I work with a meditation/mindfulness coach. Not long ago, we were having a session in a conference room of our office. At the same time, I was in the midst of a dispute with another lawyer. I excused myself a few times to deal with it. I was getting, well, a bit put out by the opposing counsel and my coach sensed it. She wrote out some advice in case I didn’t return to finish the session (but I did). It’s great advice: “Where can mindfulness fit into this chaotic world which is most folks’ everyday work life? The answer is very simple. Stopping. Even for one breath … is so powerful.” She went on to nail it: “We are in charge … we set the tone and the pace … we are not merely ‘in reaction’ mode.” She went on, “I say, ‘take five’ and by that I mean five conscious breaths—and there you will see the power in [a] breath.”
As Viktor Frankl taught us: There is the stimulus and there is our response. The gap between the two is our freedom to choose our reaction. (Feel free to check out my video blog post on Viktor Frankl and “Man’s Search for Meaning.”) There also is a very helpful post on the HBR Blog Network,”Nine Ways Successful People Defeat Stress” by Heidi Grant Halvorson.
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