larger way, also a question of self-mastery. And self-mastery is at the heart of cultivating leadership excellence, which is my professional domain. The question becomes how can I use the power of my mind, my attention, intention and focus to transform my situation? What can I practice to open up new possibilities where I now experience an impasse?

Jan’s inquiry speaks into a larger conversation about empowering leaders with awareness, choice, commitment and purposeful action. It is an ongoing conversation about living in our wholeness and engaging our capacity to be self-generating, self-healing, and self-educating. Her inquiry was a catalyst for me to conduct an online survey. Readers of my newsletter, Bridging Lives News, responded to the question: When relying solely on your own innate resources, what do you do to re-direct and quiet your mind so you can experience inner peace?

So often we think of intention and focused attention in terms of our waking activities. One interesting aspect to the sleep question is that one can’t mask what happens with lots of outer activity. We distill our attention to a basic focus: oneself. Confronted by an inner cacophony, the challenge is how to “unplug” for good purpose. Sleep is where we rest and renew. It is also the portal for intuitive and other-than-conscious awareness and exploration. It is the antidote for what winds us up taut by day. There are ways to practice disengaging the thinking, controlling mind so that we can put it to better use when we re-engage it for creativity, decision-making, and purposeful, soulful action.

Our Leader’s Situation

Jan has been suffering from poor sleep and it is impacting her performance and quality of life. Her life runs at warp speed much of the time and she prides herself on being able to juggle multiple commitments with competence and finesse. She needs to be able to function at 100% so as not to fall behind. She wants to know how she can streamline her activity – get more of what’s important done in less time and with greater ease – and also enjoy the fruits of her labor day by day. In our conversation, Jan asked for things she could do to sleep better. When the world outside her slows and quiets down, her mind continues relentlessly in problem-solving mode, churning even when all she wants is to sleep. Rather than reach for sleeping pills, she wants “natural” ways to quiet her mind.

Maybe you know a situation similar to hers. This person is leading a new company of her own creation, with all the corresponding professional challenges and responsibilities. In addition, she nurtures a mutually empowering and intimate partnership with her husband, raises children from an earlier marriage and the current one, takes care of aging parents, participates in civic activities, cultivates professional relationships as well as personal friendships. Her activities and relationships are meaningful to her and often fuel her; they are important to her sense of self. It’s just that she often feels stretched too far for too long; she feels exhausted, sometimes to the point of desperation. Professional and personal crises that may not be her fault quickly become her concern as people look to her for direction, strength, structure, comfort and support. Even with sophisticated coping strategies, the stress is getting to her. She pays the price in poor decisions, disappointed expectations, choppy communication, escalated misunderstandings, unsatisfactory performance, and now her health.

Directing the Mind’s Attention to Lead

Jan’s situation may be unique in its details but she is far from alone in her predicament. She is seeking greater satisfaction and quality of life, especially as a leader. The sleep question is a window into one’s overall state of being. We are, after all, human beings at work. In the Introduction to Being Human at Work: Bringing Somatic Intelligence Into Your Professional Life, Richard Strozzi Heckler, Ph.D., writes:

Many of us live lives of ease and luxury, yet fewer and fewer of us can claim that what we are doing produces satisfaction. Even fewer seem able to answer with any depth the question: “What am I working so hard for?” The significant loss of productivity, innovation, and creativity at the workplace, not to mention the overwhelming despair that so many experience as a result of spending more than a third of their life in an activity that has little or no personal meaning, is a staggering cost to the human spirit.

This alienation and fragmentation in modern life – as evidenced by the billion dollar industries created by antidepressants, antacids, anxiety relievers, migraine medications, and flights to virtual worlds – suggests an inability to cope with the pressures of our personal and professional lives. The greatest cost of the specialization of technological life – and out of which all other damages are birthed – is arguably our separation from the practical and enriching sense of ourselves as embodied beings. When we are alienated from the wisdom of the body, our lives become theoretical and abstract, and we are distanced from the direct, felt sense of living. Our bodies become anxious, easily depressed, incapable of satisfaction, often ineffective, and victim to the purveyors of cosmetics, medicine, and the illusion of perpetual youth. Except as delivery mechanisms that haul our brains from meeting to meeting, from work to home and back again, our bodies have grown inconsequential. Even at the gym our efforts to trim our bodies are mechanical and joyless. We have become afflicted by a cultural amnesia and have forgotten that we are feeling, multidimensional beings, rather than extras in some corporate extravaganza. (Strozzi Heckler, Being Human at Work: Bring Somatic Intelligence Into Your Professional Life)

The “embodied self” readily accesses the resources and wisdom of the whole Body: intellectual, physical, emotional and spiritual. Emotional intelligence is increasingly acknowledged as a core competence for leaders. When embodied, this intelligence enables leaders to accomplish the fundamental tasks of generating excitement, optimism, and passion for the job ahead, as well as cultivating an atmosphere of cooperation and trust. The authors of Primal Leadership: Realizing the Power of Emotional Intelligence describe four domains of emotional intelligence – 1) self-awareness, 2) self-management, 3) social awareness, and 4) relationship management – as crucial skills for resonant leadership.

These domains are, of course, closely intertwined, with a dynamic relationship among them. For instance, a leader can’t manage his emotions well if he has little of no awareness of them. And if his emotions are out of control, then his ability to handle relationships will suffer. … In short, self-awareness facilitates both empathy and self-management, and these two, in combination, allow effective relationship management. EI [emotionally intelligent] leadership, then, builds up from a foundation of self-awareness. (Goleman, Boyatzis, McKee: Primal Leadership: Realizing the Power of Emotional Intelligence)

We gain self-awareness through conscious practice. It can be vital to practice while practice is relatively easy. That way, when it’s hard – when we’re under exceptional pressure or circumstances stretch us beyond prior known limits – we build on a more reliable and expansive foundation. Returning to the sleep example, we cannot always reach for some external relief (medication or pen and paper, or whatever else); nor is it always possible to get up and move around, whether to wear ourselves out or to distance ourselves from the issue at hand.

I am thinking especially of a dear friend and colleague who, as a result of an accident earlier this year, now is paralyzed from the upper chest, down. What must it be like to lie awake night after night reliving those moments before and after the fall? I can imagine feeling tortured by the fruitless effort to re-dream that nano-second of life to produce a different outcome. What capacity of mind, heart and spirit allows one to come to peace with the reality of what has actually happened and to make choices that are life-enhancing going forward? And we all fall – somehow and at some time. Indeed, one way to know a leader is by how she or he recovers from a hard fall.

In addition to recovering from a “fall,” there is, of course, the focus and presence required for exceptional performance on demand. There may be an opportunity to present something important before a receptive or potentially hostile audience. Perhaps one has prepared for a difficult conversation or negotiation or some other kind of “test.” The mind can play all kinds of tricks in this situation. If it is not cooperating, the mind will entertain fear and doubt; it will get distracted, agonize about the competition or obsess about the stakes. The challenge is to remain calm, present, open and connected by choice. More than bracing against failure, quieting and focusing the mind is about preparing for and moving toward success.

Directing the Mind to Inner Peace:
Survey Results

I chose the following survey scenario in order to elicit responses about ways to direct the mind to inner peace.

It's 4 a.m. and you're wide awake. Your mind is relentlessly churning about some issue and won't give you peace. You need to sleep. You're in a situation where you cannot make sound and you cannot get up to move around. What do you do? I'm interested in techniques that you can vouch for from your personal experience as being effective for stilling the mind's chatter and allowing you peace. Solutions that are "out of bounds" include all those involving some external aid, e.g. another person, music, legal or illegal drugs, herbs, foods, drink, even water. When relying solely on your own innate resources, what do you do to re-direct and quiet your mind so you can experience inner peace?

I received dozens of marvelous responses and enthusiastic interest in the aggregate result. Very few submissions were sorted out based on responsiveness to the question or adherence to the scenario limitations. My sincere thanks to all who shared generously from their own experience. I recommend reviewing the unabridged responses posted on my website at www.BridgingLives.com/bln-04-12-survey.htm.

What actually works for people? The two types of response I received can be summarized as follows:

1. Re-focus on the breath and sensation in the body

• Breathing deeply into the belly, count for each inhalation and exhalation and hold between breaths.
• Progressively tense and relax body parts; start either at the feet or head, paying attention to physical sensations that arise.
• Move extremely slowly and consciously from one’s core, or just imagine the movement and feel it.
• Vividly imagine doing something physical, e.g. mountain biking on a favorite trail.

2. Re-direct the mind’s attention / Pray

• “Anchor” key words (representing ideas or issues that need attention) to individual fingers so you can remember them later (by retouching the finger).
• “Set aside” the issue by deciding specifically when to deal with it later.
• Inquire about and feel into the emotion(s) one is trying to avoid by staying in the “figuring it out” spin.
• Count something monotonous and simple; count backwards or using random intervals.
• Recite a simple prayer or mantra over and over again.
• Switch to positive self-talk: recall that you’re not alone, that resources are available, and identify specific things for which you are grateful.
• Remember what purpose could be served were the best, rather than worst, outcome to happen.
• Release the worry or concern to a power greater than yourself; request support and guidance.

These suggestions offer an opportunity to practice being self-aware by consciously directing attention and energy. Part of my coaching to Jan was to develop a practice around sleep. Choose a couple of the suggested techniques and do them daily, noticing what happens. If she already had a ritual for preparing for sleep, these could easily be integrated into that. Instead of waiting to try them when she was frustrated about being wide awake late at night, she would retrain her mind and body gradually, even on nights when sleep came relatively easily.

Breath, bodily sensation, mood, and consciously directed attention are elements of basic practice for somatic intelligence and embodied leadership. Focusing on the breath and bodily sensations brings one’s awareness to the present moment, rather than wandering into stories about past or future. Temporarily directing the mind’s attention away from a “problem,” we disengage the grinding gears; this may open space for refreshingly creative perspectives, greater clarity or renewed commitment to a compelling purpose.

Rather than being all in the mind, leading is an integrated practice of being open, present and connected in mind, heart, body and spirit. Inner peace begins with a quiet mind. So, in taking care of business for greater aliveness and satisfaction, remember also to “give it a rest.”

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About the Author:
As a leadership coach and consultant, Beata C. Lewis, J.D., provides focused guidance for highly accomplished individuals and teams. They lead in businesses where creativity, resourcefulness and agility are critical to individual and organizational success. Her coaching emphasizes the human element of leadership. Clients develop awareness and implement practices to achieve tangible, transformational and sustainable improvements in leadership, trust building and collaboration. Beata's field-tested expertise in negotiation, conflict resolution, change management and collaborative process facilitation combine elegantly with her experience as a Master Somatic Coach™. The somatic emphasis helps individuals to cultivate mastery of Self. With greater self awareness and presence, clients build their capacity to approach new opportunities and challenges with authenticity, resilience, clarity, grace and power.